Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page i
Prud ence
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
edited by
Page ii
r o b e r t
h a r i m a n
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page iii
Prud ence classical virtue, postmodern practice
the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page iv
Chapters 1 and 10 contain material that appeared in “Prudence/Performance,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 21 (1991): 26–35, and “Would It Be Prudent? Forms of Reasoning in World Politics,” coauthored with Francis A. Beer, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1998): 299–330. Chapter 3 contains material that appeared in “After Virtù: Rhetoric, Prudence, and Moral Pluralism in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy,” History of Political Thought 17 (1996): 1–29. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prudence : classical virtue, postmodern practice / edited by Robert Hariman p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-271-02255-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Prudence. I. Hariman, Robert. BJ1533.P9 P76 2003 179'.9—dc21
2002153326
Copyright © 2003 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page v
CONTENTS
Preface
vii
Acknowledgments 1
xi
Theory Without Modernity Robert Hariman
1
I. Conceptual Frameworks 2
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome Robert W. Cape Jr.
3
After Virtù: Rhetoric, Prudence, and Moral Pluralism in Machiavelli 67 Eugene Garver
4
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited: Common Sense as Prudence in the Philosophy of Thomas Reid 99 Peter J. Diamond
II. Rhetorical Structures 5
Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol and the 127 Texture of Prudence Stephen H. Browne
6
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies: Revolution, Constitution, and Slavery 145 James Jasinski
7
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence: Women, Propriety, and Transgression in Nineteenth-Century Public Oratory of the United States 189 Christine L. Oravec
v
35
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
vi
Page vi
.
Contents
III. Provisional Networks 8
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture 229 John S. Nelson
9
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence Maurice Charland
10
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century Robert Hariman Contributors Index
325
323
259 287
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page vii
P R E FA C E
— ’dəns), n. 1. the quality or fact of being prudent. 2. wisdom with regard to pracpru.dence ( proo tical matters. 3. cautiousness; circumspection. 4. provident care in the management of resources; economy. [1300–50; ME < MF < L prudentia. See prudent, -ence]
Also prudent, the adjective, and from there to a host of synonyms: careful, judicious, tactful, discerning, sensible, frugal, wary, wise, sage, level-headed, balanced, moderate, politic, practical, pragmatic, expedient. . . . But certainly nothing to get excited about. It is a convention of the modern literature on prudence to begin by apologizing for the concept’s stodginess. Such reticence is not surprising, for this antique term does not fit well with the boundless initiative and astonishing rates of change in modern life, much less the personal freedom and self-expression of liberal individualism. It does not rhyme conceptually with either “entrepreneur” or “artist,” or with “romance” or “revolution.” As a technical term, it is found in the lexicon of accounting. Prior to the modern epoch, however, a different story can be told. Prudence was celebrated within every ancient philosophical literature, East and West. It was understood to be an important accomplishment, the necessary resource for personal autonomy, and a crucial element of political leadership. Greek and Roman writers placed special emphasis on this last concern, and their literary, philosophical, and historical works provide detailed depictions of those leaders whose actions exemplified practical wisdom, and of those who lacked it. Greek philosophy and rhetoric each attempted to define and harness this mode of intelligence. If nothing else, the Sophists demonstrated its range by suggesting everything from feigned virtues to principled deception, and from self-promotion to civic art. Plato codified prudence as the first of the four cardinal virtues that would be evident in the ideal ruler, but this account was
vii
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
viii
Page viii
.
Preface
flawed, first, by the assumption that prudence could be known with certainty, and, second, by its association with a vicious elitism. By contrast, his contemporary Isocrates outlined a more democratic conception of prudence that was grounded in the management of contingency, developed through experience and learned reflection, and practiced through deliberation. Aristotle gave these ideas technical precision and far more systematic development, and his account (principally in book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics, and also in the Politics and the Rhetoric) has remained the canonical explication of the concept. According to Aristotle, prudence is a distinctive mode of intelligence. Neither scientific nor artistic nor contemplative, it is the capacity for reasoning about particular cases of contingent affairs with regard to what is good or bad. This reasoning occurs through deliberation and is completed in action. Thus prudence fulfills an executive function in respect to human flourishing: it directs application of the many other virtues (such as courage or generosity) while coordinating individual and collective interests. Aristotle claimed that the best method for identifying the elements of prudence was to observe the conduct of the wise person. This approach was not fully realized until Cicero, who developed a richer articulation of prudence through letters, speeches, treatises, and his own example. Prudence became the means for negotiating a dynamic field of expectations and demands, one replete with tensions that could be managed only through skillful attention to the requirements of public performance. This sensibility anchored practical reasoning in social knowledge, while the social practice of public speech became the primary agency for prudential action. The prudent speaker also provided a model for imitation, and successful imitation would involve reading and speaking to develop discernment, argumentative skill, self-control, and other qualities of leadership. The subsequent history of prudence features one moment of florescence and a larger pattern of recovery and accommodation within cultural narratives of transcendental authority. The flowering of prudence during the Renaissance was motivated by the discovery of Cicero’s works, and civic intellectuals of the Italian republics aspired to embody his ideal orator. Yet it was Machiavelli’s deconstruction of the Ciceronian tradition that proved most influential: modern thinkers were left with only shards of the classical sensibility, and with prudence reduced to calculations of power. Other recuperations of prudence have been less bold, but notable achievements nonetheless. Aquinas had salvaged prudence as part of his larger synthesis of reason and faith, and his account of practical reasoning has been
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page ix
Preface
.
ix
maintained as a resource within Roman Catholic education (and elsewhere) ever since. The greatest threat in the history of prudence came from the Enlightenment, and particularly with Kant’s subordination of self-interest and social context alike to universal moral principles. Although still embracing ideals of the Enlightenment, Scottish writers such as Smith and Reid held out a place for practical reasoning grounded in social knowledge. Their influence is harder to gauge, but it certainly is in accord with the language of political speech in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when prudence was a watchword. Today another recuperation of prudence is under way. Once again, prudence is being valued in contrast to dominant ideals of rational analysis and organization, and on behalf of situated knowledge, embodied values, and the cultivation of civic life. The disciplinary projects include a revival within moral philosophy of “virtue ethics,” attention within political theory to practical reasoning and the process of deliberation, analysis within rhetorical studies of how prudence structures public address, and others as well. Each project has its characteristic strengths and weaknesses, of course, which is why there is need for a more explicitly interdisciplinary context for developing the full potential of the concept. This volume is one contribution to the contemporary revival of interest in the concept of prudence. The authors come from several disciplines, and together they set out a richer conception of prudence than is available within any one theoretical vocabulary. While striving to do justice to the great themes and prior achievements within the history of prudence, the volume also gives a particular inflection to that history. Most notably, a more Ciceronian perspective is added to the familiar Aristotelian tradition. Thus, the inquiry develops through critical study of representative texts, while it focuses attention on how both the practice and theory of prudence play out according to conventions of discursive performance. So it is that this book remains a study in limits, and certainly subject to its own limitations. From the perspective of prudence, however, there is much to be said for ending, and beginning, with a sense of fallibility. Emerson described prudence as “God taking thought for oxen,” and I can do no more than ask the same of the reader.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page x
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An edited volume makes manifest what is true of all scholarship: that it is deeply collaborative. Whatever the limitations of this collection, they do not include lack of support from my colleagues. I’m embarrassed to say that it has taken so long to complete that I can no longer reliably list the many readers and others who have discussed the work with me along the way. If half of them will buy the book, we’ll do fine. Some things cannot go unsaid, however. The idea for the book came originally from a conversation with Michael Leff. Michael’s thoughtful, erudite, and persistent attention to the linked concepts of prudence and decorum has been an important contribution to the late-twentieth-century revival of rhetorical studies. As always, my departmental colleague Bill Lewis provided the ideal mixture of encouragement and criticism at every stage of the project. Most of the authors were able to come together for a small conference to discuss drafts of their work, and all have remained enthusiastic about the project despite delays not of their own making. My own work, as always, received a boost from being discussed at the faculty seminar sponsored by the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa. The reviewers and editors at the Pennsylvania State University Press have been models of virtue; I hope they can be as proud of the volume as I am grateful for their help. The Drake University Center for the Humanities provided financial support both for the conference used to the develop the volume and for the index. Finally, Jane Rankin has shown me that there is no accomplishment and no wisdom unless we live with, and care for, and answer to each other. This book is dedicated to her.
xi
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page xii
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 1
1 Theory Without Modernity Robert Hariman
So we live after virtue. Good thing, too, many of us would agree. No more “good Christian gentlemen” with all their exclusions, expropriations, and private realms of violence. No more wise old men running the state into the ground. Nor do women have to be hemmed in by such names as Chastity or Prudence. You can still say, “Neither a borrower nor lender be,” but you will be talking to people whose wallets are full of plastic and whose retirement funds are floating in the stock market. And yet the enormous environmental and social costs of modern industry, agribusiness, automotive use, and other sectors of an energy-intensive civilization continue unabated. Urban designers identify the relentless dehumanization caused by modernist development schemes that get almost all available private capital and public subsidies. Debates flare up over genetic engineering and vertical integration in food production, corporate accountability in other industries, monopoly control of communications media, and the lack of control over global warming. Then one September morning an act of rage explodes on the New York skyline, and the previously hidden costs of the American Century mount higher and higher. Such problems are characteristic of our time, in part because they reflect combinations of private interest, technocratic expertise, and global scale that devalue communal
1
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
2
Page 2
.
Prudence
wisdom and public deliberation. If we understandably don’t want to live with virtues such as prudence, it’s not clear that we can live well without them. A similar paradox emerges in the intellectual history of the modern era. Prudence never fails to disappoint the modern thinker. Despite its importance in classical and Renaissance thought, the concept carries all the marks of a simplistic, vernacular term that cannot account for the complexity of modern life, much less work productively within a modern system of explanation. Yet the revival of interest in the concept has occurred as modernity becomes ever more pervasive.1 Those scholars who have argued for recuperating the concept of prudence often have done so out of profound misgivings about modern patterns of knowledge and social organization. More to the point, the attempt to revive this concept and its antique intellectual style can provide a comparison case for identifying, and perhaps partially rectifying, failures of political concern and intellectual attentiveness that are characteristic of modernity. The chapters in this volume consider how the concept of prudence can be used to revise political thought and action. None of the authors is in any way sympathetic to those who have invoked classical virtues to outfit a reactionary politics, although we can understand the fears of accelerated social change fueling that response to late-modern civilization. Nor do we believe that the human sciences will benefit from a restoration of classical concepts in their original formulations, although we can understand the desire for a stable and comprehensive theoretical vocabulary that no longer seems possible. If prudence is to be put to work today as either a means of explanation or a guide to action, then it has to be refitted for our time. This is the logic of postmodernism: moving beyond modernism by drawing on those symbolic materials and intellectual traditions that modernism had suppressed. The emancipatory interest remains, although now it is realized, not only through the expansion of rights for all, but also through a reconsideration of those limits necessary for optimal and sustainable human life. As much as this volume is grounded in the intellectual history of prudence and inspired by the recent resurgence in work on the concept, it also brings a distinctive approach to the subject. Too often, the literature on prudence covers a great deal of old ground and appears more interested in cashing in a known concept than in discovering other formulations, especially those which might be particularly suited to problems or initiatives that define the politics of a postmodern condition. We need to review the core concept of prudence, but that is only part of the story. Indeed, our first assumption is that there is no one comprehensive account of prudence—Aristotle included.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 3
Theory Without Modernity
.
3
(Likewise, there is no need to give priority to any one of the words used historically for the concept—phronesis, prudentia, prudenzia—or to varied sets of aligned terms.) The concept is by its nature multifaceted yet useful only if tied to specific situations. The full sense of prudence should come not only from its core vocabulary but also from its activation as a field of possible articulations.2 So it is that there is particular value in taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. This commitment to a wider sense of prudence is reflected in a second assumption, which is that there has been a basic division within the history of prudence between an emphasis on rational calculation, on the one hand, and intelligible performance, on the other. The calculative tradition of prudence, which originated with Aristotle, has dominated modern understanding of the concept. The performative tradition, which was embodied by Cicero, has lived in the shadows during the modern era. We can recover this perspective in part by seeing how prudence is embedded in familiar social practices. Thus, our third assumption is that understanding prudence requires attention to how it operates through the communicative media and public discourses that constitute political community. By developing these assumptions, the study of prudence can be moved beyond artificially narrow boundaries. This richer, more polyglot sense of prudence begins by taking seriously its relationship with the art of rhetoric.3 It is difficult to understand prudence as anything other than a mere trafficking in maxims as long as it is taken without regard for a social practice. Rhetoric was the traditional practice in respect to which prudence was most directly understood in antiquity, and both rhetoric and prudence were displaced by the modern reorganization of knowledge and power.4 As Lois Self has summarized: Rhetoric is an art, phronesis an intellectual virtue; both are special “reasoned capacities” which properly function in the world of probability; both are normative processes in that they involve rational principles of choice-making; both have general applicability but always require careful analysis of particulars in determining the best response to each specific situation; both ideally take into account the wholeness of human nature (rhetoric in its three appeals, phronesis in its balance of desire and reason); and finally, both have social utility and responsibility in that both treat matters of the public good.5 These largely epistemological affinities are the basis for a functional dependency as well: full realization of rhetoric as a reflective practice that
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 4
4
.
Prudence
contributes to the common good requires the qualities of prudence, which are developed as one gains persuasive skill, experience, and influence.6 This relationship holds not only for the individual leader but also for the society at large.7 This relationship is not a matter of technical competence and social engineering, however. As Victoria Kahn has demonstrated, a prudential social practice is not one in which virtue can be localized easily or power constrained reliably.8 The cultivation of prudence complicates the relationship between leader and citizen just as it complicates the relationship between virtue and power. These difficulties were reflected in the use of prudence in classical theory: it not only was discussed in treatises on politics, ethics, and rhetoric, but appears to have operated as a bridge concept between those different theoretical fields.9 Prudence can be used to link various human sciences today precisely because it does not pretend to a universal cognitive rule. Scholars in classics, political theory, moral philosophy, rhetorical studies, and other disciplines have turned to the concept in the hope that it will provide a basic vocabulary (though not an objective method) for understanding varied social practices and for nurturing authentic relationships and sound judgments within a complex society overdetermined by many forms of expertise.10 But if these commitments are to be realized, prudence must involve more than practical reasoning. It also seems clear that full development of the concept will have to go beyond philosophical discussion to identify how it is embedded in characteristic forms of speech.11 The introductory and concluding chapters of this volume suggest the full significance of this approach: by indifference to modernity’s great themes of representation and subjectivity, and by reactivating more socially inflected forms of knowledge and agency, prudence articulates one version of the postmodern condition. The chapters in this volume illustrate how this perspective might be developed. As will be evident, each offers a distinctive understanding of prudence that in turn can draw together varied scholarly and political interests. This introductory chapter will review the classical concept of prudence, identify some of the difficulties involved in fitting prudence to the contours of modern thought, and preview the individual essays.
classical prudence Consider these predicaments: (1) A city-state deliberates whether to prepare for war. Greater preparedness will mean greater security if the war
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 5
Theory Without Modernity
.
5
comes, but the war might be more likely to come once their preparations are known to the enemy who will see them as an escalation of hostilities. (2) A citizen in the city-state who opposes war deliberates whether to produce military goods. Collective security is more likely to come from not producing arms, but greater personal gain can be had from their production. (3) A political leader who favors war considers how to argue that he should be allowed to negotiate a peace treaty. He can appear true to his beliefs or true to the role he desires, and he can risk losing his backers or the votes of the peace party. Too antique, perhaps? Here are three more: (1) A city deliberates whether to finance continued suburban development. Greater growth has widespread economic benefits, but at the expense of urban infrastructure and quality of life. (2) A council member who opposes development considers whether to invest in real estate targeted for growth. More people would benefit from improvement of the urban core, while personal gain is more likely from continued development of the suburbs. (3) A developer who favors suburban expansion considers how to argue that she should be elected to the neutral planning commission. She can be true to her beliefs or to the role she desires, and she can risk losing her clients or the votes of the urban majority. From the Sophists to Augustine, classical thinkers recognized that there is a distinctive mode of reasoning indigenous to the conduct of human affairs. This realm includes all the activities of politics broadly conceived, as well as the management of business and other social practices. Prudence referred to this necessarily general intelligence, and the term was used to justify and direct specific decisions about how to act in conjunction with others. By identifying the basic elements of this intelligence, the classical thinker hoped to equip decision makers to cope with conflicting criteria or inadequate knowledge. Aristotle provided the foundational description of this intelligence by contrasting it with four others—scientific reasoning (episteme), technical reasoning (techne), wisdom (sophia), and comprehension (nous)—in order to identify its core assumptions and central operations.12 As should be evident in the following summary, the features of prudence (phronesis) follow from the essential conditions for human choice. Prudence is the mode of reasoning about contingent matters in order to select the best course of action. Contingent events cannot be known with certainty, and actions are intelligible only with regard to some idea of what is good. As both such matters are always subject to dispute, they can be resolved rationally only through deliberation—that is, through reciprocal exposition, comparison, and evaluation of arguments that represent competing perspectives
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
6
Page 6
.
Prudence
or purposes. Likewise, analysis of how others might act and determination of one’s own objectives each require consideration of what is good in general. Therefore, prudence is the determination of what is good for both the individual and others. Since it must culminate in action, prudence also includes the determination of how to achieve these linked ends in particular cases. Thus, prudence requires a knowledge of particulars that can only be acquired through experience, and this knowledge will be used most effectively as it becomes ingrained in one’s disposition to act. As a result, prudence culminates in character rather than technique. This character becomes fully realized when it incorporates other qualities conducive to effective action amidst disturbing circumstances on behalf of common goods—qualities such as selfcontrol and sympathy toward others’ predicaments. Ultimately, prudence accomplishes an integration of all the virtues sufficient for living well with regard to the full range of one’s needs and obligations. Sounds good, doesn’t it? How nice it would be if all one had to do was to follow these precepts. Unfortunately, prudence is never equivalent to its axioms, nor can it be demarcated reliably from unrealistic objectives. If this program, or any other, had provided a universal, context-invariant decision rule for making good decisions (the Holy Grail of modernism), this book and many, many others would never have been written. There is an additional problem in the literature on prudence as well; one that is grounded in this basic difficulty of formalizing action. Scholarly discussions of prudence have for the most part been devoted to analysis and application of Aristotle’s exposition of the core elements in the concept. There are at least two good reasons for such redundancy: intellectual traditions have to be maintained across the years (and particularly so within eras indifferent to their content); and because prudence is something known through its application within a specific context, the many restatements are not so much redundancies as they are activations of its norms within specific fields of practical reasoning. The continual repetition of the same terms does seem somewhat depressing, however. How often do we need to be reminded that prudence is the selection of the appropriate means to achieve a moral end, or that one should strive to coordinate personal advantage with collective benefit, or that the wise politician deliberates carefully before acting? And isn’t such advice like the proverbial “buy low and sell high”? The formula is obvious, but the whole problem lies in discerning which stocks are going to rise or fall, and the formula provides no help whatsoever in that regard. And even this is old news: Aristotle himself made a similar observation.13
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 7
Theory Without Modernity
.
7
There is little need for discussing the classical model of prudence via yet another walk through Aristotle’s doctrine. Instead, we can take an approach he unfortunately left undeveloped, although he explicitly recognized it to be an important part of the task of understanding prudence. Recall the hypothetical cases mentioned above. What to do? One typical response is to look for rules: what would any rational person do in this situation? (Indeed, this step is crucial to any art or program for rational living—e.g., to distinguishing both rhetoric and prudence from mere cleverness [deinotes]—although it need not lead all the way to an apodeictic rule or deontological ethics.)14 There was another approach familiar to the classical thinker, however, which was to look to exemplars: how have other individuals managed situations such as this one? The attention given to the particular wise person—the phronimos—is not merely a heuristic device pertinent to a program of civic education, though it certainly can serve that important task. There is something about the nature of prudence that can only be captured through embodiment in the specific political actor. Indeed, rather than see the individual wise person as a specific case of prudence—although that certainly is a sensible definition—we might consider how the prudent decision maker is so because he or she has become a linking mechanism for joining rules and cases, universal precepts and particular circumstances. And by examining how prudence is articulated through such a person, we can not only recognize how it is nested into the idiosyncratic nooks and crannies of an individual personality but also discern the outline of its more general, impersonal operations in the flow of gestures, expressions, movements, persons, and events that make up the world of action.15 Prudential theory requires a bifocal perspective that alternates between impersonal norms and individual circumstances, a perspective that is similar to the reading strategy for understanding a persuasive text.16 As one example of how prudence is articulated through paradigmatic individuals, and of how it structures public discourse, we can briefly look at one of the classical exemplars of civic leadership, Pericles.17 Our knowledge of Pericles comes principally from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and there largely from three speeches. Of these, his Funeral Oration is a standard text for civic education, but the better speech for our purposes is his challenge to the Athenians in 430 to continue the war against Sparta despite their recent suffering and waning resolution. Bottled up in their walls while the Spartans laid waste to the countryside around them, the Athenians’ economic losses were accompanied by a devastating plague. Pericles, aware of
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
8
Page 8
.
Prudence
their anger at his leadership and their desire to sue for peace, calls an assembly. It is not surprising that his speech is not celebrated today, for it would embarrass the modern, liberal pedagogue. Pericles, paragon of the Golden Age of Greece, calls for protracted war on behalf of empire through appeal to cultural superiority, and he does so with “the view that greatness is selfjustifying, not dependent upon its social or human effects or its conformity to justice or any other moral standard.”18 In addition, we know that the war became a demonstration of the law of unintended effects (just as Pericles’ counterpart, the Spartan leader Archidamus, had prophesied), and that it ended with the conquest of Athens. Yet Thucydides makes it quite clear that Pericles is a study not in folly, but wisdom. Pericles is not portrayed as someone appealing to the Athenians’ baser tendencies, but as the “first citizen” who is contrasted with the demagogues who followed him. His “position, intelligence, and integrity” are such that he could “respect the liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check,” and his foresight and policies are celebrated.19 Pericles’ speech achieves its immediate goal, and Thucydides argues that the Athenians would have probably won the war had they followed Pericles’ policies after his death. The best leadership requires a combination of foresight and the capacity to persuade in the present—as Pericles himself observes—and his successors (including Thucydides himself at the time) seem to have had one or the other.20 What, then, are the qualities of the person who does have practical wisdom—that is to say, sound and influential understanding about matters of policy? Pericles’ oration provides an answer to this question. The speech can be read as two speeches joined together: one flattering the Athenians for their boldness and the riches it has gained them; the other checking those very tendencies to recommend restraint and continued suffering. As Robert Connor observes, Pericles’ “effectiveness derives not so much from his ability to express the characteristics and attitudes of his people as from his ability to counterbalance some of their tendencies.”21 This coupling of contradictory appeals is more than a rhetorical trick, however—more than a means by which the superior individual manipulates the masses. Since the people contain multiple tendencies, or since the same tendencies can lead to success or failure in different circumstances, we can see that leadership requires an ability to discern shifting probabilities and to adopt contrasting attitudes. The idea that the prudential person is balanced becomes an oversimplification, an easy metonym for a much more dynamic process of alternating contradictory impulses within oneself—and not just to resolve internal tensions but in order to counteract such alternations in others. Indeed, Pericles’ argument plays on
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 9
Theory Without Modernity
.
9
the Athenian capacities for both boldness and discipline, with the leader capable of both attitudes. (Pericles’ call for restraint and resolve, which involved both continuing the war yet remaining in the walls, came right after he had led a daring expedition to the Peloponnisos while Attica itself was being laid waste.) The rhetorical trick of joining counsel with flattery is a linguistic resource for representing and enacting the deep structure of prudential action. Once a figure has been declared a model of prudence, there is a tendency to see everything he or she does as some element of that ability. So, for example, we could note how Pericles confronts the audience’s anger toward him, and make something of this attentiveness to emotion and of his ability to face hostility directly.22 But we also should take care to identify those elements of prudence which could be used by anyone, including those not in the markedly secure position of a Pericles. A prudence fitted only to a rich, brilliant, experienced, self-confident, aristocratic supreme commander would not be of much use. One must be more selective, even while recognizing there need not be a strict alignment between some capabilities and positions of strength. The following analysis of Pericles’ speech will identify five elements of prudence: attending to character, recognizing limits on action, balancing contradictions, discerning mutually advantageous outcomes, and public performance. Of course, because prudence is operational only in specific circumstances, we also must keep in mind that there will be other features of this multiform intelligence that are not evident in any one instance of Pericles in action, or in all of the actions of any one exemplar. What is central to Pericles’ argument in this case is his recognition of the Athenian character. Prudence is a study in character, but not only of the wise leader. The leader’s character can only be assessed with respect to that of other leaders and of the polity, and prudential analysis in a democracy is grounded in knowing the polity’s characteristic moods, aspirations, and actions. As Connor has pointed out, Pericles sees the same city in both the Funeral Oration and his speech on continuing the war, but he values basic qualities differently in each. The qualities that are worth dying for are also inducements to bad policies. Thus, prudence will require habituation and historical knowledge, not just to season the character of the leader, but also because that is how one learns about the character of the city.23 Furthermore, knowledge of character involves seeing the contradictory tendencies in any one quality, whether it be boldness, love of luxury, or naval power. One must be able to both appreciate and beware the polity’s most basic tendencies. Thus any Greek will know that Athenians are bold, but only the wise will consider how boldness can lead to both glory and disaster. Despite this critical
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
10
Page 10
.
Prudence
sensibility, however, the attention to character also brings with it the idea that what once was arbitrary becomes fixed. There is no question of the Athenians now becoming less bold, or of living well without glory. They cannot undo what they have become, so the only question is how to live wisely as who they are known to be. As the apostle Paul knew, classical prudence cannot imagine internal transformation.24 Thus the appraisal of national character is influenced by the broader tendency to think in terms of limits. Athens, city of boundless energies, is not exempt from Pericles’ observation that all things are born to decay. Indeed, it is just as Athens has exceeded itself that it becomes most susceptible to external constraints, for Pericles’ attention to limits is most evident when he is discussing foreign affairs and particularly the Athenian empire. Once again, one is free to act but not to undo all prior actions. “Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire. . . . Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it certainly is dangerous to let it go” (2.63). Here the affinity between prudence and political conservatism may be strongest, for Pericles implies that, over time, the distinction between nature and convention disappears. What once was arbitrary now is essential. Likewise, we can see that a sensitivity to limits and sustainability need not support progressive politics, as is assumed today. The Periclean sense of limitation is not just a platform for one political ideology or another, however. It is a means for being rational. This rationality includes both the attempt for self-control amidst turmoil—recall how Pericles begins his speech by directly addressing the audience’s anger toward him—and more important, the ability to discern the elements of decision making in the situation. The speech begins by defining what is needed to be capable of action—and the definition follows an ascending series of necessary but insufficient qualities. It then reviews how the audience has been changed by its sufferings—that is, by the accumulation of constraints on its freedom and prosperity. At that point he makes the first positive appeal—reminding the audience that they are citizens of a great city—but with a twist: just as it is dishonorable to claim a reputation one does not deserve, it is equally so to not live up to the reputation one already has. Again, a powerful inducement to action is also a powerful constraint on choice. The Athenians are not only ennobled by their reputation, but also coerced by it. Reputation, like empire, is a tyranny, and not one to be overthrown. Even the most positive argument in the speech—the following analysis of Athenian geopolitical superiority— is embedded in this insistence that the capacity for action is limited by past accomplishments. Intelligence, we are told, is the capacity to discriminate
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 11
Theory Without Modernity
.
11
facts from hopes, and political action is equated with accepting the burdens of empire.25 My interest here is not the psychology of imperialism but rather the emphasis on recognizing limits even within an imperial state. The interesting thing about Pericles’ constant evocation of constraint is that he does so in order to overcome mere expediency. In this case, the conflict is not between self-interest and justice—which is simply not an issue in this debate—but between self-interest and honor. Ironically, Pericles’ speech is an appeal to constraint in order to tie the Athenians to what he believes is the normative horizon of politics: the obligations to one’s ancestors to uphold and enhance the fame of the city. All empires decline, but the highest obligation is to burn as brightly as possible in order to live for as long as possible in human memory (2.64). Mere expediency comes from serving immediate self-interest by taking advantage of the opportunities for lesser action in the present. Prudence not only sees the dangers in the lesser action but also looks for the correspondence between historical constraint and normative ideal. So it is that Pericles simultaneously defines Athens as an imperial state and advocates the strategy of staying within the walls despite the suffering entailed by that strategy. By accepting such constraints as colonial enmity, Spartan superiority on land, and their obligation to Athens’s reputation, the city can both see the wisest course of action and find the moral strength to stay the course amidst the pain and uncertainty of war. This argument demonstrates the extent to which prudence is a mentality dedicated to balancing the contradictory tendencies in any complex political situation. Pericles’ policy stands midway between two strong tendencies in the city: on the one hand, by staying within the walls, it falls short of the Athenians’ characteristic boldness, which would goad them to pursue the Spartans and their allies wherever they might go. On the other hand, by continuing the war, it goes beyond the citizens’ current willingness to be done with their sufferings by ending the war with a treaty that would allow them to recover from their unexpected misfortunes. The speech itself moves through a series of similar oppositions. These include his resolution and the audience’s emotionality, public interest and private interests, short-term gains and long-term dangers, political action and apathy, present circumstances and future glory. As with any orator, he uses opposing terms strategically; as with any audience, we should keep in mind that he might just as well reverse the polarities on another occasion. This emphasis on balance, rather than on any one set of values, follows from the structural conditions defining prudence: the political situation is self-contradictory from the beginning, actions can
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
12
Page 12
.
Prudence
only be based on educated guesses about contingent circumstances, acting at all requires others’ cooperation, and all this happens over time while encountering unexpected consequences of what one does do. Thus, Pericles’ use of contrasting terms in the speech generally involves not the displacement of one idea or value by another but a subtle blending of opposites in the interest of balancing a larger set of forces. Thus, apathy is contrasted unfavorably with political action but on behalf of staying within the city walls, which is itself based on his assessment of the array of geopolitical factors.26 This balancing act also highlights another important element in prudential thinking, which is coordinating self-interest with the public interest. Pericles features the two motives prominently at the beginning of the speech, and they color all that follows because of their affinity with his subsequent distinction between politically active and apathetic citizens. Again, the contrast with the Funeral Oration is instructive. There the city flourished from the citizens’ pursuit of their diverse interests, while all were assumed to be fascinated with politics. But now Pericles recognizes the tension between the two motives, one that certainly would have been eating at many in his audience. The key to prudential thinking, moreover, is in seeing how the two can be joined. “My own opinion is that when the state is on the right course it is a better thing for each separate individual than when private interests are satisfied but the state as a whole is going downhill” (2.60). Pericles argues explicitly that the pursuit of private interest alone is self-defeating in the long run, while the only sure way to secure private goods is through the common defense. The validity of this claim certainly cannot mean much to one who has suffered greatly while seeing others benefit from the war, however. Perhaps this is one reason why Pericles makes so much of the city’s place in history. It is in the pursuit of fame that the fortunes of the individual and the city are most thoroughly joined, and that is where individual suffering can earn its greatest reward. So it is that a speech beginning with the contrast between private and public interest can end with the claim that the real strengths of the individual and the city are identical. The validity of this claim may not seem obvious to a modern reader, but the point to be made is that Pericles turned to the context embedded in his culture that allowed him to articulate the strongest appeal to the idea of mutual advantage.27 This appeal is twice handicapped today, because it also depended on Pericles’ own performance as an orator. Thus, he exemplifies a fifth element of prudence, which is its orientation toward performance. Pericles responds to the Athenians’ low morale by calling an assembly to deliver a speech. The performance embodies the political relationship between the leader and the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 13
Theory Without Modernity
.
13
people while it provides the basis for unspoken analogies as well. Pericles reasons with an audience defined by its anger, and he stands up to them as he would have them stand up to Sparta. He advocates private suffering on behalf of the public interest, while he exemplifies the private individual secure enough to take risks in public. Although Thucydides articulates the ideas contained in this speech across his entire History, they obtain their most compelling statement not as ideas but in the person of Pericles demonstrating his mastery of the political situation within the city and without. Indeed, the ideas themselves are not difficult, but the unraveling of the Athenian fortunes seems fated once Pericles dies. The city itself can never attain the coherence of its greatest political leader, and so oscillates between one extreme and another. Thucydides seems to say that Pericles’ speech provided a sufficient model for imitation: if others could have continued to perform as he did, the city would have prevailed. Instead, however, an inferior form of oratorical performance prevailed—the demagogy motivated by personal ambition that led to their collective self-destruction. The Periclean example ends in additional paradoxes: if the highest form of prudence is exemplified in the individual leader, can the polity do as well? If the most prudent individual is superior to the rest, are more ordinary actors capable of successful imitation? If prudence is most evident in the leader’s response to actual events in specific situations, how can it be transferred to different circumstances? To answer these questions, we are led back into the complementary formulation of prudence as an impersonal mode of reasoning. This circularity is inescapable, but also of only minor concern, since prudence is not designed to be an elegant theoretical system. What it provides instead of logical elegance is the ability to flip from one cognitive set to another—from rules to exemplars, and back again, as it is helpful to reconsidering and thereby finding the better choice in a perplexing situation.28 Likewise, the processes of imitating the exemplar and applying the rule mirror aspects of each other, and in each case successful use will require a reflexive awareness of the difference between the prior form and its performative embodiment in a specific place, time, and audience.29 To summarize, prudence typically receives dual articulations as a set of rules and as an exemplary individual, with neither capable of wholly representing the other. Prudence is defined as both a form of intelligence and the qualities evident in the wise person. By examining Thucydides’ portrait of Pericles addressing the Athenian assembly, we can identify some of those qualities in the classical understanding of prudence. These include attention to the character of the political agent (whether an individual or a collectivity),
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
14
Page 14
.
Prudence
according to a comprehensive awareness of the limits on action, in order to balance the inevitable contradictions within each situation, in order to discern those policies which will secure mutually advantageous outcomes, through successful rhetorical performance. Like Pericles standing before Athens in the Golden Age, prudence represents the ideal of the individual and the society advancing together rather than at the expense of each other. As demonstrated in his accomplished speaking, it is most evident in the “rightness of tone, sureness of touch” by which such ends can be achieved with minimal friction in actual practice.30
modernity and its discontents Just as performative virtues should appeal to those who appreciate political artistry, they are likely to trigger a shake of the head, a rolling of the eyes, or other signs of immediate though reasoned dismissal from others. As much as prudence was at home in antiquity, it is a stranger in the corporate structures of modern thought. Thus, to understand prudence today we also have to consider why it is not easily assimilated into prevailing modes of analysis, social organization, and philosophical inquiry. The modern epoch runs from the Italian Renaissance and northern European Protestant Reformation, through the Enlightenment’s achievements in state formation and secularization, then to the democratic and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, and into the contemporary period of high-impact science and capitalist hegemony. This is not a clock that can be turned back. Nonetheless, those who look to a premodern concept such as prudence do so in part out of concern for how modern civilization can be harmful to human dignity. We begin by playing out a hunch: because prudence has been diminished within modern thought while those modes of political intelligence which have displaced it are proving to be dangerous, we might do well to step back and see just where things are out of balance. Prudence is rarely referred to or honored explicitly in contemporary discourse. Periodically, political elites will refer to it when having to rationalize inaction. (This usage was captured perfectly by the comedian Dana Carvey, who satirized President Bush pere by wagging his finger and saying, “Wouldn’t be prudent. Wouldn’t be prudent.”) Likewise, individuals will invoke the term from time to time when justifying flagrant self-interest or rank careerism. Although neither practice is completely at odds with the classical concept, much of the value and all of the complexity of that model are being avoided.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 15
Theory Without Modernity
.
15
What is more important, however, is the displacement of prudence by more characteristic and powerful forms of modern thought. The field of prudential judgment is now dominated by the complementary mentalities of political realism and progressive social engineering. Generally, realism is used to justify the behavior of individuals (including legal entities such as corporations and states), while social engineering governs the management of collective behavior. These patterns of justification share the assumption that rational action requires seeing through the distractions of culture in order to control material resources. “Realist” analysis defines political actors as self-interested power maximizers, constrained by their resources for effective action to that end and regulated by their perceptions of others’ capacity to affect them in return.31 Political analysis consists in assessing all of the means for action according to calculations of gain and risk. By giving priority to material and especially coercive capabilities, and being suspicious of verbal statements, one can objectively determine the best possible course of action for survival in a world of force and fraud. This program for political thinking has the authority of a long intellectual history, and has repeatedly been proven to be a sufficient account of political conflict and success in particular situations. Nonetheless, realism can also be misleading, wasteful, and self-destructive. If there are universal elements of a political consciousness, they nonetheless are always inflected through the conditions of thought and action defining a given time and place. Although realism has operated as a useful model of political rationality, it is important to recognize that it can also be unrealistic. Because realism has supplied modern political thought with its dominant style for describing the world to justify action, these reservations ought to be taken seriously.32 The erosion of prudence in modern thought is evident in the fact that “prudence” has been a watchword of sorts for realist advisers.33 This usage is not far-fetched, for both prudence and realism feature the rational control of one’s impulses in order to achieve self-sufficiency in a contingent world. The realist allegiance to prudence has often been honored in the breach, however. This is not surprising, since ultimately realism devalues some fundamental elements of prudential reasoning: neither the end of the good life in general nor habits of deliberation should influence realist calculations. In realist discourse, “prudence” is a shadow of its former self. It functions as a code word for a cautious or conservative politics, or as a rationalization when calculations falter, or as a rhetorical device for discounting “idealistic” and “ideological” appeals, or as a placeholder for what has been displaced. It is not appreciated as a fully developed pattern of reasoning. Indeed, “realists have
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
16
Page 16
.
Prudence
been so successful in expounding their particular definition of prudence that in today’s philosophical and political discourse the prudential is regularly equated with the self-interested, even by people who do not share their philosophical assumptions.”34 Conversely, when a richer sense of prudence is evoked in this context, it can hardly avoid assuming the full dress of ethical doctrine. Prudence then is a counter to raw expediency, but at the cost of being redefined as ethical thinking in the political context. As ethics is a “monological discourse” trumping political negotiation, prudence reinstates higher values only by becoming inflexible.35 The political thinker retaliates by insisting on the autonomy of politics, now the realm of power as it operates without regard for any other value. Thus, the choice is between two deformations of the classical concept: flexible-because-amoral expediency and rigid moralizing. At the same time that political thought was undergoing this transformation, politics itself was being subjected to a similar process. Politics appeared too messy and inefficient for the task of managing ever larger societies and their enormous appetites for consumption. Whether known as Fordism, Taylorism, modernism, bureaucratization, or any of several other labels, modern social engineering has long been recognized to be a boon to human life, capable of large-scale disasters, and unstoppable. Through the application of modern scientific rationality to the management of all material and human resources, both governmental and corporate organizations have achieved exponential increases in productivity and comprehensive investment within all areas of human life. From water to labor, industry to agriculture, architecture to urban design, and through every practice subject to accounting procedures, mapping, zoning, and a host of related technologies, the public space and common resources that once were the domain of politics have been remade in the image of a rational world. James C. Scott describes the current phase of this process as “authoritarian high modernism,” which is “a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws.”36 Scott demonstrates how such high modernism uses semiotic practices such as mapping to simplify social order into a series of abstractions, and then uses the productive powers of modern capitalism and the modern state to reorganize the world according to a norm of legibility. All resources are to
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 17
Theory Without Modernity
.
17
be ordered for optimally efficient appropriation, while all other features of the environment are removed or rendered invisible. As I sit before a computer that is drawing power from the regional grid, in a house heated by gas piped from thousands of miles away, and use a telephone that can call anywhere in the world. . . . Well, no one can avoid enjoying the benefits of modern civilization, and only a fool would deny what has been accomplished.37 But there is no free lunch, and exponential increases in productivity and innovation have their hidden costs. These include increased potential for systemic collapse, impoverishment of the subjective richness of social life, and trained incapacity to recognize the means to counteract these tendencies. This last mistake is the one that points to the importance of recuperating prudence. Just as prudence becomes a lesser version of the classical concept within political realism, so it occupies a reduced role within modern social engineering. It then refers to the small set of compromises the system designer or manager must make to fit the system to the environment. Prudent conduct is that which gives in a bit here and there when encountering natural or social resistance to the system’s rational, legible design. One recognizes that Rome wasn’t built in a day, that a few deviations from ideal organization and optimal efficiency are actually low-cost ways to achieve long-term system dominance, that even though we could move the mountain and shouldn’t bribe the local official, such temporary restraints and petty irrationalities are cheaper than other, more systemic measures. Prudence becomes the set of minor techniques for accommodating system to lifeworld, though never a basis for reflecting on or changing the system. This reduction reveals the Achilles heel of modernism. As Scott’s superb analyses have demonstrated, These rather extreme instances of massive, state-imposed social engineering illustrate, I think, a larger point about formally organized social action. In each case, the necessarily thin, schematic model of social organization and production animating the planning was inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a successful social order. By themselves, the simplified rules can never generate a functioning community, city, or economy. Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain.38
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
18
Page 18
.
Prudence
Furthermore, modernist social engineering, not only ignores “precisely the practical skills that underwrite any complex activity,” but does so as part of its comprehensive “strategies of control and appropriation.”39 Thus, any attempt to resist schemes of social legibility by cultivating the many forms of practical knowledge becomes a form of political opposition to the full extension of the modernist project, and perhaps a way to counter that project’s most dangerous tendencies. A common denominator between political realism and progressive engineering is that they are most valuable to the weak, but most likely to be promoted by the strong. Indeed, the problems we face today are not so much with these doctrines themselves as with their hypertrophied development throughout the new imperium of global capitalism. Conversely, prudence is that mentality least likely to appeal to the strong, though perhaps most important for the maintenance of a worthwhile civilization.40 The modern human sciences also see the world from a position of strength. From the towers of the research university, there has seemed to be little need to study cunning, learn the arts of reversal, and appreciate how the weaker argument can best the stronger, or to look for small affinities between ethics and effectiveness, limits and possibilities, and political ideas and modes of performance, or to consider how power and even justice may be misrepresentations of the actual practices of caring, self-sustaining communities. If willing to consider prudence, moreover, we have to grant that it immediately runs afoul of basic criteria of modern rationality: prudence antedates the fact-value distinction; it is difficult to quantify; it is largely retrospective; it is necessarily parochial; it is prescriptive; it is too general; it focuses too much on individual personality; it can be a stalking horse for political advocacy. Some of these criticisms are difficult for any theory to dodge (e.g., we never use quantification alone when describing human affairs), and some cancel each other— as when bias is attributed to right, center, and left alike.41 Some of them are instructive about the task anyone faces in identifying the elements of political intelligence: for example, any practical mentality has to be prescriptive at some point, while generality is often a resource when negotiating. Nonetheless, such objections will be sufficient reason for many scholars to overlook the subject. One can address each of these concerns, whether by arguing that prudence does meet the standard or that no one meets it, but the problem runs deeper. Prudence really is different from modernist norms of explanation: it is a language game that gives no special priority to either of the two great axes of modern thought—representation and subjectivity.42 Prudent counsel and
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 19
Theory Without Modernity
.
19
action does involve both representations of the external world and reflection on subjective experience, of course, but it doesn’t give any special priority to either form of consciousness, nor does it favor those procedures which provide optimal realization of either form. There is no cogito, no controlled experiment, no phenomenological method, no falsification rule. Worse yet, there is no hierarchy of decision rules. Contrary to the rational organization of a philosophical investigation or scientific research program, prudential knowledge is organized more in the manner of a crossword puzzle: one may begin at any point, will work with a hodgepodge of deeply enculturated cues, will have to integrate both formal constraints and factual knowledge from an enormous social field, and should know when to quit. A systematic theory of prudence would be a contradiction in terms.43 Perhaps one reason the classical formulation of prudence placed such emphasis on the formation of character was that character is an example of both nonhierarchical organization and qualified reflection. In the figure of the phronimos, practical wisdom is grounded in a variable process of individual habituation, defined as a series of tendencies whose internal coherence is important though essentially idiosyncratic, and made a subject of reflection as the individual becomes engaged in a social field and especially in the activity of deliberation. Another intuition in the classical context might have been that it is important to hold to relatively limited or conventional conceptions of representation and subjectivity if one is to act effectively. (Such is the gist of the critique of speculative philosophy in antiquity, first by the Sophists of the Ionian philosophers and then by many Romans of the Greeks.) Politics depends on being realistic, but also on being attentive to possibilities that can be lost amidst extensive description of what is the case; rhetorical success requires strategic self-awareness, but also social adaptability and a willingness to speak out that can be paralyzed by excessive self-consciousness. Even so, it remains the case that contemporary formulations of prudence find themselves tied to limited versions of knowledge and selfhood that won’t garner much respect in modern culture. It is as if one were giving up philosophy for pedagogy, or Virginia Woolf for Miss Manners. These and similar criticisms do not faze those scholars committed to recuperating prudence. The value of prudence to them stems in part from the fact that it does not meet the legitimation criteria of high modernism. Rather than strive to bring the classical concept up to modern specifications, they feature the concept because they believe the specifications need to be supplemented or changed. Modernism is seen, not only as a collection of powerful technologies for knowing and managing the world, but also as a futile and at times
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
20
Page 20
.
Prudence
tragic attempt to make the world conform to one civilization’s rules for social order. Modern life has included unheard of expansions of personal liberty, privacy, self-awareness, and self-fashioning across all ranks of society throughout the globe. Yet people often are no wiser, less articulate, and trapped in the paradox that their happiness depends on social practices and rhetorical skills that cannot thrive amidst modern individualism. Neither longing for the past nor another version of an endlessly projected modernity, prudence offers one version of a postmodern condition. In the studies comprising this volume, there is a looking backward in order to see more clearly a mentality that is overlooked and undervalued in the present. Whether describing prudential performance, the texture of prudence, or other concepts advanced in the following chapters, the intent in each case is to identify some of those practical skills which underwrite the complex activities of public life. These essays cannot be comprehensive. They do aspire to show how prudence is articulated through both precept and personality, how the actual operation of this intelligence can involve subtle shifts from one form of itself to the other, and how these shifts leave their traces in the texts of public discourse. If some parts of this project can double as suggestions toward developing a postmodern culture dedicated to worthwhile and sustainable communities developed through wise use of diverse modes of expertise and experience, so much the better.
the many faces of prudence Through critical studies situated in major periods in the history of prudence, the chapters in this volume focus on the internal dynamics of the concept as they demonstrate how it operates discursively. The first group of chapters provide revisionary readings of defining moments in the history of theoretical reflection on the term. Robert Cape takes us back to antiquity, although not for another reworking of Aristotle. Instead, Cape examines Cicero’s use of the term as he developed the concept in his treatises on oratory and politics. Cicero elevated practical intelligence to the status of wisdom while at the same time breaking with the standard Greek methods for expounding ethical theory. Thus prudence was enriched by its exposition through the conventions of urbane dialogue, in utramque partem disputation, and speakers who were embodiments of civic leadership. These formal devices articulate a sensibility that is learned through imitation, valued for its social and aesthetic qualities, and realized in discursive performance.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 21
Theory Without Modernity
.
21
A performative perspective always raises questions of sophistry and the misuse of language, which is where Eugene Garver begins his careful retracing of Machiavellian prudence. Garver focuses on Machiavelli’s negotiation of sophisticated logics of imitation in order to create a realm of appearance in which civic action becomes a middle way between ideals that cannot be realized and objectives that cannot be ideal. In such a realm, it is important to imitate not only virtue but necessity, and so to distinguish between both real and notional alternatives and artificial and natural limitations. Garver’s analysis leaves much of our conventional understanding of Machiavelli intact, yet it raises intriguing questions about how we might use his examples. In addition, Garver complicates the association of pluralism with liberalism while suggesting how prudence itself might reflect deep instabilities in modern politics. The Renaissance may have been the high-water mark for prudence as a theory of political action; it certainly did not fare so well once the Enlightenment brought a radical transformation of the European philosophical vocabulary. Within that movement, however, the Scottish school developed a formulation of practical reasoning that maintained prudence as a model of the right relationship between knowledge and action. Peter Diamond details the careful distinctions by which Thomas Reid developed his philosophy of common sense. Diamond argues that Reid’s account of a situationally sensitive practical reason reproduced many of the key features of the Ciceronian conception of prudence, including its respect for tacit knowledge and belief in moral suasion. Yet Reid was also defined by the ideals of modern philosophy, including its suspicion of ordinary decision making, and so his own arguments held together only precariously, needing the prudential resources they were to discover. By reconsidering prudence in respect to these three moments, we can discern how the history of prudence confirms not only the value but also the frustrations involved in trying to fit this concept to the contours of modern thought. In addition, these chapters provide both analyses of the internal complexity of prudential thinking and a general understanding of how the term is implicated in fundamental dynamics of persuasion and interpretation. These dual objectives receive additional development in the second part of the volume, which features case studies of representative figures in the history of prudential public address. These cases reveal how speakers drew on the forms of prudential reasoning as means of persuasion, and how the prudential intelligence only comes to full expression in the act of rhetorical performance. Thus prudence can be identified as one of the discursive structures capable
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
22
Page 22
.
Prudence
of motivating collective action, and sometimes its outline can be traced through attentive reading of persuasive texts. Edmund Burke, like Cicero before him, stands as one of the great exponents of practical wisdom and as one of the few figures to achieve prominence as both a statesman and a public philosopher. Stephen Browne examines the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in order to identify how Burke crafted a “discourse of virtue” that included a series of prudential maneuvers designed to counter imperial power. Browne reveals how Burke’s political thought acquires a palpable texture in composition—a “coarseness” that comes from working through speech to ground principles in historical circumstances and to act with the appropriate sense of timing that will preserve the political community. By heeding historical particulars and by discerning the proper pace of deliberation, the Letter appeals for active restraint of the operations of power, and particularly of the tendency to force conformity to abstract conceptions of order. James Jasinski demonstrates how the great public controversies of the early American republic involved competing conceptions of prudential action that represented different sides of civic republicanism. Prudence became articulated in public debate according to a central tension between audacity and accommodation, each of which was the center for a cluster of terms that were used to describe and motivate political action. Jasinski traces a shift from an early alignment of prudence with the more audacious action, to an equilibrium in the constitutional period, to a preference for an increasingly calcified accommodationism during the slavery debate, to further reassertion of prudential audacity by the radical constitutionalists at mid-century. Jasinski’s account thickens our understanding of the dynamics of prudential imitation. Both audacity and accommodation were attitudes recommended to leaders according to the wisdom of the past, yet successful application in the present broke down as the tension between the two was ignored. Christine Oravec’s study of nineteenth-century anxiety over the role of women in public address both widens the context of public culture and examines another key feature of prudence. Because the presence of women in the audience was both representative of the democratic public and inherently transgressive, it provided a litmus test of the force of propriety in prudential performance. Oravec’s explication of the “promiscuous” audience, the male critic, and a willfully imprudent female speaker reveals the conditions for public judgment that were emerging in the Jacksonian era. More important still, the feminized conception of propriety that developed became an important element in the constitution of bourgeois norms for public activity. Oravec
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 23
Theory Without Modernity
.
23
argues that the conjunction of a domesticating propriety and a denuded sense of prudence remains characteristic of the mass audience that is presumed to be incapable of active participation in democratic governance. The corollary is that transgressive speakers in the manner of her exemplar, Fanny Wright, are essential for the restoration of a vital sense of civic life. These critical studies exemplify how understanding prudence must include attentiveness to how it is realized within public discourse. The last part of the volume turns to the problem of situating prudence within some of the cultural practices and intellectual initiatives defining the early twenty-first century. John Nelson considers how the concept is alive and well, mutatis mutandis, in the genres of popular culture that people increasingly use as equipment for living in a complex society. This is a society characterized by the triumph of the social and a corresponding decline in traditional political participation, by ever wider democratization and the collapse of the public/ private framework, by the fragmentation of grand narratives and other forms of cultural legitimacy, and by a host of concerns that include moderating radical individualism and managing ecological crises. Through his explication of the arguments, principles, characters, tropes, stories, proprieties, judgments, and margins of prudence as they are elements of invention within popular literatures, Nelson outlines a vocabulary for a substantive theory of practical wisdom. The second chapter in this section situates prudence within contemporary interpretive philosophy. By examining the appropriation of the concept by Jean François Lyotard, Maurice Charland is able to identify how prudence has been redefined by the assumptions of poststructuralism. Lyotard is fixated on Aristotle, but he begins where other neo-Aristotelian accounts end, and while rejecting the idea of community he crafts a pragmatics of acting and judging within the condition of radical plurality. Prudence is awakened when one has ethos without identity and has to judge without rules. Charland situates Lyotard within the tradition of prudence by carefully tracing this supplement to Aristotelian discourse, a supplement that is by turns Sophistic, committed to justice, defined via difference, and realized through performance. My concluding chapter brings this perspective full circle to consider how prudence has depended on certain conventions of its articulation that can be rather arbitrary with respect to any moment of judgment. Along the way, I also rough out several claims for continued development of the concept. This articulation of prudence includes a commitment to sustainability through use of normative, calculative, and performative capabilities that together join personal agency and public judgment. Perhaps to suggest an affinity between
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
24
Page 24
.
Prudence
prudence and folly, and as a final example of how prudence operates through public discourse, the chapter includes a discussion of Bill Clinton’s impeachment scandal. There is no definitive case or last word, however. A reflexive understanding of prudence ends by recapitulating incompleteness.44 This lack of closure is a limitation, of course, and so a fitting place to conclude any discussion of prudence. Yet such an end is also a beginning, for if the human sciences are to rise to the challenge of articulating a postmodern culture worth having, they will have to do so by rethinking the very notion of limits. Modernity saw any limit as but a temporary obstacle, awaiting yet another great leap forward into an ever wider realm of enlightenment and freedom. A postmodern inquiry gives limits their due; its reward will be to learn how they also are liminal figures—portals into other worlds, some closer than we had realized, though perhaps not better but simply different. Prudence will always lack imagination, and typically pull itself up short of transformative experiences, but in doing so it might become possible to realize how happiness needs no more than to achieve what is always within our grasp.
notes 1. Recent discussions of prudence include Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993); Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Douglas J. Den Uyl, The Virtue of Prudence (New York: Peter Lang, 1991); Daniel Mark Nelson, The Priority of Prudence: Virtue and Natural Law in Thomas Aquinas and the Implications for Modern Ethics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: “Phronesis” and “Techne” in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); Peter J. Steinberger, The Concept of Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Daniel Westberg, Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); as well as others listed below. 2. David Wiggins, “Deliberation and Practical Reason,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Rorty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); Phillip Bricker, “Prudence,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 381–401; David R. Mapel, “Prudence and the Plurality of Value in International Ethics,” Journal of Politics 52 (1990): 433–56; Alberto R. Coll, “Normative Prudence as a Tradition of Statecraft,” Ethics and International Affairs 5 (1991): 33–51; Julia Annas, “Prudence and Morality in Ancient and Modern Ethics,” Ethics 105 (1995): 241–57; T. H. Irwin, “Prudence and Morality in Greek Ethics,” ibid., 284–95; Wynne Walker Moskop, “Prudence as a Paradigm for Political Leaders,” Political Psychology 17 (1996): 619–42; Richard S. Ruderman, “Aristotle and the Recovery of Political Judgment,” American Political Science Review 91 (1997): 409–20; James A. Bill, “The Essence of
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 25
Theory Without Modernity
.
25
Statesmanship: George Ball and Prudence,” in George Ball: Behind the Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 6; Eugene Garver, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Prudence in the Interpretation of the Constitution,” in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, ed. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 171–95; J. Patrick Dobel, “Political Prudence and the Ethics of Leadership,” Public Administration Review 58 (1998): 74–81; Christopher Colmo, “Alfarabi on the Prudence of Founders,” Review of Politics 60 (1998): 719–41; as well as rhetorical studies which are listed below. 3. For discussion of the “remarkable, but largely unremarked, affinity between phronesis and rhetoric,” see Oscar L. Brownstein, “Aristotle and the Rhetorical Process,” in Rhetoric: A Tradition in Transition, ed. Walter Fisher (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1974), and Lois S. Self, “Rhetoric and Phronesis: The Aristotelian Ideal,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 12 (1979): 130–45. See also Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); P. Christopher Smith, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998); Michael Leff, “Prudential Argument and the Use of History in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Commonwealth Club Address,’ ” in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Argumentation, ed. Frans H. van Eemeren et al. (Amsterdam: Sicsat, 1991), 1B:931–36; Robert Hariman, “Prudence/Performance,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 21 (1991): 26–35; James Jasinski, “The Forms and Limits of Prudence in Henry Clay’s (1850) Defense of the Compromise Measures,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 454–78; Jim A. Kuypers, “Doxa and a Critical Rhetoric: Accounting for the Rhetorical Agent Through Prudence,” Communication Quarterly 44 (1996): 452–62; David G. Levasseur, “A Reexamination of Edmund Burke’s Rhetorical Art: A Rhetorical Struggle Between Prudence and Heroism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 332–50; Kirt H. Wilson, “The Contested Space of Prudence in the 1874–1875 Civil Rights Debate,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 131–49; Robert Hariman and Francis A. Beer, “What Would Be Prudent? Forms of Reasoning in World Politics,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1998): 299–330; Steve Schwartze, “Performing Phronesis: The Case of Isocrates’ Helen,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 32 (1999): 78–95; Kirt H. Wilson, “Emerson, Transcendental Prudence, and the Legacy of Senator Charles Sumner,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2 (1999): 453–79; Robert E. Terrill, “Protest, Prophecy, and Prudence in the Rhetoric of Malcolm X,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4 (2001): 25–54; and James Jasinski, “Prudence/Phronesis,” in Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2001), 462–70. Curiously, “Phronesis,” “Practical Wisdom,” and “Prudence” each have a separate entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 4. One could also describe this relationship this way: prudence was the primary virtue in respect to which the social practice of rhetoric was understood. Within that practice, prudential considerations included what not to say, when to say what, and so forth. Hence the close affinity within rhetoric between prudence and decorum, which were as two sides of the same coin. These classical relationships are seen more as shadows today. For a succinct account of the relationship between modernity and rhetoric, see the introductory essay in John Bender and David E. Wellbery, eds., The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 5. Self, “Rhetoric and Phronesis,” 135. Brownstein makes a similar comparison: “They have the same ultimate objective, the prakton agathon; for both this is the product of their first objective, judgment or choice; both deal with the contingent; in both reasoning starts from probabilistic premises, but each is ‘more than a reasoned state’; and both produce their ends by means of deliberation. It is clear that rhetoric externalizes, and makes public and social, the internal and personal characteristics of phronesis” (“Aristotle and the Rhetorical Process,” 23). See also Stephen Halliwell, “The Challenge of Rhetoric to Political and Ethical Theory in
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
26
Page 26
.
Prudence
Aristotle,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 175–90. 6. Victoria Kahn illuminates these relationships in her study of the Renaissance humanists: “Eloquence is conceived of not only as the cause and effect of prudence, but as a form of prudence itself” (Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism, 10). For additional examination of the tensions between “technical and prudential conceptions of rhetoric” within the culture of Renaissance humanism, see her subsequent work, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the CounterReformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 7. In Brownstein’s words: “Phronesis is the general decision-making faculty of the individual, as the rhetorical process is the general decision-making faculty of the social organism” (“Aristotle and the Rhetorical Process,” 24). 8. Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric. Garver sees the same complications: “Here is the difference between rhetoric and the other arts. Rhetoric is the most noble art, and the most dangerous to the polis. . . . All the arts are subordinate [to politics]; only for rhetoric is the subordination problematic” (Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 45). 9. Self and Brownstein each provide a case for the cross-referencing between Aristotle’s Ethics and his Rhetoric. Smith is equally straightforward: “Hence, in specifying just how we reason and argue in these matters the Rhetoric is in fact elaborating the conclusions drawn in the Ethics about the kinds of intellectual excellences required to carry on this reasoning, in particular, phronesis or discernment, and its adjuncts, understanding, consideration, forbearance, and clemency” (Hermeneutics, 49). Garver’s formulation is more complicated. See his discussion in the last chapter of Aristotle’s Rhetoric of the varying roles for phronesis in the Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric. 10. John Dunn’s plea for “a democratization of prudence” (Interpreting Political Responsibility [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], 214) is illustrative in this regard. 11. Modern philosophers since Kant have included a limited sense of prudence in larger accounts of rational action, but that work has not been a point of departure for the authors in this volume. Uyl, Virtue of Prudence, provides a critique of the uses of prudence in the history of philosophy. He does not discuss the recent development in virtue ethics, however, which has been presented as a more full-blown challenge to prevailing assumptions about rational action and philosophical explanation. In addition, it also is being articulated in respect to specific cases of judgment and difficult questions of policy in medical ethics, moral education, and other institutional practices as well. These venues do not fit within classical definitions of the political; but following both feminism and Michel Foucault, they now can be understood as important realms of prudential action and as crucial sites for the management (for better or worse) of modern society. Not surprisingly, prudence figures prominently within virtue ethics, although with varying emphases. (Wisely so, as the theory itself should caution against making any virtue foundational in every case.) Reviews of the literature include Lee H. Yearly, “Recent Work on Virtue,” Religious Studies Review 16 (1990): 1–9; William C. Spohn, “The Return of Virtue Ethics,” Theological Studies 53 (1992): 60–75; and Vincent A. Punzo, “After Kohlberg: Virtue Ethics and the Recovery of the Moral Self,” Philosophical Psychology 9 (1996): 7–23. See also the bibliography in Robert B. Kruschwitz and Robert C. Roberts, eds., The Virtues: Contemporary Essays on Moral Character (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1987). A strong collection of essays is provided by Peter French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, eds., Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). My approach was influenced initially by Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). Virtue theory also highlights an ethical shortcoming in the histories of both prudence and rhetoric: wherever one might stand in the debate within moral philosophy about
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 27
Theory Without Modernity
.
27
an “ethics of caring” and an “ethics of justice,” it is clear that neither of these values have received much attention in the canonical discussions of either prudential reasoning or rhetorical technique. 12. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics bk. 6. 13. Ibid., 1141b.15. Even his example has a contemporary ring to it: it is not enough to know that light meats are better for you than are other meats, you have to know which meats are light, and it will suffice to know that chicken is the better choice even if you don’t know the more general rule. Prudential knowledge has to include knowledge of particulars (and not just of universals), and knowledge of particulars may suffice for intelligent action. (It probably is not wise to simply create a comprehensive catalog of particulars, however. The result could appear similar to Borges’s fiction of the Emperor’s encyclopedia, though more ungainly.) 14. Prudence and cleverness are distinguished explicitly in the Nicomachean Ethics at 1144a20. For discussion of the central importance of this distinction to the Rhetoric, see Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Aristotle’s insistence on a sliding standard of rationality also is crucial here (see, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics 1094b25, 1098a25, 1104a). 15. One corollary of this argument is that the best articulations of prudence will blend together exposition of its general features with explication of a model individual. James A. Bill’s essay on George Ball’s prudential character is an excellent example of how this can be done (“The Essence of Statesmanship”). Nor should we underestimate the value of his contrast between Ball and Henry Kissinger, who is rightly identified as both exhibit A of the practice of political realism and ample demonstration of how that doctrine is rarely conducive to prudence. For additional contrast of prudence and realism, see Hariman and Beer, “What Would be Prudent?” For related criticism of how realism has been promoted skillfully at the expense of democratic deliberation, see Robert Hariman, “Henry Kissinger: Realism’s Rational Actor,” in Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, ed. Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996). For analysis of realism as it is “a characteristically modern political style that crafts an aesthetically unified world of sheer power and constant calculation,” see Robert Hariman, “No Superficial Attractions and Ornaments: The Invention of Modernity in Machiavelli’s Realist Style,” in Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 16. This argument is a good example of my broader understanding of the history of prudence. Aristotle recognized that there were two, complementary approaches to understanding prudence, but he set out only one of them. In order to appreciate the second approach, one has to be more sensitive to how prudence is enacted rhetorically. Cicero developed this approach throughout his many works, and in doing so he also significantly redirected both prudence and the art of rhetoric along the lines set out by Isocrates. The extent to which Cicero had read Aristotle is of little relevance, but his tipping of the scales in the ongoing dialectic between the orators and the philosophers is. Such is the logic of the supplement: that which augments can eventually displace. Likewise, Cicero did not repudiate Aristotelian prudence, but by articulating it through his rhetorical sensibility he made it less impersonal, more performative, and deconstructive. On the dialectic between rhetoric and philosophy, see Samuel Ijsseling, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict: An Historical Survey (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976); Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986); and Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). For discussion of Isocrates’ influence on Cicero, see S. E. Smethurst, “Cicero and Isocrates,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 84 (1953): 262–320. 17. Pericles is singled out by Aristotle as the model of prudential conduct (Nicomachean Ethics 1140b.10). See also Isocrates Antidosis 230–36. These judgments should make us pause when Socrates defames Pericles along with all other Athenian leaders (Gorgias 515–17; Apology
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
28
Page 28
.
Prudence
36). Despite (and because of) his preoccupation with the care of the soul, Socrates is unable to understand politics and especially how it turns on observations of character. All fall below the standard, and Socrates lacks the discernment needed to see who is noble and who is base, or who will manipulate and who is likely to persuade. For a defense of the Socratic/Platonic judgment of Pericles, see Harvey Yunis, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), chap. 6. For their judgment to stick, the detractors have to pull down democracy as well, which they do. Josiah Ober has done much to set the record straight in Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 18. W. Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 74. 19. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954), 2.65. Thucydides uses the term gnome krematon, or intelligence concerning practical matters. 20. Thucydides Peloponnesian War 2.60. Note also the contrast with his use of the erga/logoi pairing in the Funeral Oration (2.35). Pericles can use the conventional distinction as it suits his strategy to celebrate either deeds or words. 21. Connor, Thucydides, 65. This is Thucydides’ judgment as well: “When he saw that they were going too far in a mood of over-confidence, he would bring back to them a sense of their dangers; and when they were discouraged for no good reason he would restore their confidence” (Peloponnesian War 2.65). 22. I regret having to pass over the important question of the relationship between prudence and the emotions. Pertinent work includes Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 104–38; Barbara Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); George E. Marcus et al., Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and a rich literature in anthropology. See also Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal-Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2001): 4–31. There has also been discussion for several decades in philosophy about the rationality of the emotions; for one example of how prudence fits into this discussion, see Evan Simpson, “Prudence and Anti-Prudence,” American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1998): 73–86. Philosophers’ interest in prudence and in virtue ethics more generally seem (to this outsider) to be pitched against the idea that emotions are radically individuated, rationally groundless, and otherwise unreliable or unwise warrants for action. The philosophical examination of the emotions and revision of their cognitive status can certainly be developed beyond questions of prudence, as it is by Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). It would be a mistake, however, to assume that a more general theory of the emotions, particularly as it is developed in reference to private life, would then account for how emotions suffuse and are modulated by political events. 23. For development of this argument, see my discussion of the role of imitation in Isocrates’ idea of the logos politikos: Robert Hariman, “Civic Education, Classical Imitation, and Democratic Polity,” in Isocrates and Civic Education in Classical Athens, ed. Takis Poulakos and David Depew (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). For analysis of how Isocrates’ discourse could provide symbolic enactment of phronesis, see Takis Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates’ Rhetorical Education (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), chap. 5, Schwartze, “Performing Phronesis.” 24. For example, see 1 Cor. 3:18: “If you think you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (New Revised Standard Version). For provocative commentary on this theme, see Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 127ff. Erasmus’s satire moves from lower to higher forms of folly, and along the way (42–44) makes
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 29
Theory Without Modernity
.
29
a supporting distinction between two forms of prudence: apparent prudence is overcautious, slavish deferral to social conventions, while true prudence “recognizes human limitations” and is willing to “overlook faults tolerantly or share them in a friendly spirit.” In short, it is “exactly what we mean by folly,” which is “exactly what it means to perform the play of life” (44). 25. See also the nearly identical statements by the Athenians in their speech at Sparta (1.73) and in the Melian dialogue (5.84–116). This is the point at which prudence is closest to realism. They are not the same, however. H. H. Joachim has put the matter to rest in his commentary, The Nicomachean Ethics (1951; corrected edition, 1955; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985): Despite a few lapses on Aristotle’s part, “The good life does not fall apart into end and means related to one another in this mechanical way. . . . For good πραξισ is an ενεργεια (activity) and not a κινησισ (movement)—i.e., its successive stages are not in themselves valueless and do not perish in the result” (218). 26. Pericles demonstrates the crucial insight that “prudence must practice moderation without establishing it as a principle external to political action that might guarantee victory. Rather it consists in knowing that victory cannot be guaranteed, that there is no such external golden rule that can allow us to subjugate engagement in events to a metadiscourse on history.” Bill Readings, “Pseudoethica Epidemica: How Pagans Talk to the Gods,” Philosophy Today 36 (1992): 383. 27. The concept of mutual advantage was advanced by Isocrates. See Antidosis 275–76, 281–85. Its persistence as a theme in Aristotle may be one sign of Isocratean influence. Relevant arguments in Aristotle’s Politics include the assertions that self-sufficiency requires interdependence, political judgment requires multiple perspectives through deliberation, the political telos is justice, and bad regimes are those that favor special interests over the common good. 28. Richard A. Lanham argues that the deep structure of rhetorical consciousness includes an ability to “toggle” between cognitive strategies. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 79ff. The deep interdependence of rule and character in Aristotle’s analysis is evident in his definition of virtue at Nicomachean Ethics 1107a. Virtue is the reasoned determination of a mean as it would be defined by ho phronimos. (Note also the verb for the act of defining: horiseien, or a setting of limits.) Right choice involves switching back and forth between personal and impersonal definitions, both to understand each one and to make the right assessment of an actual situation. 29. This emphasis on shifting back and forth between systematic and ideographic models of prudence also counters a bias within the history of prudence, which is to become fixed on the heroic individual or political genius. Exemplars such as Pericles or Lincoln can suggest that prudence is only for the very few. Likewise, a call for prudence suffers from the same criticisms that have been leveled against other theories based on classical models, not least that such theories seem irredeemably gendered. Yet we can also say that one reason it is important to define prudence with respect to specific individuals is that any individual is inherently limited. Alternation between rules and exemplars encourages reflection on the limits of any form of embodiment and on the need for more representative exemplars. The emphasis on great leaders should not be used to keep prudence out of the hands of others, or to remove it from critiques of ordinary actors and modern practices, or to define it solely in terms of individual agency and masculine traits. I have selected Pericles, not to feature heroism, individual agency, or masculinity, but rather to develop the distinctive emphases of this volume. Prudence is traced beyond the Aristotelian template, through the analysis of persuasive discourse, in the context of interdisciplinary study for a pluralistic society. For an extension of the Periclean model to a contemporary event and collective decision-making, see my discussion of the “prudential public” in the concluding chapter of this volume. 30. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 304.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
30
Page 30
.
Prudence
31. For a review and criticism of political realism, see Beer and Hariman, Post-Realism. 32. Hariman, “No Superficial Attractions and Ornaments”; Beer and Hariman, PostRealism. 33. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed., revised (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 14: “The realist defense of the autonomy of the political sphere against its subversion by other modes of thought does not imply disregard for the existence and importance of these other modes of thought. It rather implies that each should be assigned its proper sphere and function. Political realism is based upon a pluralistic conception of human nature. Real man is a composite of ‘economic man,’ ‘political man,’ ‘moral man,’ ‘religious man,’ etc. A man who was nothing but ‘political man’ would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints. A man who was nothing but ‘moral man’ would be a fool, for he would be completely lacking in prudence.” Here as elsewhere in Morgenthau’s work, prudence has a dual presence: the term itself is used to refer to realist calculations of expediency, while realism is tempered by prudential consideration of those factors it would ignore according to its own monotype of human nature. 34. Coll, “Normative Prudence,” 35. For a prime example of this usage by people who should know better, see the definition of prudence in Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), chap. 2. Note also how this distinction between broader (normative) and narrower (expedient) conceptions of prudence parallels the basic distinction within rhetoric between the civic and sophistic versions of the art. Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, provides extended discussion of this theme, while elaborations of each side are provided by Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), and John Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). 35. F. R. Ankersmit develops this insight throughout Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). The phrase comes from his essay “Political Style: Schuman and Schiller,” in Political Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 133–63. For recent discussion of prudence within the context of moral theory, see Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut, eds., Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 36. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 89–90. For related critiques of modernist political studies, see also Beiner, Political Judgment, and Terry Eagleton, “A Small History of Rhetoric,” in Walter Benjamin: or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981). For a similar argument about the human sciences, see Stephen Toulmin and Björn Gustavsen, eds., Beyond Theory: Changing Organizations Through Participation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996). For a related critique in political theory, see Robert Hollinger, The Dark Side of Liberalism: Elitism vs. Democracy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996). 37. I will go further: one of the unfortunate side effects of the alienation characterizing the modern intellectual is a loss in our ability to marvel at what humanity hath wrought. I still can’t quite believe it when I fly, much less when I think of the thousands of arrivals and departures worldwide every day, day after day. . . . Or compare the modern version of any material process—mining, manufacturing, building, heating, cooling, shipping, investing, etc. etc. etc.— with any and all predecessor societies. Only by fully comprehending modernity’s accomplishments can we understand its hubris, its ability to strip us of spiritual resources and political imagination, its impending transformation, and its challenge to those who would understand it in order to alter its course. 38. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 310. 39. Ibid., 311. 40. It seems that Livy knew as much. “Occurring as it does with such frequency, and in such important passages, prudentia has a special thematic significance in the last extant books:
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 31
Theory Without Modernity
.
31
prudentia is of great importance both during the war with Perseus, . . . and, to an even greater extent, after the war, when Rome, her last powerful foe in the Greek east defeated, has unprecedented power to reward and punish her allies and the vanquished.” Note also that “Livy never says that the Romans were more prudentes than other peoples.” Timothy J. Moore, Artistry and Ideology: Livy’s Vocabulary of Virtue (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1989), 113 (and see also 155). The relationship between prudence and imperial power could not be more current: “Instead of demobilizing after the Cold War, the United States imprudently committed itself to maintaining a global empire.” Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), ix. 41. We should not conclude that prudence is meaningless because it can serve contrasting political programs. Note the uses: conservative advocates see prudence as the means for resisting liberalism’s indifference to religious, ethnic, and communal values. Here scientific or philosophical rationality is equated with excessive secularization and individualism, while prudence provides a civic language for rearticulating traditional ideals and collective obligations. On the other hand, progressive advocates see prudence as the means for resisting liberalism’s indifference to the amount or quality of citizen involvement in democratic governance. Here modern rationality is equated with excessive proceduralism and technocratic expertise, while prudence provides a civic language for participatory democracy sustaining cultural pluralism. These contrasting ideological positions can run in parallel tracks much of the time, even while they would diverge widely at specific questions of policy. Liberals, of course, see prudence as the necessary accommodations that they make daily in the interests of maintaining consensus, by contrast to their more dogmatic associates on the right and the left. These are not signs of incoherence, but three of the faces of prudence. 42. Philosophy in the modern era has been preoccupied with the project of explicating how it is that the human mind can know the external world and reflect on itself. Some philosophical schools such as idealism, phenomenology, and structuralism have attempted to incorporate both orientations into a single, coherent discourse. Others have attempted to develop either representation or subjectivity to its fullest extent. The contemporary scene includes those projects which claim to break with the foundational assumptions of modern representation and subjectivity—as philosophical hermeneutics and poststructuralism have tried to do. These projects may have met with limited success in that regard (which is no criticism of the influence they each have achieved); what is more interesting is how each has turned to prudence to register a capacity for both action and reflection. 43. Not that it has not been or should not be tried. Exhibit A is the discussion de prudentia in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 36, Prudence, trans. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1974), 2a2ae.47ff. For recent work within this theological tradition, see Yves R. Simon, Practical Knowledge, ed. Robert J. Mulvaney (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991); Nelson, Priority of Prudence; and Westberg, Right Practical Reason. See also Josef Pieper, Prudence, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959). Perhaps I should revise my generalization with a distinction. There certainly have been systematic accounts of prudence, and they are valuable resources for understanding, even when directed, as the Thomistic literature seems to be, primarily to resolving problems of interpretation within that larger system of thought. At some point, however, and probably sooner than expected, the systematic development of the concept makes too great a substitution of its own manner of thinking for the mentality to be explicated. Pierre Bourdieu calls this substitution the scholastic fallacy, and he (following Wittgenstein) highlights definition in terms of rules as a common example of the error. Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 130. His example would cheer those proponents of virtue ethics who argue that rule accounts of moral reasoning are distortions of other, more embodied habits of decision making. For an evenhanded review (and critique) of this argument, see Michael Davis, “Civic Virtue, Corruption, and the Structure of Moral Theories,” in French
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
32
Page 32
.
Prudence
et al., Ethical Theory, 352–66. One should also note that the idea of reasoning without any recourse to theoretical discourse is itself an unrealizable ideal. 44. The incompleteness of this book includes not addressing several standard topics in the history of prudence, including the unity of the virtues and the conduct of civic education, as well as others in moral philosophy, such as the relationship of prudence to justice, and in political philosophy, such as the relationship between the individual and the state as it is articulated through concepts of citizenship and rights. It will not do to assume that a fully developed sense of prudence can do without such considerations, or that it would naturally come to address them adequately. One should also consider, however, that these questions carry their own limitations, which might in turn be better identified or managed from the perspective developed in this volume. Rather than worry about a lack of comprehensiveness, I would rather hold the door open for further discussion on these terms and others as well.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 33
I. Conceptual Frameworks
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 34
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 35
2 Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome Robert W. Cape Jr.
The modern revival of interest in prudence in the practical spheres of politics, ethics, and rhetoric shows an abiding—and appropriate—regard for the historical development of the concept and its application to civic life. Quite naturally, the European Renaissance roots of modern prudence have received considerable attention, for they show a vibrant intellectual, rhetorical, ethical, and political understanding of the virtue that is seen as both attractive and potentially useful for modern society.1 Of course, the humanists’ classical sources and models have also been examined, but with the exception of Aristotle, they have not been treated thoroughly. The emphasis placed on I would like to express my gratitude to Robert Hariman for his patience, generosity, and keen comments, which have vastly improved this chapter and my own understanding of prudence. Thanks are also due to Michael Leff for his advice about this project and his sustained encouragement, and to Elaine Fantham and Lucia Calboli Montefusco for useful coments on a version delivered at the International Society for the History of Rhetoric in Edinburgh. I am grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst for supporting a trip to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich, which became the foundation for this project, and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Fellowship for College Teachers, which although focused on another project, allowed me to expand my work on Ciceronian prudence. Translations are my own unless otherwise specified; they are close to the Loeb editions for ease of reference, but attempt to render the Latin more literally.
35
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
36
Page 36
.
Prudence
Aristotle participates in a well-recognized scholarly preference for texts that offer systematic arguments and an interest in grounding a key modern value in Greece, the favored locus for the origins of Western thought.2 But the focus on Aristotle has obscured the equally important Latin tradition that provided the humanists—and us—with the word prudentia. One of the more serious casualties has been Cicero, whose works directly inspired the most innovative aspects of humanist prudence. Cicero’s writings furnished the primary definitions of prudence in the West until the recovery of Aristotle’s texts in the twelfth century. His first work, De inventione, his last, De officiis, and part of his dialogue on the state, De re publica (in Macrobius’s commentary on the Dream of Scipio), were among the most widely read books in the Middle Ages and became the textbooks of the humanists.3 From these sources, St. Thomas Aquinas developed his idea of prudence, adding only a little from Aristotle to Cicero’s basic definition.4 The survival and influence of these works offered a convenient set of definitions for prudentia as one of the cardinal virtues and as practical reason associated with the active life, but the particular selection of texts obscured the process by which Cicero came to these definitions. The key text in which Cicero developed and displayed his understanding of prudence was his mature treatise on the orator, De oratore. This work was known in the Middle Ages only in a mutilated state, though it was often quoted and recommended; it became one of the most important texts for the humanists when a complete copy was discovered at Lodi in 1422.5 The enormous blossoming of interest in the concept of prudence in the remainder of the Quattrocento owes a great debt to the recovery of De oratore.6 If De inventione functioned as a “magna carta” for the humanists to elevate eloquence to the status of philosophy,7 De oratore provided the model upon which they built their concept of prudence. Part of the reason Cicero’s influence on the Renaissance interest in prudentia has not been adequately assessed is that we lack an understanding of Cicero’s own contribution to the history of prudence. There has been no philological study of Cicero’s use of prudentia, and historical and philosophical studies that touch on the topic tend to select definitions from across his forty-year career to produce a coherent account of his thought. This chapter cannot substitute for a full study of prudentia, but by examining its meaning before Cicero’s time and Cicero’s use of the term chronologically, in texts where it forms an important part of his project, it can sketch an outline of Cicero’s development of the concept of prudentia and contribute to our understanding of his influence on the Renaissance.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 37
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
37
prudentia before cicero Prudentia was not clearly defined as a philosophical concept for the Romans before Cicero’s time. Even the meaning “practical wisdom” seems to have been a later development, since sapientia was used for both theoretical and practical wisdom.8 Prudentia is a contraction of providentia, “foresight,” and its earliest application is primarily to actions that have legal consequences. This connection with the law led to the specialized term iuris prudentia, “legal expertise,” and the association of prudentia with jurists.9 In later Latin, prudentes was the short-hand for jurisconsults and prudentia indicated jurisprudence. The noun is rarely found in early Latin, suggesting that its meaning developed organically from the practice of a person who is described as prudens. By far the most common form is the negative aspect of the adjective, imprudens, usually applied to young men, often the young lovers in comedy, who act rashly, without considering the legal consequences of their actions.10 Constructing a definition of prudentia from the practices of imprudentes, we find that it seems to be the quality of an older person with practical experience and an understanding of the law, an ability to discern right and wrong, the capacity to foresee the consequences of one’s actions, and an inclination to do what is proper. Prudentia is also associated with speech; the prudens knows when to speak and when to be silent.11 This is reflected in the famous story told by Cato the Elder about the boy Papirius Praetextatus, who did not divulge to his mother the topics under discussion by the Senate, illustrating his prudentia. For exhibiting this virtue he was awarded the name “Praetextatus,” referring to the toga worn both by boys and also by Rome’s senior magistrates.12 The qualities of prudentia in early Latin may seem close to our own notions of calculated self-interest, especially where there are legal consequences, but this understanding of prudentia is foreign to the Romans before Cicero’s time.13 In fact, the evidence indicates that Romans usually considered the vir prudens to be extremely generous in helping others—and especially the state— with his knowledge. Ennius’s portrait of the Good Companion in the Annales (ca. 175 B.C.E.) illustrates the qualities of the vir prudens. In this passage, the consul of 217 B.C.E., Gnaeus Servilius Geminus, returns from giving a speech, perhaps to some of Hannibal’s defectors, and summons a trusted friend with whom he speaks just before leading his cavalry into one of the most devastating military defeats in Roman history, at Cannae:
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
38
Page 38
.
Prudence
Having said this he calls a man with whom he quite often shares his table, intimate conversations, and advice on their common affairs, when he is tired from having spent a large part of the day managing the affairs of state by his counsel in the broad Forum and the sacred Senate. To him he spoke openly of affairs great and small, made jokes, and blurted out all kinds of things good and bad to say if he wanted, and was sure what he said was safe. With him much pleasure14 . . . joys openly and in private. A man of talent whose advice—not fickle or evil—never counseled evil; educated, faithful, an agreeable man, pleasant, content with his lot, happy, discerning, saying the right things at the right time, agreeable, a man of few words, who remembers historical events which time has buried, knows ancient customs and new ones, the laws of the ancient gods and men, and is prudens,15 able to speak out or keep quiet about what was said. This man Servilius addresses on the battlefield as follows. . . . (Annales frr. 268–86)16 Prudens is only one of many adjectives describing the Good Companion, but even though the prudent person is not so thoroughly described again until Cicero’s writings, the constellation of attributes remains consistent, as does the fact that the adviser may be of inferior social status.17 It should also be pointed out that in this passage Servilius shares his friend’s good qualities, so the minor difference in social status is negated by the similarity of their virtues. Because of the fragmentary nature of Ennius’s Annales, it is difficult to evaluate the importance of the Good Companion in the course of book 8, but we may note that he appears just prior to one of the worst military defeats in Rome’s history. As the first lines move from the battlefield to recount Servilius’s usual practice at Rome in peaceful times, and the final one brings us abruptly back to the fighting (inter pugnas), this short description retards the action with a striking contrast of urbane calm before a disastrous military storm. The alternation between peace and war, city and military camp, lends special significance to the image of the congenial and prudent friend who acts as a trusted adviser. It has been suggested that the placement of prudentem near the end of the description indicates the importance of this quality in light of Servilius’s speech to follow.18 If so, it may refer to more than simply “discretion,” for although the fragment ends here, the later historical account of the battle at Cannae by Livy stresses that it was lost because of the rashness, impudent speech, and recklessness of a consul who argues against the plans laid down by the prudent general Quintus Fabius Maximus.19 Fabius and his
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 39
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
39
successful policy against Hannibal are associated with prudentia more than any other person or plan in Livy.20 Thus, the appearance of the Good Companion in Ennius’s epic may have served as a reminder of the qualities needed by the best Roman statesmen when Rome was facing a crisis. Prudentia was a highly respected quality for the Romans because of its practical nature—knowledge gained from experience, rather than from theoretical speculation.21 There is evidence, however, that although prudentia may have been common in everyday conversation, in public discourse it was subordinated to the broader term for wisdom, sapientia.22 It is often said that the two words are equivalent, but on close examination this appears to be more a function of Cicero’s attempt to elevate the traditional, practical, Roman ideal of the prudens to the status of the Greek philosophical ideal of the sapiens. The standard accounts begin with Cicero’s statement in De officiis 1.153 that sapientia corresponds to the Greek sophia as prudentia does to phronesis, and they commit a chronological error of taking one of his final statements about prudentia to represent generally held opinion in his time. But there is no explicit terminological correspondence before Cicero makes it, and little indication that the traditional value of prudentia was meaningfully equated with phronesis before the Hellenizing intellectual movement of the late Republic, helped along by Cicero’s philosophical writings. Instead, Cicero elevates the idea of prudentia to parity with sapientia in his writings from the 50s, and has thus already established the connection by the time he writes De officiis in 43 B.C.E. Yet his purpose is not to articulate a complete theory or calculus of prudence, as Aristotle did in book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics; nor, given that he was an Academic skeptic, should we expect him to. Instead, by elevating the term within the dialogue genre, providing examples of viri prudentes in intellectual debate, associating prudentia intimately with rhetoric and politics, and doing this within the context of writing literary dialogue as a form of political action, Cicero provided a model of prudential practice. His own activity in writing the dialogues is as much the practice of a prudens vir as are the actions of the characters within the dialogues. This performative exposition of prudential practice has been less easy for modern scholars to uncover because it is unsystematic—and not discernibly derived from Aristotle—but its cumulative force was not lost on the humanists who revived and extended it in their own development of prudence in the Renaissance.23 Although prudentia represented practical wisdom gained from experience, as opposed to theoretical or philosophical wisdom, or sapientia, the distinction does not appear to have been clear in everyday usage before Cicero’s day. Nor would the average Roman have necessarily understood a strict
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
40
Page 40
.
Prudence
correlation between prudentia and the Greek phronesis, and sapientia with sophia. When Plautus took over a character’s Greek name Phronesium, derived from phronesis, one of the characters in the play—or a later interpreter—translates it as sapientia.24 The famous Gaius Laelius “the Wise” was traditionally called “Sapiens” in Latin, but Plutarch writes that the term signified either sophos or phronesis, “for each one seems to mean ‘the Wise.’ ”25 A less famous jurist, Lucius Acilius, was called “Sapiens” although his qualification was specifically his iuris prudentia.26 There seems to have been a great deal of slippage between the words, perhaps because even sapientia did not originally mean philosophical wisdom for the Romans. Indeed, deriving from sapere, “to taste,” it developed from the idea of learning by experience.27 Thus Cicero needed to overcome an intellectual and linguistic hurdle as he developed his own idea of prudential practice and modeled it in conversation that represents standard Latin usage, rather than strict adherence to defined and dissected philosophical vocabulary. As a result, we should not expect a terminological exactitude that would have alienated Cicero’s project from his intended Roman audience. Nevertheless, there is a clear development, natural in the mode of conversation—two steps forward, one step back—and its progress can be uncovered through close examination of how prudentia functions in Cicero’s writings.28
prudentia in cicero Cicero’s earliest work, De inventione, published sometime between 91 and 80 B.C.E., reproduces the traditional usage and emphasis on imprudens, but makes a new contribution by designating prudentia as one of the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance (De inventione 2.159). Cicero says: “Prudentia is the knowledge of things that are good, bad, and neither good nor bad. Its parts are memory, intelligence, and foresight” (2.160). This use of prudentia to account for both sophia and phronesis in Plato’s account of the virtues, is shared by the contemporary Rhetorica ad Herennium (3.3), indicating that it had become an acceptable Latin translation of the cardinal virtue.29 De inventione shows numerous signs of an attempt to infuse Greek philosophy into the teaching of rhetoric. Perhaps the best known is Cicero’s statement of an ambitious philosophical goal in the preface. In this passage— central to Cicero’s later writings and his influence on the later rhetorical tradition—he expounds on the civilizing force of rhetoric and the wise man and joins wisdom and eloquence: “Indeed, after long thought, reason itself has led me to this opinion most strongly, that wisdom [sapientia] without eloquence
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 41
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
41
has been of little help to states, but eloquence without wisdom has never helped and has often caused too much harm” (1.1). This sentence reflects Cicero’s concern to unite rhetoric with philosophy, and particularly with the broader and more intellectually esteemed form of wisdom, sapientia. It later became, in John Ward’s words, “the ‘magna carta’ of the Humanists” as an authority for the goal of bringing humans out of barbarism to civilization through ratio and oratio.30 Joining sapientia and eloquentia became the first step in Latin to recover the connection between philosophy and rhetoric that had been severed by Plato. In the widely read, standard commentary on De inventione in the Middle Ages, the fourth century C.E. rhetorician Victorinus says that the sapientia of De inventione 1.1 would become prudentia in Cicero’s later work, De re publica, published in 51 B.C.E.31 This has been considered evidence of the synonymy of prudentia and sapientia.32 If the words were ultimately synonymous, it was a later development, for they are not used interchangeably in De inventione. Except for the final mention of prudentia as the first of the four virtues, Cicero uses prudentia/imprudentia and prudens/imprudens in a narrow and strictly legalistic sense throughout De inventione. Sapientia, on the other hand, has the loftier meaning of “wisdom” and is almost always used in quotations from other speakers to illustrate a point.33 Most of the instances of sapientia in Cicero’s own words occur at the beginning, in the statement on rhetoric and philosophy. This suggests that Cicero imports the idea of sapientia into the traditional material of the rhetorical handbook. Prudentia is part of the traditional apparatus of legal blame and exculpation; it does not yet have the intellectual force of the superior sapientia. Nevertheless, there is a slight tension between a high-minded Hellenic preface attached to run-of-the-mill rules and general Roman usage. The sections on sapientia and prudentia as the first of the virtues appear at opposite ends of the treatise so there is no direct conflict or synonymy at this time. That they become synonymous later is a result of Cicero’s attempts to link the ideas more closely. Victorinus’s observation may mean that by the time of De re publica, Cicero has made political prudentia equal to the philosophical sapientia of De inventione.
prudentia in de oratore Approximately thirty years separate the youthful De inventione from Cicero’s more mature treatise on oratory, De oratore, published in 54 B.C.E. to replace, he says, the earlier work with one more suitable to his experience and position (1.5). By this time, Cicero had become the unquestioned leader at the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
42
Page 42
.
Prudence
Roman bar and had held the highest office—the consulship—at the earliest age allowed by law.34 This is significant because Cicero was a “new man” (homo novus), someone without ancestors who had held the consulship, thus at a disadvantage in the conservative and rather aristocratic politics of the Late Republic. Cicero owed his advancement to his rhetorical skills, and they served him well in his consulship in 63 B.C.E., when his powerful public speeches helped cripple the planned coup d’état of Lucius Sergius Catilina. He capitalized on his influence and maintained it in the courts and in the Senate for the next few years. He now looked forward to using his speaking skills and experience as a senior statesman to help guide public affairs. Cicero soon saw his and the Senate’s authority deteriorate when Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar formed what we call the First Triumvirate in late 60 B.C.E. Eager to help themselves and their partisans, these men ran roughshod over traditional legislative procedure and effectively reduced the Senate’s ability to deliberate and decide public policy. Acknowledging Cicero’s rhetorical skills and influence, they offered him the opportunity to join them. In a letter to his friend Atticus, Cicero says he considered the offer to support their cause (initially, agrarian reform) and join them, arguing the case to himself both ways, but in the end he took advice from the Muse in his own poem on his consulship to stay the course, increase his fame by earning the praise of good men, and fight for the Republic.35 He maintained his independence and boldly spoke against the triumvirs’ wishes in court; he soon became a thorn in their side. They allowed legislation to be forced through an assembly that effectively exiled Cicero from Rome in 58 B.C.E. It was a severe blow to the statesman. He was recalled in 57 B.C.E. and claimed that in his absence Rome had lost her voice, meaning open deliberations in the Senate and speeches on behalf of the innocent in court; but his own voice was now no longer so free. In the meantime, the triumvirs were being attacked and the coalition was coming apart; when it was repaired in 56 B.C.E., Cicero was warned not to cause trouble.36 These were the conditions under which Cicero wrote De oratore. He was active in the courts, but hampered in expressing his views. He was often frustrated by the old aristocrats, who looked down on him and refused to consider his advice. Rampant violence in the streets and the open intimidation and bribing of juries had replaced deliberation in the Senate and popular assemblies and the administration of justice in the courts. Government by advice, debate, reason, and consensus had given way to rule by brute force.37 In two letters he declared that the courts and the Republic were dead.38 In both cases, as in the prologue to De oratore (1.1–3), Cicero resorted to his oratory and writing as an alternate form of political action.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 43
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
43
Despite the tense circumstances that occasioned the composition of De oratore, the work is not explicitly a political pamphlet; nor is it a conventional exposition of the art of rhetoric. Breaking away from the narrow treatments of rhetoric as a series of dry precepts, Cicero presents his treatise as an urbane, witty dialogue among the premier orators and leading statesmen of the turbulent 90s on the eve of a civil war that took the lives of most of the participants.39 In intellectual circles in the 50s, the dramatic political developments of the day must have elicited excited, even if publicly muted, discussion of and reflection on what they meant.40 Cicero’s response to one of the seemingly innocuous questions—what is the competence and function of the orator in the state—was a tour-de-force, pregnant with implications for the current government and future leaders. It was so challenging that Julius Caesar felt the need to respond with two books titled De analogia, ostensibly a work on regularizing the language by providing rules for grammar, but not without implications for a new political and social order.41 The dialogue form allows characters in the treatise to present their ideas, which carry only the force of their logic and the authority of the person. The dramatic date of the dialogue, just before the bloody civil wars in which most of the characters would die, allows for the possibility of a discourse about similar issues though not about the particular people of the time. This innovation is not only procedural, but cultural, for Cicero makes the teaching, the setting, the purpose, and the practice entirely Roman; and the characters go out of their way to disparage things Greek.42 The pursuit of eloquence leads, not to mere courtroom competence and enhanced verbal skills, but to the production of a well-rounded, humanistically trained, urbane person who can participate with others in governing the state through oratory. Thus De oratore models a practice that would become an exemplar for the Renaissance humanists. The particular elements associated with this practice are (1) the importance of prudence to the definition of the doctus orator; (2) acknowledgment of the importance of the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, while arguing for an ideal they rejected; (3) the dialogue genre and the promotion of in utramque partem argument; (4) the civility, decorum, and urbanity of the interlocutors (including semi-recherché allusions, witty banter, and irony); (5) the importance of the active life over the contemplative life; and (6) the importance of writing as a form of intellectual and political activity that promotes the good of the state. For the present we can only take this rich context as a backdrop to what Cicero says explicitly about prudentia. This limited focus will allow us to concentrate on how Cicero subtly adopts, manipulates, and then elevates the concept of prudentia throughout the dialogue.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
44
Page 44
.
Prudence
The thesis of De oratore is clearly stated—the best orator will be a person with extensive practical experience in speaking and wide, philosophical learning (1.6–23)—but the argument is not so straightforward, complete, or logical.43 Cicero said the first book provided the general argument and books 2 and 3 were more technical in nature.44 In the work itself, Crassus provides an explanation for the change when he expresses his dissatisfaction at the first day’s discussion because it was too close to the dry, technical debates of Greeks who are not specialists: books 2 and 3 are more “Roman” in that they present longer, less closely argued disquisitions by men known for their outstanding eloquence and practical experience (2.15–20). This structure ensures that the argument is made twice: first as a quasi-logical argument using fairly precise terminology, and second as a series of speeches, fuller in style and observing the decorum required in discourse among the leading men of the state, that make their point through a wealth of examples and the authority of the speakers. The oldest manuscripts of De oratore contained Marcus’s opening characterization of the differences between his conception of the role of rhetoric and Quintus’s ideas: “You were accustomed to disagree with me, because I said eloquence was found in the learning of the most prudent men [prudentissimorum hominum artibus], while you thought it ought to be separated from the refinement of teaching [ab elegantia doctrinae] and attributed to natural talent [ingenium] and practice [exercitatio].” When the manuscript containing the whole of De oratore, Orator, and the previously unknown Brutus was found in 1422, it replaced prudentissimorum with eruditissimorum, followed by the now standard texts, though according to Wilkins, prudentissimorum was preferred in older editions.45 At issue is a distinction between experience / natural talent and book learning. If the reading prudentissimorum is retained, Cicero values the theoretical learning that polishes off practical experience in the broader understanding advocated by De oratore, whereas Quintus would divorce it from learning completely. This seems to accord best with the argument of the whole treatise, and with the higher valuation of prudentia over eruditio. If Cicero wrote eruditissimorum, it would mean that the point of the dialogue was to illustrate that eloquence was found in the attainments (artibus) of men who were well educated. Whatever Cicero wrote, readers of De oratore before 1422 would have understood Cicero’s position to be that eloquence was found in the learning (artibus) of men who were prudentissimi.46 Before the dialogue begins, Cicero uses prudentia (again?) in his own voice, associating it loosely with sapientia and indicating the direction of his own argument—to join prudentia and eloquentia. When explaining why great ora-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 45
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
45
tors are rare, compared to the number of great commanders and statesmen who have governed with good counsel (consilio) and wisdom (sapientia), Cicero worries that some may locate eloquentia in rhetoric or book learning: “And so no one will think that this system of speaking should be compared, perhaps, with those other studies which involve recondite learning and a certain breadth of reading more than with the glorious achievements of a military general or the prudentia of a good senator, let him turn his attention to those very kinds of arts and see how many flourished in them. From this, he will quite easily judge how few orators there are now and ever were” (1.8). The ensuing summary of philosophers and artists supports his point that whether compared to the practical skills of a general or a speaker or the intellectual skills usually preferred by Greeks, there have been few outstanding orators. The reason for the dearth of orators is, of course, that the best must combine the practical experience Romans valued in their leading men with Hellenicstyle instruction in rhetorical theory. Crassus opens the dialogue proper with lofty praise for oratory and makes the orator responsible for the birth of civilization and bringing the scattered savages together into peaceful societies (1.30–34). His broad-ranging definition is challenged by the respected, nearly seventy-year-old lawyer Scaevola, who represents what might be considered traditional Roman beliefs. Scaevola establishes the opposition between the prudens and the orator on both a practical versus theoretical level and on the cultural level of Roman versus Greek. Taking up the conservative, traditionalist Roman stance against Crassus, Scaevola says, “Isn’t it rather that men came together and formed communities through the advice of prudent men [consiliis prudentium] rather than by the speech of eloquent men [oratione disertorum]?” (1.36) He then argues that Crassus’s definition would not be acceptable to Greek philosophers, either, for they have defined rhetoric narrowly and would claim that the power and virtues Crassus assigns to the orator really belong to the philosopher. He summarizes his position by outlining the orator’s role as limited to speaking appropriately in the courts and assemblies, adding that he should appear to speak eloquently to wise men (prudentes = senators) and truthfully to the ignorant masses, and if he does more than this, “he is not an orator, but a Crassus” (1.44). Thus, Scaevola’s speech establishes the poles around which the contemporary debate ranges, and the opposing thoughts Cicero wishes to conciliate. On the one hand, Romans place more value on the considered opinion of a vir prudens than on the oratory of a learned or eloquent man; on the other, Greek philosophers assert that all the fine qualities claimed for oratory by Crassus really belong to philosophy.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
46
Page 46
.
Prudence
Crassus replies to Scaevola by acknowledging the philosophers’ claims and maintaining that he never agreed with them or with their source, Plato, in the Gorgias (1.45–47). Yet he still insists that the orator must have broad learning. When it comes to enacting laws, for example, in the areas of war, peace, allies, taxes, civil law in general, and so on, he concedes the traditional position and wording: “Let our people prefer the Decemvirs, who wrote the XII Tables and who were necessarily prudentes, to Servius Galba and your fatherin-law, Gaius Laelius, who surpassed all others in their renown for eloquence” (1.58). He supports his claim for the necessity of practical experience by claiming that an orator can neither attack nor defend a general in court if he does not have experience in battle, or address an assembly or the Senate about governing the state “without the highest understanding of civil affairs and prudentia” (1.60). Thus, in the first book, Crassus responds to Scaevola’s claims that the Romans need a vir prudens not an orator by assuming that the orator must already be prudens or rely on someone who is (1.66). Scaevola acknowledges Crassus’s concessions with a smile, saying “you conceded to me the things I did not want to be the property of the orator, and then you somehow wrenched those very things back again and granted them to the orator as his particular property” (1.74). But just as Scaevola is mollified —though he still thinks Crassus’s ideal is too lofty—Antonius issues a challenge that Crassus’s ideal orator will be too far removed from the needs of the courts and forum, and the style of philosophers is not suited to daily pleading. Antonius contributes to the definition of prudentia by raising it to the level of philosophy. He recalls a debate on rhetoric and philosophy and mentions the rhetorician Menedemus, who argued against the position that rhetoric consists of nothing and that only philosophy could teach a man how to speak. He claimed that “there was a certain prudentia that was engaged in examining the principles for founding and governing states” (1.85). Menedemus seems to have granted prudentia to the orator, but this prudentia goes far beyond the practical/technical prudentia required by Scaevola. Menedemus’s definition is immediately attacked by Charmadas, a philosopher from the skeptical Academy, who claims that all the parts of that prudentia should be sought from philosophy, and that the parts of prudentia— “what is decided in the state about the immortal gods, education, justice, endurance, temperance, the harmony of all things, etc.”—were never to be found in the little books of the rhetoricians (1.85). Charmadas also makes fun (illudere solebat) of their teachings, showing that “not only did they lack that prudentia which they had appropriated to themselves, but they did not even know the very principle and method of eloquence” (1.87).
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 47
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
47
Menedemus replies with examples rather than proofs and brings up the case of Demosthenes. Charmadas admits that Demosthenes was a man of outstanding prudentia and eloquence, but insists that he owed his ability either to natural talent or, more likely, to Plato (1.89). Antonius then confesses that Charmadas’s influence on him was so great that he reproduced these ideas in his little book on rhetoric, which got out imprudently (1.94).47 When the two young orators express their joy at finally being able to hear Crassus and Antonius discuss oratory and the orator, Crassus opens with his definition of the ideal orator and begins to outline a kind of “art of oratory.” He mentions prudentia only once, as one of the possible sources of commonplaces (the other two being ars and ingenium), which will ultimately be expressed in writing (1.151).48 When Crassus finishes with a briefer account than hoped for, Scaevola encourages him to continue. Reversing—or conflating—the usual application of the terms for wisdom, Crassus expresses amazement that a man of Scaevola’s sapientia should want to hear the rules from someone who does not know them, while Scaevola retorts that although he knew that Crassus’s prudentia encompassed a wide variety of things—knowledge about the nature of mankind, ethics, the methods by which men’s minds are kindled and calmed, history, antiquity, the governing of the state and Roman civil law—he had never seen all that given to the orator (1.165). In effect, Scaevola now embraces a very broad application of prudentia, and although his statement operates on the assumption that the prudens and the orator are different people, he is also directly calling for a demonstration of their reconciliation. Crassus immediately tests him by having him deny that some poor speakers were oratores, then shows that they were not only lacking in eloquence, but also in prudentia (here narrowly defined as legal knowledge; 1.67). He also proves his point that prudentia (especially iuris prudentia) is essential for the orator. He then recounts the example of Publius Crassus Dives to his son, that he had learned the law (= iuris civilis prudentia) before he began to undertake and plead cases in court (1.170). Crassus continues to demonstrate the importance of broad training, including both law and eloquence, by taking up the case of Antonius, whose “godlike power of talent, even if stripped of his knowledge of the law, would easily protect and defend itself through the other weapons of his prudentia” (1.172). This extends the realm of prudentia beyond the law because Antonius has just been said to look down on the study of law (ius civile contempsit, 1.171). Prudentia is further removed from strict application to legal studies in the case of the most educated lawyer in Rome, Quintus Scaevola. He is the most
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
48
Page 48
.
Prudence
learned in the law (here, eruditissimus), sharpest in prudentia and natural talent (ingenium), and exceedingly polished and precise in his speaking (1.180). Crassus calls him “the most eloquent of the legal experts and the most expert at law of those who are eloquent.” Crassus continues to expand the definition of prudentia by interpreting the views of the jurist Scaevola in the dialogue, who does not think political science is the special property of the orator, but comes from another kind of prudentia (1.193), though it all still depends on the law. He then advances the importance of knowing Rome’s great law code, the Twelve Tables, claiming that they “surpass the libraries of all the philosophers” (1.195). The Twelve Tables become a concrete example of Rome’s intellectual superiority over other nations, particularly Greece, as they are a clear demonstration that the early Roman excelled all other nations in prudentia (1.197). The debate about the ideal orator in book 1 stands almost as a prologue to the more technical expositions of the training of the orator in books 2 and 3, as Cicero himself indicates.49 In the body of books 2 and 3 the speakers no longer argue about the role of prudentia, they assume it to be a part of the orator’s training. Thus, the original distinction between the vir prudens and the orator which was collapsed into prudentia becoming a necessary virtue for the orator, is assumed in book 2. Yet the prologue to book 2 brings up the issue for explicit comment. Cicero opens book 2 by recalling how some tried to dissuade him and his brother from studying rhetoric by pointing to Crassus and Antonius, who had attained the summit of prudentia (summam prudentiam) and an unbelievable level of eloquence (incredibilem eloquentiam) without formal study (non eruditissimi, 2.1). Based on what we have seen, it is likely that these traditionalists used the term prudentiam to represent the Roman form of practical wisdom. It is noteworthy that prudentia and eloquentia are found in the same people, which is the endpoint of the debate in book 1. By combining these characteristics in Antonius and Crassus in the purported “advice” of men in his youth, Cicero lends authority to the idea that prudentia is a broader form of wisdom than mere legal knowledge. This view is offered as the standard opinion of Romans, not the result of technical, philosophical inquiry that was associated with the Greeks. Cicero recounts how Crassus and Antonius were careful to conceal their philosophical learning and thorough acquaintance with the Greek language, with the difference that Crassus wanted to seem to look down on learning and prefer the prudentia of their Roman ancestors to the Greeks, while Antonius wanted to seem to have never studied at all (2.4). Whatever the truth
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 49
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
49
of this claim, Cicero captures the tensions among elite Romans at the beginning of the first century B.C.E. between practical, conservative, and traditional Roman values and growing interest in Hellenic intellectual spheres. One of the primary reasons Crassus and Antonius adopted their anti-intellectual (and pro-prudentia) stances was, as Cicero says of Antonius, so that their oratory would be more persuasive to the Roman people (2.4).50 Cicero makes Antonius adopt the pose that if he seemed to have too much learning, he would lose auctoritas as a speaker. Cicero notes that this was a concern of their time and no longer pertained to his—though one may wonder—and he restates his claim that no one ever excelled in eloquence unless he had taken account not only of the art of speaking but also of the whole realm of wisdom (omni sapientia, 2.5). His previous comment makes it clear that this would have been a problematic statement in the 90s, but it was very likely problematic even for Cicero in the 50s.51 To help make his case, Cicero begins equating prudentia and sapientia in the next section by explaining his point and commenting on Crassus and Antonius: “I assert that such eloquence as there was in Crassus and Antonius could not have existed without the knowledge of all things that led to such prudentia and fluency of speaking [dicendi copiam] as there was in those two men” (2.6). Here, the knowledge of all things (cognitis rebus omnibus) that leads to prudentia and dicendi copia are the equivalent of omni sapientia in Cicero’s definition in section 5. Finally, at the end of the prologue, Cicero comments that Quintus does not need this teaching and that he has acquired his prudentiam et rationem dicendi on his own and looks to Cicero only for its application (usus, 2.11). This statement makes an effective transition between the definition of 2.5 and the use of prudentia in the rest of the book, where it is taken as a part of the orator’s natural talent. The bulk of book 2 is Antonius’s exposition of the rules of oratory, but with the constant theme that many aspects do not need or even admit of rules, for experience will indicate what is correct. In many cases this experience and common sense is prudentia (2.120, 132 bis, 149, 300, 307, 308), as it is for Caesar when he discusses wit in this book (247, 275). Unlike book 1, which consists of a series of arguments in utramque partem on the larger issues of oratory, book 2 is primarily a demonstration of the points Antonius makes about the art of oratory, The importance of prudentia is no longer argued, it is assumed. As such, the subject of its acquisition is never broached. It is even downplayed at times, such as when Antonius refers to someone’s rather average (mediocris, 2.130), or natural or “common” (naturalis, volgaris, 2.132),
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
50
Page 50
.
Prudence
prudentia. But near the end of his exposition, Antonius claims that the nature of oratory teaches the basics of things to say—preface, narration, arguments, and so on—but how to arrange these is the special property of the orator’s prudentia (2.307–8). The prologue to book 3 focuses on the sad fates of the characters after the date of the dialogue. Since Crassus’s discussion continues the morning discussion by Antonius, the orator’s qualifications are no longer at issue. The orator’s possession of prudentia is thoroughly assumed in book 2, so now Cicero extends the realm of prudentia to include learning that some would assign to philosophy. This means elevating the Roman value of prudentia to the level of sapientia, which was connected with Greek philosophy. Crassus makes this move in the first use of prudentia in this book. Whereas Antonius laid out basic rules for the orator to follow, and indicated that much could be left to common sense, Crassus is on the far opposite side of rules, that they are too restrictive and that the orator ought to be devoted to the whole of wisdom. In his lofty praise of oratory he says, For eloquence [eloquentia] is one of the highest virtues—though all the virtues are equal and on par, nevertheless one can be more beautiful and outstanding in appearance than another, just as this power, embracing the knowledge of things, explains through words the feelings and opinions of the mind to such a degree that it can compel those who hear it wherever it will. And the stronger this power is the more it needs to be joined with goodness [probitate] and the highest prudentia, for if we hand over fluency of speaking [dicendi copiam] to men who lack these virtues, we will not have made them orators, but will have given weapons to madmen. [56] This method of thinking and speaking and force of speaking the ancient Greeks called sapientia. From this came men like Lycurgus, Pittacus, and Solon, and from what is similar to it came our own Coruncianus, Fabricus, Cato, and the Scipios, perhaps not so highly educated [docti] but sharing a similar mental vigor and will. Others, with the same prudentia but a different plan for its application to life pursued quiet and leisure, as Pythagoras, Democritus, and Anaxagoras, who removed themselves completely from the governing of states to the contemplation of things. (2.55–56) When powerful eloquentia is joined with outstanding prudentia and moral goodness (probitas), it can finally be called sapientia. Sapientia reigns here as the highest form of wisdom, equivalent to Greek philosophy, and Crassus’s
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 51
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
51
goal for the orator from the beginning of the dialogue. Yet he has had to endure the traditional Roman separation of prudentia from ratio dicendi, and the lengthy expansion of prudentia to include knowledge of all things. Sapientia and prudentia have now become virtually synonymous, although there is still room for a separation between Greek and Roman concepts. Sapientia is the source for the Greeks Lycurgus, Pittacus, and Solon, but Cicero says “from what is similar to it [ab hac similitudine] came our own Coruncianus, Fabricus, Cato, and the Scipios,” and then moves on to say “with the same prudentia,” suggesting that “what is similar” to the Greek sapientia is prudentia. Prudentia is the quality assigned to the great Roman statesmen and is, admittedly, due less to education (non tam fortasse docti) than to practical experience. Note the slight cultural concession in the realm of learning. Finally, this prudentia, when not combined with active involvement in the state, is exhibited by three Greek philosophers, but no Roman examples are given. Thus, although prudentia may be a feature of the contemplative life, only Greeks have participated in it. The heroic Roman prudentes are on par with Greek sapientes and engage only in the active life. Socrates becomes the consummate example of the man who possesses the highest learning in all fields. Crassus claims that on the testimony of all the most learned men (eruditissimorum) and of all of Greece, Socrates owed his success to his prudentia as well as his keen mind, charm, subtlety, eloquentia, variety, and copia (3.60). Here prudentia has been elevated to its highest level. Yet Socrates erred, for he is also responsible for separating philosophy from rhetoric. Thus, the greatest Greek philosopher suffers in comparison to the Roman Crassus, who aims at reuniting prudentia and eloquentia. A decade after De oratore was published, Cicero would claim that Aristotle was the first to unite prudentia and eloquentia, and that Cicero was doing so in Latin.52 The choice of prudentia in this later passage is considered unusual, for it must have a very broad meaning of “philosophy,” usually designated by sapientia.53 But if Cicero had elevated the concept of prudentia to parity with sapientia, especially in the context of eloquentia, his choice of words was apt.
prudentia in de re publica The six books of De re publica may have been Cicero’s most extended effort to demonstrate prudential practice.54 Begun in 54 B.C.E., shortly after the publication of De oratore, De re publica outlines the conditions necessary for the optimal commonwealth and the best citizen.55 This best citizen, sometimes called the best statesman or the rector rei publicae, is the vir prudens (2.67, 6.1).
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
52
Page 52
.
Prudence
As in De oratore, Cicero’s usage reflects the traditional Roman ideal of the practical statesman working for the good of the state (cf. 2.67); and as in De oratore, Cicero extends the competence of the vir prudens to encompass a wider field of learning, including Greek philosophy. In this way, De re publica forms a companion piece to De oratore, offering a practical and ethical model of political performance that dovetails with the rhetorical and ethical habitus of the orator. Unfortunately, De re publica has not survived in its entirety, and the book devoted to the training and competence of the vir prudens, book 5, yields the fewest fragments.56 Book 4, on the system of Roman education that would prepare the best citizen—the education that might produce the prudens—is also quite fragmentary. It is likely that these two books provided a more Hellenic and philosophical definition of prudentia, and outlined the specific qualities and education of the vir prudens that were merely assumed by Antonius in book 2 of De oratore. But we cannot know for certain what the qualities or course of education were. Nevertheless, though Cicero’s explicit definition of prudentia/prudens is lost for now, the substantial remains of books 1, 2, 3, and 6 provide an adequate model of the social and intellectual conduct expected of the prudens. If the development observable in the surviving references to prudens/prudentia is any indication, Cicero may have intended to model prudential practice throughout the work as an empirical example of the theoretical precepts advanced in book 5. Since the practice represented here is identical to that in De oratore, it lends support to the notion that Cicero modeled a form of prudential practice in that work as well. Not only does the textual transmission of De re publica complicate our attempts to understand the development of prudentia in Cicero’s thought, it also complicated its reception by the humanists. They possessed even less of the text than we have, but what they had, the “Dream of Scipio” (Somnium Scipionis) from book 6, was extremely popular reading, especially with the extensive commentary by Macrobius.57 Prudentia occurs regularly in the commentary as the first of the virtues possessed by the ideal statesman and the wise man (1.1.8, 8.4, 8.7, and 8.9–10, where prudentia is the divine mind itself), the same list, now expanded, that Cicero gave in De inventione 2.159. Nature allows her secrets to be revealed by prudent men through the use of tales, though she hides them from the common crowd (1.2.17). It is the quality associated with the enigmatic dream that needs skillful interpretation (1.3.12), and of a subordinate, though older leader who helps a king interpret his dreams (1.3.15). It is a quality “undoubtedly” exhibited by Scipio because he does not consider his own thoughts to be certain truth, disre-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 53
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
53
gards mere opinion, and “seeks more accurate information” (Stahl’s translation) (1.10.3). He shows it when he does not make a decision “by himself” to commit suicide (1.13.2; cf. 13.10). Thus, in Macrobius’s Commentary the dream is established as a vehicle for the vir prudens to discern the secrets of nature, and prudentia is closely tied to consultation with others and deliberation about ultimate ends. Since the connection receives some support among the external evidence by Favonius Eulogius in the fragments/testimonia that introduce the Somnium (cf. De re publica 6.1), it may have been made explicit by Cicero himself. For the time being, however, we must admit that we know little about the specific qualities Cicero assigned to the prudens, but we can determine how he portrayed the actions of men who are called prudentes and prudentissimi. The historical setting, importance of the speakers, and dialogue form of De re publica are similar to De oratore. Here, the main speakers are Scipio Aemilianus, grandson of the great Africanus, an outstanding general in his own right and responsible for the ultimate destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C.E., and Gaius Laelius, called Sapiens, “the Wise,” one of Rome’s eminent statesmen in the mid second century B.C.E. They are joined by three more senior characters (Philus, Mummius, and Manilius), and four younger men (Tubero, Rufus, Scaevola, and Fannius), illustrating the Roman penchant for training the youth by having them listen to respected members of the previous generation, as in De oratore.58 In fact, Scaevola provides an important link between the two dialogues, a young man in De re publica and an old man, the father-in-law and teacher of Crassus, in De oratore. The dialogue is set in 129 B.C.E., in the aftermath of the turbulent reform politics of Tiberius Gracchus and shortly before Scipio’s untimely and mysterious death. Thus, De re publica may be considered the inspired “swan song” of the respected Scipio, much as De oratore was for Crassus. This historical setting was Cicero’s original plan, but he was diverted from it for a time by a suggestion that the work would be more powerful if he spoke in his own voice.59 He considered the change beneficial, since he could comment on more recent political disturbances and thought he could manage it without offending anyone. In the end, however, he returned to the original setting. Accordingly, like De oratore, De re publica had contemporary political relevance, but Cicero chose to locate the argument in the past at an important juncture in Roman history just prior to a major constitutional setback and as the final expression of a great statesman. The conclusion that these works are meant to send a message to contemporaries is hard to ignore: if we do not recoup the practices of the past, we are doomed to repeat our failures. Yet it would be wrong to consider De re
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
54
Page 54
.
Prudence
publica a political pamphlet for reform.60 It is rather a considered—dare one say prudent?—intervention in the contemporary debate. The first person introduced as a vir prudens is Manius Manilius, a famous jurisconsult who represents the generation before Scipio.61 He was, like Cicero, a “new man,” consul in 149 B.C.E., and Scipio’s commander in Africa, although Scipio ended up saving his army when it was surrounded at Carthage. As the oldest member, he arrives last and sits next to the person of honor, Laelius (1.18). Manilius had figured in the last book of De oratore as a representative of the broad education required of the orator, and of oldfashioned generosity in helping others with his legal knowledge (De oratore 3.133). Scipio appeared there as well, a prudentissimus vir (De oratore 3.134), and is now the closest to the ideal vir prudens that Laelius is looking for in De re publica (2.67). It is Scipio who calls his fellow speakers “prudentes who are well versed in conducting the highest affairs of state at home and abroad with great glory” (1.38) and prudentissimi (1.70). Since the speakers themselves are prudentes and important men who have (and will) govern the state, the qualities they exhibit and their comments on a wide variety of subjects provide a model of prudential practice. The structure of the work, reflecting a new style of argument in Latin literature, must also be considered a part of the interlocutors’ prudential practice. The six books of De re publica are arranged in three pairs, alternating between theoretical and empirical discussions.62 The first two books consider which type of constitution is best, where Rome is the particular example in the second book. When this change from convention in philosophical discussion is challenged, because Rome is singled out for praise and extended treatment when the initiator of the debate, Tubero, wants a theoretical discussion, Scipio explains his rationale: But I thought I had given a satisfactory response to Laelius’ query about the best condition of the state. For I first defined the three good forms of states, then the three types which are opposed to them, showing that no single one of them is best, but that the one which is properly combined from the three good kinds is superior to the individual forms. For this [the mixed form] I used the example of our state, not because it helped to define the best form of the state (for that could be done without an example), but so that it might be discerned what sort of thing my reason and speech were describing from the greatest state itself. (2.66)
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 55
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
55
Scipio’s method of beginning with a theoretical discussion and then turning to a historical or “real life” example strikes the philosophically minded Tubero as different, yet it is the same balance between theory and practice that Cicero strikes in De oratore, and it may represent his own innovation in translating Greek philosophic discourse to Roman argumentative practice.63 Laelius claims that examining what is observable rather than what is too theoretical will have the practical benefit of helping the state in its time of crisis (1.31–33). Tubero believes it is difficult to explain celestial matters to unlearned men, but Scipio demonstrates that it was done when the person did not try to display his learning, but used good arguments and examples (1.23–24, cf. 21–22). Thus Scipio initiates a structured prudential practice of considering first the theory then the practice of the ideal state and statesman. This alternation reflects a particular Roman balance between theoretical and practical experience. It is also punctuated by comments from the other members of the dialogue to prevent it from becoming a lecture. In this way it represents a reasoned way of arriving at generally agreed upon conclusions. There is a lacuna in the manuscript after Scipio’s discussion of Rome as the best state; and when the text resumes, he is discussing the ideal statesman (2.67–69). Here is the definition of the rector rei publicae as the vir prudens: “Scipio said, ‘. . . [the one] I have been looking for all this time and want to come to.’ Laelius replied, ‘Could it be that you are looking for the prudent man [prudentem]?’ And Scipio interjected: ‘That very one!’ ‘There is a good supply of that type of man from all who are present here,’ Laelius retorted, ‘—and you could begin with yourself.’ Then Scipio answered, ‘I wish there was the same amount in the whole Senate’” (2.67). Laelius signals that Scipio may be the model of the prudent man he seeks (2.67). Scipio ignores the compliment and instead disparages the prudence of the Senate, the traditional locus of prudentia. He then extends the social application of prudentia as experience and training by applying it to an elephant driver, a particularly apt political analogy: “But that man is also prudens, as we often saw in Africa, who sits upon a huge and monstrous beast and restrains and masters [regit] it to go where he wants, and also changes the wild animal’s course with a gentle command or a touch” (2.67). The image of the best statesman as elephant driver was potentially shocking because of the low social status of the elephant driver. Yet the qualifications of a prudens do not depend on his social status, but on his ability to make correct decisions and understand how to regulate the irrational beast he is commissioned to control. Scipio further expands the realm of prudentia as he explains his analogy by comparing the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
56
Page 56
.
Prudence
elephant driver to the mens or rational part of mind that rules over the body (2.67). Unfortunately, Cicero’s text ends in the middle of Scipio’s comparison. What we have compares the elephant driver’s ability to control one wild animal versus the mind’s ability to control more than one animal. The natural progression of this thought would be for the mind to control the several passions within an individual, then for the individual to control many people. It is possible, however, that Scipio makes the mind of the best statesman govern the state, the body politic, which is comprised of diverse, conflicting, and unruly elements. The mens here may well be the one to be discussed at De re publica 4.1, “that very mind that sees the future, remembers the past,” recalling the definition of prudentia as one of the cardinal virtues at De inventione 2.160.64 Just how the prudens would govern—and the role of the prudens in the state, since he is not part of any of the systems of government outlined earlier—is indicated in the next large fragment: Then Laelius said, “Now I see what duty and office you would assign to the type of man I was looking for.” “And of course this should be almost his only duty,” replied Africanus, “for in this one alone are nearly all the rest: that he never cease from training himself and reflecting on his actions, that he encourage others to imitate his example, and that he offer himself as a mirror to his fellow citizens through the distinction of his intellect and his way of life.” (2.69) The role of the prudens seems remarkably passive according to traditional models of rulers, kings, and leading statesmen. The prudens leads by example, not by coercion. He adapts to new situations by improving himself through continued learning and self-examination. His ultimate goal, as the rest of the fragment suggests, is to achieve a harmony, a concordia, from the oftentimes discordant voices based on economic or class interests. This concordia is not simply imposed upon citizens, but is modeled through the prudent man’s own life and sense of justice. The second pair of books in De re publica covers the importance of justice, iustitia, and education to the best state. The administration of justice requires the prudential capacity to evaluate competing claims fairly. This capacity is modeled in the interlocutors’ in utramque partem discussion of the necessity of justice itself. Philus does not want to argue against justice, but is persuaded to in order for the group to examine the proposition thoroughly. The debate supposedly repeats a pair of speeches delivered for and against justice by the Greek philosopher Carneades when he visited Rome. Romans at the time were
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 57
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
57
shocked that one person would take both positions without an apparent preference, but the argument in De re publica avoids shocking its readers this time by allowing different speakers to take the parts and by showing Philus’s reluctance to argue against justice. Laelius addresses the issue, telling Philus that everyone knows his habit of discussing issues contrarias in partes (= in utramque partem) “because you think it is the easiest way to discover the truth” (3.8). After Philus and Laelius argue against and for the necessity of justice in the best state,65 Scipio revisits his earlier definitions of the types of states and revises his opinions (3.45). In particular, he is more specific about what can even qualify as a commonwealth (res publica), further reducing the possible choices by eliminating tyrannies and mob rule, since a “republic” is a thing of the people (res publica = res populi) and neither of those forms qualifies (3.43). Book 4 is very fragmentary and difficult to reconstruct. It covered Roman educational practice. It is likely that Cicero built on the importance of arguing contrarias in partes and emphasized the statesman’s capacity to revise his opinions. From what does survive, we know that he promoted the Roman practice of learning by experience over the Greek practice of learning a standard curriculum. There is a particularly Roman concern to subordinate book learning to practice. It also seems likely that this was the book in which Cicero connected prudentia and mens. Book 5 discusses the qualifications of the best citizen, the vir prudens. The first fragments lament the loss of Roman traditional values, indicating a conservative move to regain those values. An interesting section concerns the learning necessary for the best statesman by comparing him to the father of a household (pater familias) or the superintendent of a farm (5.5). Just as they need to know a wide variety of skills to oversee everything properly, they are not expected to spend their time using all the skills they know. In 5.6 the statesman should encourage the people to strive for praise and glory and avoid disgrace and dishonor through the force of public opinion and training. The goal of the statesman is the happiness, prosperity, and moral rectitude of the citizens (5.8). There was also a passage relating to the statesman’s use of oratory, which apparently stressed how effective it should be, but only the reply to that argument survives (5.11). The sixth book, the practical example of the best statesman, opens with the following programmatic line: “So you want to know this statesman’s whole prudentia, which takes its very name from foresight” (providendo, 6.1). Just what this tota prudentia would have entailed is lost to us, but based on Cicero’s method, it is probably to be found modeled in the main episode of the book, the “Dream of Scipio.” The Dream itself does not mention prudentia, but it is the activity of the consummate vir prudens.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
58
Page 58
.
Prudence
Two new aspects of prudentia may be noticed in the Somnium Scipionis. In addition to the ethical virtues of the prudens, devotion to family and duty to the gods and the state, the Dream also emphasizes the divine help available to the prudens that accounts for his almost divine foresight (providentia). Scipio’s dead grandfather prophesies his future and potential future (6.11–12). This account of how the prudens has a basis for his foresight, one of the main aspects of prudentia, appears to be a Ciceronian innovation.66 A standard explanation of the foresight of the prudens would emphasize the rational basis for predicting the future based on his intelligence and practical experience. Cicero may have covered this when he compares the prudens elephant driver to the rational mind (2.67). The addition of divine assistance would indicate that the prudens has access to information about a truth that is beyond normal human intelligence. Finally, the Somnium Scipionis shows that the vir prudens must continually keep his vision on greater things, beyond the narrow realm of human affairs, though he should maintain an active role in advising the state (6.17, 20ff.). The ability to do this lies both in his own education, training, and experience—all broadly conceived—and on the divine inspiration he receives. If this appeals to the idea of a noncontingent “Truth,” it also realizes that attaining knowledge of it is impossible by oneself. The contemporary political function of De re publica seems unmistakable: it models a form of the state and statesman by considering the best examples, reflecting on its own condition, judging competing claims fairly, achieving concord, and contemplating its relative position and importance in the cosmos. De re publica functions like the vir prudens himself, offering Rome a mirror of the best condition of a state, where the image is of Rome herself almost a century earlier. This rather oblique contribution to discussions of the current political situation at Rome in the late 50s was apparently very popular, as Cicero’s letters attest, and Cicero expected readers to understand its subtle method of treating current issues.67 But the political crisis at Rome was not to be solved by intellectual debates among experienced viri prudentes; it was decided by the brute force of civil war.
prudentia in brutus Caesar’s victory in his war against Pompey and the Senate ushered in a new political environment. Caesar was declared dictator; and although the traditional offices of consul, praetor, tribune, and so forth, were maintained, polit-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 59
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
59
ical power was clearly in the hands of Caesar alone. The deliberative, consensus-building, prudential world of Scipio and Laelius in De re publica and of Crassus and Antonius in De oratore was displaced by the rule of an individual. Opportunities for oratory, for consultation of senior statesmen, for significant deliberation, were gone.68 Cicero was courted by Caesar and invited to participate in the government, but he was not free to say what he wanted. Thus unable to take an active part in public life, Cicero resorted to writing philosophy, both to console himself and to educate his countrymen. Cicero had written separate treatises on the orator and the statesman; and although there is much in common between the main characters, they still inhabit separate works. In 46 B.C.E. Cicero wrote a work that effectively combined both by tracing the history of Roman oratory through Rome’s great orators. The Brutus can be treated as a simple history of Roman orators, and it would be innovative at that, but it is much more: it is a statement on the necessity of having at least two important men who are considered the best and are in control. It emphasizes cooperation, even among rivals, and it stresses prudential deliberation as the means to achieve the best ends for the good of the state. Brutus opens with a strong statement that to devote oneself to oratory is to devote oneself to prudentia (23). Once again, this use of the word is considered unusual and problematic,69 but it can be easily explained if we consider Cicero’s project in his previous works to stress the importance of prudentia in connection with eloquentia and to elevate prudentia to intellectual and cultural parity with the word that usually translated the Greek notion of wisdom, sapientia. Thus Brutus becomes another example of Cicero’s concerted effort to bring this message to his Roman audience. Brutus adopts the prudential dialogue and behavior modeling method of De oratore and De re publica but its aim is more focused. The main thrust of the work is the process by which one judges the relative value and merit of the over two hundred Roman orators listed. In this respect, it instantiates the definition of prudentia given in De inventione as “the knowledge of things that are good, bad, and neither good nor bad” (2.160), a definition to which Cicero had recourse several times during the years 46–43 B.C.E.70 The development of such a knowledge (scientia) is shown by Cicero to depend on a knowledge of history and the progression of institutions, an aesthetic sense for style, and an understanding of the greater interests of the state. As Cicero discusses the outstanding and mediocre orators and politicians of Rome’s past, his judgments are sometimes praised and sometimes doubted by the interlocutors Atticus and Brutus; disagreements are not always resolved. The possibilities
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
60
Page 60
.
Prudence
for opposing opinions are explored and even celebrated as it is revealed that during the best periods of Rome’s history there have always been at least two orators or statesmen who were considered, by someone, to be the “best.” The new emphasis on prudence as finding and evaluating examples to follow or avoid reflects a change in Cicero’s method, and almost a retreat to a simpler exposition of prudentia. The reasons for and ramifications of this change cannot be explored here,71 but it is tempting to look for them in the circumstances of Caesar’s dictatorial political regime. A subtle treatise on the ideal state was now of little practical value. Cicero redirected his efforts toward providing the building blocks to help others develop the values needed to reform the state. As Cicero said to his friend Varro in a letter in 47 B.C.E., “Let us set this as our task: to live together in our studies, from which we sought only delight in former times, but in which we now seek our salvation; to not fail but freely rush up to anyone who wishes to use us not only as architects but even as day laborers to rebuild the republic.”72
conclusion If De re publica could have been read as justification for rule by an individual, the rector rei publicae or the vir prudens, there is no way the Brutus can be so read. The stress on multiple men guiding the state, on deliberation, on the role of oratory, and even on the contribution of men who were not so great is in sharp contrast to the prevailing political climate under Caesar. Unfortunately for the idea of the prudens vir, autocratic rule had come to Rome to stay. After Caesar’s assassination, Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus formed the so-called Second Triumvirate for purposes of immediate political expediency until power again devolved into the hands of one man. But Augustus had learned the lessons of Caesar and did not attempt to impose his singular authority upon the government. Instead, he allowed Republican forms of government continue and did not assume unprecedented offices himself. He wanted to be primus inter pares, the princeps some have seen advocated in Cicero’s De re publica.73 But the prudential leader was now the sole ruler, the Prince. Prudentia was no longer one of the main virtues of the leader; it was displaced by absolute wisdom, sapientia. The divinely inspired foresight aspect of prudentia was easily assumed by the term providentia, which the emperors advertised abundantly on their coinage. The idea of prudentia that continued in the empire was not that of prudential decision making advocated by Cicero in De oratore, De re publica, and Brutus, but his own guarded use of
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 61
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
61
language when Caesar was dictator. Prudentia in later writers, particularly in Seneca and Tacitus, became a means of accommodation to the current political regime. The real heirs of Cicero’s contribution to the idea of prudentia were not the Romans of the Empire, but the Renaissance humanists. It was a double inheritance. First, they had received the notion that prudentia was the first of the four cardinal virtues from the rhetorical treatise De inventione. Second, after learning the calculus for phronesis from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, they discovered Cicero’s practice of prudential reasoning in his dialogues, arguing in utramque partem, and using dreams to gain access to divine, or nonobservable knowledge. The rich texture of prudential practice in De oratore, the Somnium Scipionis, and Brutus interwove the calculative procedures of prudence in rhetoric, ethics, and politics into a living tapestry of practical performance. Wisdom was embedded in political action; the great men of the state supported learning for its broader application to civic life and reflected upon their own positions; political performance could be learned and taught, as rhetoric was, by imitation. Prudentia became in Cicero’s works an observable—and replicable—virtue, closely tied to wide learning, practical training, and active participation in civic life. Moreover, it could be transmitted through literature, and even Cicero’s act of writing a model of political prudence as a contribution to political debate could have been viewed as an act of prudence.74 In short, the Renaissance understanding of prudence was deeply Ciceronian; and by investigating Cicero’s transformation and transmission of prudentia, we can arrive at a fuller appreciation of his contributions to the history of prudence.
notes 1. See especially Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 2. For an emphasis on Aristotle, especially to recover a particularly Aristotelian notion of prudence, see Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: “Phronesis” and “Techne” in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); and Daniel Mark Nelson, The Priority of Prudence: Virtue and Natural Law in Thomas Aquinas and the Implications for Modern Ethics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). 3. Hans Baron, “Cicero and the Roman Civic Spirit in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 22 (1938): 72–97. 4. For a brief examination of Cicero’s contribution to Aquinas’s notion of prudence, see E. K. Rand, Cicero in the Courtroom of St. Thomas Aquinas (Milwaukee: Marquette University
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
62
Page 62
.
Prudence
Press, 1946). Recent studies of St. Thomas virtually ignore Cicero; see Daniel Westberg, Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), and Nelson, Priority of Prudence. 5. For discussion of the manuscript tradition, especially of the mutili, see Michael Winterbottom et al., “De oratore, Orator, Brutus,” in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 102–9. 6. For the importance of De oratore on the humanists’ development of the dialogue and association of rhetoric with wisdom/philosophy, see David Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), and Jarrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). For the humanists’ debt to De oratore for their system of education, see Antony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), esp. 210–20. 7. John O. Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion and Commentary. Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental, fasc. 58 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 276. 8. For Afranius’s definition of sapientia as the daughter of usus and memoria, see Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 13.8. Sapientia and prudentia were always closely linked; this will be discussed below. 9. Prudentia was also used, later, for other specialized knowledge, such as farming, medicine, and architecture; see P. G. W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), s.v. “prudentia,” 2. 10. For example, Plautus Aulularia 792 and Terence Andria 642–43, Phormio 284, and Adelphoe 711. 11. Cf. Plautus Aulularia 62 and Menaechmi 1073 and Terence Andria 642–43. 12. Cato Oratio Contra Servium Galbam frag. 172.13, in E. Malcovati, ed., Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta2 (Turin: Paravia, 1955) = Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.23.13. 13. Cicero gives the best example of this meaning for prudentia in the speech Philus is forced to give against the need for justice in the ideal commonwealth (De re publica 3.16). It seems clear from the rest of the work that this definition of prudentia will be criticized when the entire argument is demolished by Laelius, but the fact that Philus could be made to use this definition indicates it was available by the mid-first century B.C.E. For the general inapplicability of the modern understanding of prudential reasoning to Greece and Rome, see Julia Annas, “Prudence and Morality in Ancient and Modern Ethics,” Ethics 105 (1995): 241–57. 14. There is a gap in the text here. 15. The form actually occurs in the accusative, which is problematic, but probably correct. Otto Skutsch, The Annales of Quintus Ennius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 460–61. 16. Latin text in Skutsch, Annales. See 447–62 for his discussion and commentary. I follow Skutsch’s reconstruction of the setting and placement of the fragment at Cannae. 17. The latter point we learn from Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 12.4. Sander M. Goldberg, Epic in Republican Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 121–23, cautions against overemphasizing the inferior status of the Companion with apt examples that may be applied to the situation of the prudens in Cicero’s De re publica. 18. Skutsch, Annales, 461. 19. Livy 22.38–49. For prudentia as a quality of Fabius, see 22.12.6, 22.29.9, 22.39.12, 28.43.1. See especially the speech of Minucius, who learned from his experience when he disregarded Fabius’s plan, 22.29.8–11. 20. See Timothy J. Moore, Artistry and Ideology: Livy’s Vocabulary of Virtue (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1989), 110–13. 21. For the main discussions of prudentia, see J. Hellegouarc’h, Le vocabulaire latin des relations et des partis politiques sous la République (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1972), and Ursula Klima,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 63
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
63
Untersuchungen zu dem Begriff Sapientia von der republikanischen Zeit bis Tacitus (Bonn: Rudolf Habelt, 1971), 28–37. 22. Klima, Untersuchungen, 28–30, 85–86. Note that this observation comes from Ciceronian evidence and assumes the terms are interchangeable. 23. The best appreciation of this aspect of Cicero’s prudential practice is given in Robert Hariman and Francis A. Beer, “What Would Be Prudent? Forms of Reasoning in World Politics,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1998): 299–330. 24. Plautus Truculentus 78a. 25. Plutarch Life of Tiberius Gracchus 8.4. 26. E. Badian, “The Clever and the Wise: Two Roman Cognomina in Context,” in Vir Bonus Discendi Peritus, ed. N. Horsfall, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Supplement 51 (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1988), 6–12. 27. Klima, Untersuchungen, 3–8. 28. Prudentia is part of a cluster of words, including consilium and ingenium, as well as cautus, sapientia, and providentia, so a narrow focus on one term does not yield a complete understanding of how Cicero developed the concept of prudentia. The goal of this chapter is merely to indicate that development; I hope to consider it more completely elsewhere. 29. Plato Republic 4.428ff.; see Harry Caplan’s note, [Cicero] Ad C. Herennium De Ratione Dicendi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 162. See also Cicero In Catilinam 2.25 and De natura deorum 3.38. 30. Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric, 276. See also Cary J. Nederman, “The Union of Wisdom and Eloquence Before the Renaissance: The Ciceronian Orator in Medieval Thought,” Journal of Medieval History 18 (1992): 75–95. 31. Rhetores Latini Minores, ed. C. Halm (Leipzig, 1863), 156. The Ciceronian order is pointedly reproduced by Lorenzo Valla; cf. Michael Baxendall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 113. 32. Klima, Untersuchungen, 28. 33. Ad Herennium mirrors this distinction almost exactly. 34. The literature about Cicero’s life is enormous; for a thorough historical biography, see the two volumes by Thomas N. Mitchell, Cicero: The Ascending Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), and Cicero: The Senior Statesman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 35. Epistulae ad Atticum (hereafter Att.) 2.3.3–4. 36. This brief summary cannot capture the subtleties of politics during this period. For a good review of the events, especially as they pertain to Cicero, see Mitchell, Cicero: The Senior Statesman, 98–203. 37. For violence in the 50s, see Andrew W. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 38. Att. 4.18.2; Epistulae ad Quintum Fratrem (hereafter Q.fr.) 3.6.4. These were in 54 B.C.E., after he published De oratore and had begun writing De re publica. In 55 he saw the trouble coming and was already considering writing something as a way to deal with his diminished position. Att. 4.6.1–3. 39. For a good introduction to the work, see George Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, 300 B.C. –A.D. 300 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 205–30. 40. Cf. Cicero’s letters, Att. 4.6.1–2, 4.8, 4.9; Epistulae ad Familiares (hereafter Fam.) 1.9, 1.8.4; Q.fr. 3.5.4. For images on contemporary coinage, see the libertas issue by Marcus Brutus in 54 B.C.E. M. H. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), no. 433/1, pp. 455–56. Elizabeth Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 146–47, comments on the general climate and thinks Cicero was the only one to get more theoretical. I consider De oratore to be opening up the possibility of a discourse on the role of oratory at Rome in the same way Mary Beard considers De
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
64
Page 64
.
Prudence
divinatione to have done for religion and philosophy. See Mary Beard, “Cicero and Divination: The Formation of a Latin Discourse,” Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 33–46. 41. See Patrick Sinclair, “Political Declensions in Latin Grammar and Oratory 55 B.C.E– C.E. 39,” Ramus 23 (1994): 92–109. 42. Philosophy, in particular; see A. A. Long, “Cicero’s Plato and Aristotle,” in Cicero the Philosopher, ed. J. G. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 37–61, esp. 50–60. 43. See Anton E. Leeman, “The Structure of Cicero’s De Oratore I,” in Ciceroniana: Hommages à Kazimierz Kumaniecki, ed. A. Michel and R. Verdière (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), 140–49, and Jon Hall, “Persuasive Design in Cicero’s De Oratore,” Phoenix 48 (1994): 210–25. 44. Att. 4.16.3. 45. Augustus S. Wilkins, M. Tulli Ciceronis De Oratore, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), 83. 46. My argument does not depend on the reading of prudentissimorum at 1.5, though I think there are reasons to consider that reading. More important is that prudentissimorum was the reading before 1422 and had a formative influence on the humanists. For passages that support Cicero’s use of prudentissimorum in 1.5, see De oratore 1, 8, 1.107–9, 2.72, 2.99; Post reditum in Senatu 15; De re publica 1.30; and Brutus 23. For an important passage against, which was unknown in the mutili, see De oratore 3.95. 47. A play on words? 48. This passage was not in the mutili MSS: one wonders what the humanists made of it. 49. Att. 4.16.3. This is supported by the time of the dialogues as well: book 1 takes place on the first day, while books 2 and 3 represent the morning and afternoon discussions on the second day. Thus, the treatise can be read as “theory” on the first day, and “exposition” or “examples” on the second. 50. See also 2.153–56, and Erich S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 223–71. 51. It was clearly an article of contention when Cicero wrote De inventione sometime in the 80s, to judge from the tone of his bold juxtaposition of sapientia and eloquentia at 1.1. For the 50s, see Hall, “Persuasive Design.” 52. Tusc. Disputat. 1.7. 53. See, for example, A. E. Douglas, Cicero: Tusculan Disputations I (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1985), 92. 54. For a general introduction to De re publica, see the introductory comments by James E. G. Zetzel in Cicero: De Re Publica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a more detailed commentary, see Karl Büchner, M. Tullius Cicero: De Re Publica (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1984). See also Malcolm Schofield, “Cicero’s Definition of Res Publica,” in Powell, Cicero the Philosopher, 63–83. Also see Robert W. Sharples, “Cicero’s Republic and Greek Political Theory,” Polis 5 (1986): 30–50. 55. Q.fr. 3.5.1. 56. For a history of the text, see Zetzel, in Cicero: De Re Publica. 57. For the text of Macrobius, see Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, ed. Jacob Wills (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1970); for an annotated translation with useful introductory material, see Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, ed. and trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). 58. For brief information on the characters, see Zetzel, in Cicero: De Re Publica, 9–12. For Roman education, see Stanley F. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome from the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977). 59. Q.fr. 3.5.1–2. 60. Zetzel, in Cicero: De Re Publica, 28–29. 61. Ibid., 10. For more information, see Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 14.1 “Manilius” 12, col. 1135–39.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 65
Cicero and the Development of Prudential Practice at Rome
.
65
62. Zetzel, in Cicero: De Re Publica, 16–29. 63. In De oratore the first book is theoretical and the second and third books are empirical, though articulating different practices. 64. Cf. also Rep. 3.38. 65. Unfortunately, only Philus’s argument is preserved in detail; we know little about Laelius’s response, except that it was stronger. Philus’s position against justice raises some important issues related to prudentia in De re publica, such as law being culturally rather than naturally determined, and prudence being separated from justice, where prudentia carries its later meaning of self-serving “political expediency” (3.16). But then he argues that even ideas about what constitutes justice change (3.17). Without Laelius’s reply it is difficult to interpret Philus’s comments, but they do appear to be part of a trend in the dialogue toward broadening the meaning of prudentia from the limited references to specific learning and political expediency to the process by which the best statesman makes good decisions for the state. 66. Although the whole dream is modeled on Plato’s Myth of Er, Cicero’s version is more accessible to the average person, who may receive inspiration from ancestors and the gods in dreams without having first to suffer a near-death experience. 67. Fam. 8.1.4; Att. 6.1.8, 6.2.9., 6.3.3; Att. 5.12.2. 68. See Matthias Gelzer, Caesar: Politician and Statesman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 272–330. 69. See the discussion in A. E. Douglas, M. Tulli Ciceronis Brutus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 16. 70. De natura deorum 3.38; De finibus bonorum et malorum 5.67; De officiis 1.153, 3.71; cf. De legibus 1.60. 71. Robert W. Cape Jr., “Prudentia in Cicero’s Brutus” (unpublished paper). 72. Fam. 9.2.5. 73. A view no longer generally held; Zetzel, in Cicero: De Re Publica, 27. 74. For this as a Renaissance idea, see Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 66
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 67
3 After Virtù rhetoric, prudence, and moral pluralism in machiavelli
Eugene Garver
The appearance of Machiavelli’s Prince and his Discourses on Livy is a fundamental event in the history of prudence and the development of pluralism. Since we read history backwards, we can see, as Berlin has taught us to see, in Machiavelli the origins of a pluralism he himself could not have recognized.1 Looking back, we see that earlier versions of morality and humanity envisaged a world that was at least in theory unitary, in which all actions and values could coexist. After Machiavelli, we have had to live in a more complex world. We have gradually come to realize that liberalism, with its emphases on individual choice and responsibility, and on tolerance and compromise toward others, is the only practical solution to the plurality that Machiavelli eloquently makes unavoidable for us. The march from Machiavelli to the pluralism of today was, in retrospect, inevitable. Machiavelli’s originality consisted in exhibiting the incommensurability of ultimate values. To achieve one good is to fail to achieve another. To become one sort of good person is to become incapable of becoming another. The study of history and contemporary events had convinced him that there can be no direct connection between principles and consequences. Christianity leads to no certain results, but Machiavelli, always ambitious, eagerly generalizes beyond his evidence and beyond the needs of the immediate rhetorical
67
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
68
Page 68
.
Prudence
situation and concludes that no principle guarantees success. Therefore, practical intelligence must be prudent, suited to deliberation about shifting particulars, not the logical derivation of acts from ethical first principles. Machiavelli exhibits three distinct kinds of pluralism, as he leads his readers to confront incommensurable good ends, incommensurable good abilities, and incommensurable good sources of value. There are, first, incommensurable ultimate ends or values. There is no common measure for comparing the duration of Venice with the expansions of Rome. Those are just two incompatible ways of being a good republic. There is, similarly, no common measure for adjudicating the conflicting claims of Christian and neopagan values. Those are just two possible good lives. There are, second, incommensurable good abilities and virtues, and the meaning of “good” can vary from effective to praiseworthy on other grounds. Some men succeed through caution, others through daring, some through force, and others through fraud. There are not only ultimately plural ends, but for any of them, there are, in addition, ultimately plural ways of achieving the ends. This psychological pluralism shows that there are irreducibly many possible good characters. Ends do not determine their means. Knowing what is good does not tell you what to do. Finally, Machiavelli is at the beginning of a historical development of the appreciation of multiple sources of value and allegiance. Men are loyal to their states, and France’s gain is Italy’s loss. Modern nation-states were at this time only gradually coming into existence, and so Machiavelli is not in a position to recognize the growing importance of this final kind of plurality. Whether the appropriate locus of allegiance in the latter case is Italy or Florence is an issue on which Machiavelli has no single opinion. I list this third dimension of pluralism, not because it is important in Machiavelli’s thought, but because in subsequent history, people who see the development of multiple ends and abilities often neglect this third dimension, so that the rise of nationalism which accompanies liberalism comes as a surprise. It is easy to recognize Machiavelli as an ancestor of many of the fundamental constituents of our practical world and our predicament. Machiavelli was a pluralist along all three dimensions I listed. He knew that there is no smooth connection between principles and consequences. Different principles of actions can lead to the same result, and a single principle can lead to contradictory results. He was aware that the indirect and unintended consequences of actions were often more significant than purposes and designs. He consequently emphasized the value and power of factions. He thought it essential to separate church and state, to judge religions on how well they served people’s political ends, and to judge states on how effectively they used the peo-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 69
After Virtù
.
69
ple’s religious faith. Yet for all that Machiavelli was no liberal. He saw greater power and wisdom in the people than in prince, yet he was no democrat either. Machiavelli was a pluralist who does not take the steps, which seem natural and inevitable to us, from pluralism on to liberalism, tolerance, and democracy. He thought that moderation, so often associated with pluralism and liberalism, was a recipe for disaster. While praising the power and wisdom of the people, he would have found the idea of basic rights of the individual against society or of a reserved domain of the private unintelligible. While he thought that people had to learn peaceful, including verbal and rhetorical, ways of getting what they wanted as well as bellicose methods, he considered war “more honorable” than getting what one wanted through winning another’s friendship (Discourses III.2), and preferred force to fraud. Isaiah Berlin, in “The Originality of Machiavelli,” nicely captures the way Machiavelli is our father in the generation of pluralism, yet is recognizably not a modern liberal. Berlin credits Machiavelli with the pluralistic insight that not all goods can coexist in a single world. He correctly notes that if practical reason and prudence cannot be assimilated to theoretical or technical reasoning, and if the confrontation between Christianity and the revival of pagan virtues results in the discovery of plural ultimate values, then “the path is open to empiricism, pluralism, toleration, compromise” (78). Berlin then shows how we got from Machiavelli to where we are today, and so is worth quoting at length: If not all values are compatible with one another . . . then a picture emerges different from that constructed round the ancient principle that there is only one good for men. If there is only one solution to the puzzle, then the only problems are firstly how to find it, then how to realize it, and finally how to convert others to the solution by persuasion or by force. But if this is not so . . . then, the path is open to empiricism, pluralism, toleration, compromise. Toleration is historically the product of the realisation of the irreconcilability of equally dogmatic faiths, and the practical impossibility of complete victory of one over the other. Those who wished to survive realised that they had to tolerate error. They gradually came to see merits in diversity, and so became skeptical about definitive solutions in human affairs. [Machiavelli’s] intellectual consequences, wholly unintended by its originator, were, by a fortunate irony of history (which some call its dialectic), the bases of the very liberalism that Machiavelli would surely have condemned. (79)
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
70
Page 70
.
Prudence
What Berlin calls the “irony of history” seems to me worth a more concentrated look. Berlin notes that Machiavelli’s pluralism leads to liberalism. It also leads to what is called civic republicanism, a variety of pluralism, prudence, and rhetoric that stresses competition over cooperation, valorizes military virtue, and denigrates compromise. Machiavelli reminds us of the less obvious competitive and even bellicose sides of pluralism and prudence. I have talked so far about pluralism, and a little about prudence, but not about the third term in my title, rhetoric. Rhetoric, from its beginning, has been a power for both cooperation and competition. The historical line that ends triumphantly with tolerance and liberalism stressed the cooperative side of rhetoric, pluralism, and prudence. We have left behind, or have tried to leave behind, the competitive side. Since our efforts to suppress the competitive face of pluralism and prudence are not always successful, it is worth considering bringing it into the open.
the history of prudence and the paradoxes of imitation In the beginning were the Sophists. Plato had to invent “rhetoric” in order to create the discipline of “philosophy.”2 Philosophy was as much a response to sophistic ideas, and their popularity, as to the investigations of nature. The Sophists attracted attention, and hope, because they promised to make virtue into a technique. The proposal to make sophistic the queen of the sciences had one large problem. Virtue obviously cannot be taught, and what can be taught does not look much like virtue. Virtue cannot be taught because it is not reducible to knowledge. The sophists’ opponents were confident that such an aspiration was impossible, although they produced quite different explanations for why virtue is not knowledge. It is not reducible to knowledge either because it is a matter of passion and the moral sentiments, or because it is a form of knowledge based on habituation, and therefore not on teaching. For Aristotle, how to make products can be taught, but virtue cannot be taught because one cannot separate product from producer. Praxis is different from production. The late Roman Republic and early Empire had a rebuttal, which is the next stage in the history of prudence. They discovered history as a substitute for personal experience and habituation. History had lessons for us. We could learn through history to be virtuous. The less good action was connected to political deliberation, the more this new form of prudence had appeal. As political rhetoric declined, rhetorical arts of erudition and teaching took over.3
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 71
After Virtù
.
71
The triumph of Christianity over a dying empire is the next stage in this breathless account. Christianity offered a clear explanation for why virtue did not lead regularly to success and—more to the point for the irrelevance of sophistic rhetoric—for why knowledge did not lead to goodness. Neither rich men nor wise men got into heaven. Prudence consisted in understanding how men could best obey the laws of God in a fallen condition, and rhetoric could be of little help with that. The Renaissance rediscovered the pagan past and the intelligibility of history.4 Therefore imitation became a key both to learning from history and to a rhetorical project of making virtue into an art. Imitation is always a central concept in rhetorical education, but in the Renaissance it becomes a central aspect of rhetorical and prudent action as well. The Renaissance revival of antiquity was not a duplication of the pagan past but a new version of pagan morality as it adapts old virtues to new times. The pluralism I ascribe to Machiavelli and associate with rhetoric and prudence emerged out of the confrontation of Christianity with the pagan revival. Prior to Machiavelli, neither rhetoric nor prudence had to have anything to do with pluralism. It is nothing new to claim that imitation is a central term for the Renaissance, and for Machiavelli in particular. Imitation makes past and present into both cooperators and competitors. I want to show its relevance for a study of pluralism and prudence by appealing to Bernard Williams’s distinction between real and notional possibilities.5 Machiavelli has a similar distinction, between imitation and admiration as two distinct attitudes one can hold toward the past. The distinction between real and notional possibilities, options, and confrontations is a rediscovery of the ancient rhetorical idea of the appropriate or the decorous, to prepon and charis. Williams says, “We should distinguish between real and notional confrontations. A real confrontation between two divergent outlooks occurs at a given time if there is a group of people for whom each of the outlooks is a real option. A notional confrontation, by contrast, occurs when some people know about two divergent outlooks, but at least one of those outlooks does not present a real option” (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 160). Problems of prudence, rhetoric, and pluralism are all problems of the relation between the possible and the actual, and so require attention to different forms of possibility. Real and notional possibilities are differently related to the actual, especially the kind of actuality we can bring about, the practicable. A real possibility is not a possibility that is already actual, but one which can become actual through our deliberate efforts. Possibilities are not real and notional in themselves, but relative to some group
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
72
Page 72
.
Prudence
of people. The distinction between real and notional possibilities is rhetorical because it is related to appropriateness, and because it is relative to groups of people, not individuals. The distinction is prudential because it is related to deliberation. Real and notional possibilities differ in their place in deliberation. Williams notes the existence of “asymmetrically related options. Some version of modern technological life and its outlooks has become a real option for members of some traditional societies, but their life is not, despite the passionate nostalgia of many, a real option for us” (“The Truth in Relativism,” 140). That is just the relation between Christian and modern morality Machiavelli hopes to develop in his readers: our modern ethics is a real possibility for people who are still Christians, but Christian morality is not a real option for us. It cannot be refuted, but no one should act on it.6 As Williams puts a similar point: “It could be a feature of a man’s moral outlook that he regarded certain courses of action as unthinkable, in the sense that he would not entertain the idea of doing them. . . . Entertaining certain alternatives, regarding them as alternatives, is itself something that he regards as dishonorable or morally absurd.”7 It would be a mistake to think that some options are real, some notional; sometimes one can and should make an option real or notional for tactical reasons. For Machiavelli these distinctions are always tactical choices. He never gives up Christian morality, as Ptolemaic astronomy yields to Copernicus or the Azanda give up magic for Western medicine. He knows that the things Christians call good really are good. Berlin gets it right: “In killing, deceiving, betraying, Machiavelli’s prince and republicans are doing evil things, not condonable in terms of common morality. It is Machiavelli’s great merit that he does not deny this. Marsilio, Hobbes, Spinoza, and, in their own fashion, Hegel, and Marx, did try to deny it” (63).8 For those thinkers, Christian morality is a purely notional option in just the sense that Williams means it. It has not been refuted, but it can safely be ignored. It is a notional possibility. But for Machiavelli the situation is more complex. Christian values stay as real possibilities, while Christian modes of acting do not. If a real option is one that people can reasonably choose, then Christian morality is not a real option. If a merely notional possibility is one that people can at best imagine, respect, and admire, then Christian morality is more real than notional. Machiavelli has to argue against it, not just dismiss it. Real, neopagan morality must be defined in opposition to Christian morality, and so Christian morality has to remain as at least that real a possibility. Ancient pagan morality could not see Christian morality as a real possibility, but neopagan morality is a permanent argument against a competitor it cannot refute but must
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 73
After Virtù
.
73
continue to argue against. Notional possibilities are not always idle possibilities.9 Perfectionism, the idea that all good things are jointly possible, is not utopian for ancient pagan morality, where tragedy is a violation of such an order, but the same perfectionism is merely utopian and unrealistic in neopagan morality, for which incommensurability and pluralism are facts of life. Ancient morality did not need to confront ultimate incommensurable values because they did not have to think about my third form of pluralism, incompatible loci of value in distinct nation-states. Parochialism about the locus of value in polis and respublica made functional a monism and perfectionism about the ultimate values themselves. The passage from Williams continues: “The idea of a ‘real option’ is largely, but not entirely, a social notion.” The closest he comes to explicating what he means by “social” comes in his own discussion of Berlin: “Where conflict needs to be overcome, this ‘need’ is not of a purely logical character, nor a requirement of pure rationality, but rather a kind of social or personal need, the pressure of which will be felt in some historical circumstances rather than others.”10 The idea of real possibilities is a fundamentally rhetorical one. It has nothing to do with logical possibility, but everything to do with what is appropriate. Fleshing out the idea of real options becomes crucial when rhetoric and prudence are associated. The distinction between real and notional possibilities forms the theme of the introductions to the first two books of the Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli worries there not about whether Christian morality is a real or notional possibility, but whether pagan antiquity is. He will, in fact, make Christian morality into a merely notional possibility by converting Roman history from a notional to a real option. The reader begins by thinking that the glories of pagan Rome are notional possibilities, to be admired and not imitated, while the virtues of Christianity are real possibilities, even when we cannot realize them. By making ancient Roman deeds more subject to imitation, he makes Christian morality more notional; by making Christian morality more notional and impractical, he makes the pagan past more available. In theory, there is no correlation between the rejection of Christianity and the utility of the Roman past. Rhetorically, the correlation is strong. In both introductions Machiavelli distinguishes between imitation and admiration, the first an attitude that regards the past as offering real options, and the other merely notional ones. People value the past, he says in the introduction to book 1, but that is not a use value. It is mere admiration based on scarcity and antiquity. “Thus the majority of those who read it take pleasure only in the variety of the events which history relates, without ever thinking
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
74
Page 74
.
Prudence
of imitating the noble actions, deeming that not only difficult, but impossible” (104–5). When there is a possibility that I do not want to act on, then by making it merely notional, through a contemplative stance like admiration, I have an excuse for choosing not to act that way. I have moved a possibility from the realm of the practical to that of the aesthetic. Book 2 begins with an attack on “partisans of the past” (271). Here his analysis is more complicated. Admiration of the past comes from ignorance, which tends to make the deeds of individuals, both winners and losers, stand out and seem more heroic than they would in a fuller context. The more admirable they seem, the less imitable. We see the great deeds of the past out of context, and so they appear as heroic, notional options, not real ones. The more remote the deed, the less it seems a real option. But he also observes in the introduction to book 2 that we find it hard to imitate the present because of our passions and interests: “Men’s hatreds generally spring from fear or envy. Now, these two powerful reasons of hatred do not exist for us with regard to the past, which can no longer inspire either apprehension or envy. But it is very different with the affairs of the present, in which we ourselves are either actors or spectators, and of which we have a complete knowledge” (272–73). Machiavelli exploits the way passions cloud our judgment about the present in order to make the past more imitable. Historical and ethical distance can make an option more real than a nearer one might be. He employs the topics of past and present to reverse the readers’ usual values of imitation and admiration. Machiavelli can create more options within pagan morality by destroying the appeal of Christian morality, and conversely. The greater the barrier between the ends of Christian and neopagan morality, the more actors can explore the plurality of modes of action within pagan morality. The more notional and less real Christian morality is, the more real and less notional will be the possibilities for imitating past Roman, and pagan, glory. All the admissible means of action in pagan morality cohere into a single practical world because they all face a common enemy, effeminate Christian values. By increasing the emotional distance between is and ought, between how we must live and how we should live, and so between pagan and Christian morality, Machiavelli is able to decrease the practical distance between republican Rome and republican Florence. The rhetorical prudential problem of decorum consists in deliberating concerning the inference from can to ought, from powers and possibilities to what should be done. Invention uncovers new opportunities for action, but judgment has to decide which new real options should be acted upon. The imitation/admiration distinction is only half the story, and the real/ notional distinction is more complicated still. Repeating Roman triumphs and
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 75
After Virtù
.
75
imitating them are different phenomena. Imitation can become forgery, fraud, and mindless and pointless repetition. Practicing Roman virtù and imitating it, returning to one’s origins and founding a new state, being faithful to Romulus and repeating his deeds—these are different acts. Thus, as I said, the present can compete with the past as well as cooperate with it. The complications of imitation have a substantive counterpart: Machiavelli’s neopagan morality is not just the revival of pagan morality: it is pagan morality as opposed to Christianity. This imitation of pagan morality practices just what Machiavelli finds so compelling in Roman history itself: it is a return to origins and principles. In neither ancient nor Christian morality is there an opposition between ethics and politics. It is only through the confrontation of these two incommensurable moral systems that the modern distinction between ethics and politics emerges. I said at the start that the alliance between rhetoric, prudence, and pluralism is not present throughout history, but emerges with Machiavelli. Now we can see why. All three—rhetoric, prudence, and pluralism—start, in different ways, with the insight that aims and outcomes are not the same. Rhetoric emerges when people discover argument on both sides of a question. Prudence emerges when people find that principles are not self-executing, that intentions and results, principles and consequences, can be at odds. Prudence develops the realization that there is something irreducibly practical—needing to be done and not just known—about praxis. Pluralism, finally, emerges when rhetoric and prudence interact. It might seem surprising, looking back, that in Aristotle, for whom rhetorical invention and deliberative calculation are distinct faculties, there is no attempt to identify rhetorical and prudential excellences. We deliberate about those things which can be otherwise through our efforts, but the boundaries of that domain—which things can be otherwise—is not itself open to deliberation. When, as in Machiavelli, that domain is no longer a given but becomes subject to negotiation and argument, then rhetorical invention and prudent deliberation can be merged. The rhetorical virtue of appropriateness and decorum and the ethical virtue of doing what is right in the right circumstances are assimilated. One sign of this assimilation is that choice is redefined as the choice among alternative possibilities instead of the choice of means to an end. Machiavelli’s imitation of necessity will be a way of making the scope of deliberation subject to argument.11 Machiavelli, in both the Discourses and The Prince, expands the past available for imitation beyond what his Christian predecessors imagined. He rejects the easy relativism that says that while ancient Romans were able to accomplish these things, times have changed and Roman virtù and glory are
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
76
Page 76
.
Prudence
to be admired, not imitated. Machiavelli has a good reason to reject relativism, both with respect to past achievements and toward his contemporary ethical competitor, Christianity. Relativism is a way of avoiding confrontations. If Christianity can restrict itself to a proper domain, and do the same for Machiavelli’s worldly politics, then Machiavelli’s princes will not be princes; they will be usurpers. Machiavelli must draw Christianity into conflict so that Machiavellian actors will be legitimate as well as successful, right and not only mighty. The more he can show the availability of past models—and the more indiscriminate their provenance the better—the more he lowers the barriers between Christian and neopagan morality. Machiavellian prudence needs the competition of pluralism, not the peace treaty of relativism.
imitation of necessity in the discourses on livy Imitating originals is a paradox that animates The Prince, as Machiavelli shows how to convert apparently merely notional exempla like Moses, Theseus, Romulus, and Cyrus into real options. If those paradigms of virtù can be made into real possibilities, anything can. How Machiavelli brings that off has been explored extensively, and I will not undertake it again here. Instead I want to turn to the other extreme, the Roman successes that were for a different reason apparently inimitable. Roman successes are admirable, but they look like notional, not real, options, for contemporary Italians. Machiavelli promised that the more we know about the past, the more available it is for imitation. But in the case of the founding of Rome, the opposite seems the case. So much of its success depended on fortune and necessity. One can imitate action, but not circumstances. We deliberate about real possibilities; necessity is by definition outside the scope of deliberation. One overcomes necessity, Machiavelli thinks, not by fighting against it, but by imitating it. Creating artificial or political necessities will be a longterm strategy for overcoming natural necessity. Whereas books 1 and 2 of the Discourses have introductions that highlight the nature of imitation, book 3 has no introduction. It begins instead with the project of imitating necessity in order to return to principles. “The return of a republic to its original principles is either the result of extrinsic accident or of intrinsic prudence” (III.1. 298). Those intrinsic means of renewal are artificial necessities. Intrinsic prudence is the imitation of extrinsic fortune, accident, and necessity. The superiority of artificial to natural necessity is reminiscent of the topos made famous in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry: artificial necessity will “not only make a Cyrus,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 77
After Virtù
.
77
which had been but a particular excellencie, as Nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the worlde, to make many Cyrus’s, if they wil learne aright why and how that Maker made him.” One central form of necessity can be made subject to method. “The disunion between Senate and the people produced such extraordinary events that chance did for her what the laws had failed to do” (I.2.115–16). Factions are an instance of fortune because their results are at odds with their aims. Nothing with such a lack of fit can be the result of virtù and intelligent design. While factions themselves cannot be instituted by planning, the management of their effects can be subject to policy. The discovery of indirect and unintended consequences is a primary insight which generates rhetoric, prudence, and pluralism. The Romans fortunately hit on the right means for safely using the energy factions supply. What the Romans did successfully by accident, Machiavelli’s readers can achieve by design. Imitating virtù allows us, in The Prince, to approach the inherently superior acts of founders and heroes; imitating necessity, here in the Discourses, allows us to surpass nature and natural necessity. Rome’s founder was not a lawgiver; in place of Lycurgus, Machiavelli says, Rome had, “not fortune’s first gift, but its second” (I.4.119), the conflict between nobles and the people. Rome surpasses Sparta. This is the kind of fortuna that allows Machiavelli to ignore (or combine) differences between fate and contingency, chance and providence.12 “Men never do anything good except by necessity, but where there is plenty of choice and excessive freedom is possible, everything is at once filled with confusion and disorder. Hence it is said that hunger and poverty make men industrious, and the laws make them good” (I.3.201). It is easy to value the energy that factions created, admire it and wish that one’s own state had such energy too. This looks like a case of something that is an essentially notional possibility. It can be admired, but cannot become a practicable option, because we cannot deliberate about producing factions. (Think about attempts to create two-party democracy in Africa.) Luck and necessity, like innocence, are essentially things one can want but cannot aim at. Machiavelli thinks that looking deeper into Roman history makes factions into real possibilities. Machiavelli discovers in factions the value of diversity and plurality, and we live with the consequences of that discovery. The Romans did not accept factions because they were pluralists and thought diversity valuable in its own right. Factions were a given for them, and out of factions, they created peace and strength. Machiavelli, learning from the past, wants factions in order to
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
78
Page 78
.
Prudence
create peace and strength. Starting with plurality as a fact of life with which we must cope, Machiavelli is on the road to seeing it as itself desirable, and so on the road to liberalism and pluralism. Machiavelli’s attitude toward factions is an unstable one that has, despite its instability, remained surprisingly constant as a core attitude ever since. Mill’s On Liberty, for example, sometimes seems to value freedom and diversity as goods in themselves, and sometimes to praise them because they lead to the discovery of new truths. Are factions punishment for building the Tower of Babel, or are they a manifestation of the Greatness of God, that He should demand so many distinct manners of worship and imitation? Is the diversity of opinions about the good evidence of a diversity among goods, or just a datum about opinions we have to accommodate? Factions are something more than an evil whose consequences can be channeled for good. But while more than a given that we just have to live with, factions are not so valuable that we would want to insure that they grow where none now do. Some people go some distance from that core attitude in either direction, and could cite Machiavellian precedents for doing so. Some try to stamp factions out as much as possible in the name of an ideal or at least neutral synthesis. If Machiavelli’s hero could really change his nature, there would be no need for the diversity of characters he thinks necessary. Pluralism is only necessary, Machiavelli thinks, because of our limited natures. Sparta had a lawgiver, and that is better than factions. Some go the other way and encourage diversity as a positive good. Machiavelli is on their side too, when he associates uniform allegiance to one value with effeminacy and lack of energy.13 Rome had a better foundation than Sparta. Machiavelli the adviser turns from the imitation of virtù to the imitation of fortune because Machiavelli the historian has discovered the lesson of history, the starting point for prudence, pluralism, and rhetoric: people aim at one thing and achieve another.14 Where others might lament unexpected and unintended consequences as a mark of man’s fallen nature, Machiavelli sees the Romans treating them opportunistically. Factions aim at their own private good, but the result of factious activity can be a common good. Roman success could not come from planning, and so must have come from necessity, for the simple reason that its factions aimed at one thing and accomplished another. Modern liberalism will rely on a similar insight into the uses of factions, so factions are not only a central case for Machiavelli, but for my project of tracing the history of prudence, rhetoric, and pluralism. Machiavelli’s pluralism is a strategy for avoiding relativism. Pluralism, relativism, the distinction between real and notional possibilities, incommensu-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 79
After Virtù
.
79
rability—all these ideas are staples for contemporary philosophy, and one might think that their academic popularity comes from their lack of practical significance. Once again I think Machiavelli’s discussion of factions can help. I said earlier that Christian morality could sustain itself by a relativistic attitude toward Machiavelli’s neopagan morality. Here is an even stronger case. Monarchs have to be relativists. They have no choice: when in Rome, do as the Romans do, is their motto. All princes—all individuals—have a way of acting to which they are committed, both by nature and because of past success. If their modes of action are suited to the times, they will succeed. History will give a nonrelativistic verdict on their actions, but the historical agents themselves cannot distinguish between what is best and what seems best to them. Chapter 10 of The Prince tells us that we measure the power of a state by its ability to take the field against its rivals. The same measure has to be used for security, stability, and prosperity. There are no metrics apart from competitive action. There is always a right answer to every practical decision; history can tell us what it is. The trouble is, we usually can only know it when it is too late. Relativism is thus a purely theoretical, or tragic, problem, nothing we can do anything about. Relativism is, for Christian morality, a practical solution to a practical problem—avoid a conflict you cannot win. Relativism for monarchs, similarly, is a confession of an inescapable defect of partiality and a limited perspective. Which possibilities are real and which notional is not something an individual can do anything about. Individuals are relativists by default; unfortunately, they operate in a world that makes nonrelativistic judgments on their success.15 Relativism combined with realism leads to tragedy; pluralism and realism can be a stable marriage. Republics, in contrast to monarchies, can, because of factions, be practical pluralists. They can incorporate within themselves incommensurable modes of acting. Republics contain argument within themselves, and so can negotiate about which possibilities will be real and which notional, altering the domain of deliberation. Discourses on Livy III.9 is my proof-text: I have often reflected that the causes of the success or failure of men depend upon their manner of suiting their conduct to the times. We see one man proceed in his actions with passion and impetuosity ; and as in both the [one] case and the other case men are apt to exceed the proper limits, not being able always to observe the just middle course, they are apt to err in both. But he errs least and will be most favored by fortune who suits his proceedings to the times, as I have said above, and always follows the impulses of his nature [ti sforza la natura]. . . .
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
80
Page 80
.
Prudence
It is this which assures to republics greater vitality and more enduring success [buona fortuna] than monarchies have; for the diversity of the genius of her citizens [diversità de’ cittandini] enables the republic better to accommodate herself to the changes of the times [diversità de’ temporali] than can be done by a prince. Republics are pluralists where monarchies are relativists. Therefore republics have an advantage: it is better to be a pluralist than a relativist.16 A prince will be prudent if he has foresight and tries to suit his mode of action to the times. In the end, though, Machiavelli resigns himself to advising the prince to treat fortune like a woman. Chapter 25 of The Prince contains lines similar to the ones I just quoted from the Discourses: Two men, acting differently, attain the same effect, and of two others acting in the same way, one attains his goal and not the other. . . . If one could change one’s nature with time and circumstances, fortune would never change. . . . I conclude then that fortune varying and men remaining fixed in their ways, they are successful so long as these ways conform to circumstances, but when they are opposed then they are unsuccessful. I certainly think it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a woman. But in this case, Machiavelli has nothing but a counsel of despair. Treating fortune like a woman is a last resort like deciding to believe once one has given up rational grounds for faith. (Similarly, in Discourses III.6, he quotes the “golden sentence” of Tacitus: “Men should honor the past and obey the present; while they should desire good princes, they should bear with those they have, such as they are.” Princes cannot change their own nature. Men cannot change the nature of their princes, either. They, like their princes, should and must be resigned to accept the world as it is.) The republican case extends the reach of prudence further. Republics are superior to monarchies in just the way that Machiavelli’s neopagan morality is better than Christian morality. Republics are more stable and energetic than monarchies because they are pluralists—they contain within themselves multiple ways of acting and so can respond flexibly, with charis, to the times, while individual rulers have to act according to their natures. Machiavelli’s neopagan morality, similarly, contains within itself plural, incommensurable ways of acting, while Christian morality is doomed to acting in a single way, whether appropriate or not. Machiavelli’s neopagan
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 81
After Virtù
.
81
morality sees flexibility and appropriateness as virtues. Christian morality sees them as signs of corruption. “To reorganize a city for living under good government assumes a good man, and to become prince of a state by violence assumes an evil man; therefore, a good man will seldom attempt to become a prince by evil methods, even though his purpose be good” (Discourses I.18).
power to the people In The Prince, Machiavelli shows how to imitate virtù virtuously. His solution depends on identifying a select, Christian, field of notional options with the realm of appearance. Notional options are not unreal—they are apparent. The realm of appearances will be a self-constituting public sphere. That is why I said earlier that not all notional options are dead ones. Appearances are not illusions. The prince’s rhetorical art of prudence is not a deceptive art, because the people have to understand the prince’s imitations. They have to see that he is acting like Moses.17 In the Discourses on Livy imitating necessity depends ultimately, not on the prince’s virtù but on the people’s ability to be prudent, energetic, and successful. Machiavelli praises the ability of the people to make prudent judgments and to perform successful actions: the people are not deceived in particulars (I.47); they are strong (I.57), wiser, and more constant than a prince (I.58). In the rhetoric and prudence of cooperation, the identification of vox populi with vox dei is the basis for liberalism, moderation, and compromise. In Machiavelli’s more competitive rhetoric and prudence, it is quite different. Practical success ultimately turns on finding means of “making men descend to particulars” (I.47.237).18 Although Machiavelli repeatedly shows that the people made correct judgments about whom to trust and what to do, he never develops as a practical corollary a maxim like “Put your trust in the people.” Instead, he gives instances of successfully deceiving the people.19 The praise of popular judgment does not lead to putting faith in people, but to confidence in those who would manipulate them. This is competitive, not cooperative, prudence. Machiavelli’s narratives rarely contain information about the agents’ intentions and deliberations, for a good strategic reason. The more he can tell stories without presenting the internal life of his actors, the more irrelevant Christianity becomes. There is one class of exceptions to his general policy of excluding deliberation. Machiavelli recounts the decision-making process in cases when wise leaders deceived the people. Proof of the ability of peo-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
82
Page 82
.
Prudence
ple to make the right judgments is in their ability to be fooled into seeing the right. Similarly, their constancy comes from the infinite fickleness and ambition fixed in human nature. They are less ungrateful than princes because they fear punishment more and are less avaricious (I.29.259). Republics are more stable and trustworthy because of the sluggishness of the people (I.59.317). The strength of the people comes from their being led and thereby united (I.57.313); their wisdom consists in judging competing orators and choosing magistrates to lead them (I.58.316). “An uncontrolled and rebellious people can be spoken to by a good man and easily led back into a good way” (317).20 To elevate popular judgment is to elevate the skill of the leaders in manipulating that judgment. More precisely, it is to recognize the cooperative nature of the relations of ruler and ruled characteristic of the public realm. The people’s skill is limited to maintaining the state, not founding it, and to judging good proposals, not inventing them. The people’s ability is the skill of a good audience judging. Solitary founders might imitate prior founders, but the imitation of necessity must be shared between leaders and the people: imitation of virtù is a pre-political and solitary act performed by a virtuoso, but the imitation of necessity is inherently public and political.21 To take the paradigm case, in I.47 Machiavelli shows that, according to the chapter title, “However Much Men Are Deceived in Generalities, They Are Not Deceived in Particulars” (I.47.291). It is worth looking at the particular story from which Machiavelli and Livy derive that generalization. The narrative may support the maxim, but, as is usual in Machiavelli, there’s more to the story than the general rule might suggest. The people, because they were ashamed of their own weakness and lack of merit, elected tribunes from among the nobility instead of their own ranks: shame is proof that they were not deceived, and so one deficiency, lack of ability, replaces another, ignorance. The “method for making men descend to particulars” turns out to be a method “for tricking the people.” Here the people are made, by intending one thing, to achieve a better end than they could aim at. Deception is the method for creating artificial necessities.22 The nobles who invented the institution of the tribunes imitated fortune in their appearance of liberality. Necessity itself, after all, often acts through human agents who think they are acting freely. These Romans, then, offer ancient models for Machiavelli’s originality by themselves imitating necessity. Seeming to act liberally while in fact acting from necessity is not a deceptive appearance but a self-confirming one. The nobles inventing the tribunes were actually acting liberally by making the best arrangement they could with
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 83
After Virtù
.
83
necessity. They acted with foresight and led the people to a correct perception of their own abilities. While the historian knows that “virtue has more sway where labor is the result of necessity rather than of choice” (Discourses I.1.107, I.3.118), Machiavelli the adviser teaches that “prudent men make the best of circumstances in their actions, and, although, constrained by necessity to a certain course, make it appear as if done from their own liberality” (I.51.243; The Prince, chap. 8). Necessity is the reality; liberality the appearance. Foresight allows the prudent man to embody the rhetorical virtue of appropriateness and decorum. Do something at one time, and it looks forced, and so you get no credit for it; do the same thing before you are forced to, and it looks freely and graciously done, and you get all the credit. Giving the appearance of acting freely does not mean presenting a deceptive appearance. Complicity between ruler and ruled makes constructing an appearance of freedom an act constituting political reality. Alongside the distinction between real and notional possibilities, we have found a counterpart in natural and artificial necessities. Artificial necessities mediate between the natural necessities which make deliberation impossible and the possibilities already within deliberative space. Machiavelli discovers in artificial necessities a way of expanding the field of deliberation, and so making prudence more rhetorical and more pluralistic. Artificial necessities shift from the debater’s special pleading into prudence when they become institutional and public. Arguments from necessity stop being sophistical when they become political.23 We can now see something more about why Machiavelli’s strategies do not lead him to become a pure pragmatist. He knows that instrumentalism requires noninstrumental values and actions to sustain itself.24 The complicity between ruler and ruled drives him beyond instrumentalism: one must not only succeed but appear to succeed. One must inspire hopes and embody values as well as produce good results. To make a virtue of necessity means keeping Christian values as the values of appearance. That is not quite to think of them as false values. The complicity between ruler and ruled suggests another Machiavellian lesson for pluralism, prudence, and rhetoric. By showing the need for this cooperation between factions, Machiavelli bars any easy identification among the different dimensions of pluralism—there is no correlation among diverse loci of value, competing modes of action, and plural ends. Ideology and utopia emerge when the different dimensions of pluralism map onto one another, so that each group has its own set of virtues or loyalties, or each virtue is to be found in a different set of people or in projects directed by different sets
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
84
Page 84
.
Prudence
of ends. Nothing contributes more to relativism than such ideological alignments. The different Roman factions were not ideological; there was nothing like a party of reform and a party of order. It was just rich and poor. Cooperation prevents relativism and, as Machiavelli well knows, substitutes peace for war. Imitating necessity by appearing to act liberally when constrained by fortune is in fact the ultimate victory of Machiavelli’s project of constructing an art of praxis. The discovery of indirect reason and the ability to find regularities within the unintended consequences of action can lead to deception, but it can also lead to cooperation and community. Cooperation comes through the recognition that, like the benefits of faction, many products of action can only be anticipated and enjoyed together. The arts of necessity that make men free are arts of appearance. The senses in which that appearance of freedom is alternatively a deceptive and a constitutive appearance—an appearance that hides a different, more sinister private reality and an appearance that is not an appearance of anything else but is its own reality—are mirrored by the ways an art that gives the appearance of praxis produces both a deceptive and a constitutive appearance, a stylistic surface that can mask a more substantive reality, and a political appearance that constitutes a public reality. The ambivalence toward factions is generalized to the entire domain of appearance. Sometimes a knowledge of the workings of necessity gives the ability to overcome necessity, and sometimes knowledge of its workings permits us to put a good face on what we have to do, or want to do anyway, making a virtue of necessity. That is why Christianity is a notional possibility that has to remain on the field. It is not like the Turkish system of politics, which Machiavelli can use in The Prince to explain Western European monarchies like France by contrast. Turkey is a purely notional possibility—we can understand it, but it lies too far from deliberation and action to be either attractive or practicable. (Of course, by another irony of history, modern nation-states are more similar to absolutist Turkey than to feudal France.) That is not the way Christianity is a notional possibility for Machiavelli. Christianity is a permanently live yet essentially notional possibility, not just because Machiavelli’s neopagan morality defines itself in contrast to it, but because it is Christian morality that tells the Machiavellian prince, subject, and citizen how to appear, and how to interpret and judge appearances. But Christianity can safely be an art of appearance only if it is a merely notional and not a real option. The Machiavellian world is not chaotic because of its common enemy, Christianity, but that enemy is co-opted into a shared appearance.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 85
After Virtù
.
85
Machiavelli’s attitude toward Christianity cannot be reciprocated. One of the attractive features of Williams’s distinction of real and notional possibilities is that two options can be related to each other asymmetrically, because options are real relative to a deliberative situation. The right-thinking Christian can come over to the side of Machiavelli’s more practically effective morality, but the neopagan could not in his turn take Christianity seriously as a real possibility. The asymmetry is given a more specific interpretation in Machiavelli—the new morality is real and Christian morality is apparent. If you are Machiavellian enough, you can appear to be good by Christian standards. There is even the hope that if you are Machiavellian enough you may actually get to be good by Christian standards. Machiavelli can recognize that his neopagan morality contests permanently and essentially with Christianity for the title of morality, but that in no way weakens his conviction that his party is right.25 In the peroration to “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin quotes Joseph Schumpeter: “To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” Berlin comments: “To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.”26 The distinction between real and notional possibilities, as refined by Machiavelli, gives us the power to be civilized. One reason for intolerance is the fear that understanding others weakens one’s own adherence to principles. One desires to exclude all possibilities that are not taken up as action-guiding motives for deliberation as the calculation of means to a given end. Being able to distinguish notional possibilities from the possibilities that are real for me removes that fear. Machiavelli reminds us that one becomes civilized by becoming civic. The realm of appearance is a middle ground between the possible and the impossible, between wishful thinking and realizable desires. Some desirable possibilities are merely notional because we cannot successfully construct, in deliberation, a connection between them and our actions. Sometimes, as with appearing to do freely what we are forced to do, we can approach, pay homage to, and indirectly achieve ends we cannot deliberate toward. Appearance stops being a rhetorical trick when it becomes constitutive appearance, the public realm of the political. Machiavelli’s political arts become a complete system of living, a moral system, and not just a series of techniques for success when the actions it enjoins create the conditions for their own success. At that point rhetoric becomes prudential. Prudence requires, then, not only deliberative excellence, but also a particular relation to a community. The constitutive
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
86
Page 86
.
Prudence
appearances of liberality and necessity create Machiavellian prudence. The Discourses on Livy, then, represents a new advance in the history of prudence. That history began with the attempts by the Greek Sophists to reduce good action to teachable technique, and the resistance to that project on behalf of the polis and its existing political and ethical powers. The history of prudence is a history of the shifting relations of the field of deliberation and praxis, things within our power, to its boundaries in necessity, chance, fate, contingency, and the rest. The history of prudence is a rhetorical history. In The Prince, Machiavelli takes the history of prudence in a new direction by announcing modes of action for which having a character, let alone having a moral character, is a hindrance: “One does not find men who are so prudent that they are capable of being sufficiently flexible: either because our natural inclinations are too strong to permit us to change, or because . . . we do not think it good to change our methods. . . . But if it were possible to change one’s character to suit the times and circumstances, one would always be successful” (chap. 25). The Discourses on Livy carries the history of prudence further along a different track. The discovery of factions and the cunning of nature and reason allows the prudent statesman to practice a prudent technique of allowing, and even encouraging, men to aim at one thing and accomplish another. The discovery of artificial necessities allows Machiavelli to renegotiate the boundaries between the field of the practical and its contraries. Rhetoric and prudence are distinct when those boundaries are taken as fixed. Rhetoric becomes prudential and prudence rhetorical when real and notional possibilities, natural and artificial necessities, are distinguished and negotiated.
competitive pluralism At the beginning I pointed to three kinds of pluralism and incommensurability to which rhetoric and prudence must be responsive. I want to close by reviewing how Machiavelli handles each dimension. Each calls for a difference use of rhetoric, and each reveals a different facet of prudence. In each of these three senses of pluralism, Machiavelli argues against moderation, but for different reasons and in different ways. The distinction between real and notional possibilities is a valuable weapon for arguing against moderation: most men aim at middle courses because they think that if something is a good, it should be good for them, and so are not sufficiently relativistic. Machiavelli shows that individuals are doomed to being relativists, and will
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 87
After Virtù
.
87
do better if they acknowledge it. Only republics can be pluralists. People practice moderation, not only because they are not relativistic enough, but also because they are not realistic enough either. They think that all goods should be compatible, and so are not sufficiently realistic to see that the world does not have to be accountable to such wishful thinking. Since men see that goods are not really compatible, they try to make them psychologically or notionally compatible, through emotions such as regret and guilt, and through hedging their bets. Fainthearted relativism in a realistic world is not likely to succeed. Republics can be opportunistic. Princes cannot, although they have to try. Pluralism comports better with realism than even the purest relativism. The periodic return to origins is a more practicable response to the threat of civic dissolution and corruption. This review of Machiavelli on incommensurability and the connections between prudence, pluralism, and rhetoric is not just of historical interest. At the beginning I said that Machiavelli’s purpose is to make Christianity into a merely notional option, one that people might admire, but could not practice as a way of life. I also said that Machiavelli’s neopagan morality led historically to the development of liberalism, individualism, and tolerance. But surely one might wonder whether liberalism is not today itself a merely notional possibility, one that people respect in the abstract but cannot embrace as a form of life. When liberalism had political and ecclesiastical absolutisms to fight against, it may have been a form of life, but it won that battle and with the victory, ceased to be a fighting faith. The existence of a competitive counterpart to the forms of prudence, pluralism, and rhetoric embodied in liberalism could offer an alternative that could be a real possibility, or could offer resources to restore the real and practical nature of liberalism today. Standard questions about the historical relation between liberalism and republicanism thus have some practical import. Earlier I noted that Machiavelli’s attitude toward factions was unstable, although permanent. This permanent instability is a mark of prudence. It is a sign that no stable, theoretical understanding is possible. Factions, diversity, and dissent are either just facts of life that we have to live with, or they are valuable in their own right, and not just for their happy consequences. This instability is characteristic of the realm of necessity and appearance. If one makes a virtue of necessity, the virtue is made from necessity, and so is not a perfect enough virtue to be chosen in its own right. One can remove the instability by sharply distinguishing between the ideal and the real, the absolute and the circumstantial, so that the virtues that come from necessity are not full virtues. Or one can remove the instability by embracing these
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
88
Page 88
.
Prudence
virtues fully—war is good because it gives us the opportunity to develop and exercise courage; it is good that I am surrounded by so many poor unfortunates so that I can show my generosity, and they their gratitude. Appearances are either appearance of something else, or have more solidity than that. Necessity cannot be sought out, but it can be imitated. That instability infects all three dimensions of pluralism: plural ends, plural modes of action, and plural loci of ultimate value. Factions are the paradigm of the instability of prudence in its appropriation of the realm of necessity and appearance. There are plural ultimate ends, and the instability with which prudence has to deal manifests itself in the two sources of value by which people are attached to ends—I love this because it is lovable, and I find it lovable because I love it. This is my end because I am convinced it should be an end, but I regard it as an end because I am committed to it. The instability of the two sets of competing plural ends—traditional Christian values against the patriotic and heroic values of pagan and neopagan morality— Machiavelli frames, as I just argued, in terms of the relation of appearance and reality. That articulation of the interrelation of these incommensurable values is one of his most noteworthy achievements.27 That instability is matched in the second dimension of pluralism by the kinds of attachments people have not to ends but to loci of value: I love my country because it is mine, and my country alone is truly lovable. In subsequent history the ambivalence of nationalism will become worrisome, up through today’s culture wars, although the nation-state had not developed enough for Machiavelli to see its dangers.28 It is no fault of Machiavelli’s that he did not have the foresight to see how important this dimension of pluralism would become. But at least Machiavelli allows us to see the connections between this sort of instability and that in pluralism’s first dimension. As we will see, it exists in the third dimension as well, with even more troublesome results. Now for each of the dimensions of pluralism in Machiavelli. The first kind of pluralism emerges in the conflict between two sets of incompatible ends, Christian and neopagan morality. Christianity is irrefutable. More strongly than that, its values are good ones. But those values, and the actions they dictate, although good, are not desirable. The appropriate rhetoric for the battle against Christianity is one of neglect, showing its irrelevance for action. Machiavelli practices such a rhetoric by excluding motives and intentions from his narratives. Prudence consists in seeing that while Christianity is a possibility, it is not a possibility for us. It is a notional rather than a real option. Even though there are still real live Christians around, we should prudently regard it as a dead idea. He awards the realm of appearance to Christianity,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 89
After Virtù
.
89
while reserving the realm of reality for neopagan morality. But this is not a consolation prize like Plato’s crowning the poets before exiling them. The Machiavellian actor must learn to operate in the realm of appearance. While it is not prudent to be a Christian, it is prudent to persuade others that one is.29 Roman counsels and prophets used religion “according to necessity, and prudently made a show of religion when they were forced not to observe it” (Discourses I.14). Modern rulers should do the same. Christian and neopagan values and ends stand in an asymmetrical relation to each other. The neopagan world has a place for Christian values in a domain of appearance and necessity, while the Christian has to regard necessity and appearance as the field of the amoral or immoral. Christian values can enter the neopagan world, but not in a way a Christian could accept. Honoring Christian values because of their political fruits destroys the conditions under which Christianity can be practiced as a morality, at the same time it helps constitute the conditions for Machiavelli’s neopagan morality. Such asymmetry is a very strong rhetorical proof of superiority. If the primitive looks on modern medicine as a real option, even in rejecting it, while I must regard primitive medicine as only a notional possibility, then my world is open to him while his cannot contain me. What stronger proof of truth could there be? But there is another side of Machiavelli, in which prudence is not fully reducible to the prudence that is concerned only with instrumental reasoning. The instability characteristic of prudence prevents its reduction to a narrower rhetorical concern for success. Full prudence says that there is no simple correlation between success and virtue. Agathocles can be a secure ruler, but he cannot gain glory. Looking at history, Machiavelli is prepared to distinguish between winners and those who deserve to win, and he dedicates the Discourses to people who deserve to rule but do not. Machiavelli wants to teach foresight, but the prudent agent has to have standards for judgment prior to events and consequences that have not yet occurred, and such noninstrumental criteria as pagan glory and Christian virtue give guidance before the event. Even if Christian morality cannot survive a confrontation with neopagan morality, it still has not been refuted. Might does not, even here, make right. Christianity is not a viable way of life in a Machiavellian world. It does not follow that because Machiavellianism wins, that it is right. It wins, but prudence does not allow triumphalism. Victory is not vindication. (Contemporary movements in the West to preserve cultures that the West would otherwise destroy—or, more accurately, cultures members of which would otherwise vote with their feet to dissolve themselves
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
90
Page 90
.
Prudence
to join the West—recognize this distinction between victory and vindication. But that’s another story.) The stress on criteria other than success establishes, among other things, the autonomy of history, which is a fundamental advance in the history of prudence. It is well known that the physical sciences advanced by establishing autonomy in a similar way. A hundred years after Machiavelli, the sciences promised payoffs in terms of technological progress, but persuaded their audience to wait for such success. Machiavelli, similarly, persuades his audience to wait for a redeemer. His audience must believe the counterfactuals that judge actors not in terms of success but in terms of merit, ability, glory, and imitability. The second dimension of pluralism, rhetoric, and prudence becomes necessary as Machiavelli recognizes, in a very inchoate way, the multiplicity of states. He clearly sees the dissolution of the Christian imperium, but does not see very clearly what the future holds. While he can look back at Rome, and to a lesser extent Greece, and see states as loci of value, and so inherently competitive ultimate values, he has no list of “states,” of what the competing entities are. There’s Florence, but there’s also Italy. Relativism—the prescriptions that When in Rome, Do as the Romans do, or Be True to Yourself, or Live the Way We Live Now—presupposes more stable identities of the loci of value than are available for Machiavelli. The situation is too fluid for relativism to be appropriate.30 In their battle against Machiavelli’s neopagan morality, Christians could employ relativism as a means of avoiding confrontation and so secure peace, not war. Equally, Machiavelli sees republics combating a relativism among factions that creates war, not peace. Relativism can lead to either peace or war. The subsequent history of nationalism bears this out. Machiavelli himself illustrates the way pluralism can be deployed for both war and peace, and the same holds for its enemies, relativism and monism. I think that Machiavelli’s work is incomplete in a more serious way, and so leaves us with four hundred years of further history to work out, because of the final dimension, irreducibly plural good ways of acting. The instability characteristic of prudence leaves Machiavelli with a difficulty he cannot solve. Earlier I quoted from Discourses III.9 and The Prince, chap. 25, on how each individual must be a relativist—must act according to a single and necessarily partial way of acting—within a world that accords final, nonrelativistic judgments. In each case Machiavelli offers two distinct reasons why people cannot change with the times. The two reasons bring in the same pattern of instability of prudence, and bring it in in a way that makes the problem unsolvable given the resources Machiavelli has. People continue to act in a
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 91
After Virtù
.
91
single way even when times change for two reasons, because of their nature and because they succeeded before. No man is found so prudent as to be able to adapt himself to [changing times and circumstances], either because he cannot deviate from that to which his nature disposes him, or else because having always prospered by walking in one path, he cannot persuade himself that it is well to leave it. (The Prince, chap. 25) That we cannot change at will is due to two causes; the one is the impossibility of resisting the natural bent of our characters; the other is the difficulty of persuading ourselves, after having been accustomed to success by a certain mode of proceeding, that any other can succeed as well. (Discourses on Livy III.9)31 With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that Machiavelli’s account of this dimension of pluralism fails because he has a deterministic view of the agent’s commitment to a mode of action. He sees it determined either by nature or a faulty induction from past success. Machiavelli’s polemics against Christianity make him unable to think more seriously about human nature and individual character. In the end, Machiavelli is limited by his own rhetorical situation. His successful tactic of defeating Christianity by making the inner life irrelevant to history and action prevents him from overcoming an overly rigid, nonrhetorical conception of the relation between agent and act, just the point where the original sophistic project floundered. Pluralism develops further by developing more sophisticated ways of understanding the relation between a person and the person’s ultimate ends and modes of action.32
notes 1. Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” first published in Myron P. Gilmore, ed., Studies on Machiavelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1972), and reprinted in Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking, 1980), 25–79. 2. On the idea that the term, and the idea, of “rhetoric” was a Platonic invention as a contrast term for “philosophy,” see Thomas Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Edward Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991); and my article “Rhetoric,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1998), 8:305–10.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
92
Page 92
.
Prudence
3. The use of history as a supplement to personal experience for learning prudence was a Roman innovation. How the Greeks could have read Thucydides and still thought that history was not a source of wisdom is a question I fortunately need not pursue here. 4. J. G. A. Pocock, “Custom and Grace, Form and Matter: An Approach to Machiavelli’s Concept of Innovation,” in Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought, ed. Martin Fleisher (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 153–72, and The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 5. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). See also “The Truth in Relativism,” in Williams, Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 132–43. 6. Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 339: “Saying that two options are incommensurate does not preclude choice. Rational action is action for (what the agent takes to be) an undefeated reason. It is not necessarily action for a reason which defeats all others.” 7. Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism: For and Against, ed. J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 75, 92. 8. I emphasize the rhetorical nature of Machiavelli’s work, especially in The Prince, in Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). I also argue there that the relation between rhetoric and prudence makes Machiavelli’s “transvaluations of value” more supple than a simple idea of one theory of morality replacing another. See also Nancy Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 162: Justice is not redescribed as injustice; courage is not cowardice. Machiavelli’s strategy of projecting adjacent, possible worlds maintains the moral system as a contiguous possible realm which demands political mastery, but with no automatic enhancement of political power: adjacency does not guarantee, or even assume, reciprocity. Then, if we take account of the argument of chapter 15 of The Prince, which insists on the separation of the domain of “is” from the domain of “ought,” we notice not only that the domain of “is” is a realm of the appearance of virtue and vice rather than the “substance,” but also that the combination of this distinction with the major distinction of virtù from fortuna, as causes, results in the formulation that the prince as virtuoso is responsible for all appearances, while in control of only half the events. This is a depressing combination which increases responsibility while it diminishes capacity; a description of the prince’s rhetorical capacity to use illusion does not fund judgments of immorality but perceptions of exasperating challenge. 9. If I were trying to explicate Williams, rather than use his distinction to illuminate Machiavellian prudence, rhetoric, and pluralism, I would note that he too thinks notional possibilities are not necessarily completely dead and inert. He knows that nostalgia and regret are not the only attitudes we can take toward notional possibilities. But I do think that his distinction is not supple enough to do justice to the difference between Machiavelli and the thinkers Berlin lists. 10. Bernard Williams, “Conflicts of Values,” in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 221–32; reprinted in Moral Luck, 72. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 125: “The civil status of a contradiction, or its status in civil life: there is the philosophical problem.” 11. For my own more extensive exposition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the absence of connections between rhetoric and phronesis, see Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 12. Cumming ascribes this conflation to Machiavelli’s combining the incompatible historiographical theories of Livy, Polybius, Tacitus, and Plutarch. Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought, 2 vols.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 93
After Virtù
.
93
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). For another discussion of the varieties of necessity, see Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 195–99. 13. Rawls lists, as one of the facets of pluralism, not only that it is given and so we have to live with it, but in addition, “the fact that a comprehensive doctrine, whenever widely, if not universally, shared in society, tends to become oppressive and stifling.” John Rawls, “The Domain of the Political and Overlapping Consensus,” New York University Law Review 64 (1989): 233. 14. Victoria Kahn, “Virtù and the Example of Agathocles in Machiavelli’s Prince,” Representations 13 (1986): 66–67: “It is precisely this intrinsic irony of politics—the gap or lack of a mimetic relation between intention and result—that both allows for and requires solutions that seem extreme from the perspective of the humanist ideal of mediocritas. Hence the place of hyperbole and exaggeration in Machiavelli’s rhetoric.” Oded Balaban, “The Human Origins of Fortuna in Machiavelli’s Thought,” History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 31, speaking of Discourses on Livy I.37: “Here fortuna is explicitly treated, on the one hand, as an outcome of teleological human activity, and on the other, not as a direct result of an action that is undertaken in accordance with the goals men have set for themselves. Although men create their own fortunes, they do so indirectly and unintentionally.” For the history of the topos of indirect reasons, the cunning of god, nature and reason, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 15. Agents and historians, therefore, have different points of view. Once again, this is a difference between pagan morality and Machiavelli’s neopagan morality. The pagans “easily believed that any god who was able to foretell your future good and future ill was also able to grant it to you” (Discourses I.12). Therefore Struever says: “The premises and procedures of well-motivated historical inquiry thus may furnish a simple distinction: not the past, but investigating the past is edifying.” Nancy Struever, “Philosophical Problems and Historical Solutions,” At the Nexus of Philosophy and History, ed. Bernard P. Dauenhauer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 85. 16. “The pluralistic world is . . . more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.” William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 145. 17. The Prince, chap. 24: “The before-mentioned things, if prudently observed, make a new prince seem ancient, and render him at once more secure and firmer in the state than if he had been established there of old. For a new prince is much more observed in his actions than a hereditary one, and when these are recognized as virtuous, he wins over men more and they are more bound to him than if he were of the ancient blood.” In that passage, past and present compete for authority. For a useful recent meditation on tradition as a source of value, see David Luban, “Legal Traditionalism,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1035–60. 18. See also 1.4.203: “The aspirations of free people are seldom harmful to liberty, because they result either from oppression or from fear that there is going to be oppression. And whenever their beliefs are mistaken, there is the remedy of assemblies, in which some man of influence gets up and makes a speech showing them how they are deceiving themselves. And as Cicero says, the people, though they are ignorant, can grasp the truth, and yield easily when by a man worthy of trust they are told what is true.” But see 1.10.220: “No one will ever be so foolish or so wise, so bad or so good, that, if there is put before him the choice between the two kinds of men, he will not praise what is to be praised and blame what is to be blamed. Yet in the end, almost all, deceived by a false good and false glory, allow themselves to go, either willingly or ignorantly, into the positions of those who deserve more blame than praise.” 19. See, e.g., 2.22.385–86: “How Far Wrong in Judging Great Things Men’s Opinions Often Are.” “Especially in quiet times, excellent men in corrupt republics, as the result of envy and other ambitious reasons, are looked on as enemies. . . . In adverse times this deception is
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
94
Page 94
.
Prudence
finally uncovered.” Similarly, 3.16.468: “In Difficult Times True Ability Is Sought For; In Easy Times Able Men Do Not Hold Office, But Those Who Through Riches Or Family Are Most Popular.” 20. E. Raimondi, “Machiavelli and the Rhetoric of the Warrior,” Modern Language Notes 92 (1977): 10. “The instinct of the people, whose force depends on unity, on a way of life still uncorrupted, assures to rhetoric, in its double moment, verbal and symbolic, the power of concrete reason, of a political action that presupposes trust and the direct, almost physical recognition of an internal energy consecrated by the institutional language of the collective life.” 21. J. Peter Euben, “Corruption,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 233: Machiavelli understood theorizing as analogous to political founding and the power of theory as analogous to republican political authority. In both cases the aim is the further politicizing of the people as opposed to rendering them quiescent or permitting their ambitions to disintegrate into a riot of private demands. Leader, founder, and theorist initiate actions in a republic, they help complete and sustain actions already initiated. While the common people understand what they can feel and the features of their immediate landscape, they are less adept and more easily deceived about more remote and distant matters. 22. In his comments on Machiavelli, John Adams says: “It was very provoking to read these continual imputations to fortune, made by Machiavel, of events which he knew very well were the effects of secret intrigue.” Defense of the Constitution of the Government of the United States of America, quoted in John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 431. 23. Cicero De partitione oratoria 24.83: The purpose in deliberating is to obtain some advantage, to which the whole procedure in giving advice and pronouncing an opinion is directed in such a manner, that the primary considerations to be kept in view by the giver of advice for or against a certain course are what action is or is not possible and what course is necessary or not necessary. For if a thing is unattainable, debate about it is cancelled, however advantageous it may be, and also if a thing is necessary—and a necessity is something that is an indispensable condition of our security or freedom—it must take precedence in public policy of all the remaining considerations, alike of honor and of profit. 24. As Pitkin puts it, “Republican authority must be exercised in a way that further politicizes the people rather than rendering them quiescent. Its function is precisely to keep a political movement or action that the people have initiated . . . from disintegrating into riot, apathy, or privatization.” Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 88. 25. David B. Wong, “Three Kinds of Incommensurability,” in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 156: The most interesting and substantial cases for evaluative incommensurability arise, not from our inability to make sense of another people’s beliefs, but precisely from those situations in which we understand and see how different their beliefs are from our own. The question of evaluative incommensurability arises, not because their beliefs appear bizarre to us, but because we can understand how they are tied to a life that people would want to live. . . . These cases for evaluative incommensurability need not arise from skepticism about the lack of an independent and neutral standard for judging between theories, but rather from a solid sense of what it is satisfying in alternative forms of life. See also Jonathan Lear, “Ethics, Mathematics, and Relativism,” in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 76–94.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 95
After Virtù
.
95
26. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 172. 27. While I think that this construction of the relation of Christian and pagan morality as appearance versus reality is one of Machiavelli’s great achievements, it is worth noting that this is just the place where Montaigne and Bacon, two of his most acute readers, leave him. Both leave the heroic dimension of neopagan morality that requires this realm of appearance, and a receptive audience. In both, in different ways, morality is more cooperative than competitive, yet more pagan than Christian. Guicciardini, whom I would rate alongside Montaigne and Bacon as Machiavelli’s most intelligent readers, similarly advances moderation in order to convert Machiavelli’s prudence from competitive to cooperative. 28. Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” first published in Partisan Review 45 (1978), and reprinted in Berlin, Against the Current, 342. Nationalism “entails the notion that one of the most compelling reasons, perhaps the most compelling, for holding a particular belief, pursuing a particular policy, serving a particular end, living a particular life, is that these ends, beliefs, policies, lives are ours.” The import of this discovery of Machiavelli’s is noted, among other places, in Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968). In a section called “The Delights of Faction,” he says (89–90): The Renaissance was particularly exercised by Machiavelli because he so accurately represented the transvaluation of values involved in the rise of nationalism. A transvaluation was called for, because religion aimed at universal virtues, whereas the virtues of nationalism would necessarily be factional, insofar as they pitted nation against nation. Conduct viewed as vice from the standpoint of universal religious values might readily be viewed as admirable if it helped some interests prevail over others. . . . But though (from the universal point of view) nations confront one another as factions, from the standpoint of any one nation factionalism is conceived in a narrower sense, with nationalism itself taking over the role of the universal. 29. Berlin, “Originality,” in Against the Current, 45–46: Machiavelli lays it down that out of men who believe in such ideals, and practice them, no satisfactory human community, in his Roman sense, can in principle be constructed. . . . Machiavelli is convinced that what are commonly thought of as the central Christian virtues, whatever their intrinsic value, are insuperable obstacles to the building of the kind of society that he wishes to see; a society which, moreover, he assumes it is natural for all normal men to want—the kind of community that, in his view, satisfies men’s permanent desires and interests. Also: “He does not condemn Christian morality: he merely points out that it is, at least in rulers (but in some degree in subjects too), incompatible with those social ends which he thinks it natural and wise for men to seek” (50). 30. Ernest Gellner, Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 49: In the world as it now is, there simply are no “Romans” and no “Rome,” whom we could emulate in conduct or in belief [and so the maxim, “when in Rome, do (and above all, think) as the Romans do” has no application]. When the Delphic oracle gave the advice which later so aroused David Hume’s Augustan admiration, the Hellenic world consisted, for all practical purposes, of reasonably identifiable “cities.” No doubt a sophist, if he wished, might have found troublesome borderline cases; but in practice, if a Greek was told to observe the custom of his city, he knew what he was being told to do. An inhabitant of our modern world, when given the same advice, quite literally has no idea—no concrete idea—of what is commended. What is “Rome”? . . . Countless boundaries, geographic and social, vertical and horizontal, criss-cross each other in a rapidly changing world.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
96
Page 96
.
Prudence
To work as a recipe, relativism requires the existence of identifiable “cities,” i.e. units in terms of which the alleged relativity is to work. The extreme case of such possible units would be single individuals, or even moods of individuals, if truth were to be defined as relative to individuals or to moments in their lives. But it is an essential feature of our current situation that there are no such “cities” inscribed into the nature of things, and even individuals possess no given identities. If your problem is, precisely, the location or erection of your city, or the selection of your self or the adoption of a mood, then a recipe which presupposes that these are already given, is worthless. 31. For another example of how powerful the realm of appearance is, see Discourses III.2.404: “Men of condition (qualità) cannot choose their way of living, and even if they did choose it sincerely and without ambition, they would not be believed.” 32. Ernest Gellner, Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 160: George Santayana observed somewhere that our nationality is like our relations with women—far too implicated in our moral nature to be changed honourably, and far too accidental to be worth changing. This corresponds exactly to the Wittgensteinian double basis for the legitimation of the hold which conceptual custom has over us: the rules of language are far too implicated in our whole way of life to be changeable without deep disruption, and at the same time they are far too contingent to deserve reform. They bind us because they are oh so ultimate and because they are ever so trite and ordinary. They are too ultimate to be changed and too optional to be worth changing. This is the double vindication: they stand both beyond and beneath the compliment of rational opposition. Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), reminds us that “factions” translates umori. It is worth thinking that a theory of humors might supply, at least in Machiavelli’s mind, what I claim is missing, namely an account of the internal nature that makes people have different ideals, loyalties, and characteristic modes of action. Alternatively, one could read my argument as a development of Parel’s insight that umori function differently in monarchies and republics, since the one is relativistic and the other pluralistic. Parel, Machiavellian Cosmos, 124: The republican freedom as Machiavelli expounds it in the Discourses, is not the modern liberal notion of freedom, viz. the freedom of individuals based on the individual right to pursue unimpeded whatever ends one may choose for oneself. The republican freedom to which Machiavelli refers is instead the freedom, firstly, of one humour to pursue its ends without being obstructed by the ends of the other humour, and secondly, of individuals considered as members of a given group. This is the inescapable meaning of freedom that the theory of humours suggests. If Parel is right about Machiavelli, I think that we have had to wait for more than four hundred years for more sophisticated condemnations of moderation and explanations of incommensurability. See. e.g., Raz, Morality of Freedom, 346. There is a distinct type of incommensurability . . . called “constitutive incommensurabilities.” First, if A and B are incomparable options of this kind then if an agent is in a situation in which option A is his and B can be obtained by forgoing A he will normally refuse to do so. Similarly if B is his he will not exchange it for A. Agents tend to remain in the position they are in. Second, they obtain between options which have special significance for people’s ability successfully to engage in certain pursuits or relationships: the refusal to trade one option for the other is a condition of the agent’s ability successfully to pursue one of his goals. Finally, it is typical, where options of this kind are involved, for agents to regard the very thought that they may be comparable in value as abhorrent. There are many gradations of lesser or greater reluctance to undertake such com-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 97
After Virtù
.
97
parisons. But for almost every person there are comparisons he will feel indignant if asked to make, and which he will, in normal circumstances, emphatically refuse to make. One may say that the special context of these incommensurabilities is that belief in their existence contributes to an attitude which is a barrier to exchange. . . . The very willingness to exchange such incompatibles has grave consequences to the life of that agent. It undermines his ability to succeed in certain pursuits. Raz’s whole discussion of incommensurability is relevant to Machiavelli’s attacks on moderation.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 98
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 99
4 The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited common sense as prudence in the philosophy of thomas reid
Peter J. Diamond
This chapter is a response to the often encountered claim that modern political theory continues to be fuddled by the metaphysical illusions of the Enlightenment, and has yet to grasp adequately the artful, organized, inventive elements of ordinary political practice. The most damaging of these illusions—it is said—is that of a self-transparent and self-grounding faculty of reason, capable of revealing self-evident principles upon which moral and political conduct ought to be predicated. This claim has been made by a large number of theorists with little in common besides the conviction that attempts to put such abstract and disembodied theorizing into practice have had and will continue to have profoundly objectionable results. Michael Oakeshott’s version of this counter-Enlightenment claim is based upon a dissection of the modern, “rationalist” character. “By a pardonable abridgment of history,” he identifies Bacon and Descartes as the dominant figures in the early history of the Enlightenment project. Both philosophers, he points out, responded to what appeared to be the defects of contemporary inquiry by proposing infallible rules of discovery. Both began by observing that genuine knowledge must begin by setting aside all received opinion, because genuine knowledge must begin as well as end in certainty and must be complete in itself. For Oakeshott the mistake in this line of thought lies
99
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
100
Page 100
.
Prudence
in the presumption that only knowledge that can be “formulated into rules which are, or may be deliberately learned, remembered, and . . . put into practice” is knowledge at all. On the contrary, he argues that “every science, every art, every practical activity requiring skill of any sort, indeed every human activity whatsoever, involves knowledge . . . of two sorts, both of which are always involved in any actual activity.” In addition to “technical” knowledge, which is expressed in rules, there is practical knowledge, which exists only in use and can only be learned by “attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together.”1 Hannah Arendt’s account of the problem of politics in modernity is similar to Oakeshott’s to the extent that she too deplores any attempt to appeal to God, to absolute rules, or to self-evident truths as a source of political authority. The quest for an absolute truth external to the human world, epitomized for Arendt in that quintessentially Enlightenment document—the Declaration of Independence—is deeply misguided, for it undermines the contingency that is the essential feature of the public realm, the feature that makes political freedom and human innovation possible. According to Arendt, an absolute is “a truth that needs no agreement since, because of its selfevidence, it compels without argumentative demonstration or political persuasion. By virtue of being self-evident, these truths are pre-rational—they inform reason but are not its product—and since their self-evidence puts them beyond disclosure and argument, they are in a sense no less compelling than ‘despotic power’ and no less absolute than the revealed truths of religion or the axiomatic verities of mathematics.”2 There are other versions: for communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre the Enlightenment’s failed project of justifying morality apart from experience is typified by “two deceptively simple theses” contained in Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. “If the rules of morality are rational,” explains MacIntyre, “they must be the same for all rational beings, in just the way that the rules of arithmetic are; and if the rules of morality are binding on all rational beings, then the contingent ability of such beings to carry them out must be unimportant—what is important is their will to carry them out. The project of discovering a rational justification of morality therefore simply is the project of discovering a rational test which will discriminate” maxims which are genuine expressions of the moral law from those which are not. For Kant the basis of morality is in practical reason, which employs no criterion external to itself. Its essence consists of laying down principles that are universal, categorical, and internally consistent, and hence can and ought to be held by everyone, independent of circumstances and conditions. The
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 101
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
101
Enlightenment project had to fail, according to MacIntyre, because its theorists—not just Kant, but Kierkegaard, Diderot, Hume, and Smith—were attempting to derive moral principles from a conception of human nature that was cut off from “their own peculiar historical and cultural situation.”3 For postmodernists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Judith Butler among others, the Enlightenment was the scene of rationalistic and transcendental “metanarratives” that lead to essentialism: the ascription of qualities to others in a manner that reifies them in the eyes of the beholder, and sometimes in their own eyes as well. In this regard Enlightenment thought can appear to be culture-bound and nondialogical,4 and the selves that are forged in this milieu are claimed to be docile, normalized, individuated, self-disciplined, and constrained. Unfortunately, none of these claims considers the Enlightenment historically, as a manner of thinking and acting that cannot be reduced to a specific set of doctrines without distorting its character. Perhaps the most influential and insightful account of the Enlightenment was written by Kant. Looking back at the movement of which he was a part, Kant in 1784 characterized the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” immaturity being the inability to make use of one’s understanding without direction from another. He suggested as its motto Sapere aude! which he paraphrased as “Have courage to use your own understanding!” For Kant, “all that is needed” for Enlightenment to occur “is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all—freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.”5 Passing over the rather blithe tone of Kant’s remarks, I want to draw attention to the social dimension implicit in his account of Enlightenment. The freedom Kant has in mind is the freedom that a man of learning has to publish his thoughts, to lay them open to public scrutiny by others, and to respond publicly to their criticism. And this suggests a model of reasoning that is reflexive and practical rather than aprioristic and abstract; and indeed, the Enlightenment throughout Europe was shaped by the growth of public institutions—universities, libraries, scientific and professional societies, improvement clubs, salons, and taverns—that relied on and nurtured conversation and collaboration among literati in search of useful knowledge.6 It is ironic, in light of his account of the Enlightenment’s spirit and especially its fundamentally dialogical character, that Kant’s practical philosophy is based upon a priori principles of right and duty that do not depend upon reflective judgment and experience.7 In this respect, Kant’s philosophy is based upon an outright rejection of Aristotelian prudence (phronesis), which requires an ability to deliberate well about the good life for oneself and one’s
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
102
Page 102
.
Prudence
community, based upon a knowledge of particulars that can only be acquired through experience.8 For Kant, morality is based upon a categorical imperative that “commands the most punctual obedience from everyone; it must, therefore, not be so difficult to judge what it requires to be done, that the commonest unpractised understanding, even without worldly prudence, should fail to apply it rightly.”9 Kant regards prudence as a nonmoral, hypothetical imperative, which merely advises us as to the technical means we might employ to achieve happiness. Kant’s theory remains at the center of moral philosophy today, in at least two important respects. First, his own efforts to overcome what he described as the “religious immaturity” of his own age, by subjecting religious belief to rational scrutiny,10 represent a decisive turn in modern moral philosophy. For Kant this entailed elaborating principles which reason lays down for itself, whose validity rests upon the very process of self-legislation, not upon the existence of principles whose validity is independent of us. The view that morality is of our own making, not God’s, currently enjoys immense prestige among philosophers as well as the public. Perhaps this is because we moderns tend to believe that the world is ultimately reducible to the physical and psychological phenomena of modern science, a universe of cause and effect, void of directives. We suppose that there can be no value in such a world unless we put it there ourselves.11 But this is a short-sighted view, as I will try to make clear. Second, Kant’s revaluation of classical prudence as mere expediency, a perversion of moral reason, has contributed to its demise as a guide to action or a resource for change. Kant was by no means the first to displace prudence from the place it had occupied in humanist discourse. Thomas Hobbes defined it as “nothing else but Conjecture from Experience,”12 of no use whatever to a science of politics requiring universal truths. And the pervasive scientism of Enlightenment philosophy effectively prevented the classical concept from regaining its former stature. Kant’s death blow merely ensured that prudence would become synonymous with instrumental rationality, part of an Enlightenment legacy that values economy and efficiency as the principal measures of success.13 But this is a deracinated conception, manifesting little awareness of the artful and inventive modes of reasoning that inhere within the public discourse of free societies. If, as Kant rightly believed, the Enlightenment should be characterized in terms of its literati’s willingness and ability to engage in the free public use of their reason in all matters,14 then we ought to be able to find something like the classical conception of prudence at work in its reasonings. I believe we can; but we should not expect to find the word itself used in its classical sense
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 103
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
103
by Enlightenment philosophers engaged in what David Hume called the “science of man”—the attempt to reach a scientific (universal, tradition-independent) understanding of the human mind’s principles in an effort to determine how persons could best use their God-given talents to lead lives of moral and civic virtue. Enlightenment scientism effectively drove classical prudence underground, its work performed by cognates such as “common sense” or “judgment” in the writings of philosophers who sought to qualify their moral and political theories with an awareness of the contingencies of human existence as revealed through public discourse. Adam Smith’s account of moral judgment, embodied in the figure of the “impartial spectator,” is, arguably, one such theory. For Smith, moral judgments are guided by “universally acknowledged and established” rules, which are formed through the impartial spectator’s “continual observations upon the conduct of others.”15 Such a process of moral judgment unquestionably evokes the movement back and forth between particular and general that characterizes prudential reasoning.16 Ultimately, however, Smith’s moral theory embraces a conventionalism—the moral rules the spectator arrives at are ultimately constructed by individuals in an essentially social process—that departs radically from the classical theory of prudence. The best example of the classical theory is to be found in the writings of Smith’s successor at Glasgow, Thomas Reid (1710–96). Reid’s appeal to common sense may be understood both as an essentially theoretical and reflexive enterprise intended to elaborate principles “which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them,”17 and as a rhetorical attempt to move people to devote themselves to the common good of society. In this respect Reid’s philosophy was self-consciously inspired by Cicero’s account of prudentia as a dialectic between honestum and utile, that is, involving the investigation and discovery of truth as it relates to actions that are both beneficial to society and useful to oneself.18 In Scotland the dialectic was occasioned by two potentially incompatible approaches to the science of man. Hume was the first to discern their presence, in this case as they troubled the philosophy of Francis Hutcheson, then professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and arguably Scotland’s most prominent and influential philosopher. Responding in September 1739 to Hutcheson’s pointed criticism of the manuscript of book 3 of A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume observed that “there are different ways of examining the Mind as well as the Body. One may consider it either as an Anatomist or as a Painter; either to discover its most secret Springs &
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
104
Page 104
.
Prudence
Principles or to describe the Grace & Beauty of its Actions. I imagine it impossible to conjoin these two views.”19 But conjoined they were, in Hutcheson’s writings and in those of most of Scotland’s moralists, who sought to apply the experimental method to morals on the assumption that, as Reid’s teacher (and Hutcheson’s contemporary) George Turnbull put it, “due enquiry into moral nature would . . . soon enable us to account for moral, as the best of Philosophers [Newton] teaches us to explain natural phenomena.”20 Few if any philosophers doubted that the scientific study of the human condition would improve a society’s morals. This was largely a result of their faith in the moral and religious value of natural philosophy. In his 1748 Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries, the Scottish mathematician Colin Maclaurin pointed out that “natural philosophy is chiefly to be valued as it lays a sure foundation for natural religion and moral philosophy; by leading us, in a satisfactory manner, to the knowledge of the Author and Governor of the universe.”21 Such was the confidence the Enlightenment’s virtuosi placed in the experimental method of reasoning, properly followed, that adherence to its strictures was itself a moral matter. But the strong connection between science and moral improvement could also be justified in Ciceronian terms. Turnbull, for example, summarized the argument of his Principles of Moral Philosophy as an attempt to vindicate the views of ancient moralists, especially those of Cicero, respecting “divine providence, the end of man’s creation, and a future state” through an examination of “the structure and fabrick of the mind.”22 His account recalls Cicero’s definition of honestum as consisting in the pursuit of useful knowledge and learning, and as the virtue that touches the human being qua human being, not just the scholar, the scientist, or the statesman on his day off.23 Hutcheson and his near-contemporaries in the Scottish universities were not unaware of the tension that Hume revealed. Many of them were ministers in the Church of Scotland or members of it, who sought to supplant the ignorance and superstition they found in orthodox Presbyterianism with an enlightened Christianity that embraced the efforts of moral philosophers to apply the experimental method of reasoning to human nature—provided their findings did not threaten the faith of ordinary Christians.24 Among the earliest and most influential of these reforming Scots were members of Edinburgh’s Rankenian Club, an intellectual society founded in 1717. The club has long been extolled as a seminal influence on Scottish culture during the Enlightenment, largely because so many of its members were, or soon became, professors, who brought the Rankenian’s devotion to “freedom of thought, boldness of disquisition, liberality of sentiment, [and] accuracy of
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 105
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
105
reasoning” to the next generation of students.25 For all their devotion to the new learning, however, the Rankenians and their eventual successors in the universities remained staunch Christians. They turned to moral philosophy to portray the beauty and dignity of virtue, not to investigate the principles of human nature in a cool and analytic manner. For all their liberality, the Presbyterian literati were unwilling to follow Hume in his “metaphysical speculations,” and they remained deeply uncomfortable with the seemingly irreligious quality of his Treatise.26 Reid too was displeased with Hume’s conclusions, but his objections were primarily philosophical, not moralistic. Whereas most of the Scottish professoriat managed only a precarious and unfruitful balance between their interest in science and the obligations imposed upon them by their calling, it was left to Reid to show that while neither mental anatomy nor moral painting was alone sufficient to move people to moral and political action, the tension between the two could be exploited for practical moral purposes. For Reid, philosophy is indirectly yet significantly related to the practice of morals and politics. Although he understood philosophy to be a theoretical rather than a practical enterprise, he believed that by “point[ing] out and ascertain[ing]” the noninferential (commonsense) principles upon which all reasoning is based, philosophers could contribute greatly to the stability and improvement of useful knowledge. As a philosopher cum moral educator he hoped to cultivate in his readers and auditors a theoretical awareness of the principles of rational action that—to use one of his favorite metaphors—he admitted is no more necessary to practical morality than the theory of vision is to seeing. But it would serve them well as practical moralists, just as the theory of vision is of great use to those who would help others see. In order to come to grips with Reid’s Ciceronian attempt to put philosophy to practical use, it is necessary that we examine his attempt to propose rules that would guide its practice.
reid’s “laws of practising philosophy” It would be no exaggeration to say that Reid is an unlikely subject of a study devoted to Enlightenment prudentia. He enjoys the reputation of having been a philosopher’s philosopher, whose painstaking inquiries into the nature and extent of human knowledge represent a turning point in the history of philosophy. He once remarked to his friend James Gregory that “the merit of what you were pleased to call my philosophy lies . . . chiefly in having called in
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
106
Page 106
.
Prudence
question the common theory of ideas or images of things in the mind being the only objects of thought.”27 A seemingly modest claim on its face, for Reid it was an avowal of the first importance, for the “ideal theory” lay at the bottom of all that was wrong with modern philosophy. Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume had all adopted the theory in order to explain the workings of the human mind in terms of the mechanical operation of physical objects. Such objects (that is to say, simple ideas) were said to impinge upon the mind in the form of sense impressions, which in turn were combined to form complex ideas of things and events. What we immediately think about is always some impression or idea representing a real object, never the object itself. Reid concluded that this theory is utterly without foundation, for there is no empirical evidence that the actions of the mind are anything like those of bodies; indeed, common sense suggests that mental and physical phenomena are quite unlike each other. The fact that philosophers were prepared to think otherwise was a deplorable example of the sort of conjectural reasoning made possible by the lawless condition of philosophy. But Reid did not merely reject the theory of ideas out of hand. He also demonstrated that many of our conceptions and beliefs cannot be understood in terms of impressions and ideas. And, most important, he argued that the theory “plunges everything into the abyss of skepticism,” as Hume had demonstrated in his Treatise of Human Nature. For as soon as “the chain that links ideas and things has been broken” (as when we have reason to distrust our senses or our memory), then all that remains are the ideas in our minds. We have no means of knowing that the real world even exists. Reid and the other members of the Philosophical Society of Aberdeen (a society he helped found) spent a considerable portion of their time debating Hume’s philosophy. Most of them were convinced that Humean skepticism posed a threat to the practice of religion and morals. While Reid cautioned his young students about the skepticism in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion when they were published (posthumously, in 1779), he was not in general worried about the effects of skepticism on society’s morals. In fact, Reid compared the ideal theory to a “hobby-horse, which a man in bad health may ride in his closet, without hurting his reputation; but, if he should take him abroad with him to church, or to the exchange, or to the play-house, his heir would immediately call a jury, and seize his estate” (I, 110). Reid was far more concerned with the effect of Humean skepticism on the philosophy of mind, which he regarded as the necessary foundation of all the other arts and sciences.28 He feared that Hume’s philosophy would undermine the possibility of an inclusive science of man, by preventing a Baconian conjunction
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 107
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
107
of labors among philosophers whose productive efforts require that they reason from a standpoint of commonly held principles. Such skepticism was not merely useless, it would have far-reaching and deleterious consequences to society. Refuting the theory of ideas was consequently the all-important first step toward prosecuting an empirical and inductive science of man. Reid’s efforts to clear the ground for a properly scientific study of human nature had begun at the outset of his professorial career, somewhat before he turned his attention to the theory of ideas. In a series of public lectures to the graduates of King’s College, Aberdeen, beginning in 1753 and occurring every three years (at the end of each three-year philosophy course), Reid elaborated five “laws of practising philosophy” that promised to guide philosophers in their search for the fundamental principles of “life and morals.” They were meant to furnish criteria “by which views that are true, genuine, and worthy of the name of philosophy can be distinguished from empty, counterfeit, and illegitimate ones” (PO, 38, 41). Although no laws had yet been formulated because of the lack of agreement among philosophers, Reid thought he might push philosophy along the road to maturity by proposing some rules abstracted from its “most approved” practices (PO, 38). Once widely recognized, such laws would enable philosophy to progress and become useful to society in the manner of mathematics and natural philosophy (PO, 32, 38–39). More specifically still, they would help unify philosophers whose methodological flights of fancy were preventing them from recognizing the selfevident principles of common sense. The first three laws are Ciceronian insofar as they announce and set the agenda for Reid’s project. The first, “that all futile questions and disputes must be removed from philosophy on the grounds that they are unworthy of the name of this art” (PO, 43), recognizes the propriety of Cicero’s observation that in the search for truth some people spend too much effort on obscure and difficult matters that are useless as well.29 The second, that “the philosopher will think that no knowledge, wisdom, or art that is useful to the human race is alien to himself” (PO, 45), also repeats Cicero’s recognition that philosophy concerns everything that can be mastered by scientific observation30 and reminds us that the Stoic conception of philosophy informing Cicero’s writings was fully compatible with the modern belief (associated for Reid with Francis Bacon) in the unity of all sciences.31 Philosophy that did not serve “the administration of the state, rhetoric, medicine, the art of war, the art of sailing, or commerce is a ridiculous object . . . because, inasmuch as it is useless, it cannot possibly be held in honor and esteem for a long time, nor ought it to. True philosophy is connected with all the sciences and liberal arts and
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
108
Page 108
.
Prudence
contains in itself the elements of all of them” (PO, 47). Reid’s third law requires philosophers “to interpret in a pure fashion the works of God, the supreme Poet, and not to corrupt these by any intermingling of the offspring of the human mind” (PO, 47). Here too Reid’s account evokes Cicero’s Academic admonition not to treat the unknown as known and too readily accept it,32 a position that was strongly associated during Reid’s lifetime with Bacon’s celebrated condemnation of the role of the imagination in natural philosophy. Reid could be very forceful in expressing this maxim. “Just as it is the duty of the Christian theologian,” Reid continued, “to draw forth from the pure word of God the dogmas of religion and not to add anything derived from his own or some other person’s thought, in the same way it is the duty of the philosopher to reject all the divinations and contrivances of men as apocrypha and to embrace this object alone, sound and divine, as it were, namely what the works of God say and relate” (PO, 48; I, 99). For Reid, as for Bacon, a scrupulously empirical approach to nature was not merely an act of piety but a moral obligation, the only way to arrive at a “just interpretation” of God’s creation (I, 97). Reid even went so far as to suggest that a creative imagination had no proper role in philosophy because the former naturally prefers invention to the drudgery of collecting and sifting evidence required by induction (C, 56; I, 99, 201–2, 206–7).33 Just as Reid worried about the role of fancy or imagination, he also recognized that language itself posed certain problems for natural philosophy. “All the works of God,” Reid explained, “have a certain meaning and speech; they speak not to the ears but to the mind . . . with a gentle voice and a language that is not vernacular, but one that can be understood with zeal and effort. . . . To fashion a grammar of this language, to understand the words . . . is the task, not of uncertain conjecture, but of legitimate explanation” (PO, 47–48). Reid was well aware of the difficulty of understanding the “language of nature” clearly and precisely when burdened by the inevitable ambiguity and muddle occasioned by the use of words. The problem, as Reid would succinctly put it (years later), was that language was not made for philosophy (IP, 474). Reid’s fourth and fifth laws assert the commonsense foundation of all philosophy. “By the fourth law, we wish care to be taken that the philosopher does not busy himself in overthrowing common notions, known alike to the learned and the unlearned, to philosophers and laymen, that snatch up assent from the very constitution of human nature; in accordance with these axioms every principle of life revolves” (PO, 49). Reid argued that the very fabric of our lives, our expectations, our plans, and our decisions are based on notions and principles that are self-evidently true and hence require no justification. Such
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 109
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
109
principles need no other authority beyond common sense to govern behavior in ordinary life; they are simultaneously the dictates of God and man, as Reid suggests by invoking Job 33.8 on the title page of the Inquiry: “The inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.” Reid’s fifth law served as a corollary to the fourth: “We wish philosophy not only to refrain from opposing common notions but also to be erected and built upon them. All legitimate reasoning must follow from principles that are given and granted.” For just as the whole of mathematics is supported by Euclid’s axioms, and physics by Newton’s regulae philosophandi, so, thought Reid, should philosophy “be built in an orderly fashion upon common notions and phenomena” (PO, 50). When Reid invoked the authority of common sense over the domain of philosophy in his graduation Orations, however, he did not specify exactly what “common notions” or “common sense” meant. His reference to “common notions, known alike to the learned and the unlearned, to philosophers and laymen” evokes the Romans’ “sense of the community” (sensus communis).34 But the claim that such principles “snatch up assent from the very constitution of human nature” suggests that Reid was appealing to abstract and universal laws rather than to a set of historically contingent maxims. It is difficult to know exactly what he meant. As his treatment of the problems of language and analogical reasoning must have made him particularly aware, “common sense” was a problematically ambiguous concept. Although Reid’s proposed laws were far more allusive than concrete, the very idea that progress in philosophy depended upon the formulation of rules that would be learned, remembered, and put into practice had far more to do with Baconian rationalism than with the recovery of prudentia.35 This would hardly be cause for celebration, since advance in science, to say nothing of philosophy, has never been achieved merely by following rules. Rules do not and cannot fully determine our actions. While Reid did not clearly make this latter, Wittgensteinian argument,36 his often-repeated remark that laws “must be sought from the nature and purpose of philosophy” (PO, 31, 38, 41), which gestures toward the first two of his laws—prohibiting futile questions and disputes and valorizing useful knowledge—suggests that Reid was at least mindful of the fact that rules are never more than after-the-fact redescriptions of actions that have already been taken. Questions of futility and utility call for knowledge that can only be learned in practice, not in the abstract. In other words, Reid’s laws of practicing philosophy point beyond themselves to the actual (useful) practices of philosophers. Similarly, his strict admonition against conjectural reasoning in his third law pointed as much to what lay without the bounds of philosophy as within. Although it was no part of his early plans
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
110
Page 110
.
Prudence
(as revealed in his Orations) to specify or explore the limits of philosophical reasoning, it was a subject to which he would eventually turn. The metatheoretical ideal of reasoning from principles never left Reid—it became the centerpiece of his philosophy of common sense—though he came to realize that there are decided limits to what one can achieve thereby.
on justifying commonsense principles By focusing on Reid’s first two graduation Orations I run the risk of providing a lopsided picture of his early work. For most of his philosophical energies during the thirteen years he spent at King’s College were devoted to explaining the laws of nature governing the mind’s faculties. In a series of papers delivered to the Philosophical Society of Aberdeen he pursued an inductive and empirical review of the five senses and of perception, attempting to discover the most primary and elementary principles of the mind, principles with which everyone agrees because they belong to the original constitution of human nature. Those papers were published in 1764 as An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense. It was an ambitious and at times a highly polemical response to Humean skepticism premised on the beliefs that (1) scientific knowledge of the laws governing human nature is in fact possible, provided the methodological strictures of Bacon and Newton were followed, and that (2) such knowledge would help to defeat skepticism and thereby contribute to a more useful science of human nature. Reid pursued the latter objective by ridiculing Hume’s skepticism, thereby hoping to provoke his readers into realizing that such beliefs are absurd when considered from the standpoint of ordinary social existence. “If [skeptics] should carry their closet belief into the world,” he argued, “the rest of mankind would consider them as diseased, and send them to an infirmary” (I, 110). Reid’s point was that philosophy should be based upon commonsense principles, “which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them” (I, 108). Indeed, he argued that it makes no sense to attempt to justify the principles governing our faculties, for the justification assumes the thing to be proven, that our faculties are trustworthy and not fallacious. The problem arises when we allow ourselves to be reasoned away from the principles of common sense, as when, in solitary and speculative moments, we are convinced by “metaphysical” arguments such as Hume’s. Reid warned that in such cases “piety, patriotism, friendship, parental affection, and private virtue, would appear as ridiculous as knight-errantry” (I, 95).
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 111
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
111
Hume believed that Reid’s appeal to common sense led to a dogmatic form of innatism, according to which we are led by our nature to form unrevisable beliefs about the world that are supernaturally guaranteed to be true.37 The fact that a belief is given to us “by our constitution” is not itself a guarantee of its truth or a proof that it needs no further justification. Perhaps our constitution systematically deceives us. And Hume of course would not rest his philosophical conclusions on the providential design of the universe. But that was exactly the impression that the Inquiry conveyed. “If we are deceived [by our senses], we are deceived by him that made us,” said Reid, “and there is no remedy” (I, 120). Hume’s response to Reid raises the question of whether he was merely a dogmatist, and consequently of little philosophical interest. That is the line taken by several of Reid’s critics, beginning with Kant.38 But if he was not asserting the superiority of commonsense beliefs over the fruits of philosophical analysis, then we need to explain what he intended by referring to a nondeceiving God, and also by the moralizing rhetoric that pervades and seemingly mars the Inquiry. But first I want to examine the account of commonsense principles he elaborated, perhaps in response to Hume’s criticism, in his post-Inquiry writings. I want to argue that Reid’s philosophy was not based upon the beliefs that the principles of common sense are either unrevisable or supernaturally guaranteed to be free from error. As it turned out, Reid’s argument was far stronger than Hume believed. In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) Reid argued that common sense is a form of judgment. As a basic operation of the mind, judgment is indefinable. But a conception of it may be “borrowed from the practice of tribunals.” As a judge, after taking the proper evidence, passes sentence in a case, and that sentence is called his judgment, so the mind, with regard to whatever is true or false, passes sentence, or determines according to the evidence that appears. Some kinds of evidence leave no room for doubt. Sentence is passed immediately, without seeking or hearing any contrary evidence, because the thing is certain and notorious. In other cases, there is room for weighing evidence on both sides, before sentence is passed. The analogy between a tribunal of justice, and this inward tribunal of the mind, is too obvious to escape the notice of any man who ever appeared before a judge. (IP, 413) More specifically still, he argued that common sense is the power to judge truth and falsity in light of a self-evident first principle, without the need for further operations such as deductive or inductive reasoning. It is, moreover,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
112
Page 112
.
Prudence
“that degree of judgement which is common to men with whom we can converse and transact business. A certain degree of it . . . is necessary to our being subjects of law and government, capable of managing our own affairs, and answerable for our conduct toward others.” And it is the basis of all scientific inquiry (IP, 422). Where do such principles come from? Some appear “by a kind of natural perception similar to the perceptions of sense” (I, 449). Others are revealed through an induction of the workings of the human mind, furnished by introspection and by the observation of those “natural signs” by which the judgments of others are made known to us. The important point is that no sooner are such principles understood than they are believed. “The judgment follows the apprehension of them necessarily, and both are equally the work of nature, and the result of our original powers” (IP, 434). By depicting the judgments of common sense as intuitive and irresistible he was attempting to parry Hume’s skeptical claim that such principles cannot be accounted for by reason. But Reid could not merely appeal to intuition. He also had to provide criteria by which authentic first principles could be distinguished from the possibly spurious claims of one’s imagination. All knowledge, Reid argued, must be founded on self-evident principles, either directly or indirectly. “When we examine . . . the evidence of any proposition, either we find it self-evident, or it rests upon one or more propositions that support it. The same thing may be said of the propositions that support it; and of those that support them, as far back as we can go. But we cannot go back in this track to infinity. Where must this analysis stop? It is evident that it must stop only when we come to propositions, which support all that are built upon them, but are themselves supported by none, that is, to self-evident propositions” (IP, 435). But how do we know whether a principle is self-evident or not? Reid maintained that “the power of judging in self-evident propositions, which are clearly understood, may be compared to the power of swallowing our food. It is purely natural, and therefore common to the learned, and the unlearned . . . : it requires ripeness of understanding, and freedom from prejudice, but nothing else” (IP, 434). A skeptic will reply that Reid is here confusing a psychological response to a proposition with its justification. But Reid was well aware of this distinction, for he acknowledged that the statement “two and two make four . . . would be a true proposition . . . although I did not perceive its truth. The truth itself . . . does not depend upon my constitution, for it was a truth before I had an existence, and will be a truth, although I were annihilate.”39 Reid held that first principles cannot be proved directly. The very idea that such proof could be sought plunges us into a vicious circle, for it presupposes that we can determine with certainty whether our reasoning is sound, and
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 113
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
113
this presupposes principles that are themselves free from doubt. And so, “although first principles are not capable of direct proof, yet differences, that may happen with regard to them among men of candour, are not without remedy; . . . Nature has not left us destitute of means by which we may discover errors of this kind; and . . . there are ways of reasoning, with regard to first principles, by which those that are truly such may be distinguished from vulgar errors or prejudices” (IP, 441). For example, our ability to ridicule absurdities, to reason ad hominem or ad absurdum or from universal consent, are all means “by which [principles] that are just and solid may be confirmed, and those that are false may be detected” (IP, 439, 435–41). These may help identify a first principle, but they are not proof that a particular belief is true. Indeed, absolutely certain knowledge of objective truth is not an attainable goal in establishing the foundations of knowledge. Something less must be sought if we are to avoid Hume’s skepticism. Reid’s alternative is, in effect, to hold that our commonsense principles are warranted because there are no reasonable grounds for doubting them.40 This is a far more sensible position to take than Descartes’s, which assumes that the foundations of knowledge must be absolutely certain, absolutely immune to all possible doubt. As we have noted, Descartes had to fall back on his belief in the existence of a benevolent and nondeceiving God to justify the absolute certainty of his knowledge claims. Reid recognized the dogmatism of that position, just as he recognized and rejected similarly unphilosophical alternatives, such as the appeal to psychology or to public opinion as justifications for our commonsense beliefs. His theory allows for the noninferential first principles of common sense to remain justified as long as we have insufficient reasons for doubting them. The fact that they are beyond reasonable doubt does not mean that they cannot be doubted. But the burden lies with those who would call commonsense principles into question. Reid’s allowance that “there are ways of reasoning, with regard to first principles by which those that are truly such may be distinguished from vulgar errors or prejudices” (IP, 441), makes it less likely that commonsense principles will be equated with popular but misguided views. It does this by encouraging moralists—“social critics” would be a more appropriate term in a present-day context—to remind people of what they can know by their common sense, if only they can overcome the influence of their passions, their narrow self-interest, or their unrestrained imagination.41 To be sure, the social critic’s reasoning will necessarily be grounded in the web of commonsense principles which he or she must take for granted, but those principles will be neither conventional nor detached from the world of everyday experience.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
114
Page 114
.
Prudence
It may also be argued that Reid’s account of first principles furnishes a better standpoint for practical reasoning than that of either Hume or Smith or Kant, all of whom refused to grant moral principles any validity independent of the mind. In their different ways, they each believed that we ourselves create the demands of morality. But Reid held that the principles of common sense have a validity that we acknowledge, not a validity that we create. He divided the principles of common sense into two categories: those which are contingent and mutable, depending upon some effect of will and power; and those which are necessary and immutable, whose contrary is impossible (IP, 437). The former principles inform us of the truth of those beliefs arising from our natural faculties—for example, consciousness, perception, memory, personal identity, and the existence of other minds. The latter pertain to grammar, logic, mathematics, taste, morals, and metaphysics. The principles of greatest applicability to a theory of prudence concern morals. Reid has a fairly long list, which he elaborated in his Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788). Some spell out general conditions concerning morality. Only voluntary and avoidable actions, for example, are subject to moral appraisal. Other principles are slightly more substantive, and relate either to our duties to ourselves, to others, or to God. Still others help us resolve conflicts between the requirements of the different virtues. It is self-evident, Reid points out, that we should repay debts before giving gifts.42 The content of these principles is of less importance to us than Reid’s claim that they are necessary truths, having “no less evidence than those of mathematics” (IP, 454). They cannot be interpreted naturalistically as expressions of feelings, as Hume had argued; nor can they be understood as rules we give ourselves through the ratiocination of an impartial spectator, as Smith proposed. And although we have no reason to think that Reid was even aware of Kant’s writings—they came too late for Reid to have considered them—his theory of morals places him at odds with Kant’s philosophy as well. For Kant, as we have noted, moral principles are imposed by reason itself rather than externally. The difficulty with theories such as Hume’s or Smith’s or Kant’s is that they fail to take account of what Charles Larmore calls the “essentially responsive” nature of our moral experience. “It is a matter of heeding the claims upon us,” he argues, “not just of exercising taste or giving ourselves rules. How can we understand our judgments of right as expressions of approval [as Hume maintained], when we believe that the right is something of which we ought to approve? So, too, what can it mean for our reason to create on its own the validity of moral principles, since no thinking can count as rational except by conformity to valid principles? How can any legislation count as the work of reason, if there are no principles given in advance determining
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 115
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
115
how it ought to proceed?”43 Of course modern philosophers would respond that the validity of principles should not depend upon their externality to us. But Reid’s point is that any appeal to principles we give ourselves is arbitrary and will begin an infinite regress that must ultimately rest on noninferential principles whose validity we acknowledge (not create) because they cannot reasonably be doubted. If this is now an unfamiliar starting point for practical reasoning, perhaps this is because we tend to believe that the only knowledge worth having is the value-free knowledge of cause and effect, and that values are a human imposition. But science is itself a normative enterprise, governed by canons of evidence and explanation, as Larmore points out. They cannot be deemed standards that we give ourselves. “We do not grasp them by means of perception,” he writes, “but sense perception is not our only source of knowledge. We learn as well by reflection, when we ponder the reasons there are for adopting new beliefs or questioning old ones. Without the conviction that we are responsible to principles of rational thought, science itself becomes but a game, a piece of high story-telling, lacking any claim on our allegiance.” We moderns have quite properly abandoned the religious conviction that morality is of God’s making; but we should not therefore leap to the conclusion that it is of our own making, “as though we had only to fill God’s shoes. To complete the escape from divine tutelage, we have to learn to see the difference between right and wrong as part of the way things are.”44 Or to put the point more broadly: in every practice, whether moral, cultural, or political, there are foundations to which we appeal that cannot be accounted for within the terms of that practice, and whose legitimacy depends upon some external source of authority. This point has recently been made by Derrida, who recognizes that the appeal to “constatives” such as God, or self-evident truths, or to laws of nature to ground our practices is an essential part of our everyday lives.45 Although Derrida’s reaction to this state of affairs is by no means the same as Reid’s—the former treats the existence of constatives as an invitation to resistance, the latter as the ground upon which all contingent truth is erected—they each regard the “law of laws” (Derrida’s phrase) as open to continual preservation and amendment in light of experience.
the rhetoric of common sense Thus far I have focused on Reid’s philosophical account of common sense, which is an array of tacit beliefs turned into explicit propositions by Reid’s “anatomy of the mind.” They are tacit inasmuch as they are “taken for
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
116
Page 116
.
Prudence
granted” in the ordinary affairs of life. “For before men can reason together, they must agree in first principles; and it is impossible to reason with a man who has no principles in common with you” (IP, 230). Reid made them explicit because he believed that philosophers had been reasoned away from them, at first seduced by the Cartesian theory of ideas into thinking that knowledge could have foundations immune to all possible doubt, and then betrayed by the skepticism to which the ideal theory inevitably led. From this perspective it is easy to see Reid’s appeal to common sense as a “counterepistemology” launched against the philosophical establishment, and “for that very reason primarily epistemological.”46 I have argued that, as such, Reid’s philosophy remains an important account of why the foundations of judgment must be noninferential, and how they remain fallible. Their noninferentiality ensures that common sense is not merely conventional wisdom, not synonymous with communal norms of thought and judgment. Their fallibility, the fact that they are not immune to all possible doubt, ensures that common sense remains, at least in principle, contestable, and therefore open to change. But Reid’s appeal to common sense was by no means limited to its cognitive function. It was also intended to serve the practical moral purpose of persuading his students and readers to pursue the common good of society. When he argued that “the candid and honest part of mankind” may be brought to agreement over first principles through ad absurdum or ad hominem reasoning, or by the evidence of universal consent (IP, 439), Reid was addressing the practical problem of teaching people to distinguish genuine first principles from those falsely alleged to be such. The means he chose to bring about such agreement were rhetorical: he relied upon the ill-defined and largely affective connotations that “common sense” had acquired since Aristotle and the Roman moralists to persuade his students and readers that certain propositions about the world are true, thereby enabling them to lead lives of civic and moral virtue.47 The broader meaning of the term was evident in the writings of such contemporary essayists as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and the third earl of Shaftesbury, for whom common sense meant a “sense of public weal and of the common interest, love of the community or society, natural affection, humanity, obligingness, or that sort of civility which rises from a just sense of the common rights of mankind, and the natural equality there is among those of the same species.”48 By relying upon this (overly) general notion of common sense Reid sought to persuade those whose understanding had been blinded by “religious panic, or very powerful prejudice” (IP, 437–38) of the validity of the specific propositions he stipulated were “first
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 117
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
117
principles of common sense.” In other words, his appeal to common sense was not merely an appeal to propositional knowledge that must be taken for granted if practical reasoning is to occur, it was also an appeal to practical knowledge of how we can distinguish true from false propositions. Thus Reid’s appeal to “common sense” must be understood in the context of his emphasis upon communication and moral persuasion. In this respect Reid’s thought had as much to do with persuading his readers to lead lives of moral and civic virtue as it did with elaborating a moral theory explaining the “powers of the mind by which we have our moral conceptions” (AP, 642). Reid had two closely related purposes in adopting a rhetoric of common sense. The first involved countering the tendency of Hume’s moral philosophy to “subvert all faith and fair dealing among mankind.” Reid believed that Hume’s attempt to base social duty on utility could undermine “the effect of discipline and education in a civilized state” (AP, 663, 667–68). Yet this was not Reid’s most serious concern, because the constitution of human nature and the pull of everyday life seemed to him sufficient to counter the corrosive skepticism of Hume’s philosophy (I, 102–4; IP, 484–85; AP, 642–43). Much more pressing was the need to put the first principles of common sense “in a proper point of view” in order to provide a foundation of a science of man. This task entailed emphasizing the indubitable character of first principles “justly arrived at” and discrediting those theories and hypotheses that were mere “fictions of human fancy.” Equally important, Reid recognized that knowledge acquired through the science of man must be informed by the life of man in society. The imperative of the scientist was “to draw from principles taken from nature itself,” and human nature could only be understood by examining the conduct of group life. The ultimate point of science was to arrive at “general conclusions which can aid the weakness of human life and people in wretched circumstances, and which can in some way elevate the lot of human beings” (PO, 42). Thus, the science of the mind was not merely a social science but also contained a moral imperative for the betterment of the social group. There is an obvious and—I want to argue—a positive tension in Reid’s work that was produced by his attempt to forge a reciprocal relationship between philosophical inquiry and practical morality. The former pursuit consisted of his attempt to elaborate a science of human nature along realist lines, by pursing a strict experimental and inductivist program—outlined in his graduation Orations—designed to codify the self-evident principles of common sense. The appeal to common sense was, in this respect, a matter of painstakingly “explicating and enumerating” the principles governing our
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
118
Page 118
.
Prudence
intellectual operations by “patient observation, by accurate experiments, or by conclusions drawn by strict reasoning from observations and experiments.” Such principles do not require proof in order to be believed, indeed they cannot be proved, but they must “be placed in a proper point of view” if they are to guide us in the common affairs of life (IP, 231, 209). Mental anatomists are consequently under a moral obligation to distinguish the “fictions of human fancy, called theories and hypothesis, which will always bear the signature of human folly” from the genuine products of “divine workmanship” (IP, 460). But Reid’s practical moral commitment to “human improvement” depended not merely on the substantive results of his scientific procedure but also upon the rhetoric of its presentation.49 By appealing to “common sense” he adopted a richly ambiguous locution that, in everyday parlance, reflects the values and beliefs of the multitude. It refers to no specific skills or truths and, consequently, possesses enormous rhetorical value. It can, for example, be affixed to any number of truth-claims with the expectation that, if believed, such claims are impervious to further assault. In a related fashion, it might be used to impugn the veracity of any claim which it was thought to oppose. As Reid himself admitted, “common sense” referred to so wide a range of perceptiveness, insight, and judgment that it was difficult to define the term precisely: “It fills up all the interval between idiocy on one hand and uncommon discernment and penetration on the other. . . . And it is hardly possible to ascertain the line where one of these ends and the other begins.”50 The result of such imprecision, especially in the case of those arguments possessed (as Shaftesbury put it) of “great life and ingenuity,” was to deprive common sense of much of its value as a tribunal of last resort. Nevertheless, an appeal to its authority had significant rhetorical value. For it retained an undeniable buoyancy, however many times its use was abused or its validity resisted. After all, as Shaftesbury remarked, “every man believes himself possessed of [common sense], and would take it for an imputation upon his understanding to be thought unacquainted with it.” And so, although Reid did not intend to abandon his realist account of commonsense principles, the “positive ambiguity” (the phrase is Gadamer’s) of “common sense” carried Reid toward a socially constructed version of reality.51 Of course, all writing is rhetorical in the ancient sense of persuasive discourse. But this is a particularly subversive realization with respect to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, written within the thrall of the theory of ideas. As Ian Hacking has shown, the language that mattered to philosophers of the ideal system was mental discourse consisting of a chain of clear and distinct ideas. Public discourse was necessary for communication,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 119
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
119
but real thinking required that philosophers try to get as far as they could from the ambiguity and imperspicuity of words.52 In this sense, philosophy became an intensely private and individualized pursuit whose very success depended upon the philosopher’s ability to measure reality precisely. But Reid believed that philosophy could not possibly succeed as an essentially private affair. “It was only in solitude and retirement,” Reid observed, “that [Hume] could yield any assent to his own philosophy; society, like daylight, dispelled the darkness and fogs of skepticism, and made him yield to the dominion of common sense” (I, 102). Reid’s willingness to embrace the Roman tradition and its rhetorical appeal to the sensus communis produced a tension within his work that cannot be resolved without destroying the prudential character of his thought. He rightly understood that useful knowledge cannot be restricted to the conclusions of discursive reason conceived on a mathematical or a purely scientific model. He realized that the principles of common sense express truths that cannot be proved, and which are often expressed in language that is metaphorical rather than literal. At the same time he recognized that “truth [cannot] be determined by most votes” (IP, 439). As he put it in the Intellectual Powers, unless the minds of men were taught to soar like eagles above the sensual and mundane, they never would be capable of contributing to a life of active virtue (IP, 380, 384, 388).
conclusion I have tried to present Reid’s philosophy of common sense as an example of prudential reasoning responsive to the theoretical and practical needs of Scottish society in the mid eighteenth-century. As a theory of prudence it necessarily embodied and thereby valorized certain of the historically cultivated sensibilities—the sensus communis—of men and women living in that place and time. By that measure Reid’s idiom and his substantive moral and political preoccupations are unlikely to be ours. This is most evidently the case with respect to his religious commitments. While he did not allow religion to enter into the justification of any of his philosophical beliefs, he nevertheless held that the “rational Piety and Devotion towards God” that accompanies religious belief “have the most salutary effects for cherishing and strengthning [sic] every virtuous Disposition.”53 In other words, Reid’s theoretical commitment to final causes necessarily prevents his theory of common sense from serving as a powerful account of political action for modernity.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
120
Page 120
.
Prudence
But his appeal to common sense both as a set of self-evident principles and as a rhetorically rich utterance whose “positive ambiguity” enabled him to act politically upon his audience nevertheless captures what I (following Oakeshott) take to be a necessary part of a theory of prudential reasoning: that every human activity whatsoever involves knowledge of two sorts, both of which are always involved in any actual activity. The first is expressed in rules or principles which are susceptible of precise formulation and so have the appearance of certainty. As Reid put it, they “serve to direct us in the common affairs of life, where our reasoning faculty would leave us in the dark.” The second sort exists only in practice, and the method by which it may be shared and becomes common knowledge is not the method of formulated doctrine. It is a matter of “know how,” which for Reid, entailed the application of a range of discursive techniques designed to put “self-evident” principles in the clearest possible light. For in a world without authoritative principles we are denied the opportunity to exercise what Arendt called our “human capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and remain a place fit to live in for those who come after us.”54
notes 1. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded edition, ed. Timothy Fuller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 12, 19–22, 44. 2. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 192. 3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 43–44, 55. 4. My account of postmodern perceptions of the Enlightenment relies upon Robert Darnton’s “George Washington’s False Teeth,” New York Review of Books, March 27, 1997, p. 36. 5. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–55. 6. The rise of such institutions in eighteenth-century France has been treated by Daniel Roche in Le Siècle des Lumières en Province: Académies et Académicians Provinciaux: 1680–1789 (Paris: Mouton Éditeur, 1978). See also Nicholas Philippson, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 19–40, and Roger L. Emerson, “Science and the Origins and Concerns of the Scottish Enlightenment,” History of Science 26 (1988): 332–66, for contrasting accounts of the importance of polite societies in Scotland. 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. T. K. Abbott (London: Longmans, 1909), 124–25. For an account of Kant’s rejection of prudence, see Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 63–71. 8. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1141b8–17. 9. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 126. 10. Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 59.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 121
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
121
11. My opposition to modern philosophical naturalism borrows heavily from Charles Larmore’s Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), as well as from his review essay, “Objectively Good,” in The New Republic, September 28, 1998, pp. 42–45. 12. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 33, and Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 22. For an account of Hobbes’s devaluation of prudence, see Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 153–54, and Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 262. 13. See Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), for a brief elaboration of this argument. 14. Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” 55. 15. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 159–60. 16. Samuel Fleischacker, A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. 120–83, is an insightful account of the extent to which Smith’s use of “judgment” corresponds to Aristotle’s use of phronesis. Although the correspondence is striking, Fleischacker’s Smith remains a modern figure, who avoided the search for moral rules outside human experience. For Smith, the ultimate source of morality remains human nature and human experience. 17. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry in to the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), in vol. 1 of Philosophical Works, ed. Sir William Hamilton, 2 vols. (1895; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1967), 108. Hereafter cited in the body of this chapter as I. 18. Cicero De officiis 1.15–18, 153, 2.33, 3.95. 19. The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1:32. 20. George Turnbull, The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy, 2 vols. (1740; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1979), 1:iii. See also Thomas Reid, The Philosophical Orations of Thomas Reid, ed. D. D. Todd, trans. Shirley M. L. Darcus (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 43–51. Hereafter cited in the body of this chapter as PO. 21. Colin Maclaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (1748; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), 3. 22. Turnbull, Principles, 1:428. 23. Cicero De officiis 1.18–19. I am indebted to Andrew R. Dyck’s commentary on these passages. See his Commentary on Cicero, De Officiis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 102. 24. Among the principal figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, Alexander Carlyle, Hugh Blair, Thomas Reid, George Campbell, Alexander Gerard, John Home, and William Robertson were ministers in the Church of Scotland. Adam Ferguson served as chaplain of a Highlands regiment for nearly a decade before leaving the ministry. Lord Monboddo, Lord Kames, James Beattie, and John Millar were devout though moderate members of the kirk. Only Hume and Adam Smith stood outside the mainstream of Protestant thought, and the latter’s writings were by no means uniformly irreligious. 25. [Anonymous], “Memoirs of Dr Wallace of Edinburgh,” Scots Magazine 33 (1771): 340–41. For an account of the Rankenian Club, see Peter Jones, “The Scottish Professoriate and the Polite Academy, 1720–46,” in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 89–117. 26. As though anticipating the popular and the scholarly receptions that his Treatise would receive, in his introduction to that work Hume complained of “the present imperfect condition” of philosophy and the sciences. “Amidst all this bustle,” he explained, “ ‘tis not reason,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
122
Page 122
.
Prudence
which carries the prize, but eloquence; and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours. The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and the sword; but by the trumpeters, drummers, and musicians of the army.” See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2d rev. ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), xiii–xiv. 27. “Correspondence of Dr. Reid,” in Philosophical Works, 1:88. Hereafter cited in the body of this chapter as C. 28. “The painter, the poet, the actor, the orator, the moralist, and the statesman,” Reid argued, “attempt to operate upon the mind in different ways, and for different ends; and they succeed, according as they touch properly the strings of human nature. Nor can their several arts ever stand on a solid foundation, or rise to the dignity of science, until they are built on the principles of the human constitution” (I, 97). 29. Cicero De officiis 1.19. 30. Cicero De oratore 1.9. 31. See Francis Bacon, The New Organon, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longman, 1857–74), 4:79, 98. 32. Cicero De officiis 1.18. 33. See also Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), in Philosophical Works, 1:291, 367, 375, 381. Hereafter cited in the body of this chapter as IP. I discuss at length Reid’s concept of imagination in “Rhetoric and Philosophy in the Social Thought of Thomas Reid,” Eighteenth-Century Life 15 (1991): 65, 78. 34. See, for example, Cicero De oratore 1.12, 2.67–68, 3.195. 35. For a critical assessment of modern rationalism as a legacy of Francis Bacon’s methodological designs, see Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 11–21. 36. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 1.201–2, 206, 292, and On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 139. 37. See P. B. Wood, “David Hume on Thomas Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind, On the Principles of Common Sense: A New Letter to Hugh Blair from July 1762,” Mind 95 (1986): 415–16. 38. According to Kant, Reid’s philosophy was “but an appeal to the opinion of the multitude, of whose applause the philosopher is ashamed, while the popular charlatan glories and boasts in it.” See his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), 7. On the question of whether Kant had firsthand knowledge of Reid’s work, see Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987). 39. Aberdeen University Library MS. 3061/8, p. 5; reprinted in James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, From Hutcheson to Hamilton (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1875), 475. 40. For more detailed accounts of Reid’s justification of commonsense principles, to which I am indebted, see Paul Vernier, “Reid on Foundations of Knowledge and His Answer to Skepticism,” in Thomas Reid: Critical Interpretations, ed. Stephen F. Barker and Tom L. Beauchamp (Philadelphia: Philosophical Monographs, 1976), 14–24, and William P. Alston, “Thomas Reid on Epistemic Principles,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 2 (1985): 435–52. 41. Richard S. Rudderman makes a similar point about Aristotle’s conception of phronesis, in “Aristotle and the Recovery of Political Judgment,” American Political Science Review 91 (1997): 418. 42. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788), in Philosophical Works, 2:637–40. Hereafter cited in the body of this chapter as AP.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 123
The “Enlightenment Project” Revisited
.
123
43. Larmore, “Objectively Good,” 45. 44. Ibid. 45. See Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science 15 (1986): 11–12. I owe this point to Bonnie Honig. See her “Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 97–113. 46. See Joel C. Weinsheimer’s Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 137. 47. My account of the rhetoric of Reid’s appeal to common sense differs radically from that of Joel Weinsheimer (in ibid., 135–65), who understands Reid’s usage as narrowly epistemological. Weinsheimer contrasts the “thinness” discernible in Reid’s technical appeal to common sense with the “rich tangle of denotations” that sensus communis possessed in the writings of ancient moralists. But that contrast can only be supported by assuming that Reid’s intentions were narrowly philosophical, when in fact Reid was a practical moralist who was well aware of the term’s rhetorical properties. 48. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 48. Reid quoted from this essay at length in his own work. See, for example, “Thomas Reid’s Cura Prima on Common Sense,” in Louise Marcil-Lacoste, Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1982), 188–89, and IP, 424. 49. The term “human improvement” was used by Reid’s student, Dugald Stewart, to refer to the Scots’ attempts to accumulate knowledge and discover laws respecting the moral and material world, in order to become more prosperous and, above all, to acquire “enlarged sentiments of humanity towards each other.” See his Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy and An Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D., in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. Sir William Hamilton, 10 vols. (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1854–58), 1:487–90, 10:59. 50. Reid, “Cura Prima on Common Sense,” 187. 51. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1995), 19–20. 52. Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 17, 33, 51–52. 53. See Thomas Reid, Practical Ethics, ed. Knud Hakonssen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 124, 123–26, 256–58. 54. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 95.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 124
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 125
II. Rhetorical Structures
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 126
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 127
5 Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol and the Texture of Prudence Stephen H. Browne
The problem with prudence, as Emerson understood, is that it can raise questions not easily answered. “What right have I,” he asked, “to write on Prudence, whereof I have little, and that of the negative sort?”1 The same sort of question might be asked of those who would link that concept with the name of Edmund Burke, whose virtues are not ordinarily associated with restraint, decorum, or golden means. To his critics, the “sublime and beautiful” Burke was if anything the very embodiment of rhetorical excess, given to flights of metaphoric fancy and speeches of inordinate length on causes known to be lost. His was, as one historian has graphically demonstrated, a life lived in caricature.2 What right have we, then, to speak of Burke in the same breath with prudence? Emerson reasoned that in the end he had “the same title to write on prudence, that I have to write on poetry or holiness. We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience.”3 Thus with Burke. His excesses notwithstanding, we have equal title to situate his legacy within an ancient and enduring discourse on the nature, scope, and function of prudence. It is a legacy, I suggest, marked not only by “antagonism” and “aspiration” but also by a resolute desire to give principle the force of lived experience. In the following, I wish to treat prudence—at least as it was imagined and exercised
127
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
128
Page 128
.
Prudence
by Burke—as a definitively rhetorical principle, an idea virtually incoherent except as it was activated within the contexts of human ambition, historical circumstance, and political discourse. Such a view stresses, in addition, that prudence works by availing itself of cultural commonplaces, that it serves as a perhaps vague but potentially powerful warrant for action, the appeal of which is proportionate to the weight it is made to bear. To understand prudence in this way is to understand how it gets embedded within specific rhetorical forms—in the case under review here, the public letter—where demands of the moment are met with recourse to enduring values of civic conduct. It remains to be seen, of course, whether there is merit in such an approach, but I do think it encourages us to ground the concept of prudence in ways not frequently observed. At a minimum, it warns us away from summoning a grand theory of the concept, applicable without change across time and space; it insists that we try to observe prudence-in-action even as we try to get a fix on its constitutive features; and it obliges us to ask what is of interest rhetorically about this amorphous but persistent standard of human action.4 Prudence, Burke teaches us, is rhetorical as it is localized, accorded, that is, object, motive, and medium. It is rhetorical when it is recognized in its contingency and as it is put on display for avowedly persuasive purposes. To grasp prudence in this way is to grasp its texture; it is to see that prudence may be simultaneously an available means of persuasion, an object of reflection, and a mode of human symbolic action. As with “freedom,” so with prudence: it is not “a thing that lies in the depths of abstruse science. It is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation; and all the just reasoning that can be upon it is of so coarse a texture as perfectly to suit the ordinary capacities of those who are to enjoy, and of those who are to defend it.”5
burke, prudence, and virtue Burke’s conception of prudence—and his exercise of it as a rhetorical resource—may be identified as a subset of what I have referred to elsewhere as a discourse of virtue.6 He laid claim to no explicit theory of prudence, hardly surprising in view of his skepticism about such reasoning. We can nevertheless reconstruct from his speeches and writings an implicit understanding of what for Burke constituted prudential wisdom. Our review must be quite brief, but we can at least locate key themes with which to frame an analysis of the Letter.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 129
Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
.
129
For Burke the distinctive function of virtue was to sustain the very possibilities of civic life. Its identification with rhetoric was bound to be close, for it was an art defined, rewarded, threatened, but always driven by the needs of community. Nearly every major address in Burke’s political career was in some respect a struggle to protect the conditions of its own performance— hence the defensive quality of so many of his speeches and writings.7 Virtue resided for Burke in the spaces between, where critical deliberation was possible only as it fended off the impositions of the Court—distant, discrete— on the one hand, and popular disorder—arbitrary, heated—on the other. Thus in Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (1770) and Speech to the Electors of Bristol (1780), Burke sought to keep open a deliberative space he saw as being under siege by two countervailing powers—the cabal and the leaderless. The point here is that Burke was keenly aware that prudential action presupposed a set of deliberative norms that, however tenuous, must always be protected as the sine qua non of civic life. A second theme in Burke’s thought has more to do with the quality of mind appropriate to virtue’s effective expression. At the center of this view is a standard of political judgment that Burke invokes throughout his political life: typically that standard was used to delineate habits of reason, patterns of judgment, and modes of apprehending the world that figured into deliberative practice. Political virtue was in this context a public expression of a certain way of thinking by one who eschews abstractions, embraces circumstances, and seeks always to balance personal conviction with common sense. To act prudently, by implication, was to act on the basis of what is given by the historical moment; it is to understand and reason through, literally, circumstantial evidence. In his classic speech on dealing with the American colonies, for example, Burke stresses time and again that it is “necessary to consider distinctly the true nature and the peculiar circumstances of the object which we have before us: because after all our struggle . . . we must govern America according to that nature and to those circumstances and not according to our imaginations, not according to abstract ideas of right.”8 A third dimension of Burke’s discourse of virtue—exemplarity—is equally suggestive for what it implies about the work of prudence. As a political good, virtue required a space of its own, free from the excesses of power; as it was given effective expression, virtue was at once the motive and result of a distinctive quality of mind; as it was given human form and rhetorical agency, virtue was embodied in what he referred to as the Philosopher-in-Action. It was, Burke remarked in the Discontents, “the business of the speculative
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
130
Page 130
.
Prudence
philosopher to mark the proper ends of government.” But it must be “the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out the proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect.”9 This exemplar became something of a stock figure in Burke’s rhetorical practice, and we need not stare at it for long before we see Burke himself staring back. The philosopher in action, in any case, helps Burke advance and dramatize claims to moral accountability (he does not act in politics out of sheer expedience), agency, and the possibilities of real change. The figure assists further in staging the clash of opposites which orders the partisan’s world (I am precisely what my opponent is not); and it allows Burke to draw from a wellfunded repertoire of epideictic images and allusions. If we are to extrapolate from Burke’s political rhetoric an implicit theory of prudence, it must be with the understanding that it is woven into and by the threads of these and other themes. Prudence might best be thought of, then, as a kind of modality through which virtue is formulated, expressed, and given efficacy. But perhaps such abstractions ought now to give way to a more situated analysis: remanding the principle to the text, we may in its custody see prudence at work, straining against and exploiting its own means of persuasion. In the following, I examine this process and suggest an account of what, after all, the appeal to prudence allows Burke to do. This much requires that we set in place the circumstances of that appeal, to construct for it a sense of motive, function, and consequence. On this basis, we can see how Burke fashions and sets on display competing arrangements of power, collapses the ideal of prudence into a practical rationale for action, and promotes a policy of active restraint—a principled check on political power that, conceding nothing, confronts the opposition with a self-privileging power of its own.
burke’s implicit theory of prudence, sketched Unlike Burke’s critics, I am not concerned here to expose the author’s struggle to abide by the standards he regularly invoked; nor, for that matter, do I intend to champion the views alleged to illuminate his writing on the subject. Neither do I suppose that we have in the Letter evidence that in counseling prudence Burke was showing his conservative colors. Whether or not the speaker was, as Russell Kirk and many others have argued, the founder of conservatism is in this context irrelevant. At the same time, we need to recognize that, in Gerald Chapman’s words, Burke typifies as no other “the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 131
Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
.
131
union, in his own thinking, of what are perhaps the two greatest achievements of English culture to date—its literary imagination, and its success in practical politics.”10 This integration of the imaginative and the practical is given singular expression by Burke, and it goes a long way toward accounting for the essentially rhetorical quality of his mind in general. More broadly, however, we can say that although Burke is sui generis, his conception of prudence is not; that is, he gives us in and through his written and oratorical performances a means to see prudence in its greater aspect, as a mode of arguing, reflecting, and acting. To better glimpse this possibility, I examine Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777). My reading is governed by the assumption that prudence—at least a rhetorically interesting conception of prudence—must be observed on the wing, in the doing of politics and deliberation. On this view, indeed, prudence cannot be otherwise recovered except from the textures it is made to take and through which it must express itself. Prudence in this sense works by design; hence my attention to rhetorical form; it works by converting the general and abstract into warrants for action of a kind; hence my stress on the pragmatic character of Burke’s political judgment; and it works by drawing attention to and sponsoring its own preference; hence my emphasis on the Letter as an instantiation of the principles it seeks to endorse. A brief overview of the text will help situate our own reading of its general argument, tone, and structure. The Letter is written, as we might expect, in the form of a public epistle, a genre in which the author was to become expert. Its overall purpose is to draw up a list of indictments against ministerial policy respecting relations with America. These indictments are couched in the context of England’s historical stance toward the colonies as well as specific and recent policy measures. Among the leading complaints: the nation ought not war against its own kind; violations of rights owing to all Englishmen, colonial or otherwise; the disastrous consequences of trying to restore peace through coercion; the inadvisability of applying abstract principles to concrete circumstances; and the poverty—indeed corruption—of the current ministry. After detailing each of these indictments, Burke concludes the Letter with a defense of his own and his party’s position and calls again for restoration of amicable relations through a policy of conciliation and leniency. Above all, it is a plea for the exercise of political prudence, a mode of reasoning and action he seeks to exemplify in the argument itself. The work of prudence, as illustrated by the Letter, is to keep itself and its object “of so coarse a texture.” It functions rhetorically by keeping deliberative
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
132
Page 132
.
Prudence
issues and modes of reasoning appropriate to their resolution, “course,” at the ready, resistant in their very coarseness to the niceties of abstract theories as well as to the whim of popular will. It is a theme to which Burke returned in many of his major writings and speeches; and while he did not expound at length on the word itself in any theoretical sense—that would be inconsistent with his own sense of the word—it nevertheless may be seen at work in virtually all of his critical campaigns, including those against English relations with Ireland and India as well as America. As a public, strategic, and stylized performance, Burke’s Letter exemplifies the coarseness to which he refers both formally and at the level of its propositions. Its aim is to keep the object of his deliberations intelligible, the pursuit of which represents the rhetorical action of the text. And because this process takes place within a localized and contested site of public debate, it must summon for its immediate purposes a principle sufficient to the task at hand. That this principle is prudence suggests at first blush a paradox of sorts, for how could a prescription so modest, so accommodating, be up to anything but mere compromise? For Burke there is neither paradox nor concession in prudence so deployed: it offers rather a rationale for active restraint: its function is to justify counsels of moderation, yes, but its privilege is to grasp the optimal order of things. Assuming that privilege, Burke through the resources of the Letter is able to discern for others what he would have them see for themselves: that imperial order should be moral order of a kind, and that human affairs so arranged cannot be calculated on the basis of “abstruse science.” The point was worth going public for, Burke reasoned, because the stakes were so high: left to their own, leaders unchecked by such counsels of liberal toleration were apt always to seek the most extreme expression or application of the law. Those who understood better the nature of political organization, conversely, knew that such simple-minded application of rules must backfire, must eventually destroy the moral order itself. If that was the tendency of government, then it was left to the citizenry and its representatives to check power so exercised. Here then was the motive, point, and effect of prudence, aiming thus not to retreat from power but to restructure it to different ends. Such a view of prudence, I hope to demonstrate, is enacted in the Letter as a contest between imperial policy and principled resistance. Here the text gives to the context its public and polemical cast, puts it on exhibit, makes of it a battle not of abstractions but of putative claims to the common good. We may read the Letter accordingly as a kind of staged competition, the outcome of which is predetermined but nonetheless suggestive of what prudence looks like when it is made to work.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 133
Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
.
133
background and analysis of the text Burke remains, it must be said, among the most axiomatic thinkers in the history of modern politics. For this he has been at turns celebrated and reviled for over two centuries, but we ought not forget that he was for all that a politician—partisan, strategic, striving. Burke found his milieu, as Joel Weinsheimer has written, “Not by contemplative detachment, but only by immersion in the particular situation, by mucking about in the actual, concrete circumstances in all their messiness,” for here was where one obtained “practical knowledge—the only pertinent knowledge for the politician—which is knowing what to do.”11 In the spring of 1777 Burke found himself, as he was to do rather frequently, in just one such mess. The war against the American colonies, so memorably contested by Burke in his previous Speech on American Taxation (1774) and Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies (1775), had taken a relatively positive turn for the “mother country,” and Burke had grown despondent over the conduct not only of the government but of his own party’s lack of unity or plan. Believing that nothing could be gained for the moment, Burke and other Rockinghamites attempted to “secede” from Parliamentary deliberations—to no discernible effect except to incite the ill-will of his Bristol constituents. In February Burke composed a letter of explanation, defense, and attack, and had it sent to the Sheriffs of Bristol, John Farr and John Harris. Burke was concerned to explain his absence during key debates over the American Treasons Act suspending Habeas Corpus for acts of high treason and acts of piracy against British subjects. Explaining himself was to become something of an art form for Burke in the years to come, and here, too, we see the characteristic move to answer specific questions as a springboard to discussing issues of greater scope and complexity. For all its twists and turns, however, the Letter fixes before itself a single preoccupation: the conduct of a ministry seemingly bent on applying laws because the laws may be said to apply. It is therefore as much a study in the nature of imprudence as in its opposite.12 The Letter was published in the middle of not one crisis but many, imperial and domestic, personal and partisan. Burke’s standing opposition to the war was taking its toll on what political capital he might claim, especially in light of recent and much-celebrated victories in New York. That this opposition was given voice by a member for Bristol—England’s second-largest trading center—was proving to be no little problem for both the city and its representative. The status of this text as a rhetorical performance cannot therefore be questioned; certainly no one would mistake it for a treatise on
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
134
Page 134
.
Prudence
the first principles of prudential reason, nor is it remotely a manual of advice on the optimal management of power. It is rather stressed on all fronts by immediate concerns and is designed specifically to get its author out of a fix. Burke thus composed the Letter on behalf of himself and his party, and to expose the dangers of ministerial policy. At the same time, he had to make clear that his actions were justified, not sheerly from reasons of expedience, but also because they were grounded in principles more enduring that those to which his opponents appealed. Within such a play of expectations, prudence can work to specific rhetorical ends. Because the author was in effect being squeezed on two fronts—for acting neither in the commercial interest of his constituents nor in support of his own government in time of war—he needed such a principle, and he needed it badly.13 Turning now to the text: at its most explicit, the Letter offers up a set of considered reasons for Burke’s position respecting the American Treason Act and the Letters of Marque Act (17 Geo. III, c. 7). Both he thought baleful. More generally, the Letter serves to explain Burke’s absence from Parliament during recent debates on the subject (he thought it “ridiculous” to fight such losing battles), and to elaborate both on his views of the war and of the ministry’s conduct. Most important for our purposes, the Letter seeks its ends by simultaneously appealing to and enacting prudential wisdom. Such wisdom, Burke will argue, works to slow the hand of power; hence the text must at once provide reasons for thus acting and act on those reasons. It must be both prudent and about prudence. We shall turn to the propositional content of the text shortly, but what of this process of enactment? What does it mean to speak of a text—this text at least—enacting its own claims to prudential wisdom? If we recall that for Burke prudence is marked by the capacity to align general and particulars—principles and circumstances—into a rationale for civic action, then we have a basis for observing in the Letter just such an interplay. Its very form suggests as much: an apologia in the shape of a public letter, the text is a conspicuous act of adaptation, an accounting of principles required by circumstantial demands. By way of further instantiating its own claims to prudential wisdom, the Letter at once explains the need for public criticism of ministerial policy and conducts just such a critique. Finally, as we shall see, Burke may be seen moving deftly throughout the Letter between the abstract and the particular, between principle and circumstance, in ways that set his mode of deliberative action in dramatic relief to that of his opponents. At the risk of oversimplifying the point, we may say that if prudence consists in rightly understanding the relationship between theory and practice; and if in this context such an understanding requires that citizens act to prevent the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 135
Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
.
135
effects of imprudence (moving too quickly from the source of power to its object); then we may say that the very performance of this argument as a public act of critical opposition instantiates its own claims to prudential wisdom. In short, Burke’s Letter is itself an instance of deliberative intervention whose rhetorical purpose it is to interrupt, slow, and correct the exercise of state power. It is not possible or necessary to undertake here a detailed examination of Burke’s argument. For our purposes it is enough to identify representative moments in the Letter, where principles definitive of prudential wisdom are exemplified in the act of speech itself. In the main these principles are given rhetorical force through a series of contrasts between the vices of precipitous power and the virtues of withholding that power, between, that is, exercising power because one has a right and restraining it because that is the right thing to do. This juxtaposition will in turn distinguish between false and true sources for the exercise of power, hence distinguish the source and authority of prudence from its opposite. Burke’s account of his resistance to the Treason Act (providing for the detention and trial in England of Americans accused of “treason”), is illustrative. The effect of that statute, Burke argues, was to accelerate the pace and process of “justice,” to eliminate barriers to the exercise of power and make the system more punitive by making it more efficient. “A person is brought hither in the dungeon of a ship’s hold: thence he is vomited into a dungeon on land; loaded with irons, unfurnished with money, unsupported by friends, three thousand miles from all means of calling upon, or confronting evidence . . . such a person may be executed,” Burke concludes, “according to form, but he can never be tried according to justice.” Here was but the first of many examples of a ministry that seemed incapable of discerning the difference between the formal shadows of justice and its actual content. Constitutional law, by contrast, functioned not to make power more efficient, more quick, but to make its unjust exercise more difficult. That is why, Burke explains, “Far from removing the difficulties which impede the execution of so mischievous a project, I would heap new difficulties upon it. . . . All the ancient, honest juridical principles, and institutions of England, are so many clogs to check and retard the headlong course of violence and oppression. They were invented for this one good purpose;—that what was not just should not be convenient.” Thus a customized version of the past functions as an authorized check on the power of the state. Its purpose is to intervene in a course of events authorized by law but not by history; the task of the prudent is then to interrupt such a course, to pose against it a logic that reintegrates rule and circumstance. This wisdom, which is taken to be the wisdom of the history, provides
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
136
Page 136
.
Prudence
a kind of vantage point from which the prudent are to train their vision. From this vantage point, at least, Burke is able to see that in fact arbitrary power works in several ways. It is either too quick—as with the statutes before him— and thus unresponsive to local contingencies; or it is insidiously slow, undetectable, its work effected rather by stealth than consent. Either way, power uncoupled from the constraints of history and circumstance seeks its ends not so much in time as through its distortion; under these conditions, the work of prudence is to reset the clock by returning power to the more natural rhythms of political life. The problem, of course, was how this return was to be effected—or more accurately, by whom. By habit, temperament, and training, people develop modes of reasoning appropriate to particular vocations but clearly not to all. The problem comes when one habit, as it were, imposes itself into realms of judgment inappropriate to its sphere. Invariably, the resulting confusion involved not just a crossing of deliberative styles, but a misreading of the dynamics of power within and between spheres. Prudence requires a certain space for its expression and realization; and the proprietors of that space were representatives, like Burke, of the people. When that space was arrogated to those possessed of minds more lawyerly than deliberative, then such crises as besetting the country were to be expected. Prudence, an attribute of knowledge as well as action, presumes access to realms unavailable to the clerks of public life. The ministry, in short, thought and acted like a group of lawyers, not legislators: therein lay their imprudence, and therein lay the source of their colonial policy. Lawyers, Burke argues, “have their strict rule to go by. But legislators ought to do what lawyers cannot; for they have no other rules to bind them but the great principles of reason and equity and the general sense of mankind. These they are bound to obey and follow,” he concludes, “and rather to enlarge and enlighten law by the liberality of legislative reason than to fetter and bind their higher capacity by the narrow constructions of subordinate, artificial justice.” The American war was the product, if not of lawyers, then of those who possessed a similar cast of mind. Appealing to the law, they forgot justice; and in seeking to strengthen the empire, they courted its ruin. At the root of ministerial thinking lay a profound confusion over what constituted the moral order of the nation and what sustained the structure of conviction necessary to its survival. Their imprudence lay, that is, in so forcing the law as to leave no room for compromise, no space for qualified resistance, “no decent retreat in the mutability of human affairs,” and “no medium between insolent victory and infamous defeat.” Possessed of power but not of the knowledge
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 137
Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
.
137
appropriate to its exercise, the ministry was led by men who could only act— not know how to act, or why, or to what effect—but simply act. For his part, Burke could not imagine anyone “more truly odious and disgusting than an impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a conscience for any other qualification for power but his servility to it, bloated with pride and arrogance, calling for battles which he is not to fight, contending for a violent dominion over which he can never exercise, and satisfied to be himself mean and miserable, in order to render others contemptible and wretched.” Burke’s description is a virtual portrait of the courtier, a political type well known to eighteenth-century audiences and a familiar object of his polemics. In the Letter as in many other of his tracts, the figure is depicted as the very embodiment of those possessed of power but not of the mind or character appropriate to its exercise. At the basis of Burke’s criticism is that authority so constituted suffers not only from lack of information—this much was obvious, and a source of constant wonder to the indefatigable Burke—but also a failure to grasp what we might now call the social psychology of empire. Imperial government presupposed extensive power, and Burke was for the most part comfortable with that fact. But he recognized as well that the effective management of empire required a principle of exchange, of giving a little to gain a great deal. Ultimately, empires cohered when they cohered at all because power was mediated by shared affections—that is what made the exchange possible in the first place. In this context, it is worth noting that Burke was not defending imperialism as such; nor was he speaking of imperial relations in general. Burke’s point, wholly consistent with his conception of prudence throughout the Letter, is that specific and local circumstances ought to shape questions of the proper management of such political relations. In any case, empires stayed together not from coercion but through natural affection of one people for another; if they fell apart, as it appeared England’s was at the moment, it was not through leniency but from overexertion, from destroying historical affections by insisting on the strict application of artificial law. This was why, Burke argues, that no reason could be given “why one people should voluntarily yield any degree of pre-eminence to another, but on the supposition of great affection and benevolence towards them. Unfortunately your rulers, trusting to other things, took no notice of this great principle of connection. From the beginning of this affair,” Burke charged, “they have done all they could to alienate your minds from your own kindred.” The imprudent mind detects occasions for the exercise of power but fails to understand the conditions required for its success. Consequently, histori-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
138
Page 138
.
Prudence
cal and natural bonds of kinship snap when ignored, and thus the one standard embraced by the imprudent—expedience—paradoxically subverts itself. In the absence of such affections, moreover, the superordinate are rendered incapable of “reading” the moral order by which imperial relations are presumably sustained. Motives are misconstrued, effects exaggerated, actions misnamed. Something of this was clearly evident in the ministry’s reaction not only to the American colonists but to her supporters in England: unable to interpret the true meaning of events because unable to see them in relation to the whole, leaders took moderation itself as a sign of extremism. Thus it was with the ministry’s treatment of the colonists’ English supporters. The prudent, by contrast, understood that power is best measured in the smallest possible units; that critics of the government at home (read: Burke and the Rockinghamites) might be looked to as evidence that the affections uniting mother country and colony remained in place. “When any community is subordinately connected with another, Burke explains, “the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior, which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favor. It is a powerful corrective to such a very rational cause of fear, if the inferior body can be made to believe, that the party inclination or political views of several in the principle state, will induce them to in some degree to counteract this blind and tyrannic partiality.” In this way, argues Burke, “by the mediation of those healing principles (call them good or evil) troublesome discussions are brought to some sort of adjustment; and every hot controversy is not a civil war.” Like John Locke before him, Burke was deeply impressed by the role trust was made to play in the nature, conduct, and fortunes of constitutional government. Coerced neither from above by the Crown nor from below by the mob, such collectives operated by a kind of rough assent to the scope and limitations of power. Thus while it was true at a certain level of abstraction that the ministry had a right to tax the colonies, that fact alone did not constitute a sufficient warrant for doing so. To exercise power inconsiderate of time, place, and temper was to violate such trust and so violate the conditions of community itself. Now, if this was so with respect to domestic affairs, a fortiori it was especially the case with the Americans. The level of trust required to retain them as subjects was proportionate to the differentials of power which defined imperial rule. Affections, connections, trust, salutary neglect, prudence, rested in and were motivated by the knowledge that these conditions of community were not created by law alone. In certain contexts, Burke
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 139
Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
.
139
writes, a given law may well be granted legal existence even as it was much wiser to permit its legal existence only. So truly has prudence (constituted as the God of this lower world) the entire dominion over every exercise of power, committed into its hands; and yet I have lived to see prudence and conformity to circumstances, wholly set at naught in our late controversies, and treated as if they were the most contemptible and irrational of all things. I have heard it a hundred times very gravely alleged, that in order to keep power in the wind, it was necessary . . . to exert it in those very points where it was most likely to be resisted and the least likely to be productive of any advantage. To step back from the text for a moment: we are reminded thus far of the strategic and polemical work that Burke’s appeal to prudence is made to do. A great deal of that work is negative, a means to attack, tirelessly, those “who have split and anatomized the doctrine of free Government, as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity, and not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling.” More positively, Burke finds in the principle a means to vindicate himself and his partisan alliances. Either way, his arguments assume their rhetorical force as they dramatically exhibit individual motives, qualities of mind, and specific actions and events. This much, we have seen, is consistent with the text’s general stress on the particular: in Burke’s view, that is where the political shows itself. As a more general set of propositions, however, prudence designates qualities of community in addition to mind; civic prudence consisted in organized efforts to act for the common good and against those who would despoil it. Inasmuch as the Letter was a party document it may be said both to represent the creed of the Rockinghamites and to speak itself onto the national stage. It is designed, that is, at once as a defense of principle and as a principled act. The Letter concludes with a sustained defense of party and affords us a final opportunity to see how prudence gets activated on its behalf. If prudence is to carry the weight of political principle, then it must be said to cohere within organized, visible, and articulate wholes. Anything less or contrary, as the critique of court power illustrates, fails prudential standards and signals corruption in the vitals of government. But if the court was by definition and in practice incapable of acting on such principle, then who or what was? The answer—party organization—was perhaps not so obvious in Burke’s day as our own, or at least it was complicated in different ways. In the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
140
Page 140
.
Prudence
first place, the very idea of party remained an object of real skepticism and polemical disfavor. Burke had in 1770 delivered a memorable defense of it in Discontents, arguably the most compelling case ever made on behalf of partisan politics. Even so, it would be some time before English proscriptions against party were to be replaced by its apparent inevitability, and Burke for one knew that the battle was far from over. In the second place, the Rockinghamite record of late seemed to many unconvincing as evidence for the virtues of party action: if anything, its shifting convictions and varying expressions of retreat and aggression illustrated precisely what was wrong with parties generally. Third, and more intractably, the defense of party as a mode of prudential action ran up against popular distrust of public figures. Politicians were in this view invariably corrupt because the power they commanded debased human nature; how then was it even possible to talk about prudence in politics, much less in their partisan form? Burke’s attempt to resolve the problem is key to the rhetorical work of the Letter and to the conception of prudence it promotes. Experience, he will argue, not ungrounded speculation, indicated how false was the skepticism against politicians and party: on the one hand, that distrust was itself a product of the court, hence antipolitical; and on the other, it presumed a wholly unrealistic and idealized standard of human nature that was inappropriate to the realms of political action. “Never expecting to find perfection in men,” Burke reasons, “and not looking for divine attributes in created beings . . . I have found much human virtue. I have seen not a little public spirit; a real subordination of interest to duty; and a decent and regulated sensibility to honest fame and reputation.” None of this was to deny the obvious: some politicians were no better than their counterparts at Court. But to move from that observation to condemnation of politics as such was subversive of polity itself. “A conscientious person would rather doubt his own judgment,” Burke concludes, “than condemn his species. He would say, I have observed without attention, or judged upon erroneous maxims; I trusted to profession, when I ought to have attended to conduct. Such a man will grow wise, not malignant, by his acquaintance with the world. But he that accuses mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.” The most insidious effect of such an antipolitics is that it eliminates the rationale for organized nonviolent resistance. If one presumes corruption, one denies the possibility of change. And without such a rationale, without a collective provision for and accommodation to organized opposition, constitutionally legitimate action is impossible. As Burke conceived of it, party could check this kind of corrosive cynicism by featuring exemplary men in organized bodies, acting collectively on behalf of the best interests of the people.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 141
Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
.
141
In their very union as representative these leaders found source, medium, and warrant for prudential action, for here they discovered the means to effectively oppose the unchecked exercise of ministerial power. Prudence is in this respect a power only as it is political; and it is political only as it presumes a capacity for organized, authorized, and effective opposition. For his part, and “from much experience, from no little thinking, and from comparing a great variety of things,” Burke was persuaded that “the last hopes of preserving the spirit of the English constitution, or of re-uniting the dissipated members of the English race upon a common plan of tranquility and liberty, does entirely depend on the firm and lasting union of such men.” Twenty years after the outbreak of hostilities with America, Burke’s commitment to the wisdom of active restraints remained unshaken. Still, he wrote plaintively, “Time has not yet been able to teach the grand lesson of his own value; that, in every question of moral and political prudence, it is the choice of the moment which renders the measure serviceable or useless, noxious or salutary.”14 If there was a politics of prudence to which Burke could be said to adhere, it rested in the ability, not so much to apply maxims to resolve exigencies, but to act out historical truths in their particularity. Prudence was in this sense, not a set of principles to be availed of, but a performative modality, a way of thinking, being, and acting in the world. It is a form of political practice that could be made positive and powerful through attention to rhetorical nuance, that if transferable, could be transferred in and through exemplary action, and that if exemplary, could expose abuses of power, defend liberty, and promote civic life.
conclusion Prudence offered to Burke as to others before and since a means to moralize power, to distinguish between its varieties, sources, and effects. Power, like prudence, had for Burke no meaningful status except as it was organized into practice; he seems not interested in it, at least, on any other basis. We have no systematic set of reflections on power as such: Burke’s eye turns, as it will again in the imperial struggles with Ireland, India, and France, toward the evident and organized expressions of power as played out in a dialectics of imposition and resistance. The Letter of 1777, in any case, sets on display just this dynamic between ministerial excess and oppositional prudence. We need now to ask what kind of knowledge it is that may be said to distinguish the prudent from their adversaries. In other words, if Burke can be seen laying claim to a privileged mode of acting, that claim presupposes a preferred way
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
142
Page 142
.
Prudence
of knowing. Just what do the prudent know that most of us do not? The question does not admit of ready answers, or at least not answers that readily satisfy. We do not get very far by noting that what thinkers like Burke know is how to act; we want to learn what it is that he must know in order to know how to act. The question is greatly complicated by the very meaning of prudence, a chief feature of which demands that no wedge be driven between knowing and doing. At a minimum, we understand that prudential action does not rest in the application of abstract rules, theories, or maxims. That is precisely what prudence is not about, and that is just what Burke so memorably accuses his opponents of doing. Throughout his public career, in fact, Burke insisted that the unchecked application of “visionary schemes” was bound to fail—not because the scheme did not fit, but because it was made to fit too well. What they did not know and what the prudent do is how to act in time. A version of this claim is evident in the rhetorical and prudential lore as kairos, or timely action appropriate to immediate situations. The principle is clearly basic to our understanding of prudence generally, but I wish to situate the point, with Burke’s help, even more fundamentally. Put another way: the problem with thus fixing on kairos is that it allows us to again beg the question of how one comes to know what will count as timely action. Experience, say the politicians, but thus circumscribed, they have little offer beyond the realm of the immediate. God, say the devout, but thus enlightened, they have difficulty meeting the demands of civic life. To the extent that an epistemology may be said to support Burke’s conception of prudence, it will refer neither to experience nor to the transcendent but to history. To know oneself as a being in history is to know how to act in time—not by virtue of applying hoary truths to specific situations, but by acting in the knowledge of lessons learned. Virtually every major tract, address, and public letter of Burke’s long career presses hard on this point: immediate circumstances present their own distinctive demands, and must be met accordingly; this does not mean, however, that the actor is thrown exclusively on his own resources. The kind of historical knowledge summoned by Burke is a knowledge of particular circumstances and general tendencies. And if there was one lesson to be acted upon here, it was that when the powerful, in their haste to expand and strengthen their province, impose theoretical abstractions upon the body politic, that body will suffer and, as in the present case, disintegrate. Prudential knowledge, knowing how to act in time and therefore in timely ways, is in this context knowing how to act slowly. Again, such a view does not diminish the efficacy of such action; quite the opposite, to act slowly in
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 143
Edmund Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
.
143
these circumstances is to conspicuously resist the power of those who virtually act out of time, incognizant, that is, of the lessons afforded by history. How are we to act, then, when confronted by the imprudent exercise of power? Not by appealing to still loftier and equally inapplicable abstractions: that simply reproduces the problem. In order to answer the question, we need a rhetorical complement to the epistemology invoked, a medium or means with which to act in such knowledge. Here the notion of “coarse texture” loops us back to previous observations and allows us to plot the following entailments. Prudence refers at once to a type of knowledge and a type of doing; it is expressed as a way of acting in time, acting, that is, in the knowledge of history; to thus know and act is to understand the moral order of things and the conduct appropriate to their sustenance and growth; prudence so conceived is also a way of discerning its opposite, namely, modes of reasoning and acting in violation of historically accrued knowledge; this capacity to discern is also and necessarily a capacity to act against such violations—that is, prudence funds a rhetorical obligation to resist, to stay the hand of power when that hand is played too quickly. It is the texture of prudence—its “coarse” formulation as an act of speech—that serves to slow down the blithe impositions of power. What history provides by way of propositional content (the “maxims of our forefathers”) to this end, rhetoric provides by way of form, design, and strategy. Power in this sense is not to be just resisted, but resisted deliberatively, as if the movement of power from source to object is retarded as it transverses the coarse planes of the rhetorical act.
notes 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Prudence,” in The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 131. 2. For a splendid treatment of Burke’s reputation in English popular culture, see Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 3. Emerson, “Prudence,” 131. 4. For further elaboration on these themes, see Stephen H. Browne, Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993). 5. Burke, “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. W. M. Elofson and John A. Woods, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 3:318. All further citations are to this edition. 6. I treat this argument at greater length in Browne, Virtue, 45–98. 7. For the classic instance of Burke’s art of apologia, see especially Burke, “Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election,” in Elofson and Woods, Writings and Speeches, 3:620–64. 8. Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with America,” in Elofson and Woods, Writings and Speeches, 3:120.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
144
Page 144
.
Prudence
9. Burke, “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,” in The Works of Edmund Burke (Boston: Little, Brown, 1889), 1:530. 10. Gerald Chapman, Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 2. For an especially critical treatment of Burke’s thought on this score, see Frank O’Gorman, “Party and Burke: The Rockingham Whigs,” Government and Opposition 3 (1968): 92–110, and John Brewer, “Party and the Double Cabinet: Two Facets of Burke’s Thoughts,” Historical Journal 14 (1971): 501. Partisan readings of Burke are exemplified, on the one hand, by Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953), and, on the other, by Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11. Joel Weinsheimer, Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 331. 12. I rely here on the editors’ comments in Elofson and Woods, Writings and Speeches, 3:288–89. 13. For further situational and rhetorical features of the text, see especially Donald C. Bryant, “The Rhetorical Art of Edmund Burke: A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol,” in Bryant, Rhetorical Dimensions in Criticism (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1973), 91–118. 14. Burke to Sir Hercules Langrishe, May 26, 1796, in Harvey C. Mansfield, Selected Letters of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 437.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 145
6 Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies revolution, constitution, and slavery
James Jasinski
Recent studies by Eugene Garver, Victoria Kahn, Michael Leff, and others suggest that a richer understanding of, and a renewed appreciation for, the possibilities of both rhetorical practice and prudential action can be developed by engaging practical discursive performances through a particular method of interpretive analysis. Dilip Gaonkar summarizes this hermeneutic strategy as an effort to “thicken . . . concepts through grounded critical readings.”1 Grounded critical readings attempt to amplify our understanding of theoretical concepts by exploring how a particular concept is manifest in the texture, structure, or substance of discursive practice. Given this broad goal of enhancing theory through critical practice, the immediate methodological question for the study of prudence is how can we detect the presence of prudential action or prudential thinking in rhetorical performance. This chapter proposes two interrelated ways of responding to this question. Since, as Garver points out, prudence is “easier to perform than to account for” (Machiavelli, 12), one way to study prudence in practice would be to focus on “paradigmatic prudent acts” (164). A closely related alternative to the paradigmatic prudent act is the public controversy.2 During periods of significant public controversy, political communities confront in a rather clear way the indeterminacy and contingency of human existence.3 The discursive
145
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
146
Page 146
.
Prudence
negotiation of public controversy, to at least some degree, inevitably assumes a very general prudential form: the community attempts to bring wisdom to bear in an effort to coordinate human action and fashion solutions to public problems. But many significant public controversies are protracted; and as they unfold, rival conceptions of wisdom and its relation to action can emerge. This tendency leads to a second way of locating prudence. The forms of practical wisdom that communities deploy in an effort to negotiate contingency and indeterminacy—the various rules, norms, and maxims that constitute the practical, as opposed to the more abstract theoretical, history of prudence— congeal into different discursive systems, into different prudential idioms. This chapter seeks to reconstruct two such idioms which have had a substantial impact in Anglo-American political life. Given the way practical wisdom most often manifests itself in periods of public controversy, three crucial antebellum controversies constitute the focus of this chapter. The British colonists who confronted the problem of imperial relations and the question of revolution, and the subsequent American citizens who faced the interrelated questions of political ideology and governmental structure as well as the challenge posed by the institution of slavery to American political ideals and practices, did not engage these controversial issues in a conceptual vacuum. American colonists and citizens were able to draw upon a wide array of conceptual and ideological resources. A major objective of the chapter is to illustrate how Americans appropriated one such resource: the prudential heritage of Renaissance republicanism. Extending some suggestive remarks in J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment,4 I argue that this Renaissance heritage is bifurcated between two competing idioms organized around the “titular” terms5 “audacity” and “accommodation.” The next section provides a brief outline of this bifurcated Renaissance heritage.6 Subsequent sections trace the career of the tension between the idioms of audacity and accommodation. During the course of the controversy between the colonies and Great Britain, audacity displaced (without completely replacing) accommodation as the principal guide for public action. In an effort “to form a more perfect union” in the late 1780s, Americans again struggled with the conflicting impulses contained in the idioms of audacity and accommodation. The practical result of that struggle, the United States Constitution, represents a precarious, unfinalized, and ultimately unfinalizable, resolution of that struggle. As the nineteenth century unfolded, the idioms of audacity and accommodation tended to harden and calcify, rendering each unable to confront the practical problems arising out of the institution of slavery.7
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 147
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
147
the prudential heritage of renaissance republicanism Garver, Kahn, and Pocock, among others, illustrate the centrality of Renaissance political thought to an understanding of prudence and its potential relationship to rhetorical action. In particular, Pocock’s discussion of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, principally in chapter 8 of The Machiavellian Moment, reveals an important tension in the Renaissance political imagination that constitutes a significant part of the prudential heritage of the Western republican tradition. The uniqueness of Renaissance political thought lies, Pocock suggests, in its formulation of the interrelated problems of time and contingency. The idea of the “Machiavellian moment,” Pocock writes, “denotes . . . the moment in conceptualized time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability” (Machiavellian Moment, viii). Renaissance political agents and theorists were no longer able to take their political community and its modes of practice for granted; according to Pocock, they had to confront the mutability of their political existence. Pocock endeavors to reconstruct the languages and concepts through which Renaissance thinkers engaged the finite temporality and contingency of their political world. His inquiry uncovers an important tension embedded in the linguistic heteroglossia of the period: “the antithesis of audacity and prudence” (198, 240). Central figures in this idiomatic and conceptual struggle are Machiavelli and Guicciardini. In chapter 8, Pocock devotes considerable attention to Guicciardini’s Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze. As one moves through the text, Pocock argues, “two codes of value [become] visible, both representing poles of Guicciardini’s own personality: on the one hand, the ideal of excellence displayed in public action; on the other, that esperienza and prudenzia which only an elite has time to acquire. Throughout his life Guicciardini felt the tension between ambition and caution, and it is fascinating to observe how he moves in the opposite direction to Machiavelli when faced with the choice between audacity and prudence” (232). In the Dialogo, Guicciardini writes: “So it is necessary that governors of states should be men of prudence, vigilantly attentive to the smallest accident, and weighing every possible consequence in order to obviate at the beginning, and eliminate as far as possible, the power of chance and fortune.”8 Commenting on this passage, Pocock maintains “there could be no clearer statement of Guicciardini’s refusal to enter into that world of virtù that so fascinated Machiavelli. Virtù as audacity, the dynamic and perhaps
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
148
Page 148
.
Prudence
creative power of a prince or a people in arms, sought to dominate fortune rather than eliminate it. . . . But Guicciardini is identifying (if not replacing) virtù with prudence, the steersman’s or doctor’s power to observe events and accommodate oneself to them, rather than seeking to shape or determine them; his is a politics of maneuver rather than of action” (Machiavellian Moment, 238). In his analysis of Guicciardini, Pocock uncovers the prudential norm of accommodation. Prudential accommodation is depicted as a generally passive mode of existence: “The prudent man,” we are told, “waits upon events” (198). This policy of temporization Pocock detects in Guicciardini (268) seems predicated on an important linguistic prefiguration: for Guicciardini, time is understood as a solution to political turbulence. Guicciardini can defend temporization because time appears as a kind of natural balm for the strains of political life.9 Guicciardinian prudential accommodation also reveals itself in “the ideal of caution” (233). In the Dialogo, Pocock writes, Guicciardini “adjures his readers to fling away ambition and be content with what is possible” (241) or “the world as it is” (244). Both Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Pocock summarizes, “depict the individual in the post-civic world; but Machiavelli’s individual is a ruler seeking to shape events through virtù in the sense of audacity, Guicciardini’s a patrician seeking to adapt himself to events through prudence” (269). Audacious action is a force that can mold or shape events and, hence, control political situations; prudential action is an ability to observe, adapt, and adjust to political reality. Each form of action, in different ways, is a strategy for responding to, or coping with, the contingency and flux of human reality. In Machiavelli and Guicciardini, audacity and prudential accommodation appear as rival forms of political imagination and action. But they are not mutually exclusive or absolutely distinct from each other. Pocock contends that “both men hold that audacity and prudence are appropriate in different circumstances, that these circumstances are brought to us by fortuna, and that it is exceedingly difficult for the individual to tell what they require” (269). In fact, Pocock maintains later in his study, individuals constantly negotiate the imperatives of audacity and prudential accommodation as they struggle to determine “the proper blend of prudence and audacity” (543). Pocock’s reading of Machiavelli and Guicciardini illustrates, I maintain, not simply a conceptual contrast but an immanent conceptual struggle. Audacity and accommodation are different modes of action through which individuals and communities confront human contingency and uncertainty and the political controversies they entail. If prudence is considered a general term for describing this confrontation, audacity and accommodation
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 149
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
149
become rival, yet linked, prudential strategies. Garver’s reconstruction of Machiavellian prudence as a form of stable innovation appears to make a similar point. Prudence, Garver suggests, should not be conceptualized as “compromise,” a simple, stable middle ground between antithetical extremes (107). It is a kind of practical oxymoron: a momentary, provisional stabilization of antagonistic, but not mutually exclusive, forces and impulses that enables decision and action. Garver’s rendering of prudence as a practical oxymoron helps us recognize that audacity and accommodation are antagonistic yet symbiotically linked titular or master terms that shaped the terrain of a Renaissance conceptualization of prudence. The play between these terms and the idioms they encapsulate, the struggle to determine the proper blend of audacity and accommodation, is continually enacted in rhetorical performances, especially those which are responsive to significant social and political controversies. Describing the particular terms and performative norms and gestures that constitute and textualize these idioms, and charting the interanimation between the idioms, makes visible a shifting, historically grounded, sense of prudence.10 Audacity and accommodation function as the titular terms for rival prudential terminological clusters or idioms. The idiom governed by the term “audacity” also includes subordinate terms and norms such as timeliness,11 ambition, innovation, daring, novelty, risk, energy, and, perhaps most important, public action. The idiom of prudential accommodation is inscribed in subordinate terms and norms such as deferral or delay, hesitancy, circumspection, caution, adaptation, moderation, and restraint (particularly with respect to public action). These idioms function, in part, as vocabularies of motive. They enable public advocates to negotiate the exigencies and constraints of particular controversies as well as the existential conditions of contingency and uncertainty. Audacity and accommodation represent the prudential idioms Americans inherited from Renaissance republicanism. They constitute an important part of the conceptual heritage within which the American colonists, followed by the citizens of the newly constituted United States, struggled with the problems of revolution, constitution, and slavery.
inventing prudence in revolutionary agitation A perceived shift in Great Britain’s imperial policy in 1765 triggered vigorous colonial opposition. Britain then rescinded its initial effort at policy innovation, the Stamp Act, but Parliament reasserted its imperial prerogatives by adopting a series of new regulations and tax duties in 1767. Opposition and
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
150
Page 150
.
Prudence
resistance to these new initiatives developed slowly in the colonies. John Dickinson was a principal figure in the emerging opposition movement, leading the way with his epistolary series “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.”12 Initially appearing in Philadelphia newspapers, and then reprinted and widely circulated in pamphlet form, the “Letters” helped energize a quiescent public. On a conceptual level, Dickinson linked the Townshend duties to the already discredited Stamp Act, subverting the claim made by policy supporters that the two measures were radically different. On a practical level, Dickinson negotiated a recurrent dilemma of protest rhetoric: how to reconcile the potentially incompatible goals of public action while keeping it restrained.13 He confronted this problem, in part, by attempting to orchestrate the inherited idioms of prudence. In the process, Dickinson would fashion a representative performance of colonial American prudence. Dickinson’s opening letter established the general strategy pursued throughout the “Letters.” Dickinson constructed a pastoral voice and perspective through which contemporary events could be assessed and addressed.14 Adopting the pastoral perspective allowed Dickinson to judge the New York assembly’s noncompliance with the Quartering Act as “imprudent” (I, 7). But this judgment was not an endorsement of colonial inaction. Turning to the question of what Pennsylvania should do about Parliament’s suspension of the New York assembly, he wrote: “With concern I have observed that two assemblies of this province have sat and adjourned, without taking any notice of this act. It may perhaps be asked, what would have been proper for them to do? I am by no means fond of inflammatory measures. I detest them. . . . But a firm, modest exertion of a free spirit, should never be wanting on public occasions. It appears to me, that it would have been sufficient for the assembly, to have ordered our agents to represent to the King’s ministers, their sense of the suspending act, and to pray for its repeal” (I, 11–12). This effort at carefully balancing resistance and restraint is sustained throughout the “Letters.” In his argument, Dickinson strives to construct a middle ground: the colonists must avoid the “benumbing stillness of overweening sloth” as well as the “feverish activity of that ill-informed zeal” (XII, 137).15 Dickinson expresses this balance through antithetical couplings like “firm but peaceful” (III, 29) or “sedate yet firm” (III, 30) and develops the argument by encouraging moderation while attacking audacity and ambition,16 criticizing both rashness and passivity, and defending vigilant action while urging restraint.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 151
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
151
The third letter illustrates the struggle to orchestrate the idioms by constructing thematic balance. Dickinson opens with an acknowledgment that some have criticized his first two letters. Appropriating the voice of an anonymous critic, Dickinson notes that since Great Britain is strong and the colonists weak, “we had better be quiet” (28). Agitating for colonial rights will not have any effect; if anything, they will cause “riots and tumults” that will “only draw down heavier displeasure upon us” (28). In response, Dickinson turns to the “prudent and glorious” colonial response to the Stamp Act. He asks his critics: “Ought the colonies at that time, instead of acting as they did, to have trusted for relief, to the fortuitous events of futurity?” (28–29). Rather than wait upon events, hoping for the best, the colonists seized the moment and acted, and they were right to do so.17 But Dickinson balances his encomium to the Stamp Act resistance movement with an effort to warn his fellow colonists “against those who may at any time endeavor to stir you up, under the pretences of patriotism, to any measure disrespectful to our sovereign and our mother country. Hot, rash, disorderly proceedings, injure the reputation of a people” (30). Dickinson here intermingles themes drawn from the rival idioms. Caution is further urged in the “Letters” both implicitly and explicitly. English history, Dickinson tells his reader, affords numerous examples when force was an appropriate response to tyrannical oppression. But Dickinson maintains that “justice and prudence” reveal that an “appeal to the sword,” even when justified, is a horrible error in judgment. The “calamities attending on war out weigh those preceding it” (32); in other words, certain forms of public action, even if justifiable in the abstract, are nevertheless imprudent and should be avoided whenever possible.18 Dickinson’s “morale” is rendered explicit on the next page: “We cannot act with too much caution in our disputes. Anger produces anger; and differences that might be accommodated by kind and respectful behavior, may by imprudence be changed to an incurable rage” (33). In the peroration, Dickinson creates a final balance. He urges his readers: “Let us behave like dutiful children, who have received unmerited blows from a beloved parent. Let us complain to our parents; but let our complaints speak at the same time, the language of affliction and veneration.” But, if such appeals are unsuccessful, Dickinson acknowledges that a more aggressive posture may be necessary: “Let us then take another step, by withholding from Great Britain, all the advantages she has been used to receive from us” (34–35). The “children” are called to boycott the “parents.” But more than that, Dickinson urges his readers to follow his lead and orchestrate
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
152
Page 152
.
Prudence
multiple idioms. They need to craft complaints that weave together the languages of “affliction and veneration” and, in the process, the idioms of audacity and accommodation. Dickinson’s recollection of British history provides additional grounding for his appeal. In the eleventh letter, he notes early on that a constant problem in history is that “a people does not reform with moderation” (118). The challenge to men of prudence, therefore, is to act now in such a way as to render future vigorous popular action in defense of rights unnecessary. To do this, a “spirit of apprehension” toward the exercise of power, an eighteenth-century republican version of a hermeneutics of suspicion, must be adopted (118). Had the British exercised this vigilance in the seventeenth century, Dickinson suggests, it might not have been necessary for Cromwell and his followers to execute Charles I and abolish the monarchy (118–19). The crucial issue is a matter of timing. Without forceful, potentially audacious, early action, grievances tend to be “multiplied” and “acts, that might by themselves have been upon many considerations excused or extenuated, derived a contagious malignancy and odium from other acts, with which they were connected” (119). This seemingly inevitable articulatory process, where the separate acts of the Crown are woven together to reveal conspiratorial “tyrannical designs,” renders a prudential response nearly impossible. In Britain, Dickinson tells the reader, “it was in vain for prudent and moderate men to insist, that there was not necessity to abolish royalty” (119). This brief narrative of the origins of the British civil war advances one of Dickinson’s dominant claims: the possibility of prudent action is preserved through preventative measures.19 But vigilance and resistance, if not rigorously controlled or restrained, can easily degenerate into the “hot, rash, disorderly proceedings” about which Dickinson tries to caution his readers. So the issue of timing is joined with the need for constant balance and restraint. Audacity must be orchestrated with accommodation. Dickinson’s call for constant vigilance and timely resistance is, therefore, qualified and moderated elsewhere in the text. Earlier, in the sixth letter, he advances a form of strict textualism when he asserts that “the nature of any impositions laid by parliament on the colonies, must determine the design in laying them”; in other words, look to the text to find the motive. But, he then confesses, “it may not be easy in every instance to discover that design. Whenever it is doubtful, I think submission cannot be dangerous; nay it must be right: for, in my opinion, there is no privilege the colonies claim, which they ought, in duty and prudence, more earnestly to maintain and defend, than the authority of the British parliament to regulate
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 153
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
153
the trade of all her dominions” (65). Because the motives and intentions guiding policy may not initially be clear, it becomes difficult to follow the rule Dickinson suggests at the end of the ninth letter: “oppose a disease at its beginning” (100). To frame the tension that emerges in the text in terms of twentieth-century interpretive theory: Dickinson’s accommodating textualism conflicts with his more audacious hermeneutics of suspicion. The “Letters” reveal how Dickinson, like Guicciardini centuries before, struggled with the conflicting impulses emanating from the idioms of audacity and accommodation. By blending his defense of the right to limited resistance through nonimportation and his advocacy of early detection of, and action in response to, British designs on American liberty with his call for caution and restraint, Dickinsonian prudence was instantiated as a balance between the idioms. But as events continued to unfold and circumstances changed, Dickinson came to rely more and more on the idiom and posture of accommodation. Much to his dismay, Dickinson’s “dutiful children” (X, 109) were becoming rebellious teenagers. And with the shifts in circumstance and attitude during the 1770s came alterations in the culture’s understanding of prudence.20 The shift from Dickinson’s politics of moderate resistance and accommodation to a more audacious understanding of prudence is visible in an anonymous pamphlet published in Philadelphia in 1776. Like Dickinson a decade earlier, the author of The Alarm; or, an Address to the People of Pennsylvania on the Late Resolve of Congress criticizes a recent decision made by a colonial assembly.21 But rather than, like Dickinson, attack an assembly for rashness, The Alarm’s author critiques the Pennsylvania assembly for acting with excessive caution and moderation. The Alarm addresses one key issue: should the Pennsylvania assembly follow the directive issued by the Continental Congress and begin to draft a state constitution? One innovative aspect of the pamphlet is the author’s claim that in order to be legitimate, a new constitution should be drafted by a special constitutional convention. Of more direct importance to the shifting contours of prudence are the author’s reasons for not trusting the sitting assembly with the task. The author claims that the assembly has, essentially, “disqualified” themselves because of their inappropriate behavior during the current term. Their most notorious decision, according to the author, was “the unwise and impolitic instructions which they have arbitrarily imposed on the Delegates for this province [to the Continental Congress] . . . forbidding them in the strongest and most positive terms to consent to any change in government, should such be moved in Congress” (323). This act of hesitation and timidity,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
154
Page 154
.
Prudence
the author claims, “became a precedent to such other provinces as might be induced to believe that the Pennsylvania Assembly, by its central situation for intelligence, was possessed of some secret, which afforded grounds to expect a reconciliation, and under that delusion they likewise issued instructions to the same purpose; and thus, by circulating a false hope, the hands of power were relaxed, and a poisonous prudence was produced in our councils, at a time when a direct contrary spirit ought to have taken place” (324; emphasis added).22 This unspecified “contrary spirit,” considering the overall innovative thrust of the pamphlet, appears to be a gesture toward the practical norms associated with audacity. Beginning to build toward his conclusion, the pamphlet’s author returns to the topic of prudence: “The die of this day will cast the fate of posterity in this province. We can no longer confide in the House of Assembly; they have, by a feeble and intimidating prudence held us up as sacrifices to a bloody-minded enemy, they have thrown cold water on the necessary military proceedings of this province and continent, and have been abettors, together with their collegues [sic], in procrastinating the expedition to Canada, which, by that delay only, may probably not now succeed” (327; emphasis added). The appeal to the locus of the irreparable immediately establishes the centrality of time to the author’s understanding of prudence.23 On this issue Dickinson and the anonymous author of The Alarm find some common ground.24 Where Dickinson emphasized the prudential nature of early action, The Alarm focuses on the imprudence of procrastination and delay. In The Alarm, the virtue of patience as well as the politics of postponement, deferral, or delay, potentially useful prescriptions for action in situations where parties are oriented to reaching a compromise, are transformed into imprudent vices. Like Dickinson in certain passages in the “Letters,” The Alarm urges innovative action by frequently speaking in the idiom of audacity. In his 1777 sermon “An Antidote to Toryism,” Massachusetts minister Nathaniel Whitaker develops a similar critique. Wanting to alert his listeners and readers to the signs of Toryism, Whitaker notes how some people, “who talk much for liberty[,] . . . are so prudent that they will waste away days, yea months, to consider” proposed defensive measures. These people, he continues, “are ever full of their wise cautions, but never zealous to execute any important project. When such men get into public stations—especially if they fill a seat in our public councils—they greatly endanger the state. They protract business, and often defeat the best councils. Prudence and moderation,” Whitaker asserts, “are amiable virtues; and the modest mind feels pain in being suspected as sanguine, rash, and imprudent.” But the Guicciardinian legacy of linking prudence and accommodation constrains
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 155
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
155
public action. The tradition of accommodation “gives the overprudent great advantage to obstruct every vigorous measure, which they brand with the name of rashness.” If a vigorous measure should be adopted, “the next motion of the prudent man is to delay the execution, that the happy moment, on which all depends, may be lost.” Whitaker concludes this section of the sermon: “Prudence and caution are highly necessary. But to be always deliberating, and opposing vigorous measures, and slow in executing, at such a crisis as this, is strongly characteristic of an inhabitant of Meroz.”25 The defects of accommodation, and the importance of audacity and timeliness, are also central features in the most famous pamphlet of the Revolutionary struggle: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.26 Paine’s invective against the policy of reconciliation can be read as a sustained assault on the practical norms of moderation and accommodation. His attack on monarchy generally, as well as his frontal assault on George III, and his call for immediate independence are developed through the idiom of prudential audacity. Reconciliation, Paine writes, is the policy of “interested men, who are not to be trusted, weak men who cannot see, prejudiced men who will not see, and a certain set of moderate men who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this Continent than all the other three” (90).27 Whereas Dickinson labored to restrain the passions and promote moderation and deliberation, Paine works feverishly to unleash them and discredit a deliberative resolution to the controversy. “Men of passive tempers,” Paine writes, “look somewhat lightly over the offences of Great Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, Come, come we shall be friends again for all this. But examine the passions and feelings of mankind: bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature, and then tell me whether you can hereafter love, honour, and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land? If you cannot do all these, then you are only deceiving yourselves, and by your delay bringing ruin upon posterity” (90). Paine is sensitive to the possibility that his appeals to his reader’s passions may be judged inappropriate and imprudent. He explicitly attempts to justify his appeal: “This is not inflaming or exaggerating matters, but trying them by those feelings and affections which nature justifies, and without which we should be incapable of discharging the social duties of life, or enjoying the felicities of it” (91). The nature of the situation, Paine seems to suggest, renders his emotional appeals appropriate.28 Paine also demonstrates an acute awareness of the psychological allure of an accommodating procrastination. Paine’s concluding paragraph to the main body of the pamphlet recognizes the attractiveness of deferring or putting off
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
156
Page 156
.
Prudence
action but he refuses to allow his readers to backslide; independence, however novel or frightening, is the only solution. “These proceedings,” Paine admits, “may at first seem strange and difficult, but like all other steps which have already passed over, will in a little time become familiar and agreeable: and until an independence is declared, the Continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity” (111). While Common Sense and The Alarm illustrate a shift toward the idiom of audacity in the latter stages of the Revolutionary struggle, the moderate or accommodating voice was not absent during this pivotal period. Dickinsonian ambivalence is inscribed in what is perhaps the greatest rhetorical effort of the American Revolution—the Declaration of Independence. When Jefferson acknowledges that “prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes,” his language reveals traces of caution and restraint, marks of prudential accommodation.29 Jefferson’s personal letters illustrate more clearly his use of the idiom of accommodation. While Jefferson could be a great innovator on the public stage, his private correspondence reveals a commitment to acquiescence and accommodation as cardinal virtues of social life. Writing to his daughter Mary in 1798, Jefferson discusses the “little rules of prudence” that he has found valuable. Among them: “When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it. Meet it with firmness and accommodate every thing to it in the best way practicable” and “if our companion views a thing in a light different from what we do [it is much better] to leave him in quiet possession of his view. What is the use of rectifying him if the thing be unimportant; and if important let it pass for the present, and wait a softer moment and more conciliatory occasion of revising the subject together.”30 Even though Jefferson’s advice is directed specifically at domestic marital harmony, a broader reading is possible since, as Jan Lewis argues, marriage functioned throughout the Revolutionary era as “a metaphor for . . . social and political relationships.”31 An eloquent defender of innovation through independence, Jefferson would remain extremely cautious about the possibilities of political action.32 The colonists’ ability to negotiate the conflicting impulses inscribed in the idioms of audacity and accommodation is perhaps one of the reasons why the American Revolution has served as a political and discursive paradigm for over two hundred years. But the stability of the American experiment in republican government was questioned during the 1780s by a number of
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 157
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
157
prominent political, civic, and business leaders. As a political crisis loomed on the horizon, Americans once again took up the challenge of orchestrating audacity and accommodation.
audacity and accommodation in the american founding Progressive historiography tended to portray the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 as conservative reactionaries trying to tame the excesses of the Revolution. According to this historical tradition, the framers were exceedingly cautious, eminently practical, and thoroughly conservative politicians concerned first and foremost with protecting their class position. This interpretation has been challenged in more recent scholarship. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick paint a portrait of a new generation of political leaders struggling to protect and perpetuate the dynamic innovations of the Revolutionary struggle. More recently, Samuel Beer attempts to reconstruct “the radicalism and audacity of the founders.”33 The play between radicalism and conservatism, innovation and moderation, and audacity and accommodation in the writing and ratification of the Constitution is extremely complex. Two controversial questions, addressed in both the Philadelphia convention and the broader public debate (in both the press and the state ratifying conventions), can illustrate the founders’ negotiation of audacity and accommodation. The first focused on the matter of need: was constitutional reform required at the present moment? Expressing what he took to be the colonists’ ambivalent sentiments, Samuel West, in a 1776 election sermon, maintained: “A wise and good man would be very loth to undermine a constitution that was once fixed and established, although he might discover many imperfections in it; and nothing short of the most urgent necessity would ever induce him to consent to it; because the unhinging of a people from a form of government to which they had been long accustomed might throw them into such a state of anarchy and confusion as might terminate in their destruction, or perhaps, in the end, subject them to the worst kind of tyranny.”34 The dilemma of 1776 reemerged in 1787. While Americans had not been “long accustomed” to the Articles of Confederation, they were devoted to the principles, such as decentralization, that it embodied. As one anonymous anti-federalist put it, the Articles were an “old and venerable fabrick, which sheltered the United States, from the dreadful and cruel storms of a tyrannical British ministry.”35 The cautious reluctance to innovate on the part of at least some Americans
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
158
Page 158
.
Prudence
presented a challenge to the advocates of constitutional reform. As the delegates gathered in Philadelphia, they had to confront three interrelated issues that clustered around the topic of need: first, by what authority could the convention act; second, what degree of innovation was necessary and appropriate given the nation’s situation; and third, how could supporters of a new constitutional structure overcome a desire to leave the question of reform to the operation of “time and habit.”36 The issue of authority emerged slowly in the convention. C. C. Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry raised the problem on May 30 when each expressed reservations regarding what the convention had been authorized to do by the Confederation Congress.37 This issue was not resolved during the initial sessions and was subsequently moved to the margins of the agenda as the delegates considered the general issues raised by the Virginia proposal. The issue resurfaced in the middle of June during the heated debate over the alternative plan submitted by William Patterson of New Jersey. On June 16 both Patterson and John Lansing urged the convention to proceed cautiously. Patterson suggested that “if the confederacy was radically wrong, let us return to our States, and obtain larger powers, not assume them of ourselves” (I, 250). Edmund Randolph of Virginia, responding that same day, exhorted the delegates to “not [be] scrupulous on the point of power. When the salvation of the Republic is at stake, it would be treason to our trust, not to propose what we found necessary. . . . There are certainly reasons of a peculiar nature where the ordinary cautions must be dispensed with; and this is certainly one of them. . . . The present moment is favorable, and is probably the last that will offer” (I, 255). The majority of delegates shared Randolph’s views. James Wilson emphasized that the delegates “be at liberty to propose any thing” (I, 253), and George Mason insisted that the appeal to caution carries “no weight,” since “the fiat is not to be here, but in the people.” Mason also echoed Randolph’s sentiments, particularly the tendency to frame the issue through an ordinary/extraordinary antithesis, that in the present situation “ordinary cautions yielded to public necessity” (I, 338). The interrelated issues of authority, innovation, and time, while not at the top of the delegates’ agenda, were key concerns raised by anti-federalists in the newspaper and pamphlet debate. Anti-federalists insisted that the Philadelphia convention had “no publick authority” to act (“Republican Federalist,” IV, 168). Others amplified this charge: the proposed Constitution is “founded in usurpation” (“Cato,” II, 109); “this convention not only neglected the duty of their appointment, but assumed a power of the most extraordinary kind, they proceeded to destroy the very government which
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 159
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
159
they were solemnly enjoined to strengthen and improve” (“[Pennsylvania] Farmer,” III, 191); and “it was an outrageous violation in the convention on the 17th of September, 1787, to attempt a consolidation of the union, and utterly destroy the confederation and the sovereignty of particular states, when their powers were restricted to the sole and express purpose of revising and amending the confederation” (“Sydney,” VI, 111). As “Sydney’s” objection illustrates, anti-federalists believed the framers were violating the intention that motivated Congress to sanction the convention in the first place. “Cato” maintained that it was not the “intention” of Congress that “our present government should be annihilated” (II, 109). Similarly, the “Republican Federalist” claimed that the framers disregarded the “original design of forming the Convention” (IV, 167). Many anti-federalists shared the concern expressed by the “[Maryland] Farmer” over the “phrenzy of innovation” that appeared to be sweeping the nation. A common fear voiced by anti-federalists was that innovation, once unleashed, would be uncontrollable. “Denatus” insisted that “had they [the Convention] preserved only one article of the union, and built the present constitution to it, the objection of innovation would be unreasonable: But they have done what you know. A more fatal innovation may be made at a future day, for as Junius says, ‘one precedent creates another, they soon accumulate and constitute law ’ ” (V, 261). Luther Martin reiterated this concern in the published version of his report on the convention submitted to the Maryland legislature. Addressing his federalist opponents, Martin maintained: “The same reasons which you now urge for destroying our present federal government, may be urged for abolishing the system which you now propose to adopt; and as the method prescribed by the articles of confederation is now totally disregarded by you, as little regard may be shewn by you to the rules prescribed for the amendment of the new system” (II, 42).38 “The Letters from the Federal Farmer,” one of the most elaborate anti-federal critiques of the proposed constitution, articulated the concern over perpetual usurpation with the issue of time. The “Farmer” averred: “It must be granted, that if men hastily and blindly adopt a system of government, they will as hastily and as blindly be led to alter or abolish it; and changes must ensue, one after another” (II, 224). The “Farmer” continued by calling into question the way most federalists were depicting the national situation: “It is natural for men, who wish to hasten the adoption of a measure, to tell us, now is the crisis—now is the critical moment which must be seized, or all will be lost” (226). Other anti-federalists joined this attack on federalist haste and their definitional construction of urgency. Defending the feasibility of a second
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
160
Page 160
.
Prudence
convention, “An Old Whig” inquired: “Why then is a constitution which affects all the inhabitants of the United States . . . to be so hastily adopted or rejected, that it cannot admit of a revision. . . . Congress may as easily direct the calling [of] another convention, as they did the calling [of] the last. . . . A few months only will be necessary for this purpose; and if we consider the magnitude of the object, we shall deem it well worth a little time and attention” (III, 31). Cautious anti-federalists did not want to rush, or be rushed, to judgment. Federalists responded to these anti-federalist objections in the public press and in the state ratifying conventions. Many scholars consider The Federalist essays of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay as the most exhaustive text produced during the controversy. Essays 37–40, opening the second volume of the papers, treat a series of general topics and objections as a prelude to the defense of federal power that occupies the remaining essays.39 In no. 38, Madison employs an extended medical metaphor as part of a discussion of the problem of innovation and haste. “A patient who finds his disorder daily growing worse, and that an efficacious remedy can no longer be delayed without extreme danger, after coolly revolving his situation and the characters of different physicians, selects and calls in such of them as he judges most capable of administering relief, and best entitled to his confidence.”40 After receiving the recommendations of the physicians, Madison continues, the patient receives conflicting advice; others in the community tell him the proposed remedy is in reality a “poison.” But, Madison notes, these other “authors” cannot agree on an alternative. What should the patients do? He maintains: “And if he found them differing as much from one another as from his first counselors, would he not act prudently in trying the experiment unanimously recommended by the latter, rather than be hearkening to those who could neither deny the necessity of a speedy remedy, nor agree in proposing one?” (234). In the present case, Madison appears to suggest, prudence requires prompt action and a willingness to experiment.41 The controversial issues of innovation and authority are treated in more detail two essays later. Essay 40 focuses on two topics: (1) was the convention authorized by their commission to propose a new constitution; and (2) was their apparently radical action justified by circumstances? Taking up the first topic, Madison reviews the language of the various charges given to the convention. While each state sending delegates developed a separate charge, Madison contends that since they all referred to the recommendations of the 1786 Annapolis conference and the charge by the Confederation Congress, an analysis focusing on these two texts would be sufficient for the task at hand. Madison proposes two hermeneutic “rules of construction” to help determine
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 161
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
161
the meaning of the charges and hence the authority of the convention. The first rule is that “every part of the expression ought, if possible, to be allowed some meaning”; all elements should be read as “conspir[ing] to some common end” (248). The second rule is that “where . . . several parts cannot be made to coincide, the less important should give way to the more important, the means should be sacrificed to the end” (248). Each rule, Madison insists, can be applied to the present case.42 Madison begins with the second rule. Suppose the objects are “irreconcilably at variance,” Madison writes, “which part of the definition ought to have been embraced and which rejected?” (248). For Madison the answer is clear: the primary object of the various charges was to establish a national government adequate to the exigencies of the Union. The means, the existing Articles, must give way to the end. But, Madison continues, applying the first rule, we need not assume that the objects are at variance.43 The supposed incompatibility between the charges of formulating alterations and new provisions for the existing articles and the object of establishing a national government is more apparent than real. Madison tries to shift the burden back on his anti-federal opponents through his manipulation of linguistic ambiguity and the relationship between order and degree.44 “Those who maintain” that the convention exceeded its charge to improve the existing frame of government, Madison contends, “ought at least to make the boundary between that degree of change which lies within the compass of alterations and further provisions and that which amounts to a transmutation of the government” (249). Madison provides additional support for his claim by considering the “fundamental principles” of the Confederation that the convention purportedly abandoned. Madison defends constitutional innovation by recasting it into the “old” language of the Confederation, allowing him to maintain that the “great principles [of the Constitution] . . . may be considered less as absolutely new than as the expansion of principles which are found in the Articles of Confederation” (251). In the opening pages of essay 40, Madison develops a weak defense of political audacity; innovation has been depicted as decidedly noninnovative. A stronger, although not unqualified, defense of innovation and audacity emerges as Madison takes up the topic of circumstantial justification. The issue in need of investigation, Madison maintains, “is how far considerations of duty arising out of the case itself could have supplied any defect of regular authority” (251). Madison’s language initially is cautious, he does not admit any “defect” of authority, but as the discussion unfolds he begins to celebrate the way the convention seized the moment and took decisive action.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
162
Page 162
.
Prudence
The opening move in this section of the essay expands upon an argument introduced earlier that summer in Philadelphia. Madison characterizes the convention’s illocutionary performance as an act of proposing. “It is time now to recollect,” Madison writes, “that the powers were merely advisory and recommendatory.” The convention “have accordingly planned and proposed a Constitution which is to be of not more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed” (252).45 With this understanding of the Constitution’s status in place, Madison turns to an investigation of the circumstances, the “ground on which the convention stood” (252). Madison emphasizes the sense of “crisis” and “anxiety” that permeated the nation. He recalls the Revolutionary struggle when patriots did not demonstrate any “ill-timed scruples, no zeal for adhering to ordinary forms.” They knew that in “all great changes of established government, forms ought to give way to substance” (252–53). But “since it is impossible for the people spontaneously and universally to move in concert towards their object . . . it is therefore essential that such changes be instituted by some informal and unauthorized propositions, made by some patriotic and respectable citizens” (253). Madison amplifies his account of the convention’s heroic leadership and virtuous action by raising a hypothetical situation: suppose the convention had “taken the cold and sullen resolution of disappointing [the nation’s] ardent hopes, of sacrificing substance to forms, of committing the dearest interest of their country to the uncertainties of delay and the hazard of events” (254), or in short, if they had left the nation’s destiny to the winds of fortune. What would be the nation’s verdict? “What judgment,” Madison wonders somewhat disingenuously, “ought to have been pronounced by the impartial world, by the friends of mankind, by every virtuous citizen, on the conduct and character of the assembly?” (254). In Madison’s account, the nation demanded innovation and audacious action, and the convention responded in the only way virtuous patriots could. In the end, Madison tells his reader, “prudent inquiry” (254) requires a similar response: the issue is whether or not the advice of the innovators is good and not where the advice came from, forms should give way to substance, and fears of usurpation should be tamed by a recognition of the needs of the situation. Perhaps sensing a degree of legitimacy in the anti-federalist critique of authority, innovation, and time, federalists such as Madison sought, during the ratification debates and after, to begin bestowing on the Constitution an aura of stability and permanence.46 For example, in essay 49, Madison takes issue with Jefferson’s proposal (made in Notes on the State of Virginia) to resolve
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 163
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
163
questions of constitutional construction by appeals to the people. Madison counters by observing that “frequent appeals would, in great measure, deprive the government of that veneration which time bestows on everything, and without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability” (314). Audacity and innovation are not, then, permanent components of Madison’s political vocabulary or imagination. They might be thought of as necessary evils that are unleashed under certain circumstances. But because they pose a threat to the stability of the government, they must be guarded, bridled, and restrained.47 Perhaps no issue better illustrates the framers’ ambivalence toward audacity than the problem of slavery. America’s “peculiar institution” was a recurrent topic at the Philadelphia convention.48 Three issues brought slavery into the open: apportioning representation, the slave trade, and fugitive slaves.49 The convention’s debates over apportioning representatives intersected with the dispute between the large and small states and with the question of the role of property and wealth in the process of representation. Opposition to counting slaves in the determination of representation was substantial, led by Gouverneur Morris and Elbridge Gerry. As Morris put it in a long speech to the convention: what “principle” allows slaves to be included in apportioning representation? (Farrand, II, 221–23). The unexpressed or implicit principle justifying the three-fifths provision becomes visible when we analyze the strategies employed by its defenders. Three strategies reveal that proponents justified the provision by exploiting the resources of moderation and accommodation. Defenders of the three-fifths ratio first pointed to the “fact” that it was the current status quo.50 James Wilson and C. C. Pinckney both pointed to its existent status when they introduced it as part of an effort to resolve the general issue of apportionment (I, 201). Second, defenders depicted it as a “compromise” or as the “middle ground” between extremes (e.g., I, 581; I, 587). Third, Wilson suggested that the ratio could be “expressed” so that “less umbrage would perhaps be taken against an admission of slaves into the rule of representation” (I, 595). In Wilson’s view, the ratio enabled the convention to employ the strategy of linguistic indirection as a resource for securing the compromise.51 Appeal to the locus of the existent, a middle-ground strategy, and the strategic use of ambiguity functioned as important performative resources in crafting the compromise. Like the issue of representation, the problem of the slave trade was implicated in a number of other disputes, the most important being the question of the extent of congressional power over commerce and the propriety of export and import taxes. Resolution of this question developed through two
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
164
Page 164
.
Prudence
discursive strategies. First, those opposed to granting Congress any power over the slave trade argued disjunctively, effectively severing political from moral issues. Responding to Luther Martin’s claim that the slave trade “was inconsistent with the principles of the revolution” (II, 364), John Rutledge insisted that “religion and humanity had nothing to do with this question— interest alone is the governing principle with Nations” (II, 364). Rutledge’s effort to bracket or defer considerations of morality and abstract principle was not entirely successful; critics such as John Dickinson continued to insist that the trade was “inadmissible on every principle of honor” (II, 372). Other delegates, such as Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, detected the materials for a “bargain” (II, 374) within the controversy. The convention referred the question of the commercial power of the proposed government along with its power over the slave trade to a committee that was charged with discovering a “moderate and middle ground” (II, 374–75). The committee crafted a compromise strategy, strongly endorsed by a coalition of delegates from the Deep South and the commercial Northeast, prohibiting Congress from interfering with the slave trade until after 1808, while providing for majority approval of commercial regulations (as opposed to the two-thirds supermajority some Southerners had initially proposed). Fugitive slaves provided the convention with the last clear chance to address the issue of slavery. Introduced late in the proceedings, the convention adopted the provision with virtually no debate (II, 443; 453–54). The language of the provision was the only point to receive any extended attention. South Carolinian Pierce Butler’s initial formulation “to require fugitive slaves and servants to be delivered up like criminals” (II, 443) was withdrawn and replaced the next day with the language: “If any person bound to service or labor in any of the U—States shall escape into another State, he or she shall not be discharged from such service or labor, in consequence of any regulations subsisting in the State to which they escape, but shall be delivered up to the person justly claiming their service or labor” (II, 453–54). The committee of style altered the provision to read: “No person legally held to service or labour in one state, escaping into another, shall in consequence of regulations subsisting therein be discharged from such labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due” (II, 601–2). The final change in the provision was reported in Madison’s notes as follows: “The term ‘legally’ was struck out, and ‘under the laws thereof’ inserted
in compliance with the wish of some who thought the term equivocal, and favoring the idea that slavery was legal in a moral view—” (II, 628). Linguistic ambiguity, as James Wilson
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 165
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
165
observed earlier regarding the three-fifths compromise, proved to be an important element of the framers effort to enact a form of prudential accommodation.52 Anti-federalists attacked the language as well as the substance of the slavery provisions.53 While their own prudential caution prevented most of them from advocating direct intervention, a number of anti-federalists made their opposition to slavery, and any constitutional support for it, clear. Many, like “Brutus,” argued that slavery was “in defiance of every idea of benevolence, justice, and religion, and contrary to all the principles of liberty, which have been publickly avowed in the late glorious revolution” (II, 378). One of the most audacious attacks on slavery was composed by three anti-federal delegates to the Massachusetts state ratifying convention. Responding to federalist arguments that the slave trade was necessary to allow South Carolina and Georgia to replace slaves lost during the Revolution, Arms, Maynard, and Field wrote: “To this we say they lost no property, because they never had any in them, however much money they might have paid for them. For we look upon it, every man is the sole proprietor of his own liberty . . . we cannot suppose a vendee, can acquire property in any thing, which at the time of purchase, he knew the vendor has no right to convey” (IV, 261). This attack struck right at the heart of the Southern property rights defense of slavery.54 Federalists extended their convention strategies and continued their defense of the slavery compromises in the public debate in three interrelated ways. In so doing, they tended to rely on the resources of prudential accommodation. First, federalists defended inaction, or the very limited action of the convention against slavery (for example, the 1808 provision allowing Congress to ban the slave trade), on the grounds that time and circumstance would solve the problem. Slavery tended to be prefigured in federalist discourse as having been put on a metaphorical “road” to extinction.55 Constitutional provisions such as the potential 1808 prohibition of the slave trade reinforced the already existing trend. The implicit logic of the federalist position was that if slavery is already doomed, if “in time [it] will not be a speck in our country” (Farrand, II, 370–71), innovation and audacity at this time would be unwise, unnecessary, and imprudent.56 Second, federalist accommodation to slavery was effected discursively through the locus of the existent. These general premises of argument, often merely implied, function to justify accommodation by “affir[ming] the superiority of that which exists, of the actual, of the real, over the possible, the contingent, or the impossible.”57 In short, the locus of the existent urges acquiescence to the demands or constraints of a situation. The founders, Roger
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
166
Page 166
.
Prudence
Sherman of Connecticut maintained in Philadelphia, did not create slavery, they merely “found” it and therefore needed to adjust themselves accordingly (Farrand, II, 369).58 James Iredell, writing as “Marcus” in 1788, expressed the common sentiment that “our situation makes it necessary to bear the evil as it is.”59 Even those claiming to “abhor” slavery, like the Baptist minister Isaac Backus in Massachusetts, could justify acquiescence by simply “consider[ing] where we are” (Elliot, II, 149), or others, like Randolph in the Philadelphia convention “lament[ing]” that slavery existed, could still insist that since “it did exist the holders of it would require . . . security” (Farrand, I, 594). Third, federalists instantiated the idiom of prudential accommodation through their construction of the situation and its subsequent relationship to political action. As federalist practice illustrated, the locus of the existent constructs powerful situational constraints to which actors must adjust. Political action must be carefully calculated or calibrated with respect to these constraints in order to be effective, and effectiveness then tends to emerge as the primary criterion for judgment.60 Federalists adopted this accommodating posture in their frequent arguments that the convention, as Heath of Massachusetts put it, “went as far as they could” (Elliot, II, 115). Thomas Dawes of Massachusetts made a similar point when he asked: “What could the convention do more?” (Elliot, II, 40).61 An anonymous federalist could claim that “the constitution does every thing which a constitution could reasonably do. It provides for the interest of the southern states, and at the same time manifests to the world that slavery is inconsistent with the views and sentiments of this country, which error will be reformed as soon as it can be done consistent with the interests of the people.”62 Beyond the expression of these “sentiments” no more could be done except to wait for time to solve the problem.63 Patrick Henry, an opponent of the Constitution in Virginia, summarized the accommodating spirit of the time in a speech to the Virginia ratifying convention on 24 June 1788. “Slavery,” Henry claimed, “is detested. We feel its fatal effects—we deplore it with all the pity of humanity. . . . As much as I deplore slavery, I see that prudence forbids its abolition” (Elliot, III, 590). At least one framer tried to reinvent or reanimate the idiom of audacity soon after the ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of the new federal government. In February 1790, Benjamin Franklin, on behalf of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, submitted a memorial petition to Congress requesting that it “step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men.”64 Maintaining that “the political creed of Americans”
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 167
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
167
was absolutely inconsistent with slavery, the memorial asserted: “That many important and salutary powers are vested in you for ‘promoting the welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the people of the United States’ ” (1197). In advancing this argument, the memorialists appropriated, and radicalized, Madison’s hermeneutic principle regarding the relationship between means and ends. According to the memorialists, the general ends stipulated in the preamble should govern the construction of powers vested in the federal government by the new Constitution. The memorialists stopped short of specifying the powers Congress possessed to remedy the problem, requesting only that Congress give “serious attention to the subject of slavery” (1198). Despite Southerners’ objections that the mere consideration of the memorials “is an act of imprudence” (Tucker, 1198), Congress committed the Franklin memorial, and a similar one presented by Pennsylvania Quakers on the slave trade, to committee for further study. The committee’s report, an effort to clarify the extent of congressional power on the issue of slavery, generated intense debate in March 1790. Responding to the committee’s ambiguously worded claim that “Congress . . . are equally restrained from interfering in the emancipation of slaves, who already are, or who may, within the period mentioned [that is, until 1808], be imported into, or born within, any of the said States” (1473), Southerners insisted that there was absolutely nothing in the Constitution that gave any authority whatsoever to Congress on the question of slavery within the states (e.g., Smith, 1453–64). The effort of the memorialists, and it would seem the committee as well, to construct a rationale for innovation from constitutional materials and sources was demolished by a coalition of angry Southerners and acquiescent Northerners. Maintaining “tranquillity” by allegiance to the constitutional “compromise” (1458) emerged as the paramount goal during the debate. But the simple fact that Franklin and some members of Congress were willing to disturb the status quo and contest the language of the Constitution serves as a sign that interpretive audacity and innovative public action on the question of slavery were not completely marginalized from the public sphere. This brief review of key moments during the constitutional era reveals the nation’s founding as, at least in part, a story of the play between audacity, innovation, compromise, and accommodation. It is also, I want to suggest, a story of subversion. The first half of the nineteenth century can be read as a protracted episode in which the framers’ prudential accommodation and continual deferral of the problem of slavery subverted their audacious and innovative effort to form a more perfect union.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
168
Page 168
.
Prudence
idioms of prudence in the antebellum debate over slavery The play between audacity and accommodation, innovation and stability, would continue after the founding era. The first part of this section traces the effort to discipline or restrain audacity and the struggle of radical abolitionists of the Garrisonian persuasion to recover it and employ its resources in a frontal assault on America’s peculiar institution. From there, the discussion shifts to the attempt made by constitutional unionists like Henry Clay to recuperate the framers’ model of compromise and prudential accommodation. The result of these rhetorical efforts was, I argue, a calcification of each idiom of prudence. Audacity and accommodation became completely uncoupled and virtual ends in themselves; in the process, important possibilities for political thought and action receded from the collective consciousness of the nation.65 Throughout the early nineteenth century, the idiom of prudential audacity would be restrained by, among other cultural and political forces, a reinterpretation of the nation’s revolutionary and founding experience. Historian Michael Kammen, for example, notes how Madison’s thinking changed between 1787 and 1828: “Madison’s [1828] stress . . . upon the cautious reluctance of the revolutionaries . . . contrasts markedly with his emphasis forty years before, when he proudly praised the founders for their bold vision and willful innovations.”66 In a speech on the subject of constitutional reform in Massachusetts in 1820, Daniel Webster compared the American Revolution with the recent “disastrous revolutions which the world has witnessed.” These radical revolutions, inspired by abstract principles and egalitarian ideals, shook “the pillars of society to their deepest foundations.” But, according to Webster, “our own immortal revolution was undertaken, not to shake or plunder property, but to protect it.”67 Webster’s fellow New Englander, Rufus Choate, simultaneously celebrated and exiled revolutionary audacity in an 1845 oration: It is the right of the people, at any moment of its representation in the legislature, to make all the law, and by its representatives in conventions, to make the Constitution anew. It is their right to do so peaceably and according to existing forms, and to do it by revolution against all forms. This is the theory. But I do not know that any wise man would desire to have this theory everyday, or ever, acted upon its whole extent, or to have it eternally pressed, promulgated, panagyrized as the grand peculiarity and chief privilege of out condi-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 169
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
169
tion. . . . True wisdom would advise to lock up the extreme medicine till the attack of the alarming malady. True wisdom would advise to place the power of revolution, overturning all to begin anew, rather in the background, to throw over it a politic, well-wrought veil, to reserve it for crises, exigencies, the rare and distant days of great historical epochs.68 Through countless orations, popular orators and political figures taught nineteenth-century Americans that the time of revolution, innovation, and audacity was over; the nation’s new task would be conversation and preservation. And memory of the Revolution, ironically, would pose a threat to the people’s ability to preserve the institutions that it produced.69 The atrophy of audacity and the conservative rewriting of the nation’s past are mutually constitutive. Reclaiming the possibility of audacity, and subverting the hegemony of prudential accommodation, is interwoven with a project of historical reconstruction. A relatively early example of this discursive struggle can be found in Wendell Phillips’s 1837 address “The Murder of Lovejoy.” “Lovejoy” was not, strictly speaking, an abolitionist oration. The historical Lovejoy, an abolitionist murdered by an anti-abolitionist mob in Alton, Illinois, quickly became the focal point of national debate. At a meeting called in Boston to protest the murder, Massachusetts Attorney General James Austin defended the mob, favorably comparing them to the patriots who dumped tea into the Boston harbor in 1773, while attacking Lovejoy as “presumptuous and imprudent.” Phillips’ speech was a direct rebuttal of Austin’s charges. Phillips framed the issue this way: Imprudent to defend the liberty of the press! Why? Because the defense was unsuccessful? Does success gild crime into patriotism, and the want of it change heroic self-devotion to imprudence? Was Hampden imprudent when he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard? Yet he, judged that single hour, was unsuccessful. . . . Imagine yourself present when the first news of Bunker Hill battle reached a New England town. The tale would have run thus: “The patriots are routed,—the redcoats victorious,—Warren lies dead upon the field.” With what scorn would that Tory have been received, who shall have charged Warren with imprudence! Who should have said that, bred a physician, he was “out of place” in that battle, and “died
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
170
Page 170
.
Prudence
as the fool dieth”! How would the intimation have been received, that Warren and his associates should have waited a better time? But if success be indeed the only criterion of prudence, repice finem,—wait till the end.70 Phillips’s subversion of prudential accommodation emerged through attacks on the constricting criterion of effectiveness and success, rejection of delay and hesitation, and dismissal of action based solely on calculating circumspection. This implicit reconceptualization of prudence was interwoven with a celebration of revolutionary risk and audacity. The revolution Phillips recollected was certainly not a mere struggle over property rights. At stake, Phillips maintained, was a matter of principles: no taxation without representation. Moreover, the issue for which Lovejoy struggled, the right of free speech, was, Phillips insisted, superior to the issues at stake during the Revolution. In “Lovejoy,” Phillips contributed to the abolitionist’s discursive reconstruction of the Revolution as a continuing project and of the abolitionists as the rightful heirs of the Revolutionary generation.71 This discursive reconstruction was fully realized in the 1844 address of the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society proclaiming “no union with slaveholders.” Early in the address, the radicals both abandoned and subverted the norm of prudential accommodation. They wrote: “While circumspection and prudence are excellent qualities in every emergency, they become the allies of tyranny whenever they restrain prompt, bold, and decisive action.”72 Abolitionist must “glory in the name of revolutionists, unfurl the banner of disunion, and consecrate our talents and means to the overthrow of all that is tyrannical in the land” (108). Abolitionists developed the attack on accommodation and defense of audacity in a variety of ways. In the 1844 address, the radicals invoked the American Revolution in an effort to destroy the hegemonic authority of the locus of the existent. Appropriating the voice of the Revolutionary generation, they wrote: “Did our fathers say, when their rights and liberties were infringed—‘why, what is done cannot be undone. That is the first thought.’ No, it was the last thing they thought of: or, rather, it never entered their minds at all. They sprang to the conclusion at once—‘What is done SHALL be undone. That is our FIRST and ONLY thought’” (109). The radicals continued their assault on prudential accommodation through attacks on such complementary norms as moderation and compromise. In the opening issue of the Liberator, Garrison rejected the “timid” posture he had assumed in 1829, writing: “I will be harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice. On this subject,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 171
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
171
I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation.”73 In his 1854 address at Broadway Tabernacle in New York, Garrison insisted that the issue of slavery “admits of no compromise. Every slave is a stolen man; every slaveholder a man-stealer. By no precedent, no example, no law, no compact, no bequest, no inheritance, no combination of circumstances, is slaveholding right or justifiable.” Ridiculing the accommodating logic federalists employed in the ratification debates, he continued: “I will not try to make as good a bargain for the Lord as the Devil will let me, and plead the necessity of a compromise, and regret that I cannot do any better, and be thankful that I can do so much.”74 Another way Garrison animated the idiom of audacity was through his effort to persuade abolitionists, and the nation, that the time was right to challenge the slave power. As early as his 1829 Fourth of July oration “The Dangers of the Nation,” Garrison anticipated an objection to the doctrine of immediatism many abolitionists were likely to consider. Employing the anticipatory strategy of prolepsis, he remarked: “It is often despondingly said, that the evil of slavery is beyond our control. Dreadful conclusion, that puts the seal of death upon our country’s existence! If we cannot conquer the monster in its infancy, while his cartilages are tender and his limbs powerless, how shall we escape his wrath when he goes forth a gigantic cannibal, seeking whom he may devour?” Garrison’s kairotic appeal returned two paragraphs later: “And since so much is to be done for our country; since so many prejudices are to be dispelled, obstacles vanquished, interests secured, blessings obtained; since the cause of emancipation must progress heavily, and meet with much unhallowed opposition, why delay the work? There must be a beginning, and now is a propitious time—perhaps the last opportunity that will be granted us by a long-suffering God. No temporizing, lukewarm measures will avail aught. We must put our shoulder to the wheel, and heave with our united strength.” In response to the accommodationist logic that action in the present is unnecessary because time tends to solve all our problems, or at least that we will have a better chance of success if we wait and act in the future, Garrison deployed the locus of the irreparable—we face what may well be our “last opportunity” to act—in order to exhort his audience to act the part of audacious republican heroes and seize the moment.75 Garrison and other radicals never completely abandoned the language and norms of prudential accommodation. They would at times appropriate them in an effort to refashion their brand of radicalism as restrained or prudent. In the 1844 Anti-Slavery Society address, the authors insisted that “ours is no anarchical movement, but one of order and obedience” (111), while Garrison,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
172
Page 172
.
Prudence
in the 1854 speech, employed the image of the middle ground as a way of situating his position and defending his version of abolitionism. “I have not,” he insisted, “at any time, advanced an ultra sentiment, or made an extravagant demand. I have avoided fanaticism on the one hand, and folly on the other” (174).76 But these efforts to moderate radicalism were overwhelmed by the radicals’ tendency to insist on the absolute necessity of audacity. Wendell Phillips’s defense of abolitionist agitation, warranted on the premise that audacity is the wellspring of innovation, can be read as a justification of audacious action. In his January 28, 1852, address to the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, Phillips invoked the memory of the colonial resistance movement to establish the need for “eternal resistance” against any encroachments against liberty. Resistance was, however, only part of a much larger process of agitation designed to prevent the nation from sinking into “sleep.” Phillips explained the necessity of agitation, in part, by reintroducing key terms like “corruption” from the fading idiom of republican politics. Phillips insisted: “Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated. The antislavery agitation is an important, nay, essential part of the machinery of state. It is not a disease nor a medicine. No; it is the normal state,—the normal state of the nation. Never, to our latest posterity, can we afford to do without prophets, like Garrison, to stir up the monotony of wealth, and reawaken the people to the great ideas that are constantly fading out of their minds,—to trouble the waters, that there may be health in their flow. Every government is always growing corrupt.”77 Phillips made no effort in this passage to figure agitation as a pharmakon, a force that can function as either a cure or a disease. Agitation, in his hands, became the nineteenth-century abolitionists’ equivalent to Machiavellian virtù: a dynamic force capable of saving a people from the constant threat of corruption.78 While defending the necessity of audacious agitation, radical abolitionists of the Garrisonian persuasion helped calcify audacity, thereby subverting its potential for generating radical innovation. The calcification of audacity can be seen in two general tendencies in radical abolitionist discourse. First, radicals eschewed all available rhetorical materials except moral feeling and sentiment.79 Viewing the problem disjunctively, as a choice between force and moral suasion, radicals in the Garrisonian camp saw morality as the only available resource.80 Other possible materials through which the nation’s political imagination might be reconfigured were rejected. For example, the possibility that the Constitution might contain material for innovation, a possibility explored by some of the framers during the ratification debate and the first congress, was categorically rejected. In the 1844 Anti-Slavery Society address,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 173
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
173
the authors maintained: the Constitution “is not a ball of clay, to be moulded into any shape that party contrivance or caprice may choose it to assume. It is not a form of words to be interpreted in any manner, or to any extent, or for the accomplishment of any purpose. . . . It means precisely what those who framed and adopted it meant—NOTHING MORE, NOTHING LESS, as a matter of bargain and compromise” (96). In his introduction to The Constitution: A ProSlavery Compact, Phillips embraced the moderate’s reliance on the locus of the existent: “What the Constitution may become a century hence, we know not; we speak of it as it is, and repudiate it as it is” (6).81 The absolute reliance on moral suasion and the rejection of alternative practical or persuasive resources gave way to a second calcifying tendency in radical agitation: a complete abandonment of the political arena and virtually all existing social and political institutions. Justified in part by the adoption of the gag rule in the House in the mid-to-late 1830s and early 1840s, the radicals came to believe that political action was futile and, even worse, implicated all participants in the sin of slavery.82 While they clung to shreds of the nation’s past, radicals for the most part rejected American traditions, especially the tradition of compromise celebrated by unionists such as Henry Clay. Alternative institutional spaces, such as those available in Christian churches, were also rejected because of their accommodation with slavery. By 1844, radicals argued that the Union itself must be abandoned in order to save the nation from slavery.83 Lacking any moderating impulse, radical abolitionist audacity culminated in a call to destroy what it had initially set out to save without really addressing the practical question of solvency. Disunion would allow radicals to save their own souls but offered little hope to slaves held captive in the South. A similar calcifying process can be detected in the constitutional unionist trajectory that runs from Madison to Henry Clay.84 Clay helped refurbish accommodation and moderation, fashioning them into the necessary prerequisites for overcoming the precariousness of political and civic existence. But Clay’s vision of prudential accommodation proved to be ill-equipped for the task of securing national stability. In contrast to radical abolitionists such as Phillips, who emphasized the centrality of agitation in the republic, moderates like Clay believed that accommodation and compromise were the essence of civic existence. During the debate over his compromise measures in 1850, Clay maintained: “Life itself is but a compromise between death and life, the struggle continuing throughout our whole existence, until the Great Destroyer finally triumphs. All legislation, all government, all society, is formed upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy; upon these
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
174
Page 174
.
Prudence
everything is based.”85 Throughout his entire public career, but especially during those precarious moments of crisis, Clay valorized the ideals of restraint, conciliation, and mutual adjustment, giving concrete discursive form to the idiom of prudential accommodation.86 Clay’s response to the problem of slavery exhibited a number of the accommodating strategies found in the late eighteenth century. For example, in his famous two-day speech in defense of his compromise measures in 1850, Clay constructed a middle ground, presenting his proposal as the prudent alternative to the “dangerous extremit[ies]” of radical abolitionism and the South’s militant proslavery stand.87 The locus of the existent was another key accommodating strategy that Clay employed. The strategy appeared in Clay’s 1839 response to the question of receiving abolition petitions: “If the question [of slavery] were an original question . . . few, if any, of the citizens of the United States, would be found to favor their introduction. . . . But that is not the question. The slaves are here. . . . In human affairs we are often constrained, by the force of circumstances and the actual state of things, to do what we would not do, if that state of things did not exist. The slaves are here, and here must remain, in some condition.”88 Clay’s reliance on this locus functioned to constrict the inventional materials at his disposal. Whereas radical calcification limited materials to the realm of moral feeling, Clay calcified prudential accommodation by limiting it to existing material conditions and settled principles, narrowly conceived. The nation’s problem in 1850, Clay suggested, was the result of an invasion of inappropriate appearances: feelings, opinions, passions, and constitutional pseudo-principles (e.g., the South’s “property rights” doctrine or the free-soil principle embodied in the Wilmot proviso). These situational features were, Clay insisted, “the cause of all our present dangers and difficulties” (115). If appearances could be banished, and attention fixed solely on the reality of the situation (e.g., that “nature” conspire to keep slavery out of the Southwest), accommodations could then be fashioned and stability restored.89 Clay not only adopted the discursive strategies of the founding generation; he also embraced what he took to be the spirit of that age. In remarks made during the compromise debate in July, Clay described the Constitution as the “greatest of all compromises.” The founders “adjusted these conflicting opinions; and the Constitution under which we sit this moment is the work of their hands—a great, a memorable, magnificent compromise, which indicates to us the course of duty when differences arise which can only be settled by the spirit of mutual concession.” If Congress would only act “in the spirit of our revolutionary sires,” putting aside passions and potentially destabilizing
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 175
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
175
pseudo-principles, the current crisis could be resolved.90 Just as the framers prudently deferred the problem of slavery, taking what little action they could and trusting that time and future generations would provide a remedy, Clay’s compromise proposals as well as his defense of them urged legislative restraint, transformed inaction into prudential moderation, and exhibited faith that future generations, working under conditions of harmony and stability, would resolve any remaining problems.91 Clay’s quest to imitate the founders, what we might consider as a performative instantiation of the filiopiety that dominated the period, floundered because of his inability to recognize the element of audacity in their understanding of imitation.92 The founding generation, in the concept of emulation, managed to reconcile innovation with fidelity to the past in a way that Clay and his generation failed to appreciate. In the “Discourses on Davila,” John Adams articulated this eighteenth-century cultural norm. Emulation, according to Adams, was “imitation and something more—a desire not only to equal or resemble but to excel.” Jay Fliegelman suggests that emulation functioned in the eighteenth century as a performative solution to the challenge “of cultural preservation and innovation.” “Emulation,” Fliegelman writes, “permitted the expression of ambition in the context of a larger reverence for the models of the past, an accommodation of authority and liberty, of ancients and moderns.” Fliegelman continues: “Emulation asserted the primacy of the given (be it present circumstances or past literary models) at the same time that it recognized the efficacy of human agency either to transcend its models or to redirect and transform its historical circumstances.”93 This reconstruction of emulation as a kind of prudential performance that is critical to the founders’ balancing of audacity and accommodation helps us understand the problem of filiopiety in the “post-heroic” generation and the limits of Clay’s imitative quest. Unionists such as Clay hoped to maintain the tradition of the founders, replicating their prudential accommodation with the problem of slavery. But in trying to emulate the founders, Clay eviscerated the moral dimension in the attitude most founders had toward the peculiar institution, and he failed to grasp the innovative aspect in their imitative performances. Imitation became calcified into the simple repetition of “old formulas.”94 As a result, Clay and other advocates in the unionist tradition were unable to either perceive or respond to shifting circumstances (e.g., technological developments such as the cotton gin that helped prevent that founders’ dream of gradual emancipation from being realized). Without either the sensibility or practical facility to innovate through imitation, Clay and other unionists remained captives of a narrowly circumscribed vision of
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
176
Page 176
.
Prudence
political action. When action, audacity, or innovation are absent, citizens are left with what Pocock describes as a “politics of maneuver” (238): the endless reshuffling of narrowly imagined materials into “new” configurations. Stephen Douglas’s final legislative finessing of the 1850 compromise was perhaps the century’s paradigmatic illustration of the politics of accommodation and maneuver.95
conclusion In his “Second Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln maintained that God “gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence [of slavery] came.”96 In this passage, Lincoln seems to suggest that war was inevitable when the first African slave was carried into Virginia.97 Perhaps it was. But it might also be the case that the Civil War was the result of a comprehensive failure in our political culture. This failure to respond effectively had many causes, and there is no reason to excuse any institution, tradition, or practice. This essay suggests that a dysfunctional conception of prudence has to be included as one factor in this failure of the nation’s political leaders and the political culture they embodied. To be more precise, the prudential failure of the antebellum era came about because a precarious relationship between audacity and accommodation, which had been sustained during the Revolutionary and Constitutional periods (and which helped to sustain many of the advocates engaged in those struggles), collapsed. The decoupling and calcification of audacity and accommodation was a byproduct of the antebellum struggle over slavery and a factor in the coming of the Civil War. These twin processes have also contributed to the common equation of prudence and conservatism; as the dynamic tension between audacity and accommodation atrophied, prudence became associated solely with the norms and values of accommodation and that association has become our contemporary prudential heritage. But the prudential failure of the antebellum era was not, I want to argue, complete. While the political, social, and economic forces associated with slavery proved too powerful to be displaced by anything short of war, audacity and accommodation, innovation and tradition, radicalism and moderation, continued to intersect and interact in the discursive practices of a variety of advocates. Consider, for example, the work of a group of abolitionists described by William Wiecek as “radical constitutionalists.” Beginning in the 1830s, Alvan Stewart, James Birney, Lysander Spooner, and Joel Tiffany rejected the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 177
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
177
federal consensus that held that the Constitution was proslavery and embraced constitutional law as the most appropriate and effective material for generating political innovation.98 By embracing America’s legal framework but rejecting its current practices, these radical constitutionalists combined audacity and accommodation; they performed an act of emulation that was both imitative and innovative. While they were not able to persuade all abolitionists, let alone the entire nation, to adopt their perspective (radicals such as Wendell Phillips argued vigorously against the radical constitutionalist interpretation), the radical constitutionalists nevertheless adumbrated the possibility that the nation’s legal system might become an important source for the stable innovation of prudential action. As a second example, consider the address delivered by Henry Highland Garnet to the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, on August 16, 1843. Commonly read as a call for a slave rebellion, Garnet in fact rejects “a revolution with the sword” for very nonradical reasons: “It would be inexpedient.” But Garnet does invoke the radical antithesis of Patrick Henry—“liberty or death”—as he indirectly exhorts slaves to engage in massive resistance to their “masters.” While Garnet was unable to persuade the assembled delegates to support his position (Frederick Douglass argued vigorously against endorsing Garnet’s appeal), he began to formulate a strategy that would not be fully realized for one hundred and twenty years: the prudential possibilities of civil disobedience.99 While the radical constitutionalists and Henry Highland Garnet managed to sustain and engage the dynamic tension between audacity and accommodation, and with it the possibility for a more vibrant mode of prudential action, neither came very close to influencing the course of political events. But the emergence of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party was a decisive factor in the nation’s drift toward civil war, and Lincoln’s rise to political prominence can be attributed, at least in part, to his efforts to negotiate and exploit the idioms of audacity and accommodation. His February 1860 address at Cooper Institute in New York illustrates his ongoing struggle to orchestrate these competing idioms and impulses. On the one hand, Lincoln manifests his continued allegiance to his political idol Henry Clay as he adopts one of Clay’s signature argument strategies. Slavery, Lincoln maintains in the climactic paragraph of the first section of the address, must be “tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.” We can hear the echo of Clay in this passage: Lincoln certainly would not vote to allow slavery into the nation if that was the question but, unfortunately, that isn’t the question; slavery is
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
178
Page 178
.
Prudence
here and we must adjust our political judgment because of its “actual presence.” But, unlike Clay, Lincoln insisted on reclaiming, despite its ambiguity, the audacious moral legacy of the founders. So Lincoln begins the passage just quoted with one of his signature tropes (chiasmus): “As those fathers marked it, so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended but tolerated and protected.” According to Lincoln’s prudential vision, the nation must perpetuate the political system instituted by the founders but the only way to do that was to reverse its present course by recovering and fulfilling the Founding Father’s flawed moral heritage. Slavery must be (re)placed in the position in which the founders had left it: on the road to extinction.100 Lincoln’s efforts, like those of the radical constitutionalists and Henry Highland Garnet, failed to alter the course of history. But Eugene Garver reminds us that “a practical method grounded in prudence is always threatened by defeat, by the possibility that doing one’s best will not be good enough” (Machiavelli, 114). If the antebellum struggle over slavery helps us understand how the possibilities of prudential political action present during the Revolutionary and Constitutional periods atrophied over time, further inquiry into the work of such provocative figures as the radical constitutionalists, Henry Garnet, and Abraham Lincoln might provide us with some direction as we try to reactivate prudence at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
notes 1. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “The Oratorical Text: The Enigma of Arrival,” in Text in Context, ed. M. C. Leff and F. J. Kauffeld (Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 270. See Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), esp. 22 (subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text); Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Michael Leff, “Prudential Argument and the Use of History in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Commonwealth Club Address,’ ” in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Argumentation, ed. Frans H. van Eemeren et al. (Amsterdam: Sicsat, 1991), 1B:931–36. See also Robert Hariman, “Prudence/Performance,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 21 (1991): 26–35. 2. See G. Thomas Goodnight, “Controversy,” in Argument in Controversy: Proceedings of the Seventh SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. D. W. Parson (Annandale, Va.: SCA, 1991), 1–13, and Michael Leff, “Things Made By Words: Reflections on Textual Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 223–31. 3. As Aristotle recognized in a frequently cited passage in the Rhetoric, “Most of the things about which we make decisions . . . present us with alternative possibilities. For it is about our actions that we deliberate . . . and all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity.” Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. R. Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1954), 1357a24–27. 4. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 179
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
179
Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 219–71. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. 5. See Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1969), e.g. 184. This gesture toward Burke’s writing can be taken a step further. The prudential idioms I seek to reconstruct might also be conceptualized, within a Burkeian frame, as “vocabularies of motives.” 6. The historical tension that I unpack in the next section of the chapter has also been conceptualized as an immanent conceptual struggle. For example, Philip Bricker’s analytic reconstruction of the concept of prudence concludes that the central norm of prudential conduct can be written in two ways: prudence directs worldly actors to “make the world conform to your preferences” (a position, I argue, that is quite compatible with the Machiavellian norms of virtù and audacity); yet prudence also directs actors to “make your preferences conform to the world” (a position that, I maintain, echoes the accommodationist stance of Francesco Guicciardini). Pocock’s suggestion that Machiavellian audacity and Guicciardinian accommodation are not mutually exclusive but dialectically linked is reinforced by Bricker’s conclusion that “these two principles are not independent of one another, but represent two facets of a single phenomenon.” The task for the social actor, Bricker concludes, is to “jointly coordinate” these principles in action (401). The coordination or negotiation of these rival principles or norms is accomplished, I suggest, discursively. See Philip Bricker, “Prudence,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 381–401. In his recent study of prudence and presidential leadership, Erwin Hargrove observes that “there is a tension between a sense of limits and a desire for boldness, but both are essential for a full expression of the possibilities of politics” (25). The central objective of this chapter is to unpack the essential play between limits (accommodation) and boldness (audacity) in some early American political controversies. See Erwin C. Hargrove, The President as Leader: Appealing to the Better Angels of Our Nature (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). 7. My argument is a historically grounded variation of Hariman’s discussion in the introduction of the modernist “deformations” of prudence into “rigid moralizing” (part of the tradition of audacity) and “flexible because amoral expediency” (part of the tradition of accommodation). 8. Quoted in Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 237. 9. But Guicciardini does not advocate inactivity and an absolute reliance on chance. See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 269–70, and Mark Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), esp. 61–80. 10. In the introduction, Hariman describes the common “dual articulation” of prudence as (1) a set of rules and norms and (2) the behavior of an exemplary individual. The approach advanced in this chapter, an “idiomatic” understanding of prudence, represents a third articulation. 11. Virtù, Pocock maintains, entails the ability to “act in time” (Machiavellian Moment, 178). Such an ability is quite similar to the traditional rhetorical principle of kairos: the ability to perceive the right or appropriate moment for speaking or acting. For example, see James L. Kinneavy, “Kairos: A neglected concept in classical rhetoric,” in Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning, ed. J. D. Moss (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 79–105; John Poulakos, “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 16 (1983): 35–48; and the essays in Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin, eds., Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 12. John Dickinson, Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania, To the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Boston: Mein and Fleming, 1768). Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text by letter and page number.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
180
Page 180
.
Prudence
13. Discussing his speech to the mass meeting held on the first day of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Martin Luther King Jr. describes this dilemma. In Stride Toward Freedom, King reflected: “How could I make a speech that would be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds?” See Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 434. On Dickinson’s effort to negotiate this tension, and others, see Robert Ferguson’s discussion in The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. 97–103. See also Kimberly Smith’s analysis of Dickinson’s advocacy efforts in The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), esp. 33–39. Smith suggests that Dickinson’s discourse helped create a conceptual innovation that allowed colonists to conceptualize the possibility of “orderly resistance” (36). The relationship between arousal and quiescence is also a key theme in the work of Murray Edelman. See Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (Chicago: Markham, 1971). 14. On Dickinson’s construction of the pastoral, see Stephen H. Browne, “The Pastoral Voice in John Dickinson’s First Letter From a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 46–57. 15. Middle-ground arguments are a species of comparison. Comparison arguments, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest in The New Rhetoric, function to increase or decrease the value of something via the comparison process. In the middle-ground strategy, the value of the middle element (a policy, course of action, idea, etc.) is enhanced by comparison with more extreme, and less desirable, elements. On comparison arguments, see Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), esp. 242–47. 16. These characteristics are attributed to the king’s ministers and introduced to account for the change in policy. See Dickinson, Letters, V, 55, 58; XI, 121. 17. Dickinson here exemplifies a common “trope” of the republican style: “the heroic individual seizing the moment” through timely action. See Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 121. This aspect of the republican style, I want to suggest, stems from the idiom of audacity. 18. Dickinson develops a subtle dissociation argument. Dissociations, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca argue, function to resolve tensions or forms of cognitive dissonance. In Dickinson’s case, the tension is how can action (an appeal to the sword) be justified yet also unjustifiable (imprudent)? The dissociation structure reveals that justification in the abstract is only an appearance; in reality, the appeal to the sword is imprudent. On dissociation, see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric, esp. 411–59. 19. This point is developed frequently via medical metaphors. See, for example, Dickinson, Letters, IX, 100, and XII, 138–39. 20. As Garver notes: “Shifts in the range of circumstances to which prudence should be relevant should force changes in the very meaning of prudence itself: the kinds of abilities required to be able to think and act in ways that are responsive to circumstances must change when circumstances change” (Machiavelli, 10). 21. Reprinted in American Political Writing During the Founding Era, 1760–1805, ed. C. S. Hyman and D. S. Lutz (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983), 1:321–27. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. 22. In The Old Revolutionaries, Pauline Maier argues that Sam Adams understood the need to distinguish cautious patience and “false prudence” (20–21). See Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 181
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
181
23. See Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric, esp. 91–92, and J. Robert Cox, “The Die Is Cast: Topical and Ontological Dimensions of the Locus of the Irreparable,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): 227–39. 24. In a 1773 election sermon, Simeon Howard blends the locus of the irreparable and the need for early action into an “ancient maxim of prudence”: “An incautious people may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrecoverably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries small in themselves, may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them; especially if they are persisted in. And, with respect to such injuries, we should ever act upon that ancient maxim of prudence; obsta principiis. The first unjust demands of an encroaching power should be firmly withstood, when there appears a disposition to repeat and increase such demands” (reprinted in American Political Writing, 1:95). Like Dickinson, Howard struggles to reconcile resistance and submission (e.g., 196). One approach to this problem, reflected in Samuel West’s 1776 election sermon, is to reconceptualize resistance as a form of obedience: “Our obligation to promote the public good extends as much to opposing every exertion of arbitrary power that is injurious to the state as it does to the submitting to good and wholesome laws. No man, therefore, can be a good member of the community that is not as zealous to oppose tyranny as he is ready to obey magistracy” (reprinted in American Political Writing, 1:421). 25. Nathaniel Whitaker, “An Antidote Against Toryism,” in The Patriot Preachers of the American Revolution, ed. Frank Moore (New York: Charles T. Evans, 1862), 213–15. In the Old Testament “Song of Deborah” (Judges 5: 23), the town of Meroz was cursed for not joining the other Israelites in their battle against the Canaanite army commanded by Sisera. Alan Heimert observes that “the ‘Curse of Meroz’ occupied an honored station among the continuing themes of colonial American literature. . . . It was probably the favorite text of the Calvinist ministry in the years of the Revolution, when it was used expressly to focus the animus of the people of God against, not the British, but the American Tories, and even the questionable and suspicious patriots of the colonies.” Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 333–34. I would like to thank Kristy Maddux for her assistance with this biblical reference. 26. Reprinted in The Writing of Thomas Paine, ed. M. D. Conway (1902; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 67–120. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. 27. In his chapter in this volume, Robert Cape notes the importance of metaphors and images of “vision” in the classical tradition of prudence. 28. Eugene Garver explores the connection between emotional appeals and appropriateness at some length. Advocates, Garver writes, “do not offer the emotion as [the] reason for [a] decision—that would be to admit that emotion corrupts judgment—but the appropriateness of the emotion as a reason” (Machiavelli, 137). See Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 29. Reprinted in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. M. D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 235. 30. Reprinted in The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, ed. E. M. Betts and J. A. Bear Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966), 151–52. 31. Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 689. 32. Jefferson’s caution and accommodation on the subject of slavery is discussed in Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery: ‘Treason Against the Hopes of the World,’ ” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. P. S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 181–221. 33. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution,” Political Science Quarterly 76 (1961): 181–216; Samuel H. Beer, To Make a Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993),
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
182
Page 182
.
Prudence
22. My thinking on Federalist audacity has been stimulated by Michael Lienesch, New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), esp. 140–45. 34. American Political Writing, 1:420. Note how West’s thinking parallels Jefferson’s invocation of prudence in the Declaration of Independence. 35. “Denatus,” reprinted in The Complete Anti-Federalist, ed. H. J. Storing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), V, 261. Subsequent references to the anti-federalist literature reprinted in Storing will be noted parenthetically in the text by author, volume, and page number. 36. See Lienesch, New Order, 142. 37. See The Records of the Federal Convention, ed. M. Farrand (1911; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 1:34. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text by volume and page. 38. Compare anti-federalists’ fears with Garver’s discussion of the “politics of opportunism” and its “susceptibility to further usurpation” (Machiavelli, 103). 39. On this division of the text, see David F. Epstein, The Political Theory of The Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 8–9. 40. The Federalist Papers, ed. C. Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), 234. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. Describing the political thinking of Guicciardini, Pocock remarks: “The ruling virtue of steersman, doctor, and statesman alike is circumspection, prudence, diligence. . . . doctors employ it to apprehend the nature of the disease and all its accidents, and without it their prescriptions would be ‘disproportionate’ to the disease and contrary to the ‘complexion’ of the patient” (Machiavellian Moment, 140). One of Madison’s innovations in this essay is to reaccent the doctor metaphor, moving it in the direction of Machiavellian audacity. 41. The question of “Publius’s” understanding of prudence is complicated and merits more attention than I am able to give it here. The terms “prudence,” “prudent,” or “prudently” appear in thirty-one essays. In some instances, such as no. 38, the image of prudence reflects innovation and audacity, whereas in other cases (e.g. nos. 43, 65), the sense is more one of moderation and accommodation. 42. Madison enacts a form of “rhetorical hermeneutics.” See Steven Mailloux, Rhetorical Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 43. On the general problem of multiple intentions and textual interpretation, see Paul Brest, “The Misconceived Quest for the Original Understanding,” in Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader, ed. S. Levinson and S. Mailloux (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 69–96. 44. See Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric, 345–49. 45. Some abolitionists appropriated the idea of proposing and turned it against the framers during the debates over the meaning of the Constitution respecting slavery. The Constitution’s status as “proposed” is used as a way to dissociate the text from the framer’s intention. See Lysander Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845; reprint, Boston: Bela Marsh, 1860). 46. Compare Garver’s discussion of Machiavelli’s advice to make “the new prince seem old” (Machiavelli, 104) with Lienesch’s discussion of the drive to “make the new Constitution seem old” (New Order, 164). 47. Like language itself, the idiom of prudential audacity is a kind of pharmakon, a cure as well as a poison. For a preliminary account of the pharmakon image in the Federalist Papers, see my “Heteroglossia, Polyphony, and The Federalist Papers,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 27 (1997): 23–46. 48. The secondary literature on the subject of slavery and the Constitution is extensive. It tends to divide into three positions. The first group of historians subvert the myth that the founders contributed in any substantial way to the abolition of slavery but believe that they
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 183
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
183
could not have done anything even if they were so inclined. See Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), and Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). A second group agree that the founders did not do much on the question of slavery but believe that more could have been done. See John Hope Franklin, “The Moral Legacy of the Founding Fathers,” reprinted in Franklin, Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 153–62, and Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant with Death,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. R. Beeman et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 188–225. See also Earl M. Maltz’s critique of Finkelman and other historians arguing this position in “The Idea of the Proslavery Constitution,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997): 37–59. The third group contend that the founders were constrained as to what they could realistically do on the subject but did, nevertheless, contribute to the abolitionist cause. See William H. Freehling, “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” American Historical Review 77 (1972): 81–93, and Herbert J. Storing, “Slavery and the Moral Foundations of the American Republic,” in The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, ed. R. H. Horwitz (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 313–32. 49. Cf. William Wiecek, who maintains that “no less than ten clauses in the Constitution . . . directly or indirectly accommodate the peculiar institution,” in The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 62. 50. The three-fifths ratio was adopted by the Confederation Congress in 1783 as a rule for apportioning taxes. Since it was only ratified by eleven of the states, it never went into effect. See Robinson, Slavery, 156–59. Finkelman, in “Slavery and the Constitutional Convention,” 198, takes issue with other historians (e.g., Clinton Rossiter) who maintain that the federal ratio was a foregone conclusion going into the Philadelphia convention. 51. Robinson (Slavery, 236) suggests this might be one reason why the three-fifths ratio was not a significant factor in the state ratifying conventions. 52. Historians disagree over what the final language change accomplished. Wiecek maintains that the deletion of “legally” was done at the request of “the Carolinians. The amended phrasing of the clause was apparently to recognize implicitly the moral legitimacy of slavery” (Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism, 80). Cf. Robinson, Slavery, 229. Finkelman (“Slavery and the Constitutional Convention”) contends that “the word ‘legally’ was omitted so as not to offend northern sensibilities” (224); Storing concludes that “it is hard to see how it could have been made in any way that would have given less sanction to the idea that property in slaves has the same moral status as other kinds of property” (“Slavery and the Moral Foundations,” 323). The overall assessment of the language of the Constitution on slavery is equally divided. Robinson views the framers’ performance as “careless language” (230), while Storing insists that it is “testimony to the skill with which the framers wrote” (320). Following Garver’s observation that ambiguity functions “to make innovation and hence stable usurpation possible” (Machiavelli, 23), my focus in the next section is on how abolitionists used ambiguity as a resource for rhetorical invention. 53. The Constitution’s language with respect to slavery was an important issue with many anti-federalists. A number of anti-federal critics tried to subvert the accommodation of slavery by pointing out the linguistic subterfuge. The anonymous anti-federalist writing as “Centinel” claimed: “The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations” (II, 160); Luther Martin, present at the convention, maintained that the framers “anxiously sought to avoid the admission of expressions which might be odious in the ears of Americans, although they were willing to admit into their system those things which the expressions signified” (II, 60); and an anonymous “Letter from a Gentleman in a Neighboring State” inquired: “Was
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
184
Page 184
.
Prudence
not this form of words thus uncouthly used to avoid using the word Negroes?” and “Why this sentence [slave trade clause] should be couched in this blind mysterious form of words, unless again to avoid using the word negroes, I must leave those that drew it to explain?” (IV, 8, 12). 54. On the centrality of property rights in early American public discourse, see Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 40–68. 55. In the nineteenth century, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln would recall this imagery. In his speech in the Senate on March 7, 1850, during the debate over Clay’s compromise resolutions, Webster reminded his audience of the founders’ belief “that if the importation of slaves ceased . . . slavery would . . . gradually wear out and expire.” “There was,” Webster insisted, “an expectation that on the ceasing of the importation of slaves from Africa, slavery would begin to run out” (271). Congressional Globe, Appendix 22 (1850), 31st Cong., 1st sess., 269–76. Lincoln advanced his belief that the founders placed slavery on “the course of ultimate extinction” throughout his 1858 senatorial campaign and beyond. See, for example, his Quincy “rejoinder” on October 13 (353) and his Alton “reply” on October 15 (384), in The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, ed. P. M. Angle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 56. For additional examples, see Wilson’s speech to the Pennsylvania ratifying convention on December 3, 1787 (reprinted in The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, ed. Jonathan Elliot [Philadelphia: Lippincot, 1901], 2:452; subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text); Thomas Dawes’s speech in the Massachusetts ratifying convention on January 18, 1788 (Debates, 2:40–41); and “An American Citizen” [Tench Coxe], An Examination of the Constitution for the United States of America, reprinted in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States, ed. P. L. Ford (1888; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 146. 57. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric, 94. For a more expansive treatment of the opposition between the real and the possible, see John Poulakos, “Rhetoric, the Sophists, and the Possible,” Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 215–26. 58. The idea that the framers merely “found” slavery remains a commonplace until the Civil War. For Lincoln’s use of the expression, see David Zarefsky, Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 147. 59. “Marcus” [James Iredell], Answers to Mr. Mason’s Objections to the New Constitution, reprinted in Ford, Pamphlets, 367. 60. Audacity, on the other hand, tends to recognize situational constraints but struggles to challenge or transform them. Practitioners of prudential audacity epitomize Max Weber’s belief “that the possible cannot be achieved without continually reaching out towards that which is impossible in this world.” See Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 128. 61. This same question is repeated by contemporary historians. Storing (“Slavery and the Moral Foundations”) writes: “In defense of his ‘temporizing’ with racism and segregation and injustice, our Founder might ask what else could have been done?” Storing concludes: “To criticize a Jefferson or a Lincoln for yielding to, even sharing in, white prejudice is equivalent to demanding either that he get out of politics altogether . . . or that he become a despot” (330). Storing’s framing of the matter as a radical disjunction, abandon politics or become a despot, seriously reduces the possibilities for rhetoric, prudence, and their interanimation in and through political leadership. Sometime between 1762 and 1766, Jefferson transcribed a passage from Livy in his commonplace book: “I know that there are other things more pleasant to hear; but even if my character did not prompt me to say what is true in preference to what is agreeable, necessity compels me. I could wish to give you pleasure, Quirites, but I had far sooner you should be saved, no matter what your feeling toward me is going to be.”
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 185
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
185
Jefferson at least recognizes here possibilities beyond Storing’s disjunction; he was simply unable to put them into practice on the issue of slavery. See Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, ed. D. L. Wilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 61–62. 62. Quoted in Storing, Complete Anti-Federalist, IV, 14, note 6. 63. Robinson summarizes the founding period in this way: “The prevailing view was that slavery was evil, but that there was nothing that could be done about it, at least not for the time being. It seemed irrational to be paralyzed by sensitivity to a situation that was irremediable. It seemed wiser to proceed toward national development, and trust that in the fullness of time a way would be found to remove the stain of slavery” (Slavery, 425). Commenting specifically on James Madison, Paul Rahe confirms this interpretation when he writes: “Madison could afford to be reticent [about slavery] in 1787 precisely because he thought future developments clear; decisive action on his part was not required” (104). Federalists, Rahe suggests, continually figured time as a solution to the problem of slavery, making action in the present unnecessary and imprudent. See Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, vol. 3 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); see esp. 96, 103–4. 64. In Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 1st Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1198. Subsequent references to the memorial and congressional debate will be made parenthetically in the text. On this episode, see also Robinson, Slavery, 302–12, and Richard S. Newman, “Prelude to the Gag Rule: Southern Reaction to Antislavery Petitions in the First Federal Congress,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996): 571–99. 65. My treatment of this issue draws from, and extends upon, Stanley Elkins’s discussion of the separation of wisdom and experience in antebellum America. See Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), esp. 140–205. 66. Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 47–48. On the gradual conservative reinterpretation of the Revolution, see 33–75. 67. Daniel Webster, “The Basis of the Senate,” December 15, 1820, in The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1903), 5:15–16. 68. Rufus Choate, “The Position and Functions of the American Bar,” July 3, 1845, in The Works of Rufus Choate (Boston: Little, Brown, 1862), 1:433. 69. On the conservative reinterpretation of America’s past in the nineteenth century, see also J. V. Mathews, “ ‘Whig History’: The New England Whigs and a Usable Past,” New England Quarterly 51 (1978): 193–208. I discuss this issue at more length in “Rearticulating History in Epideictic Discourse: Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro,’ ” in Rhetoric and Political Culture: Interpreting American Public Discourse, ed. T. W. Benson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), esp. 72–78. George Forgie discusses the ideals of conservation and preservation in Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). 70. Wendell Phillips, “The Murder of Lovejoy,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1864), 8–9. While Phillips altered portions of the speech for this edition, this passage corresponds to what appears in The Liberator, December 15, 1837. 71. Garrison took this idea to the next level in the 1833 “Declaration of Sentiments” of the National Anti-Slavery Society. Comparing abolitionists to the revolutionary generation, Garrison wrote: “In purity of motive, in earnestness of zeal, in decision of purpose, in intrepidity of action, in steadfastness of faith, in sincerity of spirit, we would not be inferior to them” (90). Abolitionists were not merely the heirs of the revolutionary generation; they were their superiors. In William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight Against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator, ed. W. E. Cain (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995). For a discussion of the republican
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
186
Page 186
.
Prudence
ideology as a force shaping Garrison’s discourse, and the abolitionist movement as whole, see Daniel J. McInerney, The Fortunate Heirs of Freedom: Abolition and Republican Thought (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 72. “Address of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society to the Friends of Emancipation in the U. States,” May 1844; reprinted in The Constitution: A ProSlavery Compact (1844; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 94. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. 73. “To the Public,” [Boston] Liberator, January 1, 1831, in Cain, William Lloyd Garrison, 72. 74. “An Address Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle,” New York, February 14, 1854; reprinted in American Forum: Speeches on Historic Issues, 1788–1900, ed. E. J. Wrage and B. Baskerville (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 173, 176. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically in the text. On Garrison’s rejection of compromise, see also McInerney, Fortunate Heirs, esp. 121–22. 75. Garrison’s speech is reprinted in Cain, William Lloyd Garrison, under the title “Address to the American Colonization Society.” See esp. 67–69. 76. On Garrison’s pragmatism and his effort to balance principle and expediency, see Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (1967; reprint, Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1989), esp. 178–234. 77. Phillips, “Public Opinion,” delivered January 28, 1852; reprinted in Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, second series, 52–53. In his last major public address in 1881, Phillips would reaffirm the sentiments expressed in 1852. In “The Scholar in a Republic,” he suggested: “The freer a nation becomes, the more utterly democratic in its form, the more need of this outside agitation. Parties and sects laden with the burden of securing their own success cannot afford to risk new ideas. . . . The agitator must stand outside of organizations, with no bread to earn, no candidate to elect, nor party to save, no object but truth,—to tear a question open and riddle it with light. In all modern constitutional governments, agitation is the only peaceful method of progress.” Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 2d ser. (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1894), 350. 78. On corruption and the return to first principles, see also McInerney, Fortunate Heirs, esp. 37–38, 89–91. 79. Garrisonian radicalism falls victim to what Garver describes as a reliance on “superfluous and ineffectual proclamation of moralizing principles” (Machiavelli, 39). 80. See Kraditor, Means and Ends, 216. 81. Garrison performs his rejection of the Constitution in 1854 by burning it in public. 82. Kraditor notes that Garrison adopted a more expedient position when considering the Quaker-backed strategy of boycotting slave-grown produce. See Means and Ends, 217–20. 83. Kraditor finds a degree of ambiguity in Garrison’s disunionism. If it at times functions as an absolute principle, at other times it served as an “agitational weapon” (Means and Ends, 206) designed to provoke reflection. Practically, Garrison believed that disunion would remove the federal support that sustained slavery, thereby bringing it to an end (212). 84. On this political trajectory, see Peter B. Knupfer, The Union As It Is: Constitutional Unionism and Sectional Compromise, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 85. Clay, speech in the Senate on April 8, 1850, in Congressional Globe 19 (1849–50), 31st Cong., 1st sess., 662. 86. For a more detailed reading of Clay and the idiom of accommodation, see my article “The Forms and Limits of Prudence in Henry Clay’s (1850) Defense of the Compromise Measures,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 454–78. 87. Clay, speech on the compromise resolutions, February 5 and 6, 1850, in Congressional Globe 19 (1849–50), 31st Cong., 1st sess., part 1, appendix, 116.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 187
Idioms of Prudence in Three Antebellum Controversies
.
187
88. Clay, speech on the reception of abolition petitions, February 7, 1839; reprinted in Life and Speeches of Henry Clay, ed. D. Mallory (Hartford: Silus Andrus and Son, 1855), 2:367. 89. In separating appearance from reality in this way, Clay enacts a process of discursive dissociation. See Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, New Rhetoric, 411–19. 90. Clay, speech in the Senate, July 22, 1850, in Congressional Globe 19 (1849–50), 31st Cong., 1st sess., appendix, 1408. 91. On the general Whig belief in progress and temporal regeneration, see Major Wilson, Space, Time, and Freedom: The Quest for Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict, 1815–1861 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 49–72, and Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 75, 125. 92. Unionists like Clay remained captive to what Garver terms a form of “unreflective imitation [that] assumes that similarities between past and future are evident, and hence that any past success carries obvious prescriptions about what to do” in the present (Machiavelli, 65–66). Clay failed to appreciate a central Machiavellian prudential lesson: “The difficulties of imitating the past” (Machiavelli, 143). 93. “An American Citizen” [John Adams], “Discourses on Davila,” in The Works of John Adams, ed. C. F. Adams (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), 6:267; Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 180, 184. See also Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York: New York University Press, 1981). The ideal of emulation had at least a modest impact in the free African American community in the North. Maria W. Stewart exhorted a black Boston audience in 1832 to “a spirit of virtuous emulation” which she developed in the following passage: “Did the pilgrims, when they first landed on these shores, quietly compose themselves and say, ‘The Britons have all the money and all the power, and we must continue their servants forever’? Did they sluggishly sigh and say, ‘Our lot is hard, the Indians own the soil, and we cannot cultivate it’? No; they first made powerful efforts to raise themselves, and then God raised up those illustrious patriots, Washington and Lafayette, to assist and defend them.” In Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, ed. M. Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 49. Even radicals like Phillips, while lacking in rhetorical materials, grasped the idea of emulation. In his “Scholar in a Republic,” Phillips maintains: “To be as good as our fathers we must be better” (Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 2d ser., 362). 94. As Knupfer documents, “Constitutional unionist preferred old formulas to new institutions or ideas for advising a troubled nation” (The Union As It Is, 3). 95. On Douglas’s role in the adoption of the compromise measures, see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964). 96. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” in Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and His Writings, ed. R. P. Basler (1946; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, n.d.), 793. 97. Historians have recently begun to explore an important historical irony: the way slavery was elided from the nation’s memory of the war. For example, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), and David Brion Davis, “The Enduring Legacy of the South’s Civil War Victory,” New York Times, August 26, 2001, Week in Review, 1, 6. 98. See Alvan Stewart, “A Constitutional Argument on the Subject of Slavery” (1837), reprinted in Jacobus tenBroek, Equal Under Law (1951; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1965), 281–95; James G. Birney, “Can Congress, Under the Constitution, Abolish Slavery in the States?” (1847), in tenBroek, 296–319; Spooner, Unconstitutionality of Slavery; and Joel Tiffany, A Treatise on the Unconstitutionality of American Slavery: Together with the Powers and
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
188
Page 188
.
Prudence
Duties of the Federal Government, in Relation to that Subject (1849; reprint, Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne, 1969). The expression “radical constitutionalist” comes from Wiecek’s Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism. 99. Henry Highland Garnet, “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America,” in The Black Abolitionist Papers, ed. C. Peter Ripley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 3:403–12. While approaching prudence from a narrower Aristotelian perspective, Francis Kane also acknowledges the prudential possibilities in civil disobedience (specifically, the actions of Rosa Parks). See Kane, Neither Beasts nor Gods: Civic Life and the Public Good (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1998), esp. 110–28. 100. Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Cooper Institute,” in His Speeches and His Writings, 526. My reading of this passage is indebted to an ongoing conversation with Michael Leff. See his “Lincoln at Cooper Union: Neo-Classical Criticism Revisited,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 232–48.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 189
7 Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence women, propriety, and transgression in the nineteenth-century public oratory of the united states
Christine L. Oravec
As evidenced throughout this volume, the concept of prudence is experiencing an enthusiastic revival. After many years of neglect and distortion, the term is recovering some of its more useful and relevant connotations through the work of postmodern scholars. These connotations—of reasonableness, civic virtue, and practicality—were originally bestowed upon prudence by classical sources to describe a certain excellence of personal character.1 In a similar vein, the notion of the decorous or proper (Gr. to prepon) has been receiving attention in part because of its long-term and still continuing dialog with prudence. Today, the word “propriety” has come to connote the timely display of those personal qualities that prudence contains.2 Hence the relationship between the two sets of concepts in the realm of academic scholarship has become increasingly close and intertwined. Indeed, a component of the pragmatic in at least one scholar’s definition of prudence is its timeliness, a quality that indicates a direct relationship to the proper.3 And propriety or decorum has been identified with such prudent virtues of character as The author wishes to thank Nicole Tonkovich and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, among others, for their assistance, and the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, for the use of its library.
189
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
190
Page 190
.
Prudence
a sense of collective responsibility, personal integrity, or the possession of a common wisdom.4 Yet the two sets of terms are not synonymous. For example, prudence has been designated, at least by classicists, as composed of qualities or traits of character, and prudent action as behavior derived from those traits. In contrast, the proper or decorous has frequently been identified with the appearance or exhibition of those qualities, often in social or public settings.5 Apparently, propriety in its modern form holds the potential for deception. Moreover, since propriety often depends upon collective, rather than individual standards, the likelihood of ill-considered conformity to rules of conduct and stifling conventionality of public expression emerges from beneath its more positive associations. A prudent action is most often decorous, but decorum is not always prudent, given the particular circumstances of time and place. Descriptions of the historical relationship between prudence and the proper have not always taken this asymmetry to heart. But one era in which the tension in the relationship becomes strikingly noticeable and therefore worthy of study is the early nineteenth century in the United States. When in the twenty-first century we seek the most immediate origins of propriety, it is nineteenth-century culture that we identify as ancestral, and it is their standard to which we respond. The nineteenth century witnessed the later stages of the transformation of notions of the proper from something close to prudence, that is, a component of character and a faculty of practical ability, into the awareness of social demeanor and the enforcement of public criticism.6 Whether this transformation was a product of the rise of the middle class, the advent of a democratic political culture, or a shift in the epistemological foundations of consciousness itself is an issue too large for this chapter. It is possible, however, to specify one important element in this transformation: the process of feminization. Feminization has always been a complex and ambivalent process, and it has been intimately involved with decorum. Its legacy from the nineteenth century was the enlargement of the domain of feminine arbitration in the areas of letters, language, dress, behavior, and deportment.7 This gradual attribution of the things of the social world to the feminine has encouraged us to characterize propriety today in terms of etiquette, tact, and manners. In other words, much of what pertains to our concept of propriety, with all of its intricate connotations of exactitude, inhibition, and fear of social chaos, belongs also to our conception of women.8 While enlarging the scope of feminization, however, the nineteenth-century notion of propriety paradoxically rein-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 191
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
191
forced the barriers behind which women themselves were placed. Of the many legal, political, and physical restrictions placed upon women during that time, the proscription on speech and public activity was perhaps the most effective, for it removed the major avenue by which women themselves could protest their lack of access to the “public sphere.”9 For example, early in the century, women were considered to be “incompetent” in law, incapable of serving on juries or testifying for themselves, and subject to their husband’s “rule of thumb” (the administration of corporeal punishment for most civil infractions by the use of a rod no bigger than her husband’s thumb). The notion of decorum had a cutting edge where women were concerned. No matter how feminized, the very notion of propriety was measured by male rules, both figurative and literal. How, then, could women be assigned the position of keeper of the boundaries of the proper and also be subject so rigidly to them? To put it crudely, how could the inmates be put in charge of the asylum? A successful statement of this paradox, at least as it was articulated in the nineteenth century, may lead us into a more sophisticated understanding of our own ideas of decorum in the social and political worlds. That is, we need to avoid defining the proper merely as a matter of exclusion, of simply determining who is in and who is out. Rather, we need to account for the mysteries of the centralized and the marginal, the processes of awareness and internalization, and the more subtle manifestations of force and power. The relative positions of the dominated and the dominator are seldom symmetrical and bipolar, but instead are dependent upon each other and interrelated in intricate ways. As Mary P. Ryan writes, “Women’s politics of the last century warns against a spatial or conceptual closure that constrains the ideal of the public to a bounded sphere with a priori rules about appropriate behavior therein. Feminists and female citizens . . . would find far more comfort in a plural and decentered concept of the public.”10 Simply put, women in the early-nineteenth-century public were both centralized and marginalized at the same time, and this paradox placed them in a uniquely significant location. In a fashion similar to Robert Hariman’s discussion of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s portrayal of Haile Selassie’s court, woman’s silence, while often leading to her being ignored or excluded in the midst of public activity, was the foundation of the whole babbling world around her. As Hariman describes the ritualized obsequiousness of Selassie’s rule, “The courtiers exemplified both the general rule that ‘bodily control is an expression of social control,’ and a specific form of social control that makes the decorous body the sign of order, and speech the sign of disorder.”11 So too,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
192
Page 192
.
Prudence
Hariman invokes Kenneth Burke’s observation that propriety requires, not only an adherence to the mystery of decorum, that is, conformation to its rules and boundaries, but a transcendence of it, a heightening of it to the point of self-signification.12 I contend that women, in and through their bodily stillness, their essential emptiness, became the transcendent sign of decorum, subject to a political and social culture that collapsed adherence and enforcement into a unitary ritualized icon—the listening female body. Although the ritual iconization of decorum appears to be a general process, the specific way decorum was feminized in the United States was embedded in early-nineteenth-century attitudes toward yet another body—that of the public. As several historians have argued, Western political culture in the early nineteenth century was both repulsed and fascinated by the public as a physical collective.13 In the United States, this ambivalence yielded two sets of attitudes. On one hand, a gathering of the general public was perceived as potentially excitable, active, and unbounded, signifying the uncontrollable and irrational in political life. Women, children, the poor, the foreign, and other groups with limited rational faculties were admitted into the civic polity, if only temporarily, by means of such public aggregates as crowds and meetings. Because of this “mixed” composition, a public gathering could potentially become a mob, and mobs represented the breakdown of civility and decorum.14 On the other hand, the collective in its physical manifestation was seen as absolutely necessary for the conduct of government. It comprised the audience and the constituency for the orators and politicians of the Golden Age. The presence of masses of people at a speech or assembly physically displayed the substance of the nation. Large, enthusiastic public crowds confirmed the correctness of the democratic order and strengthened faith in the American way of life.15 As such, the public as a collective is a paradoxical concept, for it is seen as both marginal and central to the functioning of a democratic state. And, in a highly fragmentary but condensed manner, the concept of the female audience, as part of the general public, reproduced the ambivalence toward the collective felt during the Jacksonian period of the early nineteenth century. Like the public in general, women in an audience were often described in polar, dialectical terms. But for women, as mentioned above, these polarities were uniquely nuanced because of their exclusion from almost any public action. The mere threat of women’s violating conventional decorum by becoming an active political audience was completely contained by insistent warnings concerning her immanent lapse into her essentially transgressive, marginally rational, even dangerous nature.16 Yet within this firmly drawn
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 193
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
193
boundary, she was extravagantly praised as the epitome of public behavior, being passive, physically ornamental, a repository of all the proper public virtues, and indeed a confirmation of the legitimacy of the political process.17 As Miriam Brody, referring to characterizations of gender in written style, remarks: “The feminine is loathed as the disrupter of meaning and the spoiler of prose, but she is admired as beautiful and conceded as necessary.”18 The way the threat of feminine chaos underpinned and reinforced women’s ideal decorum in public audiences illuminates the complex nineteenth-century attitude toward the public realm. But these attitudes toward female audiences may be seen as more than a rough index reflecting general attitudes toward political life. Women, like other disempowered groups such as slaves, were not simply a category of specialized auditors subsumed within the larger entity of the public. Rather, attitudes taken toward women as a gender constituted some of the terms within which the nineteenth century conceived of public activity itself. That is, the characteristics of the female audience described in various early-nineteenth-century discourses, not only reflected their conceptions of the public, but also delimited the particular categories within and outside of which public action could be said to exist—such categories as reason, practical activity, and considered judgment. And because the threat of transgression was so comprehensive, and women’s identification as legitimizer and arbiter was so complete, the female audience constituted a uniquely centralized “other,” a highly condensed signifier figuring forth both the extent and limits of social and political reality. This characterization of the female audience was effected by a specific, though variable, figure—the rhetorical critic. As much as any other factor, rhetorical critics shaped the role that audiences and orators were to play in early-nineteenth-century America. This was true, not only because criticism was often the only remaining material evidence of an historical event, such as the assemblage of a crowd or the appearance of an orator, but also because criticism’s ostensible function to observe, describe, and evaluate corresponded to and often prescribed the social and political parameters of audience behavior. One could say that the rhetorical critic of the early nineteenth century in part constructed the female audience, and that the construction established some of the constraints and demands placed by critics upon public discourse, and indeed public action itself. Consequently, the role of the female audience and the function of rhetorical criticism in portraying that audience were inextricably linked. Women, in particular, represented the boundary between culture and nature for the Jacksonian critic, as they have through much of civilized
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
194
Page 194
.
Prudence
history.19 With the women on one side of the boundary was the domain of decorum and civility; just on the other side were the dragons and monsters, riots and mobs, of the sublimated nineteenth-century imagination. Because the feminine representation of decorum was so central to her identity, her fall into incivility was all the more portentious and abrupt. The critic, whose socially appointed task it was to police the boundaries of the civil, determined and controlled the responses of the female audience through his position as transcendent, objective arbiter. Simultaneously, the critic vied for public space with the female audience, because their positions, being responsible for the upholding of social standards while located on the margins of political activity, were so similar.20 Through this rivalry with, and control of, the feminine listener, the critic constructed some of the most important constitutive qualities of the modern rhetorical audience—namely, its passivity, silence, and decorum. These social arbiters of the nineteenth century transformed the notion of the decorous from what was suitable to any given situation, to what was judged suitable for a feminized audience. The conjunction of the female audience, the public, and the rhetorical critic leads to an examination of the criticism of public address in the periodicals of the Jacksonian era. To represent the range of reference about women, I have chosen two groups of periodical discourse. The first is derived from a selection of periodicals from the early 1820s up to 1840, mostly located in the Northeast and primarily of the Whig persuasion, although one important Democratic periodical and some Federalist ones are also represented.21 The second source is located in the pages of one periodical newsletter, The Free Enquirer, edited by Fanny Wright and Robert Dale Owen. These discourses represent two significantly different placements of female audiences. Not coincidentally, they also represent different positionings of the rhetorical critic as observer and commentator upon the rhetorical scene. Looking at the two sets of materials together juxtaposes the dominant cultural configuration against a possible alternative and defines each position through contrast. Though the individual critics themselves were located on the political boundaries, being passive, anonymous, and objectified, their commentaries were situated in the mainstream of culture, their pronouncements ubiquitous and authoritative. They were concerned with clearly defining the boundaries between speaker and audience, rationality and madness, critic and reader, male and female. To do so, they simultaneously elevated, repressed, and appropriated the female audience. In contrast, The Free Enquirer was nearly off the edge of the political spectrum, and the presence of the newsletter itself was
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 195
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
195
marginal and transitory. But Fanny Wright, as coeditor and chief topic of criticism, persistently violated the boundaries by featuring her individual opinions as rhetorical criticism. In doing this she offered an alternative way of looking at the relationship between the genders that opened a space for the female audience and, indeed, the female critic. This alternative neither centralized nor marginalized the female audience, but blurred the divisions between speakers and audiences, and critics and readers as well. Although other influential women writers and speakers did challenge these boundaries in comparable ways, as Nicole Tonkovich argues for Sarah Josepha Hale, none did it with as much thoroughness and consistency as Fanny Wright. One more point, however, needs to be raised before examining the discourse of the periodicals. Consistent with other cultural commentaries of the nineteenth century, very little in the dominant Jacksonian periodicals deals directly with or even mentions women.22 Women as audiences, in particular, are simply peripheral to the major preoccupations of these critics. Yet this underrepresentation may be highly significant, since it has the potential for defining the acceptable. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White suggest, “What is socially peripheral may be symbolically central,” if not constitutive, of a culture.23 This study aims to determine the degree to which allusions to the female audience limited the conception of public activity for the standard rhetorical criticism of the time. It argues that even those fragmentary comments referring to women, few as they are and interspersed throughout the more “serious” rhetorical criticism, may sketch a telling picture of the earlynineteenth-century rhetorical and political imagination.
women, crowds, and the carnivalesque The most frequent characterization of the early American audience in its differentiated nature was the phrase “promiscuous.” This phrase had a sexual as well as a gender connotation. In addition to describing the moral quality to be discovered in a crowd, promiscuity connoted its “mixed” quality—that is, its free interchange between classes, social positions, ethnic origins, and of course the sexes. A promiscuous audience was fluid, variable, unbounded, and unpredictable in its responses because of its variegated makeup. Hence the promiscuous audience replicated the conditions characteristic of what has come to be termed the “carnivalesque.”24 Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque has conventionally been discussed as a symbolic and occasionally political ritual that subverts the established
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
196
Page 196
.
Prudence
order, if only for a sanctioned period of time. The carnivalesque has come to stand for any social structure that performs a hierarchical reversal in resistance to the established social structure. The resistance has been associated with the lower levels and marginalized of society—the working classes and peasants, the beggars and entertainers and freaks, the savages, children and women. Presumably, precapitalist folk culture with its emphasis on material excess, stimulation, and social and sexual license is the very essence of the carnivalesque and is to be valued above the rigidity, modesty, and rationality of the bourgeois.25 Stallybrass and White, among others, modify this formula in useful ways. They do not emphasize the high-low binarism of carnival, and therefore they do not valorize either the low or the high. Rather, they note that the disorder and flux of the carnival, the unstable shifting from the status of high to low and back again, is what produces the carnivalesque effect. This shifting is what disturbs the bourgeois sense of order.26 In early modern Europe, the period from which Stallybrass and White and Bakhtin draw their examples, the paradigm for the massed public was the fair or marketplace. Here the provincial in human nature came into direct contact with all forms of human existence—traders, peddlers, jugglers, dwarfs, and clowns. Prostitutes frequented the fair, as did those women who did not solicit for a living but whose sexual impulses overcame them in the period just prior to Lent or the coming of winter. Hence, Daniel Defoe is quoted in commenting on the October Charlton fair, that it was “infamous for the yearly collected rabble of mad-people” and that “the mob” was given to “all kinds of liberties, and the women are especially imprudent that day; as if it were a day that justify’d the giving themselves a loose to all manner of indecency and immodesty.”27 The female was part of the grotesque display, being placed with the beggars, madmen, and revelers within the chaotic scene of the mob.28 Although the Lenten carnival and lewd women no longer marked the boundary of the proper, the ancient attitude toward the carnivalesque remained as an undercurrent in Jacksonian public discourse, in particular the periodical criticism of public address. In fact, as Kenneth Cmiel suggests, the Federalist era yielded to a more “carnivalesque” Jacksonian age, as the presence of women as speakers and even women as audiences underscored their potential to disturb the ideal conception of the civil and political order.29 Granted, that political order was conceived by its makers as modern, democratic, and forward-looking, and indeed, women in the audience reinforced this self-image of order and decorum. But the scandal that represented women in public occasionally emerged in language that hearkened back to the medieval carnival and trade fair, a language that, to quote Miriam Brody, registered an “apparently incompatible revulsion and attraction toward the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 197
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
197
degraded.”30 By evoking this language, rhetorical critics relegated women to the paradoxical position of being praised for not acting, yet censured merely for being observed.
jacksonian women and the carnivalesque The focus of this study is the critical attitude toward women as members of audiences to public address. Nevertheless, a brief look at how women as speakers were regarded may advance the argument. Women speakers, after all, drew more attention than auditors, and that attention was expressed in more disparaging terms. No nuances entered into consideration of women’s first speaking performances. Thus, a Federalist periodical of 1825 has the following to say about women who dared to preach. It is by no means surprizing that an audience may be collected for such an exhibition, of those who go from the same motives with which they would go to see a rope dancer or a puppet show; and it is just as necessary that the latter should be removed from place to place to excite wonder and attract curiosity as the former. Had the sacred writers been silent on the subject, we would have no idea that females possessing qualities suited to the sex, would mount the rostrum, or strain the modest music of the female voice, into the vociferous eloquence necessary to attract the curiosity of a mixed assembly. [St. Paul’s proscriptions are cited.] . . . We would say that the apostle meant only the regular churches of the “standing order,” and did not recognize those numerous societies which have sprung up in modern days as churches, or that the apostle speaking of women, did not mean to exclude those who had divested themselves of the modest and retiring virtue of the sex; but these or any other explanations contrary to the plain and obvious import, are evasions unworthy of the subject.31 The language used by this critic is interpretable only in terms of the carnivalesque. The rope dance or the puppet show represent the foreign, exotic, and at the same time childlike and mechanical stimulation of the pre-Lenten fair.32 The female speaker is an attraction, a display, particularly to the mixed crowd. Yet the mixing occurs on a structural level as well. The quotation represents a volley in a war between conservative clerics and the religious phenomenon of the Second Great Awakening. This outpouring of spiritual fervor, lasting from the 1800s through the 1840s, gave a
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
198
Page 198
.
Prudence
revivalist, nonhierarchal energy to religious practice throughout the former colonies and deeply into the rural West. In the quotation cited above, the itinerant nature of the carnival fair and its street performers is juxtaposed to the circuit preaching of the Second Great Awakening—preaching that often featured women speakers and women in the audience. Here, the female preacher is both part of the crowd and its leader; but by being its leader she magically transforms her sex into a grotesque parody of femininity. This shifting from audience to speaker, or the threat of such a shift, is not an unusual activity in the nineteenth century, despite the great anxiety it produced in critical observers. We shall explore the shifting later in more detail. More important for women in their role as auditors is what might be called the “horror of observation.” Richard Sennett calls it the “stony feminine fear of being seen in public.”33 One of the problems of women in the public marketplace was that they might be looked upon in just such a disparaging light as expressed by the critic of female preaching. “At the fair,” write Stallybrass and White, “the subordinate classes became the object of a gaze constituting itself as respectable and superior by substituting observation for participation.”34 Where women might be looked at or gazed upon, as in a spectacle, they may be separated from the observer and relegated to the status of the crowd. This is particularly true if the woman voluntarily becomes a performer through her speech or actions. To become a speaker in her own right was much more horrifying than the sheer prospect of her relegation to the disparaging gaze. If women were to be part of the public scene at all, it was preferred that they were to be gazed upon, and hence prevented from disturbing or mixing the boundaries between actor and actant. Needless to say, in any instance the gaze that does such relegating is male. When women become part of the scenery, as it were, of a great public event or celebration, and are in no danger of themselves becoming performers, the vocabulary in which they are described changes. They are no longer monstrous, grotesque, or unsexed; they are, instead, “fair.” Stallybrass and White have made clear the connection between descriptions of feminine beauty as “fair” and the opportunities for local women to improve upon their rough provincial appearance by partaking of the cosmetics in the peddler’s pack. If she is to be looked upon with favor at a fair, she must appear “fair,” not grotesque. She is only allowed to observe the spectacle by becoming part of it, but a specifically passive part. This is a description of the scene at the Bunker Hill celebrations of 1825: “After the ceremony of laying the corner stone by General Lafayette, the procession occupied the amphitheatre in front of the rostrum, the Bunker Hill survivors being on the right, and the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 199
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
199
Revolutionary on the left front; the side ranges having been already filled with ladies, whose faces added a bright charm to the severe solemnities of this precious day.”35 And in 1840 the New World describes an audience, as well as its readers, thus: “For the pleasure, as well as edification of our many fair readers, we are persuaded to present, in this day’s paper, the remarks made by ‘Mr. D. Webster,’ (as the Richmond Enquirer calls him with undue disdain,) to the lovely audience lately assembled in the Log Cabin at Richmond. . . . A brilliant party of the fair of the county was assembled; and in the Tippecanoe Club’s room where he spoke, the half of the audience at least was of the gentler sex.”36 Of course, to admit women to the public scene to be gazed upon is also to permit them to gaze. Here the intermingling of actant and actor is the most difficult to control, since any action is confined to the mere activity of viewing. Yet control must be attempted. It is accomplished first through the further reinforcement of women in the role of observer rather than that of participant. Thus the charter of a debating society announced in the National Register in 1816: “The regulations of the society are such as to admit ladies as spectators.”37 Later, at the Webster rally in 1840, the “fair” are allowed to entertain him and bring him flowers—but with an attitude of distanced, if obsequious, respect. Every morning and evening magnificent bouquets of flowers, most tastefully arranged by the fairest hands, were presented to him, and some of them accompanied by wreaths of fancy which greatly added to the compliment. On a card stuck in the midst of one superb bouquet were the following admirable lines: To him, on whom each distant age shall gaze, The mighty sea-mark of these troubled days; Him, large of soul, of genius unconfined, Born to delight, instruct and mend mankind; Him, in whose breast a Roman ardor glows, Whose copious tongue with Grecian richness flows!38 The passive sentence structure of this passage (“were presented to him” “were the following admirable lines”) and the emphasis on passive observation in the poem suggests the limit of the women’s activity. Yet the ambivalence toward the women’s performance is palpable—the description also conjures up the hidden and illicit connotations of flowers and notes exchanged by lovers.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
200
Page 200
.
Prudence
The second, more direct means of enforcing the observational character of women’s role in the audience was by physical segregation. The politeness and decorum of physical contact implied in the Webster exchange of flowers hides a more primitive fear of contact—that of contamination. In early modern Europe, one of the fears of letting the classes mingle in promiscuous assemblies was, not only that fair ladies would be taken for prostitutes, but that actual contact with the rabble exposed the gentry to disease, dirt, infection, and even insanity.39 In the Jacksonian era, one way to prevent such contact from reaching middle-class female observers (and perhaps to prevent middle-class male actors from being contacted in turn) was to put the ladies in the balcony or the gallery. The balcony as a location of confinement has a long and checkered history. In the American theater from 1800 to 1850 it was the location of servants, blacks, and other mixed audiences, where the upper classes sat in the boxes and the middle classes in the orchestra.40 In the political arena, it was where women and other nonparticipants sat while observing floor debates and legislative procedure being performed by men below. The connotations of theater, especially where it came to female audiences, were never quite purged from the political gallery. Its very structure served to reinforce and separate, and at the same time, to allow to mingle, the political with the social function of the public venue. The fear was that the social (represented by women) and the political (represented by men) would mingle to such an extent that women would take the floor and men become passive, feminized observers.41 The gallery or balcony is a ubiquitous site for the drama of male and female, public and private. Elevated and sequestered from the contaminating touch of the promiscuous crowd, observable yet observing in turn, screened by boundaries of silence, decorum, and often physical screens, the balcony represented the most public participation affordable to women while still retaining them as an adoring and unexpendable audience. Balconies were also socially symbolic of the place to which middle-class women had been relegated. On the right and left of the rostrum, were two ranges of seats, also covered with an awning, extending on either hand about two hundred feet, and designed for the accommodation of ladies.42 The most brilliant and numerous audience of the session were in the galleries of the Hall of the House of Representatives to-day. The ladies’ gallery was thronged with the ladies of the metropolis, and the fashionable and beautiful multitude who are here from abroad.43 The
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 201
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
201
reporters all seize their pens, and the honorable speaker turns in his morocco chair to catch a full view of the ample and intellectual face. In the gallery there is quite a sensation. Necks are stretched over, and fingers pointed, and ladies are whispering to their beaux, and beaux are simpering to the fair ones. There is a general sensation throughout the lobbies—the members—the galleries—and even we, accustomed as we are to all manner of eloquence, feel quite a tumult within us.44 The simpering of the beaux may be explained by their physical position—in the balcony with the women. Their function is to respond to the women’s needs, not to take action with the men on the floor. From their position in the balcony, women would rain down salutary influences, “soften[ing] the asperity of debate, chasten[ing] and reform[ing] their language and sentiment, and giv[ing] a powerful impetus to emulation.”45 The standard of conduct implied in these critical descriptions extends to the domain of the symbolic. In one remarkable fictional story, a woman, formerly a lover of a freshman congressman, inspires him through a single glance from behind a curtain in the balcony, to salvage a failing speech. “After this little incident he was another man. Though he began again rather low . . . yet his voice had now a clear ring and a steady fullness which bespoke the conscious power of accustomed eloquence. . . . [T]he hint I had received respecting some peculiar relation between him and that beautiful woman in the gallery . . . directed my conjecture to that sudden electric meeting of the eye between him and her.”46 The title of this story is “The Maiden Speech,” and the double entendre is intentional. The dual connotations of the word “maiden” as both “first” and “virginal” reference the political and social elements of the legislative forum equally. But part of the horror of observation was the possibility that through the process of seeing and being seen a slippage could occur between the boundaries of the female audience and the decorous legislative chamber. Women in politics were a source of inspiration, true, but also a potential source of disorder, illicit emotions, and even madness. Their very centrality to the enforcement of civilized standards, placed as it were in the midst of decorum, implied the possibility of a quantum jump to irrational, uncontrollable behavior if not constantly monitored and held in check. By the end of the story, this particular maiden, the balconied but illegitimate inspiration for political sublimity, had married a man twice her age and died tragically in an insane asylum. Her young lover, after a successful congressional career, died on a steamboat heading west down the Ohio River.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
202
Page 202
.
Prudence
women in the political arena The differences between a country fair, a theater, a Bunker Hill celebration, and a political venue, of course, are generic. Each situation contains its own peculiar mix of spatial structures and class restrictions. But what can be argued for the marketplace fair applies equally to the political forum—that here the political and social, the rational and emotive, are intertwined. Perhaps because of the emphasis upon rational decision making, the tensions produced by a female, and presumably highly social, audience are the greatest in a political forum. Women’s presence in politics underscored the shameful truth that much of politics was a matter of persuasion and seduction, of “pressing the flesh,” rather than the measured deliberation of a sober democratic assembly. Women represented the passionate, unbounded, and irrational forces just beneath the surface of the democratic polity. Hence her involvement with politics—as observer, audience, and possibly reflective critic—was deflected, ignored, or appropriated. This appropriation was aided and abetted by the rhetorical critics. Women, it was said, were too persuadable for politics. They were unusually susceptible to the excitement of public events, much like their lower-caste companions. As mentioned in an essay titled “Excitement”: “We distinguish certain persons as having an unusual portion of [lively] sensibility; we suppose females to possess it in a higher degree than males, children, than aged persons, and those of a lively temper, than those who are sedate.”47 Political debate at its hottest ran the risk of stirring up the passions of female listeners, infecting them and even polluting them with shocking language. Women must be protected from the naturally occurring but stimulating discourse to be found on the legislative floor. Thus: We submit to qualified judges, whether, except under deep provocation, or other peculiar circumstances, severity and harshness in public debate, either in matter, words, or manner, be not a violation of that courtesy and well-bred observance, which should mark the collision, no less than the friendly intercourse, of cultivated and polished minds. Why do gentlemen avoid violence of every description, in the presence of ladies? Because it is unbecoming in refined society. And we again submit, whether such manners and habits as are discarded from the drawing-room, should find a place in the council-chambers of the nation?—those halls of wisdom, which should set an example, to our own country, at least, if not to the world, of cultivated intellect, dignified deportment, and refined breeding?
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 203
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
203
. . . The terms and phrases “Monster,” “Mammoth corporation,” “Moneyed aristocracy,” “Sink of corruption,” and other like expressions, habitually indulged in by the Chief Magistrate of the Union against the Bank of the United States, estranged alike from intellect and morality, are gross manifestations of animal passion. . . . Totally inconsistent with the dignity and decorum of high station, they lower the occupant of it to the level of the mob.48 Note the use of carnivalesque, grotesque imagery. Here one can see the tenuous line between the social disorder of carnival and the established political order that would occur should carnival extend its boundaries to become political agitation or insurrection. The fact that this disorder is confined by a reference to women is significant; women represent the boundary conditions of civilization, the extreme verge past which all is chaos. Her presence on the boundary marks the limit of human decency, the edge of reason against the flood of “animal” passion. A democracy, however, encounters contradictions in restricting access to information for any of its constituents. Young women’s exposure to “serious” rhetorical discourse had the potential to be educative and enlightening, promising to help raise the untutored young female from her trivial novels and infusing her with an emotional and intellectual investment in the future.49 Not only does the spirit of modern liberality desire to spread knowledge among all ranks, but among the individuals of both sexes. The absurd doctrine of intellectual inferiority is fast disappearing;—that doctrine which influences the savage, who degrades his wife to the condition of a menial, and which has made its appearance in more refined society in some such aphoristic form as this, that “the best learning for a lady, is to learn to make a pudding.”. . . It is admitted, that puddings, though admirable things in their way, are but indifferent subjects of conservation, and as it is the fashion now-a-days to converse a good deal, it is desirable, that there should be other subjects, not only than puddings, but even than ribbons, gauze, bobbinet, or peradventure, the last new novel. . . . The ladies of the present day are taught something of chemistry, geography, astronomy, natural philosophy, and the modern languages; there are who have not refrained from Latin, and some, it is said, have even meddled with Greek; still it is devoutly believed, that they are neither worse housekeepers nor less agreeable companions, than the potters, preservers, comfit-makers, and diligent embroiderers of times that are gone by.50
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
204
Page 204
.
Prudence
The solution, then, was not to send women back to the kitchen or the nursery. Rather, it was to censor serious discourse, particularly serious political discourse, of anything that could stir the passions, allowing it to reach female ears only in its most elevating, “rhetorical” form. An occasional glance at the speeches of distinguished American orators, without the remotest reference to their political tendency, is not only properly within the plan of our journal, but serves to add to the variety of its columns, and to bring into the light of drawing-rooms, and within the knowledge of the young and the gay, many noble passages of eloquence, which they would otherwise suffer to glide by unregarded. . . . In the daily press, even the most excellent come amid such a deluge . . . the female mind frequently turns to the more quiet and easy paths of light literature. . . . Our fair friends could scarcely trudge through so much dense unbroken matter in days—. . . . An eloquent aspiration of Clay serves only to light a candle, and a lucid appeal from Webster is twisted up upon some lovely head, ornamenting the outside, without a chance of embellishing the interior. . . . [The holding out of sheets becomes a gymnastic exercise.] The determined lover of eloquence sometimes folds the paper; but what power of rhetoric, what political sagacity, what fervid patriotism can compensate the strained eyes for struggling on over the innumerable creases. . . . [W]e shall furnish her with a choice passage or two, without giving her the trouble of finding them herself. . . . This week, therefore, we beg leave to glean a few golden ears from Mr. Webster’s broad and ample harvest-field. They are taken from his reply to Mr. Calhoun’s remarks on the nullification question. In culling these fragments, we take no liberty in presuming that every body is acquainted with the outline of the subject . . . they know, of course, that Mr. Calhoun has been the zealous and eloquent leader of the seceders, or nullifiers, and that Mr. Webster has met him in behalf of the country, of liberty, and of the general practicability of republican governments. The few extracts below, from one of these attacks on the part of Webster, we present for their rhetorical beauty, merely as specimens of eloquence. He claims our attention, not as a political leader, but only as an American speaker.51 One cannot help but note the cynical disingenuousness with which political ideology is first banished, then imported back into the discourse masked as
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 205
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
205
objective “rhetorical beauty.” The process of the canonization of Webster’s speeches is here in evidence, created by the critic’s need to teach young women political lessons without admitting either that he is addressing them directly or that they are listening to what is said. Again and again, similar strategies are employed by critics to leach out and debilitate an active political critique from women audiences and readers, even as they are admitted as passive observers and even indicators of rhetorical beauty. They are spoken about, spoken for, and spoken to—but never speak themselves. Instead, they are used to position political debates and establish the ultimate conditions of civil absurdity for both sides of the political spectrum. Mr. Benton commenced a rigmarole sort of speech after Mr. W. sat down. It was something like the rant of a clown after the performance of a tragedy. There was not a particle of argument, or any thing approaching the dignity of decent declamation, in anything he said. He abused the Senate; said they had been instructing the ladies and young misses in History during the whole winter; that Buonaparte, Cromwell and Caesar were as familiar as the nursery phrases to the children of the city, and that if the ladies were not now well acquainted with the history of tyranny, they must be exceedingly dull. The audience laughed; and Mr. B. thought it was produced by his wit, not his puerility; took courage, and became more vehement and verbose.52 Thus the rationality, order, decorum, and attention to process characteristic of the bourgeois political order were arrayed against the impending absurdity, passion, disorder, and risibility of the female mind. The solution to the dilemma was tight control over language and even tighter control over behavior—a control that extended to the audience itself. The control of the female audience ultimately became the control of all audiences, and the socially appointed policeman was the rhetorical critic.
women and the rhetorical critic The one person capable of actively defending the fortress against chaos was the rhetorical critic. Nina Baym has articulated how the literary critics of the Jacksonian period upheld the standards of civil society in the face of romanticism and the onslaught of novels written by “scribbling women.” She also underscores the fact that there were many more female readers of novels than
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
206
Page 206
.
Prudence
of political discourse.53 But the potential onslaught of the mob of irrational women was that much closer to realization in the rhetorical domain, and the threat of women’s access to agency that much more acute.54 When audiences of any sort responded to speeches, they not only sighed in garrets or threw books into fires; they hectored speakers, climbed onto stages, called for encores, and broke out in fistfights.55 Rhetorical critics, most of them male, most of them middle class, took upon themselves the function of taming the audience into some semblance of rational order.56 First to be put under control were the women, of course—for where could there be order when women ran amok? But eventually came the enforcement of women’s condition upon the entire audience. The Jacksonian audience was interactive to a degree barely conceivable to the contemporary mind. Lawrence W. Levine writes, for example, that in 1833 the New York Mirror reported an audience at the American Theatre that rejected the overture, and instead loudly called out for “Yankee Doodle.”57 Outbreaks like these reinforced critics’ self-appointed guardianship of public morals and progressively extended it to control over public behavior. “Concommitant with the establishing of the refined ‘public’ sphere and its distinct notion of professional authorship,” critics took upon themselves the responsibility of cozening audiences to “keep still and keep quiet.”58 Consequently, the cult of etiquette was born. “Individuals were taught to keep all private matters to themselves and to remain publicly as inconspicuous as possible. . . .‘A lady or gentleman should conduct herself or himself on the street so as to escape all observation,’ an etiquette book advised in 1892.”59 So, too, critics attempted to escape all observation, though they themselves reserved the right to observe from a privileged viewpoint. Unlike women, who could not escape being observed in the public arena and as a result were nearly excluded from it, male critics could judge without being judged. This observation, ideally, was passive, detached, objective and highly rational, and at the same time prescriptive and patronizing. But nowhere was this combination of stances more mixed together than in male critics’ advice to women. In this advice one may see a jostling for semantic and sometimes even physical space. For the critics’ location was also in the gallery, or sometimes along the side of the orchestra, never on the main floor and certainly never in the boxes. The critics vied for space with the women, who were always potential critics themselves and therefore potential threats to the critics’ own position as arbiters of order. If critics could quiet and subdue the audience, particularly the women, they could take their place—that is, their judgment could be substituted for that of the audience.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 207
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
207
In much of the criticism of public address, females are implored to give up their own judgment for that of a dominant, presumably more objective male. The advice comes in two forms. First is the voice of the older, paternal male addressing the young female in the ways of decorous judgment. This voice has a long history in eighteenth-century courtesy books directed from father to daughter.60 In this voice, less attempt is made to appear objective and transparent than is made to appear sage and wise. In the article “Mr. Webster’s Speech to the Ladies,” quoted previously for its visual appreciation of the female audience, the emergent voice is that of a male tutor instructing his protégé to avail herself of instructional discourse. For the pleasure, as well as edification of our many fair readers, we are persuaded to present, in this day’s paper, the remarks made by “Mr. D. Webster,” (as the Richmond Enquirer calls him with undue disdain,) to the lovely audience lately assembled in the Log Cabin at Richmond. We need not say that the speech is an excellent one, and in the best possible taste—for people will find out for themselves, if they can be prevailed upon to read it. To effect this desirable end, it is, perhaps, enough to say, that besides being brief, it is not political or partisan in its character.61 Of course the phrase “it is not political or partisan in its character” is an example of the direction (or misdirection) of women’s observation and judgment. Women are directed to “overlook,” or merely observe, Webster’s politics, not to react to it, and hence remain unscathed. The other voice is that of the objective observer. This voice, somewhat more subtle, purports to step into the female audience’s position, speaking for her innermost thoughts in the language of the male critic. The following is a fictionalized dialog set in the offices of the editor of the New England Magazine. A female wrangler is, I grant you, a melancholy object, but not the female, who takes sides in politics, and with modesty, maintains her ground. Can you be severe upon a lady . . . who goes to Washington and returns with political opinions, which she does not hesitate to express? She visits the Capitol. She hears the debates, and sees the debaters, in Congress. She sees, with intuitive tact, the overshadowing intellectual superiority of the oppositionists over the servants of the administration. . . . Mr. Webster rises to speak. The impressiveness
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
208
Page 208
.
Prudence
of truth is in all that he says. He engages the understanding; and, without delaying to dazzle the fancy or to touch the heart, he interests, illuminates, and persuades the reason. She listens to the bewildering eloquence of Clay—. . . . She is moved by the force and cogency of his remarks. She acknowledges the weight of his reasoning, the scorching fervor of his satire. While he speaks, the mists of ignorance are dispelled from the hearer’s mind; the bulwarks of prejudice are broken down, and conviction towers above the ruins. (Singleton is here seen to stuff a hand kerchief into his mouth. Vanderblunt bursts into a loud guffaw. The Editor smiles, faintly.) . . . [S]he learns, that these men are opposers of the administration. And who are its supporters? Have patience. Issac Hill rises; and, after much difficulty, is delivered of a few empeded ejaculations. Benton stands up, and roars in a voice, which is grating to the ear, and in a language, which is revolting to the taste. . . . My fair hearer exclaims: ‘Enough! Call you these, the prominent supporters of the administration? If such be the advocates, how miserable must be the cause!’ And satisfied with this unanswerable logic, she is thenceforward a staunch, staunch Whig.62 The satire here trivializes women’s considered judgment. She is ultimately persuaded not by the argument of the opposition but negatively, by the smarmy grotesqueness and disgusting habits of the administration speakers. She observes rather than actively judges the scene in Washington. But she is correct in her observation, since it coincides with that of the Whig critic—and hence that critic, and that young female, need do little more than observe. There is no need to report the substance of her judgment. The critic will provide the same result with the better reason. The convergence of female judgment and that of the critic in the lone figure of the critic also portends the fate of the general audience. The audience itself becomes feminized in a peculiarly passive, bloodless way. The grotesquerie of the active female, and of the active audience, has been tamed by effecting a cultural shift of considerable proportions. The critic becomes a “transcendental cognitive ego by the act of . . . observation,” a detached figure removed from the sociality of the crowd.63 Ironically, this position is not so different than that of the sequestered female audience in the gallery. The difference, of course, is the vast gap in cultural authority between the critic and the female audience. When “curious woman leaves her squalling nurseryparadise, or her throne in an insipid parlor, to see from the height of an orator’s contemplation, as from a monument of vision, the wide arena of the busy world,” it is the orator’s, and the critic’s, vision that is monumental, not hers.64
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 209
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
209
fanny wright as speaker and critic The effort to transform the unshapely body of the female in the audience (and the unshapely body of the audience) into the segregated, atomized, and segmented political assembly, was a bourgeois project.65 But insofar as the project implied the necessity of a polity, that is, an audience, it could not succeed completely. The very fact that the spectacle of a speaking woman could raise a crowd, if only through its grotesque fascination, ensured that the attention of the audience could not be directed completely toward the decorous, rational, and politically correct. Democracy implied public attractions, and hence it is not surprising that the most sensational attraction in the public arena in the Jacksonian period should be a woman. Frances Wright, an immigrant to the United States from Scotland, was just such an attraction. Before starting her speaking career, she traveled freely within the international intellectual and political scene, cultivating deep friendships with Jeremy Bentham and General Lafayette, as well as conversing with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Andrew Jackson, and even Sam Houston.66 Influenced by economist Robert Owen’s commune, New Harmony, she established, and ultimately witnessed the failure of, her own social experiment with freed slaves at Nashoba, Tennessee. From 1828 to 1830 she and Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen edited The Free Enquirer, from which much of the material in this study is drawn. While editing The Free Enquirer, she toured the country with a series of six lectures originating in the presumably noncontroversial subjects of formal logic and constitutional law. Although her topics appeared benign, her conclusions affirmed democratic principles of freedom of speech and individual rights for all, tenets that sounded scandalous when spoken by one of the first documented women public speakers in U.S. history. From today’s perspective, her reputation as a rabble-rousing, riot-inciting firebrand cannot be substantiated by the content of her speeches, but by her association with causes ranging from free love to workers’ unions to women’s rights. Eventually, her very name was evoked as a synonym for the term “radical.”67 Yet despite all of the controversy surrounding her, no one denied that Fanny Wright drew crowds. Critics described her in terms signifying the disruption of decorum and segregation of categories characteristic of the carnivalesque. As a speaker she could only be an object of “prurient” curiosity, like the performers at a fair, or the most brazen of prostitutes. As the “Red Harlot of Infidelity,” she was the focus of unnamable fears. “Suppose the singular spectacle of a female, publicly and ostentatiously proclaiming doctrines of atheistical fanaticism, and even the most abandoned lewdness, should draw a
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
210
Page 210
.
Prudence
crowd from a prurient curiosity, and that a riot should ensue, which should end in the demolition of the interior of the building, or even in burning it down, on whom would the loss fall?”68 The veiled threat behind this exclamation of fear reveals the degree to which the potential presence of the irrational mob and the speaking woman was used to enforce social control. Fanny Wright’s discourses described the utter extreme of human social and political behavior and hence served as an effective means of regulating social standards through the critical act. “We need not the false, visionary, and pernicious schemes of a Wolstonecraft [sic] or a Wright to enforce the claims of woman: a temperate discussion of the principles of the law . . . is all that is needed, without resorting to the utter annihilation or upturning of the present constitution of civil society.”69 Wright herself was associated with the lowest and most depraved elements of society—animals, sexual indeterminates, the feebleminded, and beggars. For our individual self, we are opposed to the lady’s lectures; not on account of the matter . . . but the tack she has undertaken does not, in our view, belong to one of her sex. . . . Nature points out to them a different path, and propriety and common sense are scandalized whenever they deviate from it. . . . Now, in our apprehension, the female part of society has much more than its due share of influence in all our institutions, in all our manners, habits, principles and transactions. What but the overbearing influence of female caprice and vanity, has filled the country with monkeys in literature, dandies in theology, numskulls in law, and bankrupts in trade?70 Her sexuality was variable; at one time she was “masculine,” “bold,” and “forcible” (all pejorative labels),71 at other times she had “lady-like delicacy and perfect self-command.”72 On the one hand, she was “reviled, applauded and notorious,”73 on the other a “lone woman.”74 Indeed, the shifting of signification over Wright’s bodily presence, even to disagreements about her physical appearance, is so rapid and contradictory, that it is nearly impossible to determine anything specific about her from the critical accounts of her time. Clotted with the residues of fear, desire, and memory, the formulas with which Wright was described obscured her material existence and elevated her to the status of signifying icon. In a parallel way, Wright’s audiences were also transformed to the level of signifying icons, particularly the women. In sharp distinction with the major-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 211
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
211
ity of criticism of male discourse, which seldom mentions women at all except as ornaments to an oratorical scene, both Wright’s proponents and her detractors persistently noted the presence of a female audience. In most cases this is not merely a decorative audience, but one that by its sheer numbers and presence exerts a legitimizing but dangerously volatile quality to the proceedings. They are numerous and promiscuous (estimates culled from various performances range from one-third to one-half the total, the latter from reluctant testimony).75 For the most part, they are “more than usually respectable” and “ladies of respectability.”76 This latter feature, however, is not necessarily a compliment; it again implies a warning. “Hundreds and hundreds of respectable females by frequenting her lectures give countenance and currency to these startling principles and doctrines. . . . [T]he great Red Harlot is madly and triumphantly stalking over the city.”77 The implication is that respectable female members of Wright’s audiences will no longer remain respectable and slip in social position. Indeed, warns one critic of an upcoming lecture, “We hope nothing will happen of a dangerous, or even of an unpleasant nature. We presume no modest woman will be seen there.”78 But many modest women were “seen” at Wright’s lectures. The problem was that someone who should have been a member of the audience had become a speaker, and hence had disrupted the order of the sexes, the social-political order, and the order of nature, as determined by the rhetorical critics. Further, the female audience, perhaps taking Wright as an example, exerted their presence in measurable numbers and thus threatened themselves to become a significant social force, transcending the boundary between passivity and activity. Yet Fanny Wright and her audiences violated public standards in one more way that is not so apparent to the student of public address. In addition to transcending the boundary between audience and speaker, she transcended the boundary between rhetorical scene and rhetorical critic. Rather than accept the position of being passively observed, subject to the judgments of authoritative critics, or of turning herself into a passive critic of the public scene, she actively evaluated and criticized rhetoric from a distinctly partisan perspective. Her newsletter, The Free Enquirer, was not an “objective” newspaper; far from it, it was a propaganda sheet for the Workingmen’s Union and the Owenite principles Wright espoused after the failure of her utopian experiment at Nashoba. It took on the role of active rhetorical criticism that is consciously implicated in partisan politics. There was no rigid boundary between speaker, author, and critic in The Free Enquirer; no separate “reviewer” function apart from the participation in and reception of messages
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
212
Page 212
.
Prudence
as part of a politically aware audience. In this sense, Wright and her audience are merged, and the audience is not addressed as the “other” needing direction and advice, but rather as co-critics of the public domain. Wright accomplishes this feat in several ways. First, she does not separate beauty from political efficacy, either in rhetoric or in her characterization of women. The rhetorical critics attempted to view the political scene as detached observers, separating rhetorical quality from political considerations and remaining blind to their own political positioning. In the same way, they viewed women as aesthetic objects, ignoring the repressive strategy this implied for female political presence. Wright did neither. By quoting the Washington Chronicle in its description of Madame Roland, who figured prominently in American interpretations of French revolutionary activity, she combines the political and the social: “We have seen her [Roland] naive and good in her infancy, virtuous and attractive in her early youth; we shall see her brilliant and full of energy in the chaos of political trouble.”79 Similarly, Wright reverses the usual relationship between moral virtue and serious intellect when describing the French revolutionaries of 1789 as “virtuous men and high minded women” rather than the other way around.80 She was intent upon mixing and reversing the standard attributions of masculinity and femininity current in her day. In rhetoric, Wright values the efficacious, the impressive, the witty, and even the grotesque. By reprinting a review from the London Magazine, she praised a speaker for his “extraordinary combination of the impressive and the grotesque” with which he unleashed a torrent of “scorn, denunciation, and invective” upon an opponent.81 She celebrated when her favorite target, the Church, was attacked for its hypocritical discourse: “What find we [in religious discourse] but exhortations to passive obedience, laudatory apostrophes to thrones and crowns, princedoms, dominations, and powers.”82 She rejected the kind of critical response to discourse that allowed the audience to “soar out of sight, and hearing of the dust and din of earth, which is true devotion . . . [nor] to step aside for a little from actual participation in the drama of life, and sleeping or affecting to sleep away the memory of it, at certain periods appointed by custom or authority.”83 Instead, she favored being “in the very focus of the world’s interests and passions, and borne upon by the concentrated power and excitement of all its hottest and inflammatory influences.”84 Both in the case of women and also the case of rhetoric, she reformulated the boundary between decorum and disorder, observation and participation, criticism and politics. Second, for all of its partisanship, The Free Enquirer does not set up a single voice, or even a consistent set of voices, as the ultimate or transcenden-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 213
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
213
tal critical arbiter. Some of the critical commentary comes through reprints of Wright’s own speeches, with notes by Robert Dale Owens. But much of it consists of reprints of criticism from other newspapers and magazines, foreign and domestic, on all sides of the Wright question. For example, all of the attacks upon Wright used in this chapter come from reprints in The Free Enquirer, where they are juxtaposed against rabidly friendly reports. Even in this heteroglot of competing voices one can identify a distinct partisan position and divide out the opinions accordingly. The overall effect, however, is of an intertextual conversation in which speakers, critics, and audiences exchange positions, at times criticizing, at times becoming the object of criticism. For example, in one particular instance Wright herself writes a commentary upon her own lectures delivered in the Park Theatre in New York. First, she explains her rhetorical strategy (the establishing of first premises before discussing particular topics). Then she incorporates a highly inflammable and critical article as evidence that neither first premises nor particular topics matter when someone of her reputation is the speaker. In taking this self-reflexive move, Wright positions herself firmly in the debate over her principles while exercising critical judgment over her own, and others’ rhetorical techniques.85 The slippage from speaker, to critic, to audience of her own work gives the impression of rational and intelligent engagement on the part of the writer, and implies freedom and independent judgment for the reader. Through her elaborate rationality she also illustrates the irrationality of the attacks made against her, which ironically imitates the irrationality of the female auditor whom the critic fears. Third, while taking such various positions toward her own and others’ discourse, Wright avoids speaking for her audience, and even more important, prescribing its response. A good amount of the criticism in The Free Enquirer comes in the form of the reprinting of letters to the editor written by observers of particular performances of hers. The letters are often partisan, but never overwhelmingly laudatory. Many of them come from liberal males who quarrel with Wright’s ideas but defend her right to express them in public. Many attempt to modify Wright’s harridan image into something more moderate and acceptable to the broadly democratic and liberal mind. We can scarcely believe her the advocate of so revolting and improbable a measure [as that of free love], especially after listening to her intelligent and beautiful address, and whilst we are willing to award her all commendation as a woman of genius and acquirement, we would be glad to hear from her, publicly, a clear and concise exposition of her views both moral and political, without their being glossed
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
214
Page 214
.
Prudence
over by any precious refinement of sophistry, or kept in the back ground by any appeals to our boasted independence and freedom of the press.86 Yet the important characteristic in these letters is not so much their liberal tone, but the position of the writers. These writers are not presented as authoritative critics, objectively reporting on the speech as a social event, but members of the audience voicing their responses. In this positioning of the listening audience, one might see an amalgam, as in a curved mirror, of the active, boisterous, rowdy crowds of the nineteenth-century marketplace and theater. Here the audience speaks for itself. Therefore, in her variegated characterization of women and rhetoric, her inclusion of multiple critical voices, and in her providing a forum for the audience’s response, Wright violated most of the social and critical standards that were established, or rapidly being established, in her day. One must mention, however, that the voice of those members of the audience represented in Wright’s publication is still male. The voice of the female audience does not appear directly in the pages of The Free Enquirer, as it does later in various suffragist and women’s rights publications. Wright, however, did succeed in reaching an enormously important female audience—the leadership of the women’s suffrage movement, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was hailed by these two leaders as one of the three great pioneers of the movement, along with Mary Wollstonecraft and Ernestine Rose.87 In that sense, then, her influence was fundamental and constitutive, as distinct from immediate and consequential. Although she may have “failed” as a persuader of the mass public, a public dominated by men, she established an alternative paradigm for the way women were to be empowered as members of a social movement and as an audience. As a final reminder of the kind of critical stance modeled by Frances Wright, here is Mary Howitt, reporting on the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, in the Pennsylvania Freeman. Her description of Lucretia Mott, who with Elizabeth Cady Stanton was denied participation in the convention, proceeds in laudatory, yet gender-neutral terms. Her style represents not only a new attitude toward female speakers, but a new dialect with which to observe and describe them. Never will the writer of this article forget seeing for the first time this extraordinary woman. Lucretia Mott, to her idea, must be an Amazon who, if full of intellectual power, and moral intrepidity, would want
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 215
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
215
yet the graces of the true woman. She came; she was not above the middle size; in the plainest garb of a Quaker matron; calm, gentle, affectionate, and womanly in the highest degree. There was something absolutely subduing in the tenderness of her eye, in her soft smile, and low, pleasant voice; presently, however, the intellectual brow, the kindling eye, the beaming countenance, and the eloquent tongue realized an idea of intellectual and moral greatness, and singleness of purpose, which wanted no Amazonian figure to complete it. She is now the writer’s idea of a woman of the apostolic age. . . . [B]ut she was a woman, and the World’s Convention would not receive her; nor, of course, her sister delegates.88 This excerpt of a memoir contains many of the characteristics of the kind of criticism Wright attempted to create. The writer describes Lucretia Mott as a whole, complex, and even contradictory figure with both feminine and masculine qualities intact, rather than a two-dimensional cutout. The writer of the criticism admits to the kinds of self-reflexivity and self-examination characteristic of Wright’s multivocal criticism. Finally, she reports as from a member of the audience, rather than from a transcendent and authoritative critical position. Perhaps all three of these characteristics are requirements, or allowances, for the critical liberation of subjugated audiences.
fanny wright and the free enquirer—an assessment As Mary Howitt mentions, the women delegates to the London conventions of the World’s Anti-Slavery Association were put into galleries and told to keep quiet. Much of that would change after 1848, as women became increasingly and publicly vocal. Certainly Wright’s activity as a female speaker, her pioneering utopian projects, and the publication of her short-lived but powerful newsletter had brought about some of this shift in attitude. But her most noteworthy contribution was her timing. No other woman in the United States had performed in public so early and with such notoriety in a culture as closed and resistant to change as the Jacksonian period. Given the constraints of her age, she modeled a distinct alternative to members of female audiences, even though not many of those members followed her example. She flouted appropriate behavior by performing as a public speaker and also writing her own rhetorical criticism. She violated the boundaries between audience and critic by publishing the personal reports of
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
216
Page 216
.
Prudence
audience members, in the form of letters to the editor, along with her own responses. Finally, she refused to describe women in passive, scenic, or patronizing terms, but as dynamic actors within the realm of politics. Fanny Wright transgressed the restrictions upon women’s public participation by breaking into the dominant paradigm of critical apprehension that required and reinforced a passive, “feminized” rhetorical audience. Because Fanny Wright was so contrary to the trend of her times, she may be seen, and has been seen, as a rhetorical failure. But her lack of public success need not detract from her accomplishment. Given the conditions for women in public the late 1820s and early 1830s in America, Wright should not have existed, much less been allowed to speak and write for a period of approximately two years. Further, the question is not whether she succeeded or failed to overcome the prejudices of her society to effect change through identification and persuasion. This is a task available only to the few, and often only those who are positioned firmly within the orbit of a given set of understandings. Rather, the question is to uncover both the conditions that made her intervention into culture a possibility, and to recognize the degree and nature of her intervention. Fanny Wright embraced the sharp contradictions of the Jacksonian culture, its origins in provincial prejudices combined with its hankering for bourgeois decorum, its respect for the public and its suspicion of the mob, and used them to open a space for women speakers and audiences. In marshaling the carnivalesque against itself, she broke open its oppressive restrictions and made more decorous speech available for others. By acting imprudently, she made possible opportunities for prudent speech for women. In so doing, she helped reconstitute the boundaries—of criticism, of the feminine, and of speech itself. “To restore prudence we must recover the conditions that enabled it,” writes Robert W. Cape Jr.89 Lacking the power to recover the conditions of the Greek city-state or the Roman republic—lacking also perhaps the desire to do so—such a rhetor as Fanny Wright still recognized the insidiousness of the position into which she had been relegated, appropriated the reduced dimensions of prudence available to her, and exposed the bankrupt propriety that stood in its place. She deliberately acted “improperly” in a culture in which propriety had usurped the role of prudence. With the center of social life exposed and rendered vulnerable by her actions, Jacksonian critics beheld in horror the abyss that lay just beneath their carefully constructed discourse of decorum. But their efforts at repair simply called attention to the rupture. Impeccably logical, unremarkable in appearance, modest to a fault, Fanny Wright was a sensation only because she was labeled a sensation. Audiences
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 217
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
217
and readers were called upon to view the epitome of the improper, as if at a carnival sideshow, but the impropriety they were called upon to view simply did not exist in the terms attributed to it by its own culture. This perceptual gap made it impossible for audiences to dismiss the women speakers that would follow. The evidence of their own eyes and ears made it impossible for them to make women into either angels or monsters merely upon entering the auditorium. In arguing for Fanny Wright as a critical alternative, however, I am not advocating that her techniques be adapted to today’s rhetorical culture. Nor would I like to return to the days when a listening audience could “point and settle” (that is, correct or shout down) performers or speakers on the podium. But it is worth reiterating how entrenched the constitutive conventions of rhetorical performance were in the Jacksonian age, and how remarkable the existence of an alternative. The bourgeois conception of regulated public life was built upon the systematic repression of the carnivalesque and the construction of the clearly defined boundaries between speaker and audience, rationality and madness, critic and reader, male and female, that we in the twenty-first century have inherited. The very existence of women, as well as other marginalized groups, defined the limits of white male bourgeois identity, and nowhere is that identity more apparent than in the visible performance and criticism of public address. The examples of the rhetorical critics and of Fanny Wright, then, challenge those who speculate upon propriety to widen their assumptions. For today, audiences designated by their racial, national, class, or gender identity are still seen merely as a part of the civic polity, as groups whose behavior and decorum are to be judged as within or outside of a particular culturally determined rule or law, and as such they face the contradictions of their iconic status. They will always remain a “working class” crowd, a “mob” of inner-city blacks, or a “female” audience, and discourse using these conceptions will both qualify and characterize their activity in the public domain. But even more important, this discourse qualifies and characterizes the activity of the public itself, if only through proscription, repression, and inversion. As in the case of the feminization of propriety, language describing such groups helps to define what it means to be a public, because it epitomizes appropriate public behavior while identifying that point beyond which a speaker cannot claim to be addressing the public at all. Thus the notion of propriety, as it has been bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century and feminized through the taming of the carnivalesque audience, has cemented the ritual iconization of the public realm. Our conception
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
218
Page 218
.
Prudence
of the polity has been based upon the control of what has been perceived to be its most subterranean and marginal components. In the process, we have reduced the public to the passivity of spectacle. Only the reformulation of such fundamental concepts as the feminine, the public, and propriety itself, through discursive gestures so radical as to be generative, can call attention to the workings of these concepts, recognize their constructed nature, and use them to effect social and political change.
conclusion: propriety, decorum, and prudence A final consideration of the female audience and Fanny Wright’s position toward it should address their effect upon our contemporary conceptions of what is proper, decorous, and for the purposes of this volume, prudent. It has been suggested above that Fanny Wright opened the way for women’s participation in public life to be considered appropriate by engaging in actions judged imprudent for the advancement of her own agenda. A careful examination of her activities has provided at least some insight into her accomplishment. It may be even more relevant, however, to ask how the activism of Fanny Wright may have affected the way we understand the functioning of “the proper” or “the prudent” as constitutive terms. Language may affect action, but action can and does influence the way language is employed. For example, it has been noted that in today’s scholarship the concept of prudence has recovered the positive connotations of reasonableness, moral virtue, and practicality. But by the nineteenth century in the United States, each of these traits had been rarified and intensified almost beyond their ability to coexist within a coherent description of human activity. Rationality, influenced by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, became a kind of pure calculation conducted according to lawlike rules. Public morality became infused with patriotism and ultimately coincided with the building of nation-states. And practicality became the blind efficiency of capitalist industrial production. Prudence itself—no longer retaining the balanced equilibrium of its characterological components—became channeled through or entangled in gendered conceptions of public propriety within a rationalistic, mechanized national culture. Being male meant having the power to further extend and attenuate at least one of these forms of social regimentation. Being female meant acquiescing submissively to all three. Women were responsible for maintaining the balance between the components at the center of this triad, but without obtaining access to its central integrative power. Prudence became the name of (a) Woman.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 219
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
219
Prudence, however, was not the only term affected by the ambivalent position of women speakers and audiences. In antiquity, prudence had been matched with propriety or decorum as paired, if not identical, articulations of discursive practices. Yet propriety in the nineteenth century no longer connoted the functional communicative practice of the prudent individual, or the behavioral signature of personal traits. Instead, it had become a set of social conventions that had been attenuated, like the components of prudence, almost to the extreme within a bourgeois culture. It became the endless recital of solipsisms, the automatic patriotic gesture, and the thoughtless reproduction of cultural ritual. Further, the proper or decorous had progressively displaced the prudent, even as phronesis in its classical form had been exiled to the boundary of social and civic life. Prudence, no longer a trait of character, had become propriety, the specter of the gendered individual in the form of public appearance. The construction of the audience as feminine through the discourse of the Jacksonian critics has remained a significant dimension of the definitions of propriety, decorum, and the prudent, even today. Women and the portions of audiences they comprised were not liberated when they ceased being demonized. What was termed the “settling” of the mixed public audience as a whole continued, perhaps with even increased urgency, after the Civil War.90 This quieting and pacification of the crowd resulted in significant changes in social behavior—the hushed attendance at concerts and plays, the demise of pubs and social clubs as political venues, and the polite distancing on the streets that we experience today. More important, however, the feminization of the audience substituted the entire mass of people for the female audience, thus co-opting them and subordinating them once again. Women were given the vote and access to the political podium, but the structural conditions of audience passivity remained the same, on an even greater scale. Thus from the marginalization of the female audience came the marginalization of the public audience. The epitome of rhetorical efficacy today has become the mediated image of a lone speaker talking to her- or himself, with a silent, observing critic/audience looking on.91 In this way the audience has become an icon capable of being displayed through all forms of contemporary representation. Specifically, the feminization of the audience, an ongoing task even at the start of the twenty-first century, has in part made possible the social, political, and technical advances associated with popular performance, the partisan campaign, and the coverage of nationwide media. When, within the boundaries of Jacksonian linguistic usage, our present-day leaders and entertainers appear in huge rallies, packed convention halls, and on widely disseminated channels of
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
220
Page 220
.
Prudence
communication, the “proper” and “decorous,” but not necessarily “prudent,” audience is there to greet them. The audience may shout and applaud, but it does so on cue and sometimes by command. It is not the individual voices of its members but the appearance of the whole that is significant—the uncountable numbers, the anonymous faces, and the endless, oceanlike extension. No longer actors but a reactor, the audience is compliant, passive and above all observed—in other words, it represents the “mass.” The shift in terminology from the prudent individual to the decorous crowd to the enmassed audience has far-reaching implications for a democratic society. To remove the connotations of the word “prudent” from the mass reverses an Aristotelian investment of trust in the minds of the many rather than those of the few. To require appropriate behavior alone of the collective masses, and to expect self-regulation in turn, is to eliminate the need to acquire the crowd’s explicit acquiescence to external controls. And to expect immobility, or at least an icon-like presence, whenever represented in the media, is to eliminate its potential for action. Thus the conditions for the future of the public are set. The very language of propriety and decorum inherited from the nineteenth century has succeeded in making actively conscious governance and collective decision making among the public citizenry of the twenty-first century almost impossible to conceive. And what of the recent revival of phronesis? So far, the recovery of prudence as a term for civic virtue in the public realm has occurred only within the literary efforts of the scholars and the philosophers, not the actions of audiences responding to the speakers and leaders of our age. Thought has not yet resulted in performance. Let us hope that linguistic transformation can still affect public activity as much as rhetors claim.
notes 1. In classical rhetoric, prudence, or phronesis, is generally identified with the qualities of a person’s character and the actions that follow from such a character. These qualities include intellect or judgment, involvement in civic affairs, and pragmatism. For the association of prudence with personal character, see Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). For the components of the ancient concept of prudence that have been revived by contemporary scholarship, see Robert A. Gaines, “Phronesis,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 601. For additional discussions of prudence or phronesis, see Christopher Johnstone, “Practical Wisdom,” in Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 634; Robert W. Cape Jr., “Prudence,” ibid., 637–40; and Lois Self, “Rhetoric and Phronesis: The Aristotelian Ideal,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 12 (1979): 130–45.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 221
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
221
2. There have been many inflections of the definition of propriety or decorum throughout the history of rhetoric. Robert Hariman, in “Decorum,” in Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 199–209, articulates nine modes, including a sophistic approach based upon timely and adaptable enactment; a humanist version based on qualities of character, and a literary variety based upon organically well formed productions. In the present chapter I underscore the performative element of the sophistic inflection as it functions to reveal classical qualities of personal virtue or character, as distinct from the stylistic excellences of an artistic work. In other words, I focus upon what Jasinski labels the “external” as distinct from the “internal” dimensions of decorum, with particular emphasis upon the relationship between timely action and the nature of the source. See James Jasinski, “Decorum,” in Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2001), 148–50. 3. Gaines, “Phronesis,” 601. 4. Hariman, “Decorum,” 202–5. 5. One of the more enduring controversies over the definition of propriety and the decorous involves efforts to juxtapose the concept’s connotations of timeliness (kairos) and adaptation to particular circumstances with its manifest adherence to cultural and social rules or conventions. The former is seen as postmodern, the latter as more traditional. See, for example, John Poulakos, “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 16 (1983): 35–48; “Interpreting Sophistical Rhetoric: A Response to Schiappa,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990): 218–28; and “Terms for a Sophistical Rhetoric,” in Rethinking the History of Rhetoric: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Takis Poulakos (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993). Also see Edward Schiappa, “Neo-Sophistic Rhetorical Criticism or the Historical Reconstruction of Sophistic Doctrines?” Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990): 192–217; “History and Neo-Sophistic Criticism: A Reply to Poulakos,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990): 307–15; and Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 71–77. 6. A consensus seems to be emerging that nineteenth-century notions of propriety and decorum in particular emphasized social conformity to the extreme. Hariman, in “Decorum,” 207, notes that by the nineteenth century “decorum became merely a compendium of manners” conforming to the “norms of bourgeois society.” In addition, Kenneth Cmiel, throughout his book, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1990), indicates a cultural shift from characterological notions of decorum to notions based upon role specialization and the exercise of technique. Nan Johnson, in “Nineteenth Century Rhetoric,” in Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 520, even while emphasizing “adaptation” in nineteenth-century rhetorical theory, notes at the same time the popularity of a “parlor curriculum” in rhetoric designed to refine the social skills of the domestic learner. 7. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1977). 8. Mary P. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press), 285. 9. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, vol. 1 (New York: Greenwood Publishing, Praeger, 1989). 10. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access,” 285. 11. Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 62. 12. Ibid., 56–57. 13. George Rudé, The Crowd in History: 1730–1848 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1976); Nicolaus Mills, The Crowd in American Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
222
Page 222
.
Prudence
14. Nicole Tonkovich, “Rhetorical Power in the Victorian Parlor: Godey’s Lady’s Book and the Gendering of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric,” in Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1993), 161; Miriam Brody, Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1993), 115. 15. Christine Oravec, “The Sublimation of Mass Consciousness in the Rhetorical Criticism of Jacksonian America,” Communication 11 (1990): 291–314; Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 73. 16. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access,” 266; Brody, Manly Writing, 110. 17. Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 30; Ryan, “Gender and Public Access,” 266; 271. 18. Brody, Manly Writing, 91–92. 19. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), 167; Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). 20. Cmiel points out that nineteenth-century women were often criticized for being too genteel, that is, for being overrefined in their use of language. This criticism suggests that women were identified as central representatives of decorum and civility. Yet at the same time, women’s centrality was bounded by a constant threat that their essentially “low” condition could emerge at any time. As Cmiel states, “The terms genteel and gentility referred to false and pretentious efforts at refinement, or attempts of ‘low’ people to affect cultivation. Women were often cited as the main offenders” (Democratic Eloquence, 132). Cmiel also notes how women’s responsibility passively to “guard the language” increased after the Civil War and paralleled the more active regulative function of the group he labels the “male language critics” (130). 21. The periodicals examined for this study are northern east-coast monthlies, with some weeklies and political newspapers. They were selected from an extensive collection of periodicals of the period located at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. The selection was based upon time period (focusing upon the 1820s up to 1840) and any quotable reference to women or women in audiences. For a complete discussion of the periodicals, see Jean Hoornstra and Trudy Heath, eds., American Periodicals, 1741–1900: An Index of Microfilm Collections (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilm International, 1979). One might guess that the rhetorical critics writing for Democratic magazines would be more open and liberal toward women’s public roles. Given the infrequency of direct reference to women, this conclusion is hard either to support or deny. There appears, however, to be no substantive difference in attitude toward women in public settings between Federalist, Whig, and Democratic critics based upon the evidence in this sample. For a discussion of the periodicals’ role in rhetorical history, see Christine Oravec, “The Democratic Critics: An Alternative American Rhetorical Tradition of the Nineteenth Century,” Rhetorica 4 (1986): 395–421. 22. Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 136. 23. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 23. 24. Ibid., 135, 136, 180. Susan Zaeske, in “The ‘Promiscuous Audience’ Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Woman’s Rights Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995), 191–207, delves extensively into the origins, moral charge, and rhetorical effect of the phrase, “promiscuous audience,” upon the early women’s rights movement in the United States. 25. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 6–19. 26. Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 44. 27. Ibid., 32; also see 93. 28. Ibid., 115.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 223
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
223
29. Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 15. 30. Brody, Manly Writing, 90. 31. “Female Preaching,” The Merrimack Magazine and Monthly Register, April 1, 1825, 94–95. 32. See Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 118, where “rope dancers” are mentioned performing at the Bartholomew Fair. References to these European pre-Lenten entertainers apparently survived until the late Federalist period in the United States. 33. Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 167. 34. Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 42. 35. Review of “An Address, delivered at the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Bunker Hill Monument,” by Daniel Webster, The U.S. Literary Gazette, August 1825, 331. 36. “Mr. Webster’s Speech to the Ladies,” New World, October 17, 1840, 317. 37. “The Forum,” The National Register, November 30, 1816, 224. 38. “Mr. Webster’s Speech to the Ladies,” 317. 39. Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 135–38. 40. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 24. 41. Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 136. 42. Review of “An Address, delivered at the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Bunker Hill Monument,” 329. 43. “Correspondence of the New York Express. Washington, December, 21—Thursday Night,” The Jeffersonian, January 5, 1839, 376. 44. “Scenic and Characteristic Outlines of Congress,” National Magazine and Republican Review, January 1839, 86. 45. “The Forum,” 224. 46. “The Maiden Speech,” Democratic Review, May 1843, 506. 47. “Excitement,” Reflector, September 1821, 51. 48. “Remarks on the Eloquence of Debate,” New England Magazine, August 1, 1834, 114, 115. 49. Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 47. 50. “Popular Lectures,” U.S. Review and Literary Gazette, November 12, 1826, 131. 51. “American Eloquence. Mr. Webster,” New York Mirror, April 6, 1833, 316–17. 52. “From the Philadelphia Inquirer. Extract to the editor, dated Washington, May 7, 1834,” The Political Register, May 20, 1834, 844–45. 53. Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 170–71. 54. Ibid., 265. 55. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access,” 268–69. 56. Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 83; Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 195. 57. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 26–27. 58. Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 83, 84. 59. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 198–99. 60. Kathryn Shevelow, “Fathers and Daughters: Women as Readers of the Tatler,” Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patroncinio P. Schweickart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 107–23. 61. “Mr. Webster’s Speech to the Ladies,” 317. 62. “Cabinet Councils, No. 1,” New England Magazine, April 1835, 319. 63. Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 119, 187. 64. “Lectures and Lecturers,” New World, March 12, 1842, 174. 65. Stallybrass and White, Transgression, 87. 66. Kathleen Edgerton Kendall and Jeanne Y. Fisher, “Frances Wright on Women’s Rights:
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
224
Page 224
.
Prudence
Eloquence Versus Ethos,” Quarterly Journal of Speech. 60 (1974): 58–68; Elizabeth Ann Bartlett, Liberty, Equality, Sorority: The Origins and Interpretation of American Feminist Thought: Frances Wright, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1994), 26. 67. Bartlett, Liberty, Equality, Sorority, 27–28; Molly Abel Travis, “Frances Wright: The Other Woman of Early American Feminism,” Women’s Studies 22 (1993): 389–97. 68. Frances Wright, “Lectures on Knowledge. As Delivered in the Park Theatre, City of New York,” The Free Enquirer, March 4, 1829, 145. 69. Review of “Art II. A Treatise on the Rights, Duties and Liabilities of Husband and Wife, at Law and in Equity,” by James Clancy, Esq., Barrister at Law, American Quarterly Review, December 1835, 308. 70. “News from Boston,” [a letter from the Boston Courier] The Free Enquirer, August 12, 1829, 329. 71. “From the Boston Gazette,” The Free Enquirer, July 22, 1829, 308. 72. “News from Boston,” 329. 73. “Miss Wright’s Oration,” [from the Philadelphia Album,] The Free Enquirer, July 22, 1829, 311. 74. “For the Boston Gazette,” The Free Enquirer, July 22, 1829, 308. (Note: The articles entitled “From the Boston Gazette” and “For the Boston Gazette” appear in the same issue of The Free Enquirer, and on the same page. They are two separate entries.) 75. “Miss Wright’s Oration,” 311; “Miss Wright’s Parting Address,” [from the Courier and Enquirer,] The Free Enquirer, January 19, 1830, 267; [Letter to the Editor from the Boston FreePress,] The Free Enquirer, August 12, 1829, 330. 76. [Letter to the Editor from the Boston Free-Press,] 330; “Miss Wright’s Oration,” 311; “Miss Wright’s Parting Address, 267. 77. “Miss Wright’s Parting Address,” 267–68. 78. Wright, “Lectures on Knowledge,” 145. 79. “Madame Roland,” [From the Washington Chronicle,] The Free Enquirer, November 12, 1828, 19. 80. “Orthodox Charges against the French Revolution of ‘89,” The Free Enquirer, November 12, 1828, 24. 81. “Rev. Edward Irving,” [from the London Magazine,] The Free Enquirer, December 6, 1828, 43. 82. “Orthodox Charges against the French Revolution of ‘89,” 23; see also “From the Savage. Sermons,” The Free Enquirer, April 29, 1829, 209–10. 83. “Rev. Edward Irving.” 84. Ibid. 85. Wright, “Lectures on Knowledge.” 86. “Miss Wright’s Oration,” 311. See also “For the Boston Gazette,” 308. 87. Kendall and Fisher, in “Frances Wright on Women’s Rights,” argue that Wright’s most important influence was historical, and that her most important female audience was the leadership of the later women’s suffrage movement. In a manner reminiscent of neoclassical standards of criticism, they consider this kind of influence to be inconsequential (producing “museum pieces of oratory”) compared to immediately persuasive outcomes (producing “tangible change in the society of her time,” and generating “catalytic compositions that influence the course of history”) (88). In contrast, I argue that Wright’s very existence as an alternative to the dominant view is highly significant. Her radical “otherness” as an enactment of free thought within an otherwise prim and proper Jacksonian world for women cannot be confined to recognition by such a select circle as the leaders of the suffrage campaign. Rather, her significance must be explained in today’s historical vocabulary, that is, in terms of ideology, hegemony, and the structural conditions under which discourse is produced. That is to say, criticism
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 225
Fanny Wright and the Enforcing of Prudence
.
225
of any particular phenomenon must be open to a new social/cultural historicism, if only as a check upon the myopia that comes with looking too closely for immediate effects. For a critique of Kendall and Fisher, see Carole Spitzack and Kathryn Carter, “Women in Communication Studies: A Typology for Revision,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 401–23. 88. “From the People’s Journal. Memoirs of William Lloyd Garrison by Mary Howitt,” The Pennsylvania Freeman, March 25, 1847, 4. 89. Cape, “Prudence,” 640. 90. Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 206. 91. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 81–89, makes a similar argument for the notion of a feminine style functioning today in the televised political speaking to mass audiences performed by both men and women. In this case, however, I would argue that broadcast technology as it currently exists merely provides the illusion of audience participation.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 226
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 227
III. Provisional Networks
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 228
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 229
8 Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture John S. Nelson
arguments They say Americans are too eager to make theories. They say we don’t spend enough time observing the world, and so we don’t know how things actually are. —Michael Crichton, Rising Sun
As a tradition, prudence needs practical substance. Hence it needs specific theories far more than it needs abstract philosophies or epistemic metatheories. Prudential judgment must stay sensitive to the vagaries of particular, changing situations. The challenge for theorists is to provide general yet substantive accounts. Thus late-modern theorists of prudence react against the modern monomania for subsuming all situations by forms or categories at once descriptive and controlling. Some even seem to deny, in effect, that prudence can be specified theoretically. Anything capable of expression in sets of equations or comparable theoretical forms would be too regular, too predictable, to count as prudence. As practical wisdom or phronesis, prudence by definition is about what people cannot control or predict with confidence. Yet it would be a mistake to think that prudence can receive only a diffuse philosophy or an empty metatheory.1
229
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
230
Page 230
.
Prudence
To be sure, prudence cannot be reduced (in the usual modes of modern science) to lists of conditions, whether necessary or sufficient. Nor can prudence be detailed in bulwarks of laws, whether deductive or inductive, universal or stochastic. Nor can it be summarized in loosely empirical generalizations. Such rough claims of fact lack the power of explanation and direction intrinsic to prudence. Prudence is not a modern science or even a late-modern one. Thus theorists of prudence must step beyond even the late-modern theorists of “chaos” in nonlinear systems. Such nonlinearity produces a sensitivity to initial conditions that makes the kinds of prediction featured by linear sciences impossible in principle.2 Though prudence, too, responds to “sensitive dependence,” prudence seems resistant to specification in algorithms suited to nonlinear systems. (Many nonlinear systems spring from a few equations notorious for their individual simplicity of form.) The unfortunate implication might be that, in principle, prudence cannot be detailed or directed in any substantive fashion. If so, there can be no substantive theories of prudence. Yet this inference would be mistaken. It is precisely in principles—and other figures with a notably postmodern resonance—that prudence remains substantive. It is specifically in the articulation of networks of such prudential figures that we can theorize prudence. To turn aside from these principles is for accounts of prudence to become hollow. Without devices for detailing prudence, theories become helpless to provide the practical inspiration and detailed advice that long have been the hallmark of the prudential tradition in politics. We might learn much from metatheories and philosophies of prudence, but not specifically how to be prudent. Elsewhere I explain how, from the very beginning, the prudential tradition in politics has been distinctively rhetorical and republican.3 It has been a public discipline of political speech-in-action.4 As the modern turns to science and ideology have worked, respectively, to denigrate rhetoric and eclipse republicanism, cultural and intellectual support has eroded for prudence. Prediction promised—and claimed to deliver—much more in practice. That is why the great modern theorists of prudence were mainly Renaissance humanists such as Niccolò Machiavelli (plus their strange outlier in the Italian Enlightenment, Giambattista Vico).5 These theorists stood at the start of the modern age, before the modern conceptions of “theory” had taken full hold and before the substance of prudence had come largely to be lost or discredited for the academy. By the high times of enlightenment, some of the best scholars had forgotten what practical wisdom could be. Thus Immanuel Kant
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 231
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
231
made prudence into mere process, providing no substantive insight or commitment whatever.6 And G. W. F. Hegel implicitly relegated prudence to the early classical culture later transcended by the March of modern Rationality in the form of the welfare State.7 In the twentieth century, philosophers, classicists, rhetoricians, political theorists, indeed humanists of every stripe, have conspired to make contentfree metatheories of prudence all too attractive. In times dominated by epistemology, it would be all too easy for scholars to forget that prudence must be substantive—or become imprudent. Some branches of the academy may know little about what substantive theories of prudence might include, let alone how they might cohere. They know even less about why people need substantive accounts of prudence. Why can’t we simply return to the accounts of the Renaissance or antiquity? Even the metatheorists know that prudence is intrinsically situational. In the modern age, almost by definition, “the times, they are a-changin’.”8 Modern situations slip away from previous templates. Machiavelli offered his own theory of political prudence mainly for the “new principality,” which left classical and medieval accounts outdated. Are ours still the politics of Machiavelli’s new principality? As the rent-a-car commercials insist, “Not Exactly!” Old accounts of prudence have much to teach us, both about prudence and what a theory of prudence might be, but they cannot meet the needs for substantive accounts suited to our own situations of practical action. Since prudence is situational—and its practices are complexes of recurrent, strongly interrelated situations—why can’t we at least turn to the talk in whatever practice is at issue?9 Why can’t we simply explicate its immanent accounts of prudential performances? Wouldn’t that at least yield a substantive theory of prudence for each practice? Again the answer is “Not Exactly!” A cardinal principle of prudence is that no practice can be adequately articulate and selfcritical until it compares its own moves and maxims with those of other practices.10 When there were few walks of life, in times ancient or medieval or even early modern, accounts of prudence could present themselves as comprehensive no matter what their practical inspiration. (Notice in this connection, though, how Machiavelli took his principles of prudence to hold only for politics and war, not for familial and religious affairs.) No longer could that be plausible. Comparisons across practices are where we enter the realm of reliable and substantive theories of prudence as wisdom-in-action. One chapter is too brief to detail a substantive theory of prudence for our times. Its scope is too restricted to encompass any sustained comparison of prudential discourses across the host of late- and postmodern practices. But
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
232
Page 232
.
Prudence
it might permit me to persuade you that prudence can, must, and does admit of such theories, even in our times. And it should enable me to show you where some are being specified, especially for our times. For the most part, America’s substantive theories of prudence are being pursued outside the academy, by the vernacular culture of popular genres and political movements. These enterprises of popular politics are detailing the principles we need for prudential action across the manifold practices of postmodern (perhaps even post-Western) cultures. To metatheorize prudence is to distract attention from its practical details. To deny that prudence is susceptible to theory could be to discourage substantive treatments of prudence. Both approaches are antiprudential: they take away from inquiries appropriate to learning, teaching, and practicing prudence. Both are imprudent: they turn away from actual situations of prudence. They tend to ignore the specific practices, actions, and appreciations of prudence in our vernacular culture. They can be particularly unfortunate in America and other electronic societies, because our popular genres and political movements are rich in prudential invention for present, pressing, popular needs. Scholars have favored the classic discourses of prudence that address leaders and elites, explaining how to get power and use it. But current discourses of prudence speak more to ordinary people, telling how to defend against power and redirect it. The heroic accounts of prudence locate it exclusively in councils of government and affairs of state. Increasingly the need is to relocate prudence more within popular cultures and ordinary situations. These are where everyday lives encounter one another in the disseminated publics of the day: in schools, clubs, neighborhoods, workplaces, families, churches, radio or television programs, electronic bulletin boards, and more.11 These are where to locate our specific resources for a prudence made popular and effective for postmodern times.
principles These were men of the mountains and the prairie, who read trail sign as an educated man reads print. —Louis L’Amour, Down the Long Hills
One way to specify substantial theories of prudence is in terms of principles. This way bears the most resemblance to the kinds of details familiar from modern theories of politics, since principles often become conflated with iron-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 233
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
233
clad laws or rigid rules.12 Yet prudential principles are very different. They are precepts that guide or inform, rather than determine, action. They mean more in the manner of maxims or aphorisms than laws; they function more in the fashion of lessons and morals (the epimyths for fables) than rules. Principles inspirit us and suffuse our actions—rather than standing apart to move us or cause them from outside. Therefore Wendell Berry once defined “a principle [as] an indwelling the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.”13 As Hannah Arendt explained, principles are how we act freely in public, so that ulterior motives and exterior ends do not determine what we say and do.14 Principles specify how we should heed the words-in-deeds for any arena of concerted activity. Principles provide prudential foundations for practices as stable yet selftransforming networks of mutual performance. They help make the foundations vitally political and rhetorical, rather than perversely absolute or literal.15 For all these reasons and more, principles have been the most prominent way for theories of prudence to stay substantive yet adaptable. That is why many theorists in the republican-rhetorical-prudential tradition of politics have advanced their accounts of action and judgment importantly in terms of principles.16 In America, we have a popular, everyday term for these principles; we call them rules of thumb. They are flexible rules, with different logics and uses than the rigid rules promoted by modern authoritarians of inquiry and polity alike. Modern philosophers and social scientists tend to treat such forms as species of shorthand speech: condensations of longer but literalizable phrases too complicated to spell out in all particulars. Or they incline us to see them as simplifications: models of more complex statements or phenomena. Perhaps the worst temptation, because the most plausible and yet the most misleading, is to treat them as generalities in need of application to particularities, or adaptation to diverse circumstances. These perspectives are not so much wrong as insufficient to appreciate the special virtues (and vices) of flexible rules by contrast with rigid ones. Principles, as flexible rules of thumb, provide us with perspectives for judgment and action. They do not dictate particular decisions or conduct; they enable us to explore possibilities and consequences. Practices are enduring and coherent complexes of human activity defined by rules but informed and inspired by principles.17 In America, commonly recognized practices encompass business, education, government, law, medicine, politics, science, and the like. For example, American practices of politics presumably involve administering, campaigning, legislating, lobbying, and voting—among others. Just as cultures incorporate subcultures, so practices admit of subpractices. Among the subpractices of political science might
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
234
Page 234
.
Prudence
be conventioneering, generating data, recruiting, refereeing, teaching, testing, and theorizing. Thus the principles of political science could include such maxims as (1) two types of testing are better than one, (2) use classroom politics when teaching politics in a classroom, or (3) recruit faculty members more for political interest and intelligence than methodological training. Principles of politics turn importantly on the kinds of politics at issue. Some of these precepts are the lore of politicians, some are the wisdom of journalists who cover government, and a few are even the insights of scholars. The best introduction I know to principles for the mass-mediated, interest-group-liberal politics current in America is the collection Hardball, produced by journalist, television pundit, and former congressional staffer Christopher Matthews. He goes further toward a substantive theory of political prudence for the official politics in America than the vast majority of textbooks by political scientists. He performs this feat simply by stating and explaining the main principles of various successful pols—particularly Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan. Giving each chapter a prudential principle for its title, Matthews shows how prudential action in American politics turns on alliances, enemies, deals, and reputations: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.
It’s Not Who You Know; It’s Who You Get to Know. All Politics Is Local. It’s Better to Receive Than to Give. Dance with the One that Brung Ya. Keep Your Enemies in Front of You. Don’t Get Mad; Don’t Get Even; Get Ahead. Leave No Shot Unanswered: (1) Method No. 1: Catch ’Em in a Lie. (2) Method No. 2: Ridicule. (3) Method No. 3: Jujitsu. Only Talk When It Improves the Silence. Always Concede on Principle. Hang a Lantern on Your Problem. Spin! The Press Is the Enemy. The Reputation of Power [Is Power]: (1) Play Your Strengths. (2) When You’re in a Hole, Stop Digging. (3) Lowball. (4) Sandbag.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 235
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
235
(5) Create New Commandments. (6) Pass the Buck. (7) Inchon Landings . . . Raid Behind Enemy Lines. 14. Position [Yourself Where You Want to Be]. 15. [Keep Your] Perspective.18 As the hosts of students who applaud this book have said on evaluation forms, it gives readers a much more substantive sense of how to act in America’s official politics than any scholarly work assigned, although many of their other readings are excellent and enjoyable. The students testify that Hardball also gives them a far more informative sense of how America’s official politics work than do their other texts. Matthews recognizes the vast distance between his principled sense of politics and what sometimes passes for philosophies of politics. “What we are discussing here is not political philosophy but practical method,” he insists, “not why, but how.”19 Here our modern, antiprudential language misserves him somewhat. There is plenty of “why” in his account, as you might expect, but its substantive principles keep the vacuous whys of metatheory from chasing out the specific hows of detailed theory.20 Prudence depends on keeping hows and whys as much in touch as possible with forms and contents. Does the list from Matthews look familiar? Matthews models his prudential principles on Machiavelli’s. The Prince, too, alludes to practical rules of thumb in its chapter titles; then it, too, specifies and exemplifies prudential principles in the words to follow. Consider just a few of his famous guidelines that come readily to mind: XIV. MILITARY DUTIES OF THE PRINCE: A prince, therefore, should have no other object, no other thought, no other subject of study, than war, its rules and disciplines; this is the only art for a man who commands. . . .21 XVII.
ON CRUELTY AND CLEMENCY: WHETHER IT IS BETTER TO BE
. . . every prince would like to be both; but since it is hard to accommodate these qualities, if you have to make a choice, to be feared is much safer than to be loved.22 XVIII. THE WAY PRINCES SHOULD KEEP THEIR WORD: . . . a prince should take great care never to drop a word that does not seem imbued with the[se] five good qualities . . . ; to anyone who sees or hears him, he should appear all compassion, all honor, all humanity, all integrity, all religion.23 LOVED OR FEARED:
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
236
Page 236
.
Prudence
. . . the prince should try to avoid anything which makes him hateful or contemptible.24 XIX.
ON AVOIDING CONTEMPT AND HATRED:
XXI.
HOW A PRINCE SHOULD ACT TO ACQUIRE REPUTATION:
Nothing gives a prince more prestige than undertaking great enterprises and setting a splendid example for his people.25 XXII. ON A PRINCE’S PRIVATE COUNSELORS: . . . There is one way for a prince to judge of a minister that never fails. When you notice that your minister is thinking more of himself than of you, and that everything he does serves his own interest, a man like this will never make a good minister; you cannot possibly trust him.26 XXIII. HOW TO AVOID FLATTERERS: A prince should always take counsel, then, but when he wants advice, not when other people want to give it. On the contrary, he should prevent anyone from offering him uncalled-for advice. But he should also be a liberal questioner, and afterwards a patient hearer of the truth regarding whatever he has asked about.27 The systematic differences between Machiavelli’s principles of prudence and Matthews’s theory of political action turn on the advent of liberal democracy and especially popular media. So the two theories of prudence are not the same, though there remain ample affinities between them. The kinds of principles recommended by Matthews and Machiavelli to specify and teach prudent action can succeed only in networks. Readers must be educated by explanations, stories, and personal experiences to develop highly complicated senses of what the principles mean and how they interact in actual situations. Like most prudentialists, Matthews and Machiavelli rely on intense and sustained immersion in histories and activities of politics to develop a second-nature capacity of political judgment—that is, a sophisticated feel for putting the principles of prudence into practice. Prudential principles are vehicles of theory-in-practice, but they are no less theoretical for that. Rather they keep theories of prudence in touch with the substance of prudential action, within politics or any other practice. Such principles carry out another cardinal principle of prudence: that a prudent actor typically concedes on large, theoretical points. As Matthews says, “It is the smaller, more tangible points that seem to interest him.”28 The prudential trick is to spot the tangible details that eventually make bigger differences than your colleagues and competitors have been able to imagine. A coach who knows even a bit about hitting could talk for hours on improvements possi-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 237
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
237
ble in the stances and swings of little-league baseball players. Given two or three pointers, though, young players become crippled by more information than they can manage. So the challenge is to spot the one simple move that actually enables each player to cure many ills at once. Inexperienced politicians seldom can attend simultaneously to myriad dynamics in a new situation. Their need is for a principle or two that helps them identify the key developments quickly. These tangible, telling details—closely related to the “concrete universals” evoked by Hegel—are what scholarly commentators on prudence do well to notice and provide. Then they can produce substantive theories that offer (specific, flexible) principles. Relating prudential principles in one particular field to other fields and the broader domains of everyday life is a common practice among the substantive theorists of prudence. It is even more common among their attentive audiences. Prudential principles invite such use because they are tropal and aphoristic. Thus they provide figures and directives to try in diverse settings. Only in practice(s), after all, can we learn how they will work, when they will prove apt, and where they won’t. So Matthews insists that his principles for official politics are pertinent to many other actors and practices in America. His way of putting this is to emphasize that “there’s a great deal of politics in everyday life.”29 Then he advises readers with no interest whatever in entering or even understanding official politics in America that, “to get ahead in life, you can learn a great deal from those who get ahead for a living.”30 In this way, he acknowledges the comparative dimension of any adequate theory of prudence. Substantive theories of prudence must take into account the pertinence of their principles to a variety of practices. Comparisons can test the generality of a principle. Then they can help refine it, explain it, and articulate its limits. The prudential handbooks of Matthews and Machiavelli instance a longstanding genre of political writing, one scarce in the late-modern academy. When I was in graduate school, Theodore Lowi had been trying for years to interest his fellow scholars in something of a practical updating of Machiavelli. All scholars whom I heard discuss the project counseled him that publishing it would be a big mistake. Such a popular work would discredit him as a political scientist, a political theorist, even a serious scholar. Or so they said, and they knew the pertinent subpractices of scholarship well enough to speak with authority. Our situation remains much the same. We have every reason to recognize from browsing in bookstores, especially the mass-marketing chains, that such handbooks of advice have become a staple of popular culture. We call them self-help books, and almost every practice or subpractice widely
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
238
Page 238
.
Prudence
encountered by professionals or ordinary people keeps anywhere from several to scores of these tomes in print. The good ones—and there are good advice books, despite the sneering that the genre of self-help receives from some scholars—brim over with colorful labels for prudential principles. Where the advice is best, furthermore, these precepts engage the targeted practice with an intelligent ear for its distinctive details. (Personal favorites include the business guides by Scott Adams that teach smart precepts through catchy slogans and Dilbert cartoons.)31 Then they match this with a sophisticated sense of how the recommended conduct relates to other domains of endeavor.32 Other genres of popular culture also attend closely to principles of prudential action. These include popular fiction (and film). In my experience, born of sustained concern for the implicit politics of such popular forms, the one genre of literature and cinema most committed to theorizing prudence through principles is the western.33 The “eastern,” with its emphasis on the martial arts, runs a close second. Westerns and easterns both explore how the agonal politics of honor, anger, and character can work in our times of economic interest and legal civility. Prudential theories of politics-as-rhetorics originated in the agonal cultures that we call ancient Greece and classical Rome. Furthermore those cultures practiced their honor and character as codes of virtue, vice, and virtuosity. To teach, judge, and enact these virtues and vices, such classical cultures specified them as principles or precepts. Is it any wonder that popular westerns and easterns keep track of their observations of virtue and vice through principles stated in pithy ways? A strong convention in westerns is to connect these principles to the genre’s figures of tracking and trailing. As the epigraph for this section implies, the treatment of trails and tracks in westerns is tantamount to a prudential theory of signs. We may reverse that as well, reading the western genre for its semiotic theory of prudence.34 As befits a prudential, and thus rhetorical theory, the western principles of trails and tracking detail a western ethics of character (ethos) as well. A striking case is “Dutchman’s Flat,” the story that supplies the next section’s epigraph. There Louis L’Amour has a posse learn from trailing a fugitive that his character is not the kind that would commit the alleged crime.35 Overall westerns provide hosts of apt prudential principles for virtue-oso action in late-modern times. Together, in networks that speak to one another, such principles are indispensable parts of the general theory of prudence. This is the one field they all share. Accordingly my first section mobilized the prudential principle of cultivating agonies-in-inquiry (arguments), and this second section explores
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 239
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
239
the directive of heeding words-in-deeds (principles). The third section encounters the precept of living virtue-in-person (characters). Then the five sections to follow articulate several of the principles already borrowed from Matthews and Machiavelli, although presented here in somewhat different terms, plus others: recognizing meanings-in-turns (tropes), narrating knowledge -in-action (stories), localizing decorum-in-manners (proprieties), doing beauty-in-style (judgments), and learning limits-in-order (margins).
characters No rider of the desert must see a man to know him, for it is enough to follow his trail. In these things are the ways of a man made plain, his kindness or cruelty, his ignorance or cunning, his strength and his weakness. There are indications that cannot escape a man who has followed trails. —Louis L’Amour, “Dutchman’s Flat”
Having given detailed attention to principles, to demonstrate that a substantive theory of prudence is possible, even necessary, let me address other substantive figures for prudence more briefly. These show that any prudence theory has elements other than principles, they explain further how principles are not modern rules or generalizations, and they suggest what relationships might hold among the various dimensions and dynamics of prudence. This inventory is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive. Still the ambition is to show how popular genres and political movements have been contributing to substantive accounts of prudence for particular practices and everyday politics in our times. Many a prudentialist suggests that prudence works through personal characters. From dynamics of character come the standards and skills that can become virtue-in-action. Thus the cultivation of character is a prime principle of republican politics and rhetorical education. But Victorian images of “character structure” and Marine talk of “building character” are misleading, in a way, because prudential character is not exclusively individual or rigidly fixed. Instead it is relational and situational, as intimated by the ancient notion of ethos.36 These days, though, prudential character is also self-improving and improvising. In times of continual change, virtuosity requires no less.37 That’s why westerns, with their generic interest in “bad boys” or even “bad girls,” treat prudential characters as often blooming late, in response to difficult but enlivening conditions. Like Machiavelli, westerns imagine prudential characters as strong and tough on the outside. These exteriors protect
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
240
Page 240
.
Prudence
interior capacities of judgment that become acutely, exquisitely sensitive to surroundings and neighbors. Unlike Machiavelli, westerns work hard to take us as readers inside the tough exteriors. This accounts for a conventional test of character in westerns: the capacity of newcomers to love the rugged beauty of the land.38 The toughness is a protection from the force and fraud of others, but it also renders the prudential characters hard for others to read. Both are Machiavellian advantages that loom large in westerns. They help explain why westerns emphasize the skills and activities of tracking, of reading the somewhat concealed characters and capabilities of others by attending to their behavioral trails. The western tracker treats the trail as fragmentary signs that can be read to cohere as traces of the other’s character. To know the (prudential) characters of other humans, animals, or things is (for Machiavelli and the western) to know their proclivities for behavior. To figure out new situations in time to act appropriately is the chief challenge for the prudential westerner. Thus westerns portray character as the potential to adapt to different circumstances without sacrificing the sense of self that knows to prize virtue over vice in the actual, complicated situations we face. As westerns show, the virtues of prudential character live within people and their actions. The cultivation of prudential character makes it a kind of “second nature,” defining and informing but not determining who we are and what we do. Prudential principles of character are inventories of virtues and vices. Consequently any vital republican culture would have as its highest priority the instruction of its people in the virtues and vices appropriate for the times. As Alasdair MacIntyre observes, it has been more than a century since such republican education fell out of favor in the United States and in Europe.39 Is it merest coincidence that the professional disciplines of scholarship form at about the same time?40 At the moment, with little in the way of specifically republican education or example, the practical politics most attuned to prudential character might well come from environmentalists. In America, their main project is to cultivate better, genuinely ecological, ethics for human conduct in all arenas of late-modern life. To do this, the works of the sagest environmentalists—Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez, William Cronon, Kim Stanley Robinson, Wes Jackson, and others—promote postmodern aesthetics. These sensibilities cultivate different patterns of action and experience, ones that respect and delight more in other creatures and wild conditions than in industrial constructions. To date, the most concentrated exposition of prudential virtues and vices for environmental ethics appears in a book by Michael Pollan. It has the pru-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 241
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
241
dentially telling title of Second Nature. And in conclusion, it proposes a “Garden Ethic of Man in Nature” that amounts to a prudential environmentalism. “An ethic based on the garden would give local answers.” Always “the gardener starts out from here,” so that “a garden ethic would be frankly anthropocentric.” As a prudentialist, “the gardener doesn’t waste much time on metaphysics—on figuring out what a ‘truer’ perspective on nature (such as biocentrism or geocentrism) might look like.” Still “the gardener’s conception of his self-interest is broad and enlightened.” Yet “the gardener tends not to be romantic about nature.” Indeed “the gardener feels he has a legitimate quarrel with nature—with her weeds and storms and plagues, her rot and death. What’s more, that quarrel has produced much of value,” and “civilization itself . . . is the product of that quarrel.” But “the gardener appreciates that it would probably not be in his interest, or in nature’s, to push his side of this argument too hard.” Thus “the gardener doesn’t take it for granted that man’s impact on nature will always be negative,” and “the gardener firmly believes it is possible to make distinctions between kinds and degrees of human intervention in nature.” Overall “the good gardener commonly borrows his methods, if not his goals, from nature itself.” But “if nature is one necessary source of instruction for a garden ethic, culture is the other.”41 These virtues include a prudential distaste for metatheory, but mainly they zip about providing a substantive account of the complicated enterprises of cultivating our second natures—be they our gardens or our characters. In fact, the book is replete with further rosters of virtues and vices, for this is one of Pollan’s main ways to character-ize gardening, environmental ethics, and prudential conduct in general. In only three hundred mellifluous pages, I readily count clever statements and telling explications for more than fifty additional virtues and vices tied to producing and appreciating fine gardens in particular. Pollan specifies another five virtues of composting.42 His chapter on “Green Thumbs” is a rich start toward a theory of prudential character, discussing four of its cardinal virtues.43 And so on, through virtues of farms and trees, vices of lawns and weeds. In something of a self-critical mode, Pollan even essays a paragraph or two on the character flaws of naturalists.44 Substantive theories of prudence are bound to target character as a focus and figure of immense importance. Since American popular genres address people’s prudential interests in the practices and challenges at hand in our times, it is no surprise that they spill over with relevant virtues and vices of character. Nor is it startling that they explore the specific types of character most prominent and pertinent for our cultural situations. When MacIntyre writes philosophically of prudence, he manages to address three such characters:
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
242
Page 242
.
Prudence
the manager, the aesthete, and the therapist.45 Environmentalists typically write about handfuls, and our popular genres surely examine mythic characters by the hundreds. So where would prudent people look for substantive accounts of prudence?
tropes The trail I’ve been followin’ for so many years was twisted an’ tangled, but it’s straightenin’ out now. —Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage
To track the character and principles of others is a prime skill of prudential people. In this way, they treat characters and principles as constellations of tropes. And they regard the tropes as figures of prudential inquiry and action, not mere devices of poetic speech. In naming them, the ancient Greeks regarded tropes as turns or movements. Like the twists in a challenging trail, these tropes call us to trace or at times even to anticipate and make them. And if tropes configure our meanings-in-turns, then we late-moderns often model these moves. Thus recent theories of prudence talk in terms of models as well as tropes.46 Hannah Arendt wrote that “turning operations” begin and end whole cultures, even civilizations.47 The Greeks named “trophies” for the decisive turns of events that would yield victories. Their prudential advice was to practice the repertoire of moves for psyche and physique that could effect these triumphs. Martial-arts movies (the easterns mentioned earlier) feature much the same cultivation of prudence through practicing the tropes or figures of decisive action. The genre gives a long middle section of virtually every film to having the mentor put the student through exercises designed to develop excellent character-in-motion. Thus the “Karate Kid” traces the figures of that art, going through its motions, whether he is polishing cars or painting fences. In myriad ways, prudential theories pay special attention to tropes. Again Pollan’s Second Nature comes to the fore as a substantive theory of prudence for our (environmentally oriented) times. He argues that we should garden tropally; and true to his word, Pollan explores a blooming, buzzing confusion of tropes for prudent action in gardens and beyond. He tropes the light fantastic of roses, of course, concluding with the prudent, postmodern advice that “what we need is to confound our metaphors, and the rose can help us do this better than the swamp can.”48 He traces how “ ‘weed’ soon became a standard synecdoche for wilderness.”49 But then he displays how
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 243
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
243
“weeds are our words, too.”50 So he traces prudent paths of several alternate figures for “nature’s ambulance chasers, carpetbaggers, and confidence men.”51 Pollan moves nimbly through eleven different tropes for trees, trying to find the best models for various historical circumstances.52 He tracks witty tropes for lawns as “nature under culture’s boot,” ecologies as gardens, gardeners as librarians and bumblebees, and seed catalogs as studies in the politics of language. He re-poeticizes the green thumb into a figure of surprising power and grace. Surely, as Pollan shows, a high priority these days for theories of prudence is to re-trope prudence itself. Here a playful sense of invention would be helpful.53 When scholars convene to address the dynamics of prudence and political judgment, the sober archetype of the judge-in-deliberation looms over almost every word. Perhaps in consequence, seldom do treatises on prudence address—let alone produce or provoke—memorable examples of prudential action. ‘Twould be good to complement these images with more imaginative figures in the manner of more popular arenas. Likewise few academic accounts generate the narrative drive to probe the details of plausible characters in complicated settings. Yet this is what popular genres create in abundance. So why not have fun with other figures for the prudential doer? What of a stand-up comedian in tune with an audience or a jazz pianist in an improvisational jam?54 How about a prudential gardener—planning crops, sewing seeds, weeding rows, pruning plants, and then harvesting the ripe fruits of action? Or what of something really wild: a prudent plant melding its desires and circumstances?55
stories The path beckons. . . . In a path is the beginning of narrative, that sure and welcoming sign of human presence. —Michael Pollan, Second Nature
Neither Machiavelli nor Matthews merely lists his principles of prudential action and judgment. Instead each tells brief stories to present the principles complete with examples and explanations. Some of these tales are anecdotes, others are fables or parables, and a few are full-blown case studies. These stories, illustrative and analytical, are where principles, tropes, and characters meet. They make the other elements of prudential theories readily comprehensible, truly memorable, and incipiently self-critical. Prudential discourse can seldom succeed without such stories. But the hypothetical cases of
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
244
Page 244
.
Prudence
philosophers seldom pass a prime test of prudential sufficiency: enough telling details to help prudent people assess actual situations, quickly and accurately. By contrast, prudential stories are how we narrate knowledge-in-action. Prudential principles do not stand alone; they operate in actions. Thus they can be advanced only in situations and appreciated only in narrations. As prudential counselors, Machiavelli and Matthew teach us through their anecdotes to keep—and criticize—their principles in context. The same goes for Pollan, Berry, Snyder, Dillard, Lopez, and most other gifted environmentalists. All these are prudentialists, most are rhetoricians, and many are republican in their politics. A standard trope of their environmental, prudential ethics is the path. To judge from Snyder, Cronon, Donald Worster, and others, American environmentalists do recognize the figure of the path as the westerner’s trail.56 And Snyder explains how this figure is an apt translation of the way of life, the Tao, that these environmentalists recommend for prudent conduct as we enter the third millennium of the common era. In much the same manner, Pollan treats the garden path as taking a trip and telling a story. “Capability Brown used to maintain that the most important kind of form a garden can have is an itinerary. It should unfold gradually, more like a narrative than a single picture such as at Versailles (all of which can be comprehended at a glance from the king’s bedroom window).” Pollan holds that, “instead of that one large impression—of royal power, which is the main story Versailles has to tell—there should be a succession of smaller ones: scenes of mystery, melancholy, romance, humor, and even sublime terror, all of these linked by the garden path. In order to “read” the picturesque landscape, we must venture out into it—go on a little journey.”57 Pollan also offers a prudential recommendation as to the kind of story best suited to gardens. “Once begun,” says Pollan, “the garden path must take us somewhere, and then it had better bring us home again.”58 Accordingly he commends the garden as comedy. He urges “A story about people and the land that ends happily—that form, which is the form of the garden tour, should never be in any serious doubt, though pretending it is can certainly keep things interesting.”59 A prudential attention to figure connects narratives and tropes. In the end, Pollan’s prudent approach to (and through) the garden serves to suggest how tales and tropes work together prudentially. He notes that “the picturesque designers always put some bit of artifice in the distance—a statue, a ruin, a little sign of art to beckon us down their paths. Kent used to call them ‘eye catchers.’ ”60 Catching the eye, these concluding tropes draw us along the path, so that we learn the character of the garden. The final figure provides the prudential path “a destination.”61 And so does the prudential story rec-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 245
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
245
ommend a concluding principle, a lesson for its fable. Westerns, too, teach the prudential lesson that tracks and trails should be followed as stories. “Slowly, methodically, as was their way, they put the story together. They could see the tracks, they could see the wounds in the bear’s body,” relates Louis L’Amour, “and they could imagine what had happened.”62 Prudential stories are actions in scenes. They enable us to experience and explore diverse settings vicariously. Our situations for action may never be precisely the same, but many are likely to be comparable enough for us to recognize what is at stake and how to proceed. Working our ways through stories can become exercises for skills and sensibilities needed later in prudential action. That is precisely the method for political learning recommended—and practiced—by Machiavelli, Pollan, and L’Amour alike. Even so, the popular genre of film and fiction most oriented to a prudential education in the kinds of settings that configure late-modern lives is the detective tale. Its political and prudential rationale is an investigation of how different practices or subcultures cohere. If the old prudential saw is “When in Rome, do as the Romans,” then what a good detective tale offers of political interest is less an engrossing mystery or a challenging puzzle than a detailed tour of the many (kinds of) Romes that configure late-modern lives. Methodical or otherwise intelligent attention to details of the setting is what enables a decent detective to “solve the crime.” Writers of these tales typically move their detectives from one kind of setting to another, case by case: so much so that the major index of detective fiction for bookstores lists its works not just by author and title but also by setting and locale. When we follow the turns in many a story, we track the details with prudent, critical attention. When we make these turns along with the characters, whether detectives or figures from other popular genres, we learn the rhythms of each path. Thus we cultivate a second-nature capacity to time our actions within various settings. Taking this the other way around, we can read the stories or view the films in popular genres as accounts of prudent (and imprudent) timing in those settings. Many conventions of popular genres amount to substantive accounts of their distinctive settings. The cases pursued by detective tales offer especially detailed and diverse tours of settings for prudential action. The language of paths hints as well that prudential stories teach us emotionally, as well as intellectually. (This is even true for detective tales, a lot of implausible claims about the allegedly strict or dispassionate “rationality” of a few detectives notwithstanding.) As paths, prudential stories cultivate the sensibilities that we need for feeling our way through challenging situations.63 After all, the word path virtually says pathos.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
246
Page 246
.
Prudence
Popular genres take us down emotional paths formed often through the so-called pathetic fallacy, where “external” scenes parallel the “internal” moods of focal characters: fog for confusion, blackest night for despair, sunshine for joy.64 Since this pathetic strategy is really a valid and effective mode of mythic exposition, we should experience no surprise that popular genres instruct us superbly in the prudential dynamics of sympathy, empathy, and even (as the detective tales have it) pathology. No theory of prudence could be complete without them. An example? Once upon a classroom, I confessed that my keen interest in what stories are and how they work stems only in part from a sense of their importance for action in politics and elsewhere. My fascination with myths and other accounts comes also, I confided to the students, from my longstanding ignorance and incompetence for narrative. So even as I assigned the students to write some tales, I admitted that I might well fail at their task. When it comes to storytelling, I added, my ear and my tongue turn to tin. Punchlines for my jokes come too early or lack snap, because the progression of points becomes unclear. Structures for my anecdotes lapse into outline or wander into digression, since I tend to include too little or too much detail. Characters for my tales stay unknown names from scholarly classics or straw folks from abstract agendas, rather than coalescing into colorful figures who can interest others. As I proceeded through this litany of personal error, I kept reminding the students that they had been hearing precisely these shortcomings in class (just as you have been seeing them here). Presumably, I explained, the trouble stems from the subcultures of my youth, which were poor in stories. Probably I had since compounded the problem by working in the social sciences—where pride of membership depends on avoiding the particularistic and well-turned tales of the historians. Surely, I conceded, my incapacities of prudence in action, all too evident in the profuse illustrations available from my own boneheaded conduct over the years, owe more than a little to this same liability. Now, however, you students (and readers?) can turn the principles apparent in my mistakes into much better stories (and perhaps even principles) than you can receive directly from me. Isn’t that a hopeful lesson to emerge from such a tale of woe?
proprieties Where I want to go, there’s always a trail. . . . I make my own trails. . . . I don’t try to follow and steal the work of other men. —Louis L’Amour, The Tall Stranger
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 247
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
247
As Leonard Cohen might say, “everybody knows” that prudence is about propriety. It is about what to do and what not, when, where, and perhaps even why. As far as informing detailed conduct, though, that is fatally vague. What specifically is propriety? More to the substantive point of prudence, what exactly is proper and what is not, when, where, and why? If acting properly is an art for changeful times, how can we learn propriety? In detail? Just invoking the norm is not enough. Detective tales and environmental advocates agree that prudential inquiries begin with specific scenes, move to encompassing situations, and eventually address recurrent settings. The two literatures share a figure for teaching and practicing this lesson, and that trope is place. Time and again, the investigation of crimes turns on the detection of improprieties that are things said, done, or left out of place. Likewise the environmentalists show over and over that we cannot act prudently in any ecological niche without cultivating a decent sense of place. Surely the places appropriate to our prudential interests include the practices, subcultures, media, genres, and other forms that comprise our vernacular culture. That is why popular genres join environmental projects as some of our most adequately prudent inquiries into the places of our lives. In prudential terms, we know these places for the most part by the conventions that we learn to define them. For prudence, then, propriety is akin to piety. It cultivates respect for the conventions of a place. But piety is more rigid and impolite (which is to say, more impolitic) than propriety. Propriety also cultivates a prudential capacity for the invention of new conventions (and the violation of old ones). In times replete with change, this can even mean the constitution of new places. The inventional capacity of prudent people stems from their acute, welltuned sensitivity to the complexities of any place. No garden is ever finished for Pollan. Its very complexity calls forth never-ending experimentation to test different arrangements among the parts of its locale. Moreover no place lacks this kind of complexity. Every place displays conventions in tension and conflict. Prudent people appreciate how some conventions are on the way to dissolution, while others are in the throes of invention. Thus propriety is the art of replaying these complexities as they lie, when possible, and playing them anew when not. So Aristotle studied the proprieties of argument in his time and places, when he outlined the classical topics of persuasion.65 And so we now need on occasion to turn those established figures of argument into new ones, made for different times and places.66 Propriety localizes decorum-in-manners. That’s how Hobbes could agree with his old foe Aristotle on turning to propriety as the source of property,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 248
.
248
Prudence
both in word and deed.67 That’s how capitalist and socialist theories of property, which neglect propriety in favor of simpler standards such as labor and exchange, could become so imprudent. In turn, that’s how the laws and practices of property in both capitalist and socialist regimes come to depart so widely from their ideologies. Propriety distinguishes yours from mine, right from wrong, tasteful from tacky. How could prudence do without it? And how could a substantive theory of prudence fail to specify a number of our proprieties? Already we have recognized that popular genres and environmental ethics cultivate strongly detailed senses of place. Hence we should acknowledge that these discourses pursue effective senses of propriety. Like the novels of manners, these forms overflow with attention to the particular proprieties that configure various practices and settings. Yet the popular genre most attuned to specifics of propriety is surely the column on etiquette. For my money, in fact, the champion theorist of prudence as propriety is Miss Manners (a.k.a. Judith Martin). For one thing, she recognizes that her distinctions of public and private spheres are fully qualified to count as political theory.68 For another, her collections of columns are dense and delightful with prudential principles, stories, tropes, characters, judgments, supporting arguments, and even margins—all in the service of plying her trade in proprieties.69 Those collections, of course, are self-help books of a sort. And if they are not enough, Martin even adds a comedy of manners.70 Hence Miss Manners has made herself one of our most telling characters of propriety. No scholar of prudence may neglect her works.
judgments We need paths and trails and will always be maintaining them. You first must be on the path, before you can turn and walk into the wild. —Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
Hannah Arendt once suggested that the Western tradition might have appreciated politics as public action far better had the ancient Greeks complemented their notions of doing good and telling truth with a sense of “doing beauty.”71 At the time, Arendt was working on what was to remain an unfinished trilogy on thinking, willing, and judging as The Life of the Mind.72 Though she might have been inclined to connect doing beauty with thinking, we would do well to appreciate prudential judgment as doing beauty-in-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 249
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
249
style. (This pun can be complicated, since the republican-rhetorical tradition where I would locate Arendt tends to construe “doing beauty” as “style.”73 No less relevant, though, is the American version of virtuosity as doing almost anything “with style.”) To educate a sense of style is to cultivate “taste” in experience and “touch” in action. It avoids fixing a determinate set of specific standards for distinguishing good from bad, right from wrong, apt from not. To analyze taste in philosophical terms is notoriously difficult, and to analyze touch has yet to be tried at all. This is why, as Arendt was beginning to intuit, aesthetics turn out to be highly pertinent to prudential judgment. The study of prudence cannot become substantive until scholars attend to its practical aesthetics. This is one of the reasons that aesthetic forms—such as popular genres— deserve sustained scrutiny as enactments and accounts of prudence. The philosophy of prudence has concentrated on whether and how to rationalize judgment. Can this be done at all? Can it be done once and for all? Or should it be attempted practice by practice? Can it be done with economic rationality, or must there be—at least for politics?—a specifically political rationality? Since politics are plural, this could require many rationalities, even for prudential judgment.74 We may wonder as well whether the rationalities of prudence are less argumentative than narratival, as the writing of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre might suggest.75 And does prudence have an irreducible element of intuition that cannot be rationalized? Does it include an ineliminable horizon of emotion that transcends any rationality? From these kinds of inquiries, we have been able to learn that such questions can play intriguing tricks on the questioners, taking them further and further away from their initial notions of “rationality.” Perhaps the time has come, too, for substantive inquiries of prudence to take us beyond the rationalism lurking in the earlier questions. Long ago, when even the early critics of Thomas Kuhn could concede that scientific judgment involves aesthetics, it became time to turn toward the aesthetics of judgment.76 Can appreciations of prudence do less? The popular genre most obviously oriented to judgment is, as we might expect, the legal thriller. If it began with courtroom dramas after the fashion of Perry Mason, the genre has shifted with the likes of John Grisham and Scott Turow to our larger practices of law. This enables legal thrillers to address prudential strategies and tactics pertinent to the mundane judgments that configure many other walks of life. Make no mistake, though, the genre’s emphasis is still on judgment. Prudential practices, rhetorics, and perplexities of judgment dominate its conventional turns of plot and character. The
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
250
Page 250
.
Prudence
likes of L.A. Law, Picket Fences, The Practice, Law and Order, and sometimes even Ally McBeal continue to show on television how the genre can take advantage of the legal system’s capacity to engage hosts of social problems on the fields of individual action. But these are more issue-oriented than the genre’s novels, which emphasize with greater effect the prudential dynamics of character and judgment. Thus legal thrillers confront challenges of judgment scattered throughout the textures of contemporary life. They help refine our prudential senses of troubles, improving our second-nature capacities of judgment. Westerns, too, stress judgment. A conventional concern of westerns is the proper interplay of interest calculation and cultivated intuition in coping with a beautiful but dangerous land. The expectation of westerns is that judgment gone awry will trap people in feuds and other futile quests. Westerners must invent modes of justice suited to their new circumstances. Along the trail, these pioneers are bound to fail—time and time again. Hence the need, teaches the genre, is for forgiveness of others and selves. Then westerners can muster the true grit to keep going, to keep trying new ways in the West’s conditions of surprise and uncertainty. This enables westerners to learn reliably from experiences filled with mistakes, so they can judge better on the far side of that next ridge. Few novels by Grey or L’Amour lack these dynamics, and they are featured themes in the cinematic westerns that distinguished the 1990s: Unforgiven, Tombstone, Geronimo, Last of the Dogmen, Dances with Wolves, The Quick and the Dead, Wild Bill, and more. For the relentlessly new situations thrown at us by times late or postmodern, the westerns would school us readers and viewers in acts of confident, flexible, but forgivable judgment. Their prudential project is to prepare us for encounters across the fences, in the wilds, over the horizons: in sum, on the margins.
margins What few tracks might have betrayed him he obliterated, so only an expert tracker could have trailed him. —Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage
Prudence is hard to study, because it covers its tracks. We need to keep every sense alert for clues in order to follow its trail. This means staying close to the ground. If our noses get too far in the air, all we can smell is ourselves. But when the trail dies out, and we must enter a trackless wilderness, what
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 251
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
251
are we to do? Having followed the trail that far, we stand on the edge of an unknown territory. Then we need to turn our distance to advantage, gain perspective on the whole, survey the lay of the land, and figure where a prudential course is most likely to run. Any good tracker could tell us that. So we are brought to the edges, the margins. Telling theories of prudence must detail them, too, but differently from the other elements. Margins must be respected as the wild and uncultivatable dimensions of prudence, where rhetorics reach beyond given publics.77 They are where action moves beyond convention into invention and revolution—as, occasionally, it is prudent to do. Consequently studies of prudence cannot neglect the margins. And if “even wilderness depends upon a frame, upon the foil of human artifice,”78 might the conventions of prudence at least outline conditions and deeds that range beyond the more settled territories of prudence proper? Postmodern movements have brought margins (back) into fashion. Literary deconstructions deal extensively in the marginal matters of the excess, the supplement, and writing under erasure.79 Multiculturalisms in education and politics celebrate the margins as resources of difference.80 Even the environmentalists promote margins as sources of biotic diversity and sustainability.81 The margins are so important to Berry’s ecological brand of prudence that he proposes we “accommodate the margin within the form, to allow the wilderness or nature to thrive in domesticity, to accommodate diversity within unity.”82 With other environmentalists, Pollan appreciates how margins complete prudence by reminding us humans of our many limits: “The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence—antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.”83 The genres of popular culture best attuned to margins may be horror and science fiction. Yet the two engage prudential judgment in strikingly different ways. A prudential advantage of America’s popular culture is that these genres enable us to cultivate both sets of sensibilities through their distinctive tropes, stories, characters, styles, and more. Horror explores practical responses to the liminal experiences that trouble our everyday lives and politics. It knows that the margins already are disseminated widely, that there are cracks and crevices everywhere, that (in the recurrent words of Stephen King) “there are holes in the middle of things.”84 Without a prudential appreciation of margins, the abyss looms large and overwhelming. A continuing project of horror as a genre is to face these prudential troubles and draw the lines (as between good and evil) we need to make
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
252
Page 252
.
Prudence
the radical moves required for addressing such awful situations.85 The prudential sensibility cultivated by science fiction tends to complement the categorical impulses of horror with a perspectivalism we need to face the explosion of possibilities and situations in late-modern times. As its aficionados say, SF aligns us with the estranging edges of experience.86 As the slogan for Star Trek has it, science fiction dares “to boldly go where no one has gone before”—right to the frontiers, the margins. There it helps us experience the situations and sensibilities of creatures starkly different from ourselves. Thus it enables us to invent constructive responses to the strangest of settings. A prudence unresponsive to the margins is insensitive to boundaries and thus inflexible about rules. Science fiction extends radically the green prudence of putting us in touch with other beings, with orders of nature and value different from the human.87 In this connection, prudential practices do well to learn their own margins and respect their own limits. Not only must the student of prudence examine imprudence with a careful eye; but as an updated Machiavelli might say, the postmodern practitioner of prudence also must learn how not to be prudent. When foresight is unavailable or beside the point, a stubborn prudence can become a stupid caution. Popular genres of all sorts repeatedly teach Americans the existential need for faith as a proper leap past what we can (actually) see toward what we can (plausibly) hope. The experimental spirit of modernity need not contradict the principles of prudence, especially at the margins of experience and the edges of history in changing times.88 Everyday lives and popular cultures are themselves margins for the prudential discourses in the West. The republican-rhetorical tradition has featured the high politics of office and opposition. It has slighted the low politics of ordinary people in everyday affairs. That might have worked for rigid hierarchies and restricted education in earlier eras. But ours are times of fluid organization, popular education, and ample participation in a profusion of arenas open to people of diverse preparations. These ordinary places, people, and priorities are the preeminent margins that revitalized traditions of prudence must address in practical detail. The conventions and margins of everyday endeavor are the primary subjects of postmodern prudence, and the genres of popular culture are among America’s main devices for facing these subjects skillfully and effectively. Margins are where we learn limits-in-order. They are the disorder in order, the wilderness in civilization, the audacity in accommodation, the imprudence in prudence. That is why environmentalists advise us to save the margins and study them for what our order and civilization and prudence do not know or
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 253
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
253
may not accomplish. Just as much, though, the margins are the order in disorder, the civilization in wilderness, the audacity in accommodation, the prudence in imprudence. Prudential margins are the centers around the peripheries, the diversities within as well as beyond the categories. This is why environmentalists also urge us to disseminate the margins. If the hedge is uncultivated, then let the rows become low-till and no-till—at least until we restrict the erosion and pollution of irreplaceable resources to decent limits. In hosts of analogous ways, we can—and we must—reconceive prudence for postmodern people. Popular genres can help. With their inspiration, we can undo and redo the outdated, imprudent, antirhetorical cultures of modern life. Through their experimentation, we can turn to the margins of modern cultures for properly prudential powers of postmodern invention.
notes 1. Among the recent works on prudence and political judgment that inform the account at hand are Charles W. Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); J. Patrick Dobel, Compromise and Political Action (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990); John Dunn, Interpreting Political Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: “Phronesis” and “Techne” in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988); Martha C. Nussbaum, “Non-Scientific Deliberation,” in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 290–317; Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962); Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); and Peter J. Steinberger, The Concept of Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For more substantive treatments of prudence and related matters, see Eugene Garver, Machiavellii and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), and Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 2. See James Gleick, Chaos (New York: Viking, 1987). For echoes in popular culture, see N. Katherine Hayles, ed., Chaos and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and Kate Wilhelm, Death Qualified (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991). 3. See John S. Nelson, “Commerce Among the Archipelagos,” in The Core and the Canon, ed. L. Robert Stevens, G. L. Seligmann, and Julian Long (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1993), 78–100. Also see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 220–22. 4. See John S. Nelson, “The Republic of Myth” (paper presented at the Foundations of Political Theory Annual Workshop on Political Myth, Rhetoric, and Symbolism, San Francisco, August 2001). 5. See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses (New York: Random House, 1950); History of Florence (New York: Harper and Row, 1960); and The Prince, 1st and 2d eds.,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
254
Page 254
.
Prudence
ed. and trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977, 1992). Also see Giambattista Vico, The New Science, rev. ed., trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961); On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965); and The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944). Notice how recent commentators want to set aside specific substances for theories of prudence in favor of making Machiavelli and Vico into metatheorists of praxis and practical wisdom: John Plamenatz, “In Search of Machiavellian Virtú,” in The Prince, 1st ed., 217–26; Isaiah Berlin, “The Question of Machiavelli,” in The Prince, 2d ed., 206–36; and Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Philip Verene, eds., Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 395–448. 6. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 3d ed., trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), and Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Macmillan, 1951). Also see Roger J. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 31–43. 7. This, at any rate, is how I read G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 37–74. Also see G.W.F. Hegel, On Art, Religion, Philosophy, ed. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 195–204. 8. Why not credit the modern folk source expressly, since the essay turns pointedly to prudential resources of popular culture? See Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” (New York: M. Witmark and Sons, 1963). 9. On the theory of practices, see John S. Nelson, “Education for Politics,” in What Should Political Theory Be Now? ed. John S. Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 453–56; “When Words Gain Their Meanings,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 21, no. 3 (summer 1991): 22–37; and “Account and Acknowledge, or Represent and Control?” Organizations and Society 18, no. 2-3 (February-April 1993): 207–29. Also see MacIntyre, After Virtue, and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 10. For a defense of this principle in connection with rhetoric of inquiry, see John S. Nelson, “Seven Rhetorics of Inquiry,” in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and D. N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 407–34, and “Approaches, Opportunities and Priorities in the Rhetoric of Political Inquiry,” The Recovery of Rhetoric, ed. R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 164–89. 11. See John S. Nelson, Tropes of Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 150–79. 12. On principles for political inquiry, see William H. Panning, “What Does It Take to Have a Theory? Principles in Political Science,” in Nelson, What Should Political Theory Be Now? 479–511, and G. R. Boynton, “On Getting from Here to There,” Strategies of Political Inquiry, ed. Elinor Ostrom (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1982), 29–68. 13. Wendell Berry, “The Sycamore,” in Collected Poems, 1957–1982 (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 65. 14. See Hannah Arendt, “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin, 1968), 143–71, and On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), 85, 93–94, 213–14. Also see Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, 227–64, and The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2d ed. (New York: World, 1958), 243–44. 15. See John S. Nelson, “Political Foundations for Rhetoric of Inquiry,” The Rhetorical Turn, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 258–89. 16. See John S. Nelson, “Political Theory as Political Rhetoric,” in Nelson, What Should Political Theory Be Now? 188–89. 17. See Nelson, “Account and Acknowledge.”
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 255
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
255
18. See Christopher Matthews, Hardball (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). 19. Ibid., 16. 20. I adapt the notion of “metatheory” from the tradition of resistance to Western metaphysics. For studies of politics, the chief critic of metatheory is John G. Gunnell. See his Political Philosophy and Time (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1968); Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1979); Between Philosophy and Politics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); The Descent of Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and The Orders of Discourse (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). Gunnell also indicts metatheory in epistemology and philosophy of science, in Philosophy, Science, and Political Inquiry (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1975). 21. Machiavelli, “The Prince,” in The Prince, 2d ed., 40. 22. Ibid., 45. 23. Ibid., 47, 39. 24. Ibid., 49. 25. Ibid., 60. 26. Ibid., 63–64. 27. Ibid., 64–65. 28. Matthews, Hardball, 13. Also see Garry Wills, “Hurrah for Politicians,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1975, 45–54, and Henry Fairlie, “In Search of a President,” Washington Post Syndicate, May 23, 1976, and “The Politician’s Art,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1977, 33–46, 123–24. Please notice, though, that these three men use “principle” in a sense different from mine—to mean an abstract, theoretical claim that, in context, lacks the practical substance which defines prudential principles as aphoristic rules of thumb. 29. Matthews, Hardball, 14. 30. Ibid., 16. 31. See Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); The Dilbert Future (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); and The Joy of Work (New York: HarperCollins, 1999). 32. That there are genuinely prudential exercises in “self-help” is not to deny that many a con game gets played under the same rubric: see D. N. McCloskey, If You’re So Smart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 111–34. 33. See John S. Nelson, “Western Speech as Political Action” (paper presented at the Foundations of Political Theory Annual Workshop on Political Myth, Rhetoric, and Symbolism, Washington, D.C., August 1993). 34. In many ways, in fact, the Western theme of trails and tracks intersects the deconstructive discourse of traces and writing under erasure. See John S. Nelson, “The Surprising Politics of Popular Westerns” (paper presented at the Foundations of Political Theory Annual Workshop on Political Myth, Rhetoric, and Symbolism, Washington, D.C., August 1993). 35. See Louis L’Amour, “Dutchman’s Flat,” in Dutchman’s Flat (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 1–21. Some deconstructivists work likewise on paths that lead from theories of writing and reading to practical advice for ethics and politics. See William Corlett, Community Without Unity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989). 36. See Nelson, Tropes of Politics, 135–49. 37. On prudential presentations of character in America’s political advertising on television, see John S. Nelson and G. R. Boynton, Video Rhetorics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 38. See John S. Nelson, “The Western Culture of Honor, Interest, and Character” (paper presented at the Foundations of Political Theory Annual Workshop on Political Myth, Rhetoric, and Symbolism, Washington, D.C., August 1993). 39. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 222–26.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
256
Page 256
.
Prudence
40. See Nelson, Tropes of Politics, 34–46. 41. Michael Pollan, Second Nature (New York: Dell, 1991), 225–33. Pollan’s own list actually numbers ten virtues; but in articulating it, I think that he slips in an eleventh. 42. Ibid., 80–81. 43. Ibid., 139–59. 44. Ibid., 58–59. 45. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 23–29, 70–75. 46. See Nelson, Tropes of Politics, 99–114. 47. See Hannah Arendt, “The Gap Between Past and Future,” in Between Past and Future, 3–15, and “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in ibid., 17–40. 48. Pollan, Second Nature, 114. 49. Ibid., 20. 50. Ibid., 137. 51. See ibid., 116–38. 52. See ibid., 178–208. 53. See Nelson, Tropes of Politics, 132–34, 150–79. 54. See David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 55. See Berry, “The Sycamore.” Also see Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (New York: Random House, 2001). 56. See William Cronon, “Kennecott Journey,” in Under an Open Sky, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 28–51, and Donald Worster, “Paths Across the Levee,” The Wealth of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16–29. 57. Pollan, Second Nature, 296. 58. Ibid., 294–95. 59. Ibid., 298. 60. Ibid., 297. 61. Ibid., 297. 62. L’Amour, Down the Long Hills, 72. 63. See Gary Snyder, “On the Path, Off the Trail,” in The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 154. Also see Donald Worster, “Paths Across the Levee,” in The Wealth of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 16–29. 64. See Nelson, Tropes of Politics, 141–43. 65. See Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civil Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 66. See Nelson, Tropes of Politics, 180–230. 67. See Thomas Hobbes, “Chapter XXIV: Of the Nutrition, and Procreation of a Common-wealth,” in Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1968), 294–302. 68. See Judith Martin, Common Courtesy: In Which Miss Manners Solves the Problem That Baffled Mr. Jefferson (New York: Atheneum, 1985). 69. See Judith Martin, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (New York: Warner Books, 1982); Miss Manners’ Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millennium (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); and Miss Manners Rescues Civilization (New York: Crown, 1996). 70. See Judith Martin, Gilbert (New York: Penguin, 1982). 71. See Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (autumn 1971): 417–46, and J. Glenn Gray, “The Winds of Thought,” Social Research 44, no. 1 (spring 1977): 44–62. 72. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 257
Prudence as Republican Politics in American Popular Culture
.
257
73. See Nelson, Tropes of Politics, 145–46. 74. On the plurality of politics, see Nelson, “Political Theory as Political Rhetoric,” 239–40. On the multiplicity of rationalities, see Nelson, “Political Theory as Political Rhetoric,” 193–204, and Tropes of Politics, 84–87. 75. See MacIntyre, After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Also see Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974); Character and the Christian Life (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1975); A Community of Character (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Why Narrative? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1989); In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); and Christians Among the Virtues (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). 76. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), and Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 77. See Robert Hariman, “Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72, no. 1 (February 1986): 38–54. 78. Pollan, Second Nature, 301. 79. See Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); and The Post Card (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Also see Corlett, Community Without Unity, and Dilip Parameshwar Goankar, “Rhetoric and Its Double: Reflections on the Rhetorical Turn in the Human Sciences,” The Rhetorical Turn, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 341–66. 80. See Russell Ferguson et al., eds., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 81. See Florence R. Krall, Ecotone: Wayfaring on the Margins (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 82. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 179. 83. Pollan, Second Nature, 300. 84. See Stephen King, “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” in Skeleton Crew (New York: Putnam, 1985), 196–97. Also see John S. Nelson, “Horror, Crisis, and Control” (paper presented to the North American Society for Social Philosophy at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, La., August 1985). 85. See John S. Nelson, “The Politics of Evil in Popular Culture” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Ill., August 1995). 86. See John S. Nelson, “Political Mythmaking for Post-Moderns,” in Spheres of Argument, ed. Bruce E. Gronbeck (Annandale, Va.: Speech Communication Association, 1989), 175–83. 87. See Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals (New York: Viking Press, 1978). 88. See William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 258
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 259
9 Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence Maurice Charland
While there might be considerable disagreement regarding the validity of claims regarding the “postmodern” character of the contemporary age, one cannot doubt that there is a growing disenchantment within both philosophy and contemporary culture with modernity and its legacy. We find ourselves with reason and freedom, but without a basis for practical life. The current renewed interest in “prudence” within political thought should therefore be of no surprise, for that concept finds its roots outside the modern project. Indeed, as we shall see, the concept operates within modernity’s aporia and demands that we reconsider the ontological status of ethical political knowledge. Furthermore, while “prudence” receives its fullest treatment in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the term is not irretrievably premodern. On the contrary, “prudence,” like its premodern fellow traveler “rhetoric,” has a certain currency within postmodern thought, which emphasizes performance over reason and becoming over being. Consequently, the recovery of prudence does not require that we follow Alasdair MacIntyre in fully renouncing the modern project and awaiting the return of ethical communities. Rather, prudence requires an overcoming of—a going beyond—modernity that revisits premodern ontology and epistemology in order to reestablish prudence’s proper domain. This overcoming must, however, take modernity
259
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
260
Page 260
.
Prudence
seriously and cannot simply ignore modernity’s attack upon conventionalism or reduce prudence to the pragmatic governance of an imperial republican order. In what follows, we shall consider Jean-François Lyotard’s attempt at such an overcoming. Lyotard, counterposing Sophistic and Aristotelian thought to modern epistemology and moral theory, poses the question of prudence in terms of knowledge and categorical rules, only to overcome these categories through a constitutive model of ethical performance.
modern limits Many characterizations exist of modernity or the Enlightenment project. It is governed by an instrumental reason that becomes nihilistic; it undermines human solidarity in favor of individualism; it is based in a metaphysics of totality, teleology, and utopia; it is antifoundational and relativistic; it is destructive of value and meaning.1 In all of these we can detect a binary opposition between the fully determined or realized and the fully arbitrary or diffuse. This follows from modernity’s ontology and attendant epistemology. Ontologically, modernity posits a rational and ordered natural universe. Science is possible because nature is governed by law-like regularities. Modern epistemology is based in representation, in the “mirroring” of nature in the mind.2 If the world of human affairs operates according to principles of “nature” or is reducible to “phenomena” in Kant’s sense, it is representable in theoretical language and hence is knowable. On the other hand, if it is the consequence of the actions of human subjects endowed with free will, it becomes irreducible to theoretical explanation and so beyond the purview of abstract reason. In other words, modern theoretical knowledge must be fully (even if stochastically) determinant. As Eugene Garver observes, modernity consequently can offer only two logics of action: “algorithmics,” the following of preordained procedures, and “heuristics,” a strategy of trial-and-error.3 Modern epistemology makes prudence’s ontological domain vanish. Furthermore, as MacIntyre rightly argues, modernity has difficulty identifying goods, for it is profoundly skeptical of first principles that are not fully and incontrovertibly apparent. It is for this reason that Bacon appeals to sense impressions and Descartes begins by deducing the necessary existence of a thinker subtending the phenomenon of thought. Because values and ultimate meanings are neither empirical nor formally necessary, however, they cannot be secured, and so remain arbitrary in modern thought.4 Modernity rejects faith and in its skepticism points to the plurality of cultures with their own
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 261
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
261
goods and modes of being-in-the-world. For modernity, value is metaphysical and so outside the domain of reason and knowledge. Indeed, value is “irrational” and is easily dismissed as a manifestation of desire, ideology, or will. The only “good” that modernity can accept is its own immanent principle: reason. But since reason is an empty—formal—principle, modernity opens itself to narcissism and nihilism, to being in service to a will with no end but willing itself. Modern ontology and epistemology leave political theory in a quandary, for it can neither contribute in a substantive way to a debate regarding the ends of human political association nor serve as guide to attain given ends or goods. Modernity is far more congenial to social theory, with its descriptive or even predictive vocation. Thus Marxism, a modern social theory par excellence, abstracted grand principles out of history (dialectical laws) and through them predicted history’s inevitable outcome. Marxism guaranteed the end of history because it offered itself as a science that had identified the workings of the dialectic. While Marxism is commonly understood to be “political,” it had in its modern scientific form no “politics,” since it could neither reason its commitments nor derive maxims for action. Attempts at normative moral or political theory within modernity at best offer formal or procedural norms and maxims that are consistent with the dictates of reason itself. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, for example, establishes universalizability as the criterion for judging moral maxims. That is to say, as a modern, Kant proceeds by abstracting human particularities in favor of a general category (the rational subject) that can be treated through theoretical reason. Contemporary thinkers, such as Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls, similarly must abstract the historical particularity of human agents in order to place them under the rule of reason. Thus, moral thought becomes the affair of what Seyla Benhabib terms the “moral geometrician,”5 whose reasoning never addresses that most practical of classical questions: “What is the good life and how do we attain it?” Rather, in its most enlightened form, modern moral theory provides a philosophical justification for those political rights which are in the interest of communicative or deliberative reason, such as freedom and respect.6 The current interest in “prudence” within political theory can be understood in part to be a reaction to these aspects of modernity. Prudence does not consist of following a set of rules or doggedly insisting upon one end. Rather, it requires innovation and a balancing of goods. As the term was developed by Aristotle, prudence is an intellectual (or calculative or deliberative) virtue, “a truth-attaining rational quality, concerned with action in relation
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
262
Page 262
.
Prudence
to things that are good for human beings.”7 While Aristotle takes human happiness to be the first good because he assumes that all humans desire it, the secondary goods that would lead to it vary in accordance with the forms and constitutions of political community. Thus Aristotle has no doubt that goods are not arbitrary even while they are not universal, and he provides a framework in which ends are not reducible to irrational desire, taste, or will, but are the consequence of practical reason. Against both determinant reason and arbitrary choice, Aristotle offers prudence as action’s guide. Aristotle considers prudence to be a “virtue,” but it is important to note that it is a virtue of the intellect, of the deliberative part of the soul. That is to say, Aristotle’s fundamental categories render the domain of particularity accessible to understanding, and action itself is figured within the purview of practical reason. Although this might all resonate with our common sense, like common sense itself it has no place in modern ontology.
the ontology of the contingent Pierre Aubenque persuasively argues that the Aristotelian conception of prudence is subtended by an ontology which is distinct from those of both Socrates and modernity. Aubenque identifies in Aristotle an “ontology of the contingent.”8 This ontology considers the human world to be undetermined even while it manifests certain regularities. We live in a world of contingency, of circumstances and events that are beyond certain prediction. Furthermore, the future consequences of current events or of our actions cannot be charted with certainty. Syllogistic or determinant reason does not apply. At most, one has recourse to enthymemes. Here, epistemology follows ontology: it is not that history is governed by laws we cannot understand or that the world’s order is only knowable to the gods, as Plato would say. Rather, the course of human events is in its nature unpredictable. For Aristotle, not even God can have certain knowledge of what will occur. “Il faut admettre que ce qui est indéterminé pour l’homme l’est aussi en soi, c’est-à-dire, pour Dieu.”9 Aristotle is not, however, offering an ontology of randomness. All events have causes, but these are multiple. Causes coincide by chance. The conjuncture of causes is unpredictable, a matter of luck. Thus, we can retrospectively understand why a battle was lost, but we could not have predicted that the general would die or the weapon would fail. This is our ontological condition. The world of human events unfolds as chance brings innumerable factors into play.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 263
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
263
Aristotle’s ontology has an epistemological counterpart. The world of events cannot be the object of certain knowledge. No law or categorical maxim can properly prescribe action because no full representation of what is in play is possible. Thus, citing Aristotle, Lyotard asserts that there can be no science of politics: “Therefore, there is no science of the political. I would put it otherwise: There is no metalanguage, and by metalanguage, I mean the famous theoretical discourse that is supposed to ground political and ethical decisions that will be taken as the basis for its statements.”10 For Aristotle, atheoretical practical political “knowledge” remains possible, however, for chance is only one factor in the outcome of events. Certain patterns and regularities remain, and these can be perceptible to the keen observer. Of course, modern thought also recognizes chance in the form of randomness, and regularities through stochastic or statistical theory. Statistics, however, displaces particularity through a reductive process of generalization. Thus, in terms of epistemology, knowledge still takes the form of a general “rule,” even if it is formulated in terms of probability. That is to say, modern thought does not deny contingency so much as ignore its uniqueness, by uniformly distributing probability. In contrast, for Aristotle a recognition of regularities is a consequence of “experience,” not in the narrow sense of an accumulation of sense perceptions, but in the sense of ordered intuitions about what is likely to happen and what is the best thing to do in a given situation.11 Prudence consists in this “savoir-faire” which, while possible in the modern world, cannot be conceptually redeemed in order to stand as “real” knowledge. What then makes prudence more than luck or a “knack”? As Aubenque observes, Aristotle develops his concept of prudence by elaborating an epistemology and theory of action appropriate to his ontology. Thus, and this is key, prudence is not knowledge in the usual sense. It is distinct from both theoretical knowledge and wisdom in that it is not conceptual but performed: prudence is manifest in “right action.” Furthermore, it is not guided by a concept: rightness is determined not by a general rule, but only by a contingent rule. But what does this mean? A general rule or principle is external and logically prior to case and agent and indeed mediates between the two. A contingent rule or principle is proper only to a particular case and hence cannot be determined in advance.12 It can only be determined in the face of a case, and that by a deliberating agent. In contrast, modern moral theory proceeds through the development of categorical rules or maxims that hold independently of the subject. Indeed, subject-independent procedures and forms of knowledge are the hallmarks of modern thought. As such, prudence is not a form of knowledge but an embodied type of understanding.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
264
Page 264
.
Prudence
the place of subject, ethos, and polis in prudence-as-action Modern knowledge stands in principle without a knowing subject. It stands as a representational text, which as such is unhinged from its origin. Aristotelian prudence on the contrary requires a knowing agent not only as origin but as foundation and measure of practical knowledge. Indeed, for Aristotle prudence is a virtue. As Aubenque makes clear, this is so because right action depends upon a right agent rather than objective right knowledge. Prudence does not guide an agent so much as depend upon her.13 Furthermore, the exercise of this virtue has as a priori (1) that the contingent world be knowable, that is to say coherent, regular, and textualizable, and (2) that humans have the capacity to know the world, to read it as text and apprehend coherence and regularity. In Aristotle, the goods toward which prudence are directed are immanent to the political community and its attendant character (ethos). Without a polis, where the public existence of agents is instantiated, prudence would be meaningless. But the existence of a community does not in itself guarantee prudence. Agents require an adequate understanding of their community, its character, and its goods, as well as an appreciation of what is probable. Skillful interpretation and action require “experience,” in its colloquial sense, as well as “natural” ability. Prudence requires hermeneutic agents in a meaningful world. As such, it is hardly surprising that Gadamer develops his philosophical hermeneutics out of Aristotle’s phronesis,14 and like hermeneutics more generally, prudence is implicated with a number of “humanist” notions, such as intention, meaning, communication, and understanding, even while it does not require that these be taken up unproblematically. Prudence as a civic virtue requires both a meaningful public or political horizon and an agent with the requisite experience and prior knowledge. For this reason, in Aristotle the young cannot be prudent, because they lack experience: “Although the young may be experts in geometry and mathematics and similar branches of knowledge, we do not consider that a young man can have Prudence. The reason is that Prudence includes a knowledge of particular facts, and this is derived from experience, which a young man does not possess; for experience is the fruit of years.”15 Thus, not even Pericles can teach his son prudence, it can only be developed through living. Prudence is a public virtue, a virtue of the citizen, that develops not through academic study but through its exercise. Prudence, when understood in terms of hermeneutics as a form of understanding rather than knowledge, appears compatible with modernity. It offers us a way of speaking of the virtue and effectiveness of mainstream political
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 265
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
265
figures, who interpret their respective communities, but can the term provide insight into the actions of a Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, who acted to transform their polities? Yes, they both acted effectively to produce what in retrospect appears to be a practical good. But what were they when they acted? They both were dissidents who violated reigning laws and norms. Do we call them prudent only through reference to their successes? In Aristotle, one can be prudent and fail. Prudence does not guarantee mastery over luck and all other contingencies, for “virtue ensures the rightness of the end we aim at, Prudence ensures the rightness of the means we adopt to gain that end.”16 Prudence is a virtue because it pertains to character-in-action rather than outcomes, and judgments of character, of ethos, are community-dependent. When the character of a community is unproblematic, it can serve as a horizon against which to judge choices made with respect to the probable and the desirable. But how can we judge actions directed toward the reconstitution of community itself? Is prudence merely the championing of conventional values? Would we consider Lincoln prudent had the fates conspired to defeat the Union? When we consider history as change, can prudence mean more than the conjugation of “Whig” and “great men” conceptions of history? In more theoretical terms, what is the temporal relation between prudential action and the horizon against which it both proceeds and is recognized. Is its horizon the past, the present, or the future? And furthermore, whose past and which future? To raise the same issue in somewhat different terms, as the kernel of a normative political theory, Aristotelian prudence demands action-in-understanding, but “understanding” implies that prudence is a “communitarian” virtue that begins with what is taken or attributed to be the horizon of the “community.” This means that prudential figures cannot remain fully “other,” either as outlaws or the abject. Does prudence demand the ultimate identification of the phronimos with a “community”? Or can prudence accommodate difference, where understanding always remains elusive? Hermeneutic prudence may ultimately be incompatible with a core component of the modern project: the overcoming of conventional authority through critical reason. The modern project was directed toward realizing human autonomy and reason. This in particular meant the undercutting of the authority of faith and tradition in favor of a critical spirit. In that prudence proceeds hermeneutically, we can ask whether its recent currency is but veiled nostalgia for a more stable order, akin to George Grant’s lament in In Defence of North America or Alasdair MacIntyre’s despair in After Virtue. The facile progressive critic could object that prudence is “reactionary” because (1) as a hermeneutic practice it
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
266
Page 266
.
Prudence
proceeds within a tradition, and (2) as a model of practical governance directed toward the contingent good, it is anti-utopian, must compose with things as they are and as such cannot offer an uncompromising radical break. Against its detractors, Richard Bernstein defends the progressive potential of “tradition” by arguing that there is more to it than monolithic rationalization of dominant interests. Tradition includes antagonistic positions and countermovements that prudence can animate; in other words, tradition contains within itself progressive or innovative as well as oppressive and reactionary elements. Beginning within tradition does not preclude its transformation or transcendence.17 With respect to prudence’s anti-utopian character and orientation toward compromise, we need only return to Eugene Garver’s argument that the politics of principle, “ideological” politics, is no politics at all.18 In other words, the idea of prudence is not necessarily incompatible with modernity’s aim of emancipation. Like modernity, prudence seeks to empower human agency, is open to innovation, and is not rigidly tied to a universe of fixed values and meanings. Even so, Aristotelian prudence remains premodern because will and autonomy are constituted within the hermeneutic horizon of a given community, and a point from which to engage in critique is lacking. Prudence risks becoming no more than the successful enactment of conventional wisdom. Can we speak of prudent action directed to a good that we do not yet recognize?
lyotard and postmodern prudence Quite remarkably, prudence is a fundamental category in the political philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, best known in the English-speaking world as the author of The Postmodern Condition. Lyotard is a strong proponent of avant-garde movements in art and rejects the hermeneutic horizon of communicability. In spite of this, he does not dismiss prudence as reactionary or antiquated. On the contrary, he reads Aristotle as a kind of Sophist whose ontology of the contingent is compatible with a postmodern sensitivity to incommensurability. Lyotard adapts speech act theory and argues that discourses can be distinguished as genres with distinct pragmatics. Science, art, ethics, and dialectics would each have their characteristic pragmatic positions (speaking, listening, judging, and so on) and finalities (truth, beauty, justice, etc.). Lyotard redeems prudence in postmodern terms by focusing upon its pragmatics, which are markedly other than those productive of modern knowledge. Prudence consists of “linking” phrases between “language
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 267
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
267
games” in the absence of rules.19 Lyotard does not link prudence to science or epistème, but neither does he link it to an interpretive hermeneutics. Lyotard offers a model of prudence that can both guide and account for innovation and does not require a normalizing or “terroristic” common measure of human understanding. Lyotard defines postmodernism as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.”20 He both observes and celebrates this incredulity. His project is the development of a political philosophy of difference. Lyotard is concerned with the exclusions imposed by dominant political, social, and cultural forms and seeks to chart the defense of the unseen or excluded. This has led him to both theorize difference and exclusion so that their existence can be apprehended and develop a practical moral theory that will guide their defense. In this, Lyotard is postmodern for three reasons. First, while he does not use such language, his critique is in a sense “after” modernity. In his view, the Enlightenment project has failed, because it has resulted in “terror.” That is to say, his philosophy is a response to the violence that is the legacy of the Enlightenment project. The Enlightenment promised to liberate humanity through reason, but in attempting to do so unleashed the Will, no longer constrained by faith, traditional morality, or its subordination to nature. Modernity offers a Philosophy of the Will, where reason is either instrumental or an alibi for hubris. We can name some of its terrors: the Terror of the French Revolution, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Gulag, Vietnam. Against these, Lyotard seeks a mode both of practical thinking and of philosophizing that has a certain humility even as it maintains the critical moment within modernity. Second, he is postmodern in seeking to preserve modernity’s critical moment, for by “postmodern” he means that within modernity which is iconoclastic, experimental, and strives toward an overcoming. For Lyotard, the prefix “post” does not invoke a temporal framework: it is neither a matter of epochs nor of historical “progress.” Postmodernity does not succeed modernity. Rather, Lyotard understands “postmodern” in terms of the future (post) anterior (modo), where a future moment is looked at from a time beyond it and retrospectively judged.21 Thus it implies a going beyond or overcoming of present understandings. If postmodernism is within modernity, so is its opposite, romanticism, by which Lyotard understands the canonization of modern experiments. Romanticism aims for a new classicism, a new rigidity of forms.22 Modernity swings between an incredulity toward metanarratives and the canonization of new metanarratives. Thus, science is born in skepticism but is institutionalized as the only legitimate form of knowledge; revolutionary republics become colonial empires; radical activism based in critical
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
268
Page 268
.
Prudence
reason treats hostages as means. Third, Lyotard is postmodern rather than premodern because he comes after Kant and refuses to abandon the categorical distinction between the realms of truth, justice, and beauty. Consistent with his postmodern incredulity, he does not grant an objective singular character to the True, the Just, and the Beautiful. He does, however, hold that they pertain to distinct discursive domains with distinct pragmatics and finalities. Justice is not a consequence of true knowledge, nor should we imagine that a just politics can be guided by aesthetics. Furthermore, consistent with modern thought, his central political preoccupation is justice rather than the good. In sharing these commitments with Jürgen Habermas, Lyotard is not as such a modern thinker, however, for he does not seek to harmonize these three distinct spheres by bringing them together under the banner of reason, as would Habermas.23 In his view, the rule of reason is a form of terror. Consequently and to the contrary, the autonomy of each domain, as manifest in its pragmatics, must be preserved.
from postmodernity through premodernity Lyotard develops a practical political philosophy of difference by returning to Greek thought, and most notably the concept of prudence as understood both by Sophists and Aristotle. Against modern coherence and continuity, their “ontology of the contingent” opens a space for difference because it underscores the indeterminacy of the human condition. Modern moral or political thought stresses totality, metanarratives of knowledge, progress and emancipation, and deontological categorical ethics. Each of these eliminates the possibility of substantial human agency, for they subsume choice under some law given by a priori or deductive reason. Lyotard develops his thought through theological metaphors. (Romantic) modernity is “monotheistic,” ordering the world in terms of truth, autonomy, and progress. Aristotle, Sophists, and Cynics are pagan, for any moment can be understood from a number of perspectives, and one is confronted with coexisting and yet incommensurable obligations and criteria for judgment. There are, in a sense, many local and finite gods, each with its own domain and interests. Prudential judgment does not follow one rule or one god. The pagan judge must listen to prescriptives and then act. Instead of being ruled by one “metanarrative,” she must weigh many little narratives that may well be incommensurable, and then judge (without a net, as it were).24 Thus, postmodernity and (Sophistic)
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 269
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
269
premodernity meet not only in their amodernity, but also in their radical plurality, their recognition of the irreducibility of the contingent moment, and their appreciation of the gaps or discontinuities between knowledge, judgment, and action.
pagan prudence explained Jean-François Lyotard occupies a curious place in relation to premodernity and modernity. His thought proceeds from Aristotle’s ontology of the contingent and develops through the conceptual vocabulary of “language games,” which he shares with that most modern of thinkers, Habermas. However, unlike Aristotle, he does not imagine a metaphysical framework from which the good-in-itself or an abstract human happiness can be derived. And, contra Habermas, he does not use language pragmatics as the basis for a reconstructive theory. That is to say, he does not inquire into the a priori of the speech act or impute to it a particular teleology. As such, the very nature of speech acts invokes no set of enabling norms. In particular, for Lyotard speech acts are not necessarily communicative. He does not consider mutual understanding a necessary finality of speech: “Language is not an ‘instrument of communication,’ it is a highly complex archipelago formed of domains of phrases, phrases from such different regimes that one cannot translate a phrase from one regime (a descriptive for example) into a phrase from another (an evaluative, a prescriptive).”25 It is not that Lyotard denies meaning outright. Interlocutors may be on the same terms, and be able to reach agreement and coordinate action. But he does not consider mutual understanding an a priori to the speech act. “Understanding,” if one can still use the term, is only one possible and genredependent outcome of speech. Borrowing from Wittgenstein, Lyotard exploits the metaphor of “game” when discussing language. Speech acts are “moves.” Phrases follow each other, link with each other, in accordance with gameimmanent rules or regulative ideas. What marks these games is that they all are based in “agonistics,” where each linking or speech act is guided by an idea of a “good move.”26 Different games have different good moves. Thus, the “science” game, the “obligation” game, and the “deliberation” game have constitutively different pragmatics and hence different ways of “winning.” The ideal speech situation that Habermas champions would be a “consensus” game. According to Lyotard, however, “politics” is not a game at all, but the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
270
Page 270
.
Prudence
point of intersection between games, where rules are absent.27 Consequently, there are no principles or criteria to give meaning to the category of “knowledge,” and justice is always at stake.
prudence without hermeneutics Lyotard radicalizes the indeterminacy of Aristotle’s ontology of the contingent, finding its counterparts within metaphysics and language. For Lyotard, the speech act, the possibility of “phrasing,” and meaning itself are contingent. Between each speech act is a “gap,” which is only overcome by a “linking” that, if not arbitrary, is organized by a genre or “phrase regimen.”28 There is thus no master discourse or set of discursive procedures that can unproblematically resolve moral or contingent questions or guide action. On the contrary, between each linking there is the possibility of a “differend,” which Lyotard defines as “a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.”29 Thus, for Lyotard, as for Aristotle, political judgments cannot be subsumed under questions of knowledge or reduced to moral theory. Neither can offer a “right rule” against which contingent cases can be measured. Lyotard reads this indeterminacy metaphorically against the horizon of Greek mythology and argues that Aristotle and the Sophists locate judgment within a pagan cosmology, where many rules (or many gods) lay claim to the same case, and usually for their own purposes. From this perspective, various conflicting rhetorical appeals are perspectival and incommensurable. Thus, Lyotard like Aristotle considers political judgment in the face of appeals to lack any solid grounding. “[Prudence] consists in dispensing justice without models. It is not possible to produce a learned discourse upon what justice is.”30 Lyotard reads Aristotle as a pluralist. Aristotle holds the ultimate good to be human happiness, but recognizes that intermediate goods will vary from community to community. Lyotard cites Aristotle’s cataloguing in the Politics of various constitutions in order to reject the legitimacy of any given polis (under the regime of one god) and its demand for allegiance.31 Lyotard, however, ultimately cannot accept what many interpret to be Aristotle’s response to this variability. Aristotle presents prudence as a civic virtue, allied to the end and ethos of each polis. Lyotard’s postmodernism offers no such comforts. Lyotard views the community of virile ethos as negating rather than transcending or even bracketing difference. Against this, he celebrates such “lesser Greeks”
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 271
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
271
as Protagoras and Diogenes, impertinent marginal figures who deny the very existence of the center-margin binary, for difference and the differend are always lurking, every phrase risks alterity and a movement outside a given regime of meaning.32 When inspired by Aristotle, the turn to “prudence” can be understood as a retreat from modernity, not because it is based upon a non-modern model of knowledge (although there is that too), but because the experience from which that knowledge would be derived is tied to the polis and thus cannot easily escape the charge of “conventionalism” that is often leveled at contemporary communitarians. We can understand this through Aristotle’s schema. Prudence is a virtue, an attribute of the phronimos. Prudential acts are effected by deliberating with a hermeneutic rather than conceptual knowledge of the probable. While the right rule of an action exists not in the community, but in the phronimos himself, the phronimos acquires this knowledge as his natural ability is wedded to experience and education (hexis). Thus, the phronimos must appreciate through experience not only what is probable, but also what the community values.33
justice as idea and good As Aristotle observes, one does not deliberate ends, only means, even while communities have different constitutive ends. One might argue that Aristotle’s ultimate end, the “good,” is so general that it can accommodate a plurality of intermediate ends, but these are community-specific. Thus, Aristotelian prudence always has an Idea of the good to guide it. Lyotard does not, however, accept the regime of phrasing and meaning that would make “local” goods possible. This would require deferring to given local traditions and values, and to a nostalgia for the presence of community. In rejecting such a turn to the “local,” Lyotard does not embrace the modern principle of “universality,” and yet he cannot simply dismiss it. Lyotard is an at least modern thinker when rejecting both convention and natural philosophy’s understanding of a human telos in nature. But he is postmodern in rejecting the redeployment of that telos within reason or language. In other words, he rejects the common bases for normative theory: nature, convention, and reason. And yet, and perhaps unexpectedly, he does not fully abandon political norms and maxims. For Lyotard, politics is by definition concerned with justice. “There is no politics if there is not at the very center of society, at least at a center that is not a center but everywhere in the society, a question of existing institutions, a
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
272
Page 272
.
Prudence
project to improve them, to make them more just. This means that all politics implies the prescription of doing something else than what it is.”34 This is not Aristotle’s understanding of politics. For Aristotle, politics is a virtuous practice, a practice which instantiates civic virtue, a good in itself, because the polis is an ethical community directed toward forming virtuous (and hence happy) citizens. In contrast, as he foregrounds justice, Lyotard is heir to modernity’s legacy. He emphasizes an external finality, rather than the internal one of enacting politics for its own sake. As Lyotard develops his understanding of justice, however, the ends of politics become increasingly less simple. Lyotard has no “concept” of justice. For him, it is an Idea. That is to say, while Lyotard is committed to justice, he maintains that one cannot specify what justice is. “Justice” is not representable. It cannot be an object of conceptual knowledge. It is akin to the beautiful or the sublime as a Kantian regulative Idea. Lyotard furthermore insists that there is a multiplicity of justices. As such, Lyotard offers a postmodern synthesis of Sophistry, Aristotelianism, and a curious Kantianism that identifies justice with prudence and paganism. Lyotard does so, in the first instance, by identifying himself with the weak, with Sophists and Cynics who are not the pious masters of the polis. Thus, his pagans are displaced, resident aliens or “metics” (the Sophists were for the most part not Athenians). These are not only marginal figures, but incarnate a troubling difference within themselves. They have no center. They have no being, and like Gorgias (who was one of them) deny that being exists. Gorgias aligns justice with an opening toward that kind of difference and offers “pagan instructions” (instructions païennes), which are little more than sophistical strategies. Sophistry and strategic impertinence is “the strength of the weak,” and “prudence is a matter of seizing opportunities.”35 Against a prudence that would impose closure, Lyotard favors wild Sophistry and its disruptions of probability. He likes to recount the wellknown tale of Corax (Protagoras in his account) taking a student to court to receive his fee. The student protests that his instruction had been worthless, but the teacher counters that should the student win in court, the lessons will have been of value and therefore will merit payment. Lyotard observes that the young student was doubtless the son of a rich Athenian, while the Sophist had only his wits to support him. Thus, false enthymemes are central to Lyotard performative politics, and indeed his maxim, if not his performative norm, is that they should be used strategically to disrupt. Put otherwise, disruption is a fundamental source of invention and favors a multiplicity of justices, which results in the norm of a “justice of multiplicity.” This justice
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 273
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
273
cannot be expressed in a formula or a canonic law. It is a perspective. What perspective? Destroy narrative monopolies, both as exclusive themes (of parties) and as exclusive pragmatics (exclusive to parties and markets). Take away the privileges the narrator has granted himself. Prove that there is as much power—and not less power—in listening, if you are a narratee, and in acting, if you are the narrated (and let the fools believe that you are singing the praises of servitude when you do so).36 Notice that for Lyotard, the quest for justice is tied to discourse, to the breaking up or subverting of metanarratives. One must do justice to the possibility of other forms of phrasing and be attentive to the possibility of the differend, to the gap that is the ontological condition at the origin of every speech act. Hence, his prudence is not the virtue of an imperial prince but a tactic for a plural world.
the two moments of prudence Power, prudence, and justice are linked not only when acting but also when listening and judging. Lyotard’s “just” agents are pagans or outlaws, undermining the normalization of the polis by “seizing opportunities” when they occupy the “addressor” pole and circulate discourse. When occupying the addressee pole, as judges, they are not within one “language game,” but between two or more. At most, they are within a pragmatics of obligation: many rules claim the right to subsume cases; claims are addressed to judges; they must judge. The very incommensurability of obligations then moves from an existential condition to a regulative principle: justice requires the preservation and multiplication of plurality. “Be pagan” is his maxim that commends a way of judging, and hence a particular form of performing the ethos of the judge. As such, Lyotard places prudence on the side of difference or of the differend. Prudence becomes the modality or the instance for action in the absence not only of knowledge but also of a “phrase regimen” determinant of how justice will be phrased. Lyotard figures these two moments of prudence in terms of acting and listening. In the first instance, his earlier writings figure prudence as the virtue of tactical judgment, of seizing opportunities. In this, prudence is strongly performative and sophistically rhetorical. It is linked to what the Greeks
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
274
Page 274
.
Prudence
termed kairos and prepon, a sense of timing and appropriateness, the capacity to seize the moment. Because it is associated with marginals, this first prudence entails identifying the proper strategy that the weak or disenfranchised can deploy against the strong, against the viri, the guardians of a community normatively secured through metanarratives. This “prudence” realizes the contingent good, but not for the community. It does so for the marginals— and for marginality, without reconstituting community. We have a guerrilla phronimos. The second figure of prudence foregrounds listening and judging. In his later writing, Lyotard struggles with the pragmatics of obligation and judgment. In Just Gaming, he begins with the Aristotelian and Sophistic ontology of contingency. He then asks what can guide judgment when different “gods,” incommensurable claims of obligation, confront us. Lyotard forcefully rejects the conflation of aesthetic and political judgment: “It is not true that one can do an aesthetic politics. It is not true the search for intensities of things of that type can ground politics, because there is the problem of injustice.”37 In other words, Lyotard is unwilling to concede that political judgment should be derived from sheer rhetorical form. Lyotard also, however, rejects a recourse to opinion in any simple sense. “If all opinions are acceptable, then I cannot decide.”38 In other words, he recognizes the truth of the dissoi logoi, which prompts him to raise the question of judgment: “How do I decide among opinions if I no longer accept as legitimate the appeal to science? The question must be asked: Where do I get this capability to judge.”39 Lyotard refuses to settle the question through an aesthetic conception of performed ethos, as do many contemporary commentators, but responds to the dilemma of judgment by turning to Kant. He argues against Kant’s model of practical reason as set forth in the Second Critique, and develops a philosophy of political judgment based upon Kant’s Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment. He argues that political judgment depends not upon a concept, but upon an Idea, which is not a concept and hence cannot find representation or cognitive expression. An Idea is unrepresentable, even while accessible to the imagination. He maintains that Aristotle’s prudential model follows this schema, because the phronimos must seek to realize the contingent good, even as he cannot specify conceptually what it might be. What Lyotard considers fundamental to prudential (and “synthetic”) judgment is the Idea, as a regulative finality that eludes conceptual specification. Like the “beautiful,” it can never be fully realized. For Aristotle, this finality is “the good,” which depends upon either a conception of human nature, a “metaphysical biology,” as Alasdair MacIntyre observes in After Virtue, or upon a polis and an attendant valorization of civic virtue. A recognition of right action must proceed
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 275
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
275
through a hermeneutic moment, when contingency and horizon are fused in an interpretive act. Lyotard, however, does not acknowledge simple horizons: He admits neither “human nature” nor the legitimacy of the polis. Consequently, his justice is neither representable nor instantiated in a community or a tradition. It stands analogous to the sublime. Lyotard’s “good” is a justice of multiplicity, a justice consistent with his ontology of speech, but a justice that can never find its form in an institution or practice. His justice, like beauty or the sublime, can never be attained but only approximated. Furthermore, and only like the sublime, it arises not through harmony but through its opposite. Sublime justice is constituted in heterogeneity and difference. As such, the Idea or principle that would guide prudent judgment, and distinguish right doxa from conventional opinion, cannot acquire the plenitude necessary for a hermeneutics, except a “hermeneutics of absence,” the enactment of which would instantiate a prudential nonrepublican ethos. As I observe above, Lyotard offers two distinct moments of prudence, the first, of seizing opportunities, is within an agonistic understanding of action and performance. The second, of listening and judging, appears more reflective or disinterested. These two are linked, however, just as rhetoric and phronesis are linked in Aristotle.40 For Lyotard, agonistics itself requires judgment. Sophists and Cynics judge the tactics that they invent, and do so consistently with their impious ethos. As such, rhetorical invention and performance themselves are prudential, for they have both an internal end, impious virtuosity, and an external one, success (for the impious), even as impious performance is consistent with the Idea of a justice of multiplicity. Pagan judgment, as developed by Lyotard in Just Gaming similarly includes a praxis with the internal end of enacting a pagan ethos and the external end of giving voice to new ways of conceiving the probable. While Lyotard studiously avoids giving weight to subjectivist or phenomenological understandings, he nevertheless admits the significance of ethos as the measure of the phronimos, but ethos is always an externality immanent in performance. It is an effect of rhetoric, for it remains an attribution by an audience: “It is true that he [Aristotle] speaks of an éthos. . . . But what is this éthos? Ultimately, it is a description and not a theoretical one this time, but still a description of what someone who always holds to the just mean can be. Which is precisely to say that the good éthos of the judge, far from being the cause of just judgments, is that which can manifest itself only through just judgments.”41 Thus, Lyotard links Aristotle’s two conceptions of ethos, that of lived character and that of rhetorical proof, through the fact that both are enacted before others. What distinguishes Lyotard from Aristotle is that he rejects the ethos of the
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
276
Page 276
.
Prudence
citizen because it is incompatible with the Idea of justice as derived from a radicalized ontology of the contingent that troubles the very notions of community and meaning. As such, Lyotard’s prudence would be deconstructive, not committed to any community or substantive way of life, even as it depends upon the situated judgments of others that it seeks to reconfigure.
lyotard and radical rhetoricity Lyotard’s attempt to develop a postmodern politics, which is to say an antifoundational and postconventional praxis directed toward justice, has encountered many critics. On the one hand, he is accused of bad faith, of being unwilling to follow through on his postmodern commitments. On the other hand, he is identified as a poststructuralist whose radical dismissal of unity and meaning undermine the very bases for oppositional politics. In what follows, I will argue that Lyotard offers a viable anticommunitarian model of prudence that successfully negotiates between transcendentalism and radical negation because rhetorical categories infuse his thought. Lyotard’s recurring citation of Aristotle and the Sophists is an index of his break with modern categories, in particular those linked to being, identity, and epistemologies of representation. Against these, we find in Lyotard a stress upon becoming, nonidentity, and ontologies of figuration and performance. Lyotard could well subscribe to Gorgias’s thesis on the nonexistent, which plays on the ambiguity of the verb “is” and asserts: “Nothing exists; if it exists, it cannot be known; if it can be known, it cannot be communicated.”42 Can this position sustain a politics? Not according to Honi Fern Haber, who argues that Lyotard ultimately fails in his attempt to render a politics that is both postmodern and just: “Try as he might, paganism cannot be reconciled with Kantianism as is evident by the end of Just Gaming where, contrary to all prohibitions of the pagan, he ends by speaking in the voice of the ‘great prescriber himself.’ ”43 For Haber, this antipagan return to Kant is the consequence of his distrust of a politics of opinion. According to Haber, postmodern antifoundationalism invalidates claim redemption and argumentation and therefore “offers only aesthetic judgment as the standard for discriminating between the just and the unjust.”44 Lyotard, however, refuses the turn to aesthetics, because politics and aesthetics have different ends: the former is directed toward justice, the latter toward the beautiful or sublime. He rejects both reason and aesthetics as bases for political judgment, because the former leads to terror and the latter does not care about justice.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 277
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
277
For Haber, there are only two alternatives: a politics without reason based in radical undecidability, which would necessarily be without foundation and depend upon aesthetics, or a politics of reason, whether founded on communal (Aristotelian) or categorical (Kantian) laws. Haber does not offer an alternative to discursive claim redemption (the better argument) or aesthetics. He certainly does not consider a rhetorically informed prudence. Lyotard, in contrast, raises squarely the problem of political judgment that the turn to prudence seeks to address. He focuses on the indeterminate component of prudence as a “calculative virtue” that neither collapses into reason nor defers without judgment to “common” opinion: “I don’t think that one can say that this [prudential] calculation is theoretical. It is a calculation that bears upon objects for which there is no truth. In other words, there are statements about possibilities, and statements about possibilities are only statements of opinion. The judge relies upon opinions.”45 By focusing on the judge, Lyotard starts down a path followed by Eugene Garver in his discussion of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Garver asks, “Why does reasoning persuade?” More precisely, since rhetoric can argue both sides of a case, what permits or enables judgment? Garver maintains that Aristotle resolves this difficulty through ethos. The rhetorical agon constitutes a contest between orators. They offer artificial proofs, proofs that construct and defend an opinion. They are before a judge. In well-argued cases, when either side can lay claim to the probable, not logos but the ethos of the orator is determinate. In Aristotle, the judge (or judges) will assess which orator has instantiated prudence, virtue, and goodwill through his performance. These will emerge in the orator’s appropriate use of logos, including the choice of argumentative topics.46 In addition, these can only be assessed with reference to the ethos of the polis itself. The orator himself must perform as a virtuous citizen, not as a cynical manipulator of sophistries and legalisms. As such, while ethos and other rhetorical proofs are performed, they are more than aesthetic, they are enactments of ways of being. While ethos exists as an appearance, it also sets things in motion. It has consequences. In Garver’s formulation, rhetoric is not epistemic. It is neither a means of enquiry nor a way to produce good “social knowledge” through deliberative reason. It will favor measures consistent with the idea of the polis itself. In a “good” polis, such as Athens in its own imaginary self-understanding as an ethical community, rhetoric could yield good measures. Garver is far less optimistic with regard to rhetoric in the modern world of private interest.47 Lyotard proceeds by inverting this usual strategy, because he begins with neither nostalgia nor appreciation for the “good” polis. He parts company with
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
278
Page 278
.
Prudence
Aristotle, where the moral purpose of the phronimos is instantiated in his ethos as citizen and prudential judgment depends upon an understanding of the probable. Lyotard is postmodern and demands postconventional justice, and hence rejects both the polis and its ethos. Instead, he favors an ethos consistent with the pagus (the township circumscribing peasant life). As a consequence, Lyotard requires a maxim to guide judgment that will not depend upon “popular” opinion or conventional understandings of the probable but remains directed toward justice (of multiplicity). It is for this reason that he offers the prescription “be pagan” and “act in such a way that the maxim of your will may erect a principle of multiplicity.” For Haber, this implies that Lyotard adopts a “unity of humanity” and “needs to have objective criteria for deciding ‘this is just, that is not.’ ”48 Haber asserts that in this, Lyotard returns to the Kant of the Second Critique and that this maxim of multiplicity sets up a determinant judgment, which is to say it provides explicit criteria for judging acts. Clearly, the form of the latter maxim mimics Kant’s moral maxim, as Lyotard well recognizes at the conclusion of Just Gaming. It does not, however, reduce him to the Kant of the Second Critique. Haber’s analysis depends upon reading Lyotard’s maxim as a categorical rule. However, what Lyotard seeks to offer is a philosophy of political judgment analogous to Kant’s aesthetic judgment, as outlined in the Third Critique. For Lyotard, Kant then follows the trajectory of Aristotle and the Sophists. Ethos takes center stage and identity is absent. Garver reads Aristotle’s Rhetoric as offering an art of citizenship, where Aristotle’s maxim is “be a citizen,” or more properly, perform as a citizen. In Just Gaming, Lyotard admits to being an Aristotelian in certain respects, which suggests that we should also understand his rule as a commonplace or rhetorical maxim concerned with performance or ethos. Thus, while prudence is a calculative virtue in Aristotle, it depends upon performance. Read as a prudential maxim, “be pagan” inverts Aristotelian civic virtue and summons us to act like those found outside the city and its normalizations. Lyotard, who celebrates false enthymemes or sophistries, ties these to an ethos. Performance is not a consequence of calculation, but is its origin. “Be pagan” is a performative maxim calling for the enactment of pagan ethos. Put otherwise: “act—perform yourself—against the idea of unities, of the polis, of the citizen—be ironic and sophistic.” In other words, “act such that” becomes “act so as to appear.” While Lyotard does not explicitly develop the rhetorical character of “be pagan,” he admits that while a prescription, it is also a “gentle request” and that “the prescription to be pagan is intrinsically contradictory.”49 After all, the Sophists are Lyotard’s fellow travelers as he derides philosophies of truth:
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 279
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
279
Imagine a world in which justice (and justness) consists primarily of treating speech as an art, in which the discourse of truth is an unknown vulgarity. What does Gorgias’s unjust man want? To be right. He would have the whole pagus in stitches. He ought to visit the schools of Paris and promote his new mode of speech—theory— and to try to make people forget what they know in the borderlands, namely that it is a late addition to the arts of speech, a literary genre like any other, and a stratagem which has never caught on except amongst the gentry.50 In sum then, by rejecting an “unjust” regime of “truth,” Lyotard reanimates prudence as a form of political judgment that cannot be reduced to aesthetics or the discursive redemption of claims through rational argumentation. We are not left with the undecidability of “mere opinion,” but with the performance of doxa, which both instantiates and constitutes ethos, not as a depth but as an appearance with consequences. This is not that far from Aristotle’s understanding, where the phronimos does not follow a moral theory, but performs civic character. Prudential performance is ethical rather than moral. What is distinct in Lyotard is a “hermeneutics” of absence, where postmodern prudent judgment instantiates an ethos consistent not with the polis, but with the pagus and the very negation of the idea of community. Pagans “say that there is no margin at all. Only empires, reflecting their borders, frontiers, and marches to conquest, speak of margins.”51 Lyotard, as such, aspires for a prudence that proceeds from no-place, even though, of course, its rhetoricity necessarily implies an audience and hence a local horizon. While Haber considers Lyotard to be a timid postmodernist who returns to Kant, Shaun Gallagher offers a contrary reading, accusing him of abandoning prudence and justice in favor of aesthetic innovation: For Lyotard, phronesis is simply the ability to play the game with inventiveness, to play “master strokes” (JG61). Justice is nothing other than this. “Justice consists in working at the limits of what the rules permit, in order to invent new moves, perhaps new rules, and therefore new games” (JG100). In the end, inventiveness seems to be the sole measure of “goodness.” For Lyotard’s postmodern individual, action is not informed or educated by an understanding of goodness, or a concern for seeking the good in any other sense than understanding and seeking after novel rules and games.52
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
280
Page 280
.
Prudence
This critique is apt, in that prudence is not based in a hermeneutics of the good polis, as it is in Aristotle. Lyotard furthermore champions experimentation in politics and the arts. Nevertheless, Lyotard remains committed to the “just” in the double sense of “justice” and “justesse,” “justness” or appropriateness, which stand as goods proper to his radicalized ontology of the contingent. Lyotard does not admit a “common humanity,” and hence cannot identify a substantive value. However, he does subscribe to a view of our common condition arising from his philosophy of language based in the differend and the gaps between the “archipelagos” of language games. Despite his antihermeneutic and antiphenomenological stance, he nevertheless asserts that “we are set out, positioned by our phrases.”53 Our fate is to live within and enact various pragmatics. Furthermore, with Kant he recognizes the inevitability of judgment, for obligations befall us, and because he is less a poststructuralist than a rhetorician, he does not consider language a “prison house” or closed totality, even before obligation. At any moment something new can emerge. With this, and revealing a phenomenological tendency in spite of himself, he recognizes that at any moment a given language is inadequate to the task of what might be said, including the putting into language, the “phrasing,” of “unspeakable” wrongs. This is not to say that Lyotard sees language as a medium for the expression of interiority or self-transcendence. Speech remains only considered in its externality, as constitutive of modes of claiming, acting, and appearing. Even so, while Lyotard’s maxim is formal rather than substantive, it is also profoundly ethical, because figured in terms of plural ways of performing the self, of the pagan ethos. Prudence bears witness to the possibility of the differend even as it permits opportunities for new ways of phrasing, of bringing the unvoiced into unhiddenness.
the pagan anti-community Lyotard considers politics (and justice) to be at the intersection of different language games, at a point where there is no common substance or means of communication between games. Against Habermas, he denies that they can be united justly under critical reason even as he refuses their hermeneutic mediation by Aristotle’s civic-minded and patriotic judge. Consequently, Lyotard’s prudent pagan politics proceeds without community, at least in the usual sense. There is no community of common meaning. Nevertheless, there remains a “we” arising from the inevitability of performance. The fact of obligation, the inevitability of judgment, and the ontological or existential (rather
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 281
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
281
than moral or ethical) necessity of “making links,” of issuing another phrase, form a common and dare one say “human” condition. This opens the possibility for community, a “we,” although more is required. As Lyotard observes, there is no “we” in the mere recognition that one must make phrases or links, or even that this condition is shared. The “we” arises from our struggling to link despite our lack: we are not in the possession of its rule [of how to link], we seek it, we make links in seeking it; it is thus the stakes but not the rule for the linkage. This we works, or has to work no matter where “to vary all the rules of linkage whatever they might be, in music, in painting, in film, in political economy” in a way not unrelated to Derridean dissemination. . . . “if we are the community of hostages of the ‘One must make links,’ it is that we are learning to read, therefore that we do not know how to read, and that for us, to read is precisely to read the illegible.”54 Thus, Lyotard’s phronimos acts in accordance with a community that is not constituted through identity or a republicanism of the will, but arises through a performative attitude in the face of the tragic recognition of our ontological (and linguistic) condition. Furthermore, this attitude is comic: “The relation to plurality is tied up with humor, in the case of Hassidism. For example, one tells a little story; the question is going to be whether there is, hidden in this little story, a prescription of any importance. The humor that is going to come in will show that the distance from the story one started with to a given prescription is always immense. . . . And therefore the question of prescription will always remain an open question.”55 Community is not a matter of presence or identification, of shared values or projects, but only a recognition of the continuity of life in the face of finitude, of the radical implication of the “ontology of the contingent” when carried into language itself. This might well provide the basis for pathos, but with distance. It is for this reason that Todd May can ask: “What is it that binds us, or better, that ought to bind us, such that we are participants in a common endeavor rather than individual specialists in disparate genres?” and then answers: “For Lyotard, the place of the community is the sublime” because it “provokes heterogeneity rather than harmony, both in the relationship of the cognitive faculty to the sublime which surpasses it and in the relation of the faculties to one another.”56 Furthermore, as he outlines, heterogeneity requires absence and a concomitant refusal to translate ethical obligation into the cognitive genre. A community of prudence is incompatible with the discursive redemption of political
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
282
Page 282
.
Prudence
claims. “There is an ethics, but it cannot be shared, because such sharing would require accounting for one’s obligations, and that would be a reduction to the cognitive genre. Ethics, like community, resists reduction to empirical reality; but ethics is not community, because the only way it could become so would be to suffer such a reduction.”57 For Lyotard, obligation and the inevitability of judgment befalls each of us in our singularity; we are addressed from a source we cannot name, whose legitimacy cannot be secured through argument. Obligation cannot be resolved under reason or consensus. There is no place (literally) for a community of reasonable beings to develop moral (cognitive) knowledge in an ideal speech situation. We can tell stories, which perspectivally consider the implications of obligations. Furthermore, we can—and this is key to both Lyotard and Aristotelian prudence—consider the possible consequences of a judgment. Prudence for both must imagine the future, except that Lyotard maximizes the idea of a future that could be other, with different probabilities. The indeterminacy that necessitates prudence is thus more than a mere condition to be overcome, but a guiding interest. It is thus well understandable that Lyotard’s political project is directed toward a justice of difference rather than toward seizing power. Lyotard does not aim at the empowerment of some group, but at the disruption of narrative monopolies. For this reason, while he supported Algerian resistance to French imperialism, he also recognized that success would lead to a new terror. May argues that by destabilizing all at the same time, Lyotard admits no community, and hence cannot have ethics, and his understanding of the pragmatics of obligation stands in opposition to ethics because obligation cannot be shared. Lyotard’s “ethics” has nothing to do with sharing, however. It is a matter of ethos as performance, not against the horizon of community, but in accordance with a principle of singularity. The pagus then stands as anticommunity, constituted as difference. The absence of community does not preclude a political praxis or even a sort of solidarity, but pagan praxis will multiply narratives: “The only way that networks of uncertain and ephemeral stories can gnaw away at the great institutionalized narrative apparatuses is by increasing the number of skirmishes that take place on the sidelines. That’s what women have been doing in your country over the last decade or so. You make up little stories, or even segments of little stories, listen to them, transmit them and act them out when the time is right.”58 To do so is not to erect a new metanarrative or new polis, but to contribute to noisy and contentious networks that clash with each other. As Bill Readings observes:
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 283
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
283
If there is no outside or beyond, no final goal, resistance becomes endless: no consensus can establish a new world order. What consensus between peoples is possible when refusing common identity is the basis for minoritarian struggle, in struggles such as those of the Native Americans, who “seek to remain minoritarian and be recognized as such?” Tolerating differences is much harder in the here and now, when no appeal to the fact that “we are all human” is possible, once the appeal to humanity has been ruled out by the minoritarians, recognized as the Western Empire’s ruse for demanding that the indigenous peoples play on “our” terms.59 And yet it is not that simple, for paganism is antithetical to minoritarian substance. The differend bears precise witness to the gap between phrases and to the possibility of their phrasing; as such, Lyotard offers no respite from modernity, but calls on us to refuse modernity’s comfort and hubris. As such, there is a cosmopolitan strain based in the ironic recognition of not only being minoritarian, but also recognizing the absence within one’s identity. Any positive identity is not only historically contingent but negates the differend. Thus, against a “multicultural” or pluralist reading of Lyotard, we have the recognition, as Lyotard observes, that those in the pagus in fact deny the existence of a center. Lyotard’s metics are not only minoritarian, but aliens who lack a proper substance to support the claims that they will nevertheless make. Lyotard’s neo-Kantian Idea is manifest in a rhetorical (that is to say, performative and superficial) ethos. It is the ethos of incompleteness, of seeking an unobtainable justice. And this ethos is rhetorical in the strong sense, which is to say that its prudence is constitutive. Lyotard is clear that pagan prudence creates or constitutes new “probabilities” that can serve as “rules” for a given case. As such, this ethos provides topics for rhetorical invention.60 The community, the we, will not come to presence in the canonization of some new “probability,” but remain a proposition based in the recognition of the possibility of new probabilities, and hence of the rhetoricity of justice and judgment itself. In this, the pagus, the place of the pagan, is at most a locus for a “noncommunity” where ironic pathos nevertheless is possible. In the pagus, one can say “we” to denominate the consubstantiality of a lack of substance, and the only normative burden imposed is upon the addressee as judge, who cannot understand but is nevertheless confronted with justice as the telos of judgment itself, and must perform judgment in accordance the Idea of an otherwise.61
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
284
Page 284
.
Prudence
notes 1. See, for example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972); Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991); and Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light (New York: Routledge, 1988), 185–209. 2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 131–64. 3. Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 13. 4. This raises the problem of “emotivism” as discussed in Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 11–14. 5. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992), 52. 6. Reason and respect are the fundamental components of Kant’s moral theory as developed in his second critique. These principles find their expression in communicative ethics in the work of Jürgen Habermas. See in particular, Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in The Communicative Ethics Controversy, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallamyr (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 60–110. 7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), 1140b. 8. Pierre Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963), 65. 9. Ibid., 75. 10. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 28. 11. Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, 58–59. 12. The contingent rule is a hypothetical maxim. Kant’s “synthetic judgment” proceeds by forming a contingent rule. Umberto Eco describes this process in terms of Pierce’s concept of abduction. See Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 131–33. 13. Aubenque, La Prudence chez Aristote, 40–44. 14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 278–89. 15. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1142a. 16. Ibid., 1144a. 17. Richard J. Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 58–114. 18. Garver, Machiavelli, 63–75. 19. Lyotard, “Discussions, or Phrasing ‘After Auschwitz,’ ” in The Lyotard Reader, trans. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 386. 20. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1979), xxiv. 21. Lyotard, “What Is Postmodernism?” in Postmodern Condition, 81. 22. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 11. 23. See Lyotard, “What Is Postmodernism?” 72, and Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 3–15. 24. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 14. 25. Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1993). 26. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 10.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 285
Lyotard’s Postmodern Prudence
.
285
27. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 93–94. 28. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1988), 13. 29. Ibid., xi. 30. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 26. 31. Ibid., 95. 32. Lyotard, “On the Strength of the Weak,” in Toward the Postmodern (Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press International, 1993), 65. 33. Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 172–205. 34. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 23. 35. Lyotard, “Lessons in Paganism,” in The Lyotard Reader, trans. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 152. 36. Lyotard, “Lessons in Paganism,” 153. 37. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 90. This is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s observation that fascism leads to aesthetic politics. See “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 241. 38. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 81. 39. Ibid. 40. For a discussion of the relationship of rhetoric to prudence, see Lois S. Self, “Rhetoric and Phronesis: The Aristotelian Ideal,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 12 (1979): 130–45. 41. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 26. 42. For a discussion of Gorgias’s thesis, see Robert N. Gaines, “Knowledge and Discourse in Gorgias’s ‘On the Non-Existent or on Nature,’ ” Philosophy and Rhetoric 30, no. 1 (1997): 1–12. 43. Honi Fern Haber, “Lyotard and the Problems of Pagan Politics,” Philosophy Today 39 (summer 1995): 150. 44. Ibid. 45. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 27. 46. Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 169. 47. Ibid., 247. 48. Haber, “Pagan Politics,” 152. 49. Jean-François Lyotard and Gilbert Larochelle, “That Which Resists, After All,” Philosophy Today 36 (winter 1992): 404. 50. Lyotard, “Lessons in Paganism,” 136. 51. Lyotard, “On the Strength of the Weak,” 65. 52. Shaun Gallagher, “The Place of Phronesis in Postmodern Hermeneutics,” Philosophy Today 37 (fall 1993): 300. 53. Lyotard and Larochelle, “That Which Resists,” 408. 54. Lyotard, “Discussions,” 388. 55. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 98. 56. Todd May, “The Community’s Absence in Lyotard, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe,” Philosophy Today 37 (fall 1993): 276–77. 57. Ibid., 281. 58. Lyotard, “Lessons in Paganism,” 132. 59. Bill Readings, “Pseudoethica Epidemica: How Pagans Talk to the Gods,” Philosophy Today 36 (1992): 383. 60. Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 17. 61. This research was funded in part by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada. The author thanks Sheryl Hamilton for her astute and helpful comments.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 286
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 287
10 Prudence in the Twenty-First Century Robert Hariman
Like other large-scale modernist projects—the Soviet Union, Los Angeles, agribusiness—the human sciences now face the possibility of systemic collapse. Likewise, they are threatened not by other large-scale competitors but by smaller yet pervasive changes in the social environment. Big science is no threat, while cell phones and laser eye surgery lead the way to a cyborg society engineered by design technologies in which neither social explanation nor social critique are valuable commodities. This story is tragic, even if you don’t sympathize with the protagonist.1 It is a story of good intentions gone awry, of success setting up failure, of learned ignorance, and of hubris. And yet it is hard to let go of that Archimedean dream of finding the one place from which to move the world, that sure means of improving the human condition. Even the critique of foundationalism usually relies on an Enlightenment residue of hope in human progress. Were we without hope—or as Kafka put it, if we believed there was hope, but not for us—we would not be so quick to live without structure. At this point, most American thinkers retreat into pragmatism.2 From there it is easy to drift toward the concept of prudence. But as I have suggested before, taking that route can lead merely to what is familiar and comfortable. What is needed instead is an attempt to rethink the basic problems of the
287
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
288
Page 288
.
Prudence
human sciences in our time. How is modern civilization going to achieve its promise? How can it restrain its tendencies to destroy peoples, species, and ecosystems at staggering and ultimately suicidal rates? What kind of knowledge is needed to make social organization more just, productive, enjoyable, and sustainable? What do people need to know to be able to participate as decision makers in private and public life? How can the available means for explaining, directing, understanding, and evaluating social practices work with the sciences, technologies, organizations, and species that will constitute the world of the twenty-first century? Instead of seeing prudence, or anything else, as an alternative foundation for the human sciences, I would like to consider how the concept embodies some of the changes in orientation and scale that will be required to meet the challenges before us. Instead of recovering a core doctrine (similar to a set of natural laws) or shoring up a universal method, I would like to show how prudence serves as one example of how reflection on a practice necessarily involves negotiating a series of lacunae, absences, or paradoxes. Instead of applying a known concept to a class of problems, I contend that we need to develop prudence as a program for identifying and getting inside that new class of political problems that currently elude solutions because of both their complexity and their lack of alignment with established political interests.3 The goal, then, is to realize a strong sense of prudence, but with the understanding that strength need not be the same as size, the systematic projection of analytical power, or similar attributes. A strong sense of prudence must be one that is true to the peculiar conditions of thinking within human affairs and is capable of working with problems that have not yet fully revealed themselves.
history As with many concepts in the human sciences, prudence can have several historical referents. We could examine at least the following phenomena: (a) All people have always exhibited good and bad judgment by turns. (b) Specific peoples have recorded their history as a history of judgment. (c) Some political elites have used the term as a professed norm in their declarations, speeches, commentaries, letters, and related texts for judging policies and other actions. (d) Some intellectuals have developed the term as a mode of explanation and critique for their time. (e) As a corollary (or comic corrective), writers of fiction occasionally have crafted depictions of prudential characters, often for satire.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 289
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
289
Literary history, intellectual history, political history, a history of judgment, and perhaps other reconstructions can each influence understanding of the term.4 We might ask, however, whether prudence really has a history. On the one hand, it surely does, for by its nature it cannot be constantly the same. A study of usage would reveal nuanced adaptations to historical circumstances by those who rely on the term, how it has been defined differently within various constellations of terms, and so forth. Beyond that, attending to past experiences to gain foresight regarding events yet to come would seem to dovetail perfectly with historical consciousness. On the other hand, prudential speakers can rely heavily on maxims and other formulaic expressions, and their historical references are often to examples that come from circumstances wildly different from their own. This peculiar use of history in turn is reflected in the academic literature of prudence, which follows a familiar periodization while often demonstrating little or no attention to historical context. Although these answers to the question may seem appropriately balanced, I think that may be misleading. A strong sense of prudence might require, at least initially, a weak sense of historical difference. Thus, the history of prudence could be a form of typology. Prudence rises above the waves in classical antiquity, the European Renaissance, and in late modernity. In each period, the concept is valorized during a period of rapid cultural change—particularly changes in political and intellectual networks that are occasioned by new communication technologies. It is used as part of a broader rejection of an established cultural order, and it is the leading wedge for articulating the legitimacy of political action with respect to that order. Finally, it reflects close relationships and a common vocabulary between intellectual and political elites. Thus, in Athens and later in Rome, prudence was used by both orators and philosophers to articulate a political realm that had relative autonomy from the old paideia and had to manage unprecedented political, economic, and cultural expansion. In the Renaissance, prudence was a leading term for the new civic intellectual who was enmeshed in political affairs, repudiating scholasticism, and exploring new cultural horizons. And today? Although hardly a golden age or a renaissance, the motives are familiar: prudence is valued precisely because it is a means for living amidst change one cannot control, it deviates from the dictates of modernism, it valorizes democratic politics as they are being absorbed into a global culture shaped primarily by market economies and private corporations, and it holds out the possibility of overcoming social divisions between academics, public intellectuals, and ordinary citizens.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
290
Page 290
.
Prudence
The emphasis on classical, early-modern, and late-modern periods, the common definitional themes, and the recurrent figures in the history of prudence reflect less a record of usage and more a pattern of imitation. This is in keeping with the close relationship between prudence and rhetorical consciousness. The history of prudence is not so much a study in development as it is a means for recognizing and managing a particular cultural predicament. It doesn’t provide a narrative of trial and error and the consolidation of knowledge, but rather a program for interpreting and restraining a dynamic society that is capable of overpowering both history and democratic politics as independent means for maintaining some degree of control and accountability.
theory The typological template within a comprehensive history of prudence is also evident from the two tendencies in recent theoretical discussions of the concept. These two strains emphasize, respectively, prudence as a civic art and as a logic of interpretation. The first, explicitly political sense is the core concept in the political theory of Ronald Beiner, among others.5 Prudence is political judgment, and politics is most fully realized in some form of civic republicanism that calls for citizens developing and pooling their virtues through public deliberation on behalf of the common good. This model is set against liberal proceduralism, on the one hand, and technocratic instrumentalism, on the other. Prudence is the means by which political actors are able to create communities that will be more than neutral sites for brokering self-interest, just as prudence is a process of reasoning that stops short of solving all problems according to systematic allocations of expertise. The second articulation of prudence comes from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, and it supplies an epistemological underpinning for Beiner. Gadamer positions Aristotle’s account of phronesis as the model for how understanding requires application of a text to one’s experience. Just as the judgment of one’s conduct requires the provisional and reciprocal interrogation of norms and experiences, so does understanding require an engaged yet open negotiation between the text and interpreter. Although Gadamer allows the political register of prudence to be wholly obscured while he highlights ethical and rhetorical concerns, he brings out the full significance of the contrast between scientific and prudential reasoning. In addition, by elevating prudence to the stature of a philosophical vocabulary capable of encompassing the problems of hermeneutics, Gadamer in a single stroke clarifies the relationships
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 291
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
291
between various modes of knowledge, valorizes practical experience and ordinary language, identifies how understanding occurs through application, provides a means for understanding various realms of practice while still recognizing their relative autonomy, and posits a theoretical succession from the tradition of practical philosophy to philosophical hermeneutics.6 Yet it is just this philosophical sweep, coupled with his indifference to the explicitly political nature of many problems of judgment, that suggests an unrecognized limitation on Gadamer’s project and, by extension, on those who rely on his work. These grand theories of prudence have fallen into the paradox of becoming too abstract to serve as actual models for practice. Thus, we can label such theories versions of bourgeois prudence. They are characterized primarily by their preference for “general ideas” and their reformulation of politics as an engaging conversation that depends on communal norms already taken to heart within cultural institutions.7 This redefinition of politics as civics and of political community as a sensus communis is not wholly wrong, of course, but it does look too much like a high-WASP congregational meeting. Furthermore, the fault is not so much a presumed homogeneity and elitism, but rather the legibility of the group.8 Bourgeois prudence is only one variant of the wide range of perspectives, skills, and forms of knowledge characteristic of pragmatic political reflection, and one that maintains an illusion of social control. Currently, the literature of prudence offers only a few alternatives to the dominant model developed by Gadamer and various civic republican theorists. The most explicit counterpoint comes from Continental theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard; no one is quicker than these poststructuralists to sniff out the presumptions of class, or to look for occasions to shock those around the dinner table. (For example, shock value is the primary value in Lyotard’s pronouncement that the prudential judge makes decisions without regard to any rule whatsoever.9 This restatement of contingency, which would be better stated as a lack of any metaphysical rule, is otherwise nonsense in respect to the practical deliberation of any actual judge.) The more important motive for the poststructuralist turn to prudence is to supply a vocabulary for pragmatic discussion that is mandated by their commitment to praxis but otherwise absent in their philosophical lexicon. The value of this turn is that it immediately brings a number of important analytical terms into the literature on prudence—I have in mind those terms used by writers from Martin Heidegger to Michel de Certeau which point toward reflection on ordinary life or recover the canny intelligence of those who are in subordinate positions.10 If the oxymoron is not too glaring—or perhaps because it
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
292
Page 292
.
Prudence
is—these projects can be called avant-garde prudence. The jury is still out, of course, but the prospects will not be bright until a better strategy is developed for managing the glaring contradiction between the poststructuralist critique of individual agency and the necessity of that construct for maintaining accountability in ordinary life.11 Two other projects bear mentioning here as additional alternatives to the prevailing literature. Although Eugene Garver’s work often is lumped with Beiner’s and others—and rightly so, given their shared aspirations for public life—Garver really represents a separate strain that we might call stoic prudence.12 An exact lineage with Stoic philosophers is not so much the point here; what does set him apart from bourgeois prudence is his more pessimistic assumptions about human nature and a theoretical asceticism that holds to sharply demarcated modes and stages of reflection (and which does not celebrate openness, contingency, and the like as much as it accepts them out of necessity). Additional emphases include a severely rational sense of character that takes it to the edge of wholly objectified technique, and a commitment to political community that goes no further than demanding individual accountability on matters of justice. Whereas bourgeois prudence cultivates sensibility, and its avant-garde counterpoint celebrates action and resistance, Garver articulates a prudence that few today could stomach: prudence as intellectual discipline in a decaying world.13 The final variant on prudential theory can be labeled ecological prudence. This is the perspective that I stumbled into while working on this volume. A genealogy of ecological thought—say, from Aldo Leopold through the environmental movement to contemporary critics of social engineering and urban design such as James C. Scott and Mike Davis—would reveal not only use of the term “prudence” and its cognates, but, more important, the development of a comprehensive critique of modernism, the emergence of a new horizon for defining and forecasting political problems, the use of a new vocabulary for policymaking across a wide range of topics, redefinition of the relationship between expertise and folklore, and valorization of practical modes of reasoning and grassroots political participation.14 From this perspective, good judgment will reflect, not only consistency with rules of organizational procedure, efficiency, and the like, but also sensitivity to the informal, practical intelligence that underwrites all coordinated activity. More generally, any analysis or recommendation about one program of activity would include some attention to its implications for an encompassing field of interconnected processes that, as a whole, are necessary for sustaining the activity itself. John Nelson has suggested how this and related forms of prudence are already
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 293
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
293
deeply embedded in American popular culture, but I doubt anyone has realized its potential.15 Just as ecology may represent the best articulation of prudence in our time, the further development of ecological thought as a form of prudence may be a means for realizing the full potential of environmental advocacy in respect to modern technologies and institutions while warding off its co-optation.16 This sense of prudence also illustrates how the concept can be refitted for work in a postmodern world. Prudence means, at the least, the attempt to both make a profit and not pollute, but it means more as well. Scott’s example is illustrative. Although he uses the term metis, his subsequent usage (literal and otherwise), clearly goes beyond the more limited range of that intelligence to encompass many of the elements of prudential judgment.17 His basic definition of the term is a virtual restatement of Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric: “Knowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in a concrete situation.”18 This localized knowledge is different from both technical skill and scientific knowledge, learned through imitation and practical experience, contrasted with modernist routinization of the world, and embedded most reliably in deliberation.19 Such practical knowledge should not function as a universal negation of modernism, however, for that would recapitulate its central mistake: “As Pascal wrote, the great failure of rationalism is ‘not its recognition of technical knowledge, but its failure to recognize any other.’ ”20 Ecological prudence looks to what came before modern rationality in order to thrive after it, but not with the expectation that there ever will be or should be a clean break. It doesn’t repudiate modern modes of knowledge and production, but it does place them within a wider context. Prudence becomes not just the application of reason to an ever changing world of human affairs, but a program for keeping an overly rational world habitable.
practice Prudence can be defined as a trait, virtue, norm, skill, mode of reasoning, and form of character. Prudential conduct often can be explained adequately in ordinary discourse by reference to one or another of these terms. Yet each of these definitions reifies the concept, making it less useful in some other situation. If it is a trait, prudence is the fixed feature of an individual; if it is a virtue, it is something an individual may acquire; if it is a norm, it is the feature of a group and perhaps capable of slow change; if it is a skill, it is
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
294
Page 294
.
Prudence
teachable; if it is a form of character, it will be evident even when unskilled; and so forth. Essential features of prudence such as its plasticity and lack of hierarchical internal organization are visible only when considering the set of terms. The fact that prudence has many faces complicates any attempt to give the term a history or set it out as a theoretical system, but it does help one understand it as a practice. This emphasis is suggested by both theory and history, moreover. Even Aristotle, for all his interest in identifying rational decision rules, has the concept defined ultimately by its instantiation in action, while Cicero’s discourses can be understood not as poor theorizing but as a demonstration of how prudence is a way of thinking, speaking, acting, and judging in the midst of complexity and change. Likewise, the intellectual history of prudence is dominated by writers who not only were active politically, but also valorized politics as an activity deserving a place within a world defined by some transcendental value (reason in antiquity, revelation for Augustine, church doctrine for Aquinas, church authority for Machiavelli, revolution for Burke, science for the Scots). Prudence is misunderstood both when it becomes merely a means for approximating some such larger value, and when it is elevated to something like transcendental status. By defining prudence as a practice, we shift the emphasis from cognitive or moral rules to habits, routines, rituals, and other familiar forms of interaction, as well as those discourses used to maintain and adjust pertinent cultural beliefs. Prudence is evident as a political actor meets with clients, talks with neighbors, works the crowd, attends an event, joins a group, or makes a speech. If it is a trait, virtue, or norm, it is one that is evident as one does these things. If it is a skill, mode of reasoning, or form of character, it is evident in the decisions and their rationales that define this way of “walking through the world.”21 It may be seen at a glance or discernible only over a long period of time, but in any case it is the complex of familiar activities that provide the core intelligibility for deriving a judgment, maxim, or model for imitation. Prudence is not just another name for the practice itself, however, or for the particular style that may also be contributing to the actor’s intelligibility and influence. Nor is prudence synonymous with the mundane features of political action; it can be what is most at issue or in play during a dramatic moment of decision or action. Instead, let us think of prudence as a particular language game that is operative in politics, and one that keeps the practice of politics in a rational relationship with the world. As political actors talk prudentially—for example, as they balance considerations of ethics and expediency, or audacity and accommodation, or aspirations and limits—they simul-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 295
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
295
taneously position themselves within the relative autonomy of their practice while orienting the practice in respect to a larger context. These functions of orienting and positioning correspond somewhat to Alasdair MacIntyre’s concepts of the external and internal goods that can be achieved through competent performance of a practice.22 But we should beware too neat a schema, if only because we know how understanding prudence has been straitjacketed by excessive attention to the related pattern of ethics versus expediency. The more important point is that prudential thinking is a mode of reflection on practical affairs that emphasizes attention to the limits on action.23 Whether pursuing internal or external goods, one has to be aware of obstacles without, contradictions within, and unintended consequences across the board. This is the key to the distinction between phronesis and techne.24 Whereas instrumental rationality is dedicated to optimizing a given set of vectors, prudential thinking is used to maintain attention to both natural and artificial limitations. Thus, prudence looks for long-term effects, variant reactions, and the like. Moreover, it considers how natural limits might have been ignored, how seemingly natural limits might be artificial, and how some artificial limits ought to be imposed.25 (So it is that we can consider something as weird as Gene Garver’s idea of “the imitation of necessity,” an astute formulation that points directly toward the problems of thinking about and imposing limitations, while it also complicates the relationship of prudential thinking to technical calculation.)26 In short, prudence is an ecological consciousness regarding the political system itself, which in turn requires an attentiveness to the limits on human productivity, expansion, and conquest, albeit without a secure normative grounding in a particular model of political order. The discussions of prudence in political theory and in philosophical hermeneutics feature those elements of the language game that constitute civic culture and critical reflection, and these certainly are important. Prudence is more than civic awareness in action, however. The actual usage when speaking prudentially reveals operations that are at once more dynamic and too crabbed to be oriented solely toward the purposes of constituting or applying cultural norms. Instead of pronouncements, we see a lot of hedging. Instead of sustained reflection, we find dodges, refusals, and deliberate forgetfulness. Instead of commitment to the status quo, we discover nothing more than commitment to the political process. Yet these many diminished commitments and often embarrassing maneuvers all serve the same function, which is the sustainability of the political system. Prudential discourse is the language game played by those who are committed (consciously or unwittingly)
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
296
Page 296
.
Prudence
to keeping a political practice sustainable. This orientation accounts for the typical associations of prudence with personal cautiousness, social conformity, and political conservatism, while it also reveals the error in assuming they are but varied features of the same thing. Even when focusing on sustainability, a prudential actor may contribute to the demise of his or her political order, whether by contributing to its calcification or by staking too much on any particular choice. For the most part, however, a prudential discourse is a proven language for maintaining a political practice over time. It does so by destabilizing every value other than the maintenance of the political process while also habitually subjecting all initiatives to deliberation.27 More practically, it imposes limits which must be removed if any action is to occur, and it tends to keep any action from being optimized. The language of prudence is a trafficking in limits—constantly posing values against one another, strewing social conventions across the path of development, and slowing down the process of deliberation.28 And this is why prudence itself has to be limited, reined in, or abandoned at times. Most of the time, however, prudence is a worthwhile language that rightly doubles as one means for socializing new members into the political community. This emphasis on sustainability is evident in the process of political socialization. The political actor can learn to speak the language of prudence only by absorbing the local knowledge, customs, routines, and beliefs that constitute the political culture. This parochial learning is a study in limits. On the one hand, it may reproduce the false consciousness at work in the society— those exploitative social conventions that appear natural. On the other hand, it includes an awareness of customs as customs—limits on action that are fixed by convention but also are available means for persuasion because of that. As the political actor acquires experience and power, she also comes to learn of additional constraints on action, both natural (such as topography) and conventional (such as budgets) and often equally daunting. Most important, prudence comes to the fore when it leads to self-imposed limits in the interest of sustainability. This is the key, for example, when negotiating between self-interest and the common good: the latter is more likely to win out when the former threatens sustainability. So it is that some egregious forms of self-interest can prevail seemingly with little effort—they don’t pose a long-term threat to the community. Likewise, the general tendency of prudence to look for a congruence between the two values makes sense, not only for resolving specific conflicts, but also for empowering the community to sustain itself over time. Modern references to prudence usually have associated political sustainability with the autonomy of the political realm. There often have been com-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 297
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
297
pelling reasons for doing so. That assumption has become increasingly dangerous, however, given many of the greatest challenges now facing the world’s most advanced societies. Thus, the practice of prudence today requires tying political sustainability to the vitality of larger networks of cultural and natural interaction. Currently, there is pressing need to impose limits on the expansionist tendencies in modern capitalist societies on behalf of the longterm survival of democratic polity, a healthy global ecosystem, and the human species. Each of these is seriously threatened by current forms of political economy, energy use, and technological development. The prudential actor will be one who, in order to avoid disaster in the long term, abides by artificial limits in the present. This may be a hard lesson to learn.
structure “Prudence” designates an intelligence that is not identical with a hierarchical system of terms and derivations. It can be structured in this way, but need not be and—most important—the prudent actor can abandon such organization without loss. Like the art of rhetoric, prudential thinking relies on the cognitive operations of a “nearly decomposing system”: it is a radically separable hierarchy of constructs.29 Like many elements of the complex environments in which they operate, rhetorical artistry and prudential thinking each have weaker relationships (for example, of entailment) between component subsystems and stronger relationships within each of those components. For example, the elements of style are more dependent on each other for discrimination, meaning, and effect than on the forms of argument and forms of organization, although a change from, for example, narrative to dialectical organization can produce a shift from a grand to a middling style and there from one set of figures to another. Likewise, it is difficult to break up various elements of either an ethical sensibility or a sense of expedience, while easier to bracket either at the expense of the other, yet reemphasis within either sensibility can change the relationship with the other. For example, factors such as religious training, personal integrity, and familial loyalty might cohere powerfully, as will elements of expertise, threat, and timing, while each set can prove decisive, yet any change within one set of considerations can lead to realignment with regard to the other. The many elements of the system can operate independently in the short run, and even the large-scale dynamics of the system follow relationships of aggregation rather than strictly logical entailment. Such a system is more flexible than any of its parts; no wonder
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
298
Page 298
.
Prudence
that those committed to prudence have to watch themselves as much as they do others. It is not that the flesh is weak; rather, the cognitive system is continually decoupling and recoupling itself. For purposes of discussion, however, we can set out a system of distinctions that will reveal some of the characteristics of this way of thinking. The first level of demarcation defines prudence with respect to three essential conditions of political choice: contingency, plurality, and praxis. Contingency refers to the inevitable unpredictability of the human world because of the complexity created by desire, chance, and the high degree of interdependence among all the variables affecting action. Prudential theorists always emphasize that prudential analysis begins where structural determinations end. In the Aristotelian vocabulary, prudence is neither scientific nor technical knowledge because it is about actions that are not determined by necessity.30 Plurality refers to the condition of having multiple, autonomous, and often competing values pertinent to the decision. Whether joining reason and desire, or collective good and individual interest, or speaker and audience, prudence is a trafficking in potentially incommensurable perspectives. Stated otherwise, it refers to an inherently intermediating process—one that cannot be reduced to the norms, explicit or implicit, of any one domain.31 Praxis identifies the fact that at some point prudential thinking has to be realized in action. There are several aspects to this requirement. Unlike technical, theoretical, or other modes of thought, prudence exists in order to direct action; prudence is more capable of commanding action; prudence is validated by action; the most important skill for the prudent leader is skill in deliberation, which is the communicative practice designed to determine the best course of action and to lead others to act accordingly.32 These three conditions might be imagined as the ultimate horizon of prudence—its outer circle of intelligibility. Once within this circle, three more distinctions can be made that create different articulations of prudence. These distinctions are similar to those just mentioned, although there is no neat alignment between a particular condition of possibility and a particular mode of articulation. These three modes are normative prudence, calculative prudence, and performative prudence.33 Their collection under a single rubric is not an accident, and certainly not a sign of less theoretical sophistication, but rather a symptom of the consciousness to which it refers: it is only by holding these different mentalities in tension that the distinctively prudential intelligence comes to exist and continually renews itself. The first and best-known dimension of prudence is normative prudence. Politics in this sense has to answer to some good, whether it is the integrity
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 299
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
299
of the individual, the legitimacy of the institution, the survival of the nation, the preservation of the ecosystem, or any other worthwhile objective. As Aristotle defined the concept (of phronesis): it is “a state grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about what is good or bad for a human being.”34 Prudence aims at some end, and it encompasses the deliberative process by which the individual and the polity alike determine how to attain what is good and avoid what is bad. This normative orientation is emphasized further in Aristotle by contrast with more technical and theoretical forms of intelligence, and by its development within the terms of his ethical theory. With Cicero, and subsequently until Machiavelli, the idea of harnessing reason to act for the good becomes the dominant understanding of prudence. This idea suggests that prudence is ethical reasoning in a political context.35 Such understanding quickly leads to its association with idealism and dismissal whenever realism should prevail. Normative prudence is not so limited, however. The full discussion of prudence in classical literature reveals a much more descriptive, and more complex, sense of its normative mentality. Thus, one can define normative prudence as that form of reasoning which manages the incommensurability of goods.36 Prudence is a manner of thinking that focuses on achieving multiple and often contradictory objectives. Normative prudence is not using politics to some good, or even balancing ethics and expediency; rather, it is how one thinks when trying to achieve both security and freedom, human rights and prosperity, foreign markets and domestic revenues, democratic values and reliable allies, and so on. This is the problem that Isaiah Berlin announced in his brilliant essay on Machiavelli: “Machiavelli’s cardinal achievement is, let me repeat, his uncovering of an insoluble dilemma, . . . his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration, and that not merely in exceptional circumstances or accident or error . . . but (this was surely new) as part of the normal human situation.”37 Politics is essentially the process that emerges when people have to negotiate a radical plurality of goods.38 Contrary to a key assumption of realism, politics begins not with scarcity but with abundance. The mentality of calculative prudence will be familiar to political scientists. Disciplinary histories often attribute the discovery of this mode of reasoning to Machiavelli, but the distinction is clear in Aristotle: “Now virtue makes the decision correct; but the actions that are naturally to be done to fulfill the decision are the concern not of virtue, but of another capacity . . . called
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
300
Page 300
.
Prudence
cleverness, which is such as to be able to do the actions that tend to promote whatever goal is assumed and to achieve it.”39 This statement marks a major fault line running through the foundation of Western political thought. Stated simply, the manner of thinking that one uses to determine the end of political action is not sufficient to determine the means to achieve that end. Hence, the political actor needs a second way of thinking, one where the focus is on making valid predictions with a potentially large number of variables. This is the problem of radical contingency. Politics, since it is a form of action, requires knowledge of the world and particularly knowledge of how the world is changing. That knowledge will always be incomplete, and any action one does take creates an entirely new set of possibilities for everything and everyone affected by that action. Furthermore, political failure encourages competitors while political success engenders resistance. So it is that the political leader has been encouraged to have “eyes in the back as well as to the front” so that one “can look back on what has already happened and ahead to the future, thereby having the greatest knowledge possible.”40 Calculative prudence brackets consideration of the good in order to optimize the acquisition of knowledge to make valid predictions about specific actions. This is the way of knowing appropriate to the task of managing the empirical contingencies of the political environment. Calculative prudence is the premodern equivalent of a social science, and its virtues become precursors of the modern ideal of objectivity. The third mode of prudence is often ignored in academic studies of politics. This is not surprising, since performative prudence has been a largely intuitive dimension of political action. This is in keeping with its nature and its role: by encompassing the aesthetic dimension of politics, it deals with what is largely tacit; by remaining understated, it can better mediate the tension between the other, more explicit modes of political consciousness. Garver’s account of Machiavelli’s role in the history of prudence reproduces this latent, intermediate nature of the performative dimension. Garver sets out to identify the specific type of rule (cognitive operation) that would characterize prudential thinking: Prudence is defined as the rational procedure that lies midway between the algorithmic rules of an ethics of principles (that is to say, a version of normative prudence) and the heuristic rules of an ethics of consequences (a version of calculative prudence), and that cannot be understood correctly as an approximation of either kind. This intermediate rule turns out to be difficult to define, however; and as he attempts to develop this argument, Garver makes the following observation: “The problem is . . . whether one can find principles midway between principles and consequences. . . .
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 301
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
301
prudence itself seems easier to accomplish than to explain: the fact that practical reason is difficult to elaborate systematically may be due to its being so closely tied to concrete experience and action, and hence easier to perform than to account for.”41 Although this formulation has to be part truism, it is indicative of both the difficulty in understanding prudence within the modern context and a way out of that difficulty. Like Weber before him, Garver sees that political wisdom must lie somewhere between the two great mentalities of deontology and consequentialism that have dominated modern thinking about right conduct.42 The strength of Garver’s formulation is that political intelligence has to have the characteristics of ordinary action—that is, it must be something that can be intelligible without explanation. Stated more generally, because prudence is a mode of political action (and not just an ethical theory or a calculation of means), it has to be consistent with the social conventions that make action intelligible at all. This third mode of prudence focuses on the accomplished performance of one’s role. The major representative of this mentality is not Aristotle, but Cicero. Likewise, in the Renaissance we are closer to explicit discussion of performative prudence in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier than in Machiavelli’s Prince. The key in any case is to see a linkage between the concepts of prudence and decorum (social appropriateness, propriety, and so on). “For by ‘right’ we indicate the perfect line of duty which every one must follow everywhere, but ‘propriety’ is what is fitting and agreeable to an occasion or person; it is important often in actions as well as in words, in the expression of the face, in gesture and in gait.”43 This emphasis on performance depends on manifestly social knowledge—the knowledge of occasions, ceremonies, status, and the like—and it often requires improvisation. Thus prudence becomes a capacity for managing appearances for political effect. We can summarize these three modes of prudence with the terms purpose, foresight, and role. In general, a prudent actor is one who balances incommensurable goods, discerns probable courses of action, and interacts with others in an appropriate and timely manner. Imprudent decisions become more likely when any one mode dominates the others for too long. Then we can observe characteristic pathologies: normative prudence is prone to moralizing and excessive credulity; calculative prudence is disposed to isolation, hypertechnicality, and paranoia; and performative prudence is susceptible to forgetting about effects amidst the intrinsic satisfactions of putting on a good show. We also ought to recognize how anyone is likely to be insensitive to the normal operation of one or more of these three dimensions of political consciousness, all of which are essential for sustained political effectiveness.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
302
Page 302
.
Prudence
Indeed, each of these mentalities has generated its own strain of theory; each anticipates and includes its own versions of the other faculties; each can be promoted as the single key to political success. A better approach is to emphasize their combination within a complex whole.
character As prudence appears to be a matter of blending, balancing, or choosing between varied mentalities, the basis for judgment is typically thought to be lodged in some feature of individual character. Not surprisingly, the concept of the self has been a sore spot, not only for those who assess prudence in respect to the modern valorization of self-consciousness and individual rights, but within the history of prudence itself. Some of the time, prudence is tied to a thoroughly egocentric agent who reflects only enough to calculate selfinterest and adapt to the extrinsic social constraints and opportunities that are the means for individual achievement and legitimacy.44 Even with more comprehensive formulations such as Aristotle’s, the agent’s self-awareness and psychological stability never seem to be at risk. The solid core of selfhood seems evident in the most eloquent testimony to social life in the Aristotelian literature, where the friend is defined as the other self.45 Although a modern interpreter might turn that definition into a hall of mirrors, there is little reason to believe that a classical author would have appreciated the change. It is easy to conclude that, in antiquity, the prudent actor faced a complex world with a sure sense of self whose weight could bend deliberation away from the common good. Today, prudence is equated with a conventional sense of selfinterest, while it falls short of just about everything we moderns have found to be interesting about our subjective experience. This construction of prudence relies on a series of small misrepresentations; as these are corrected, we can discern a more complex pattern of social cognition. To begin with, we now know that interior life did not at one time have the serene, graceful repose of figures on a Greek vase. The greatest embarrassment to this idea of a stable self comes, of course, from Cicero, whose letters reveal a much more anxious and plastic subjectivity.46 Further support comes from looking to Greek theater and seeing why it could be the inspiration for Freud’s formulations of internal conflict. At this point one might conclude that there is a universal human experience reassuringly similar to our own. My conclusion is much different, for prudence is never a primary language of subjective experience. Like the tradition of rhetoric, theories
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 303
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
303
of prudence consistently bracket the psychological storms that regularly accompany its actual practice. Prudence is not a means for registering internal experience, but rather a means of controlling it on behalf of intentional action.47 Intentionality, not personality is its fundamental interest. (This orientation also explains why prudential models of character have little psychological or literary value, as they appear formulaic and other-oriented.) Prudence is a means of self-control and so a means for creating a particular incarnation of the self, which it does in part through denial. By reining in personality on behalf of action, prudence does overlap with modern conceptions of self-interested calculation. There is some confusion in our ordinary usage when we equate terms such as “individual” or “agent” with “self” or “self-consciousness” or “self-interest.” As Douglas Uyl has pointed out, the frequent identification of prudence and self-interest comes from their common platform of personal agency; that is, prudence and selfinterest are two forms of agent-centered thinking, but they are not different names for the same calculations.48 Similarly, the classical thinker would have assumed that an agent would be an individual person, and the solidity of the latter phenomenon might have been transferred back to the former, but the interest would have been in the agent—the individual acting—rather than in the individual per se. If prudence is an agent-centered perspective—rather than a structural or ethical perspective—the key to understanding it is to realize that the sense of agency is undefined and overdetermined. Prudence requires an agent, but that agent has neither the solidity of an individual one sees daily in a stable society nor the egocentric interiority of the modern self. Thus, in place of a stable self calculating its interests, prudence provides the means for constituting oneself as an agent. Prudence is a form of thinking for individual action within a social field.49 In addition, wisdom consists in doing what brings about personal well-being and development when those conditions have to involve other people.50 For an act to be wise, it has to meet the dual conditions of intelligibility with respect to both individual and social goods. In a prudential practice, subjectivity has been distributed across the social field within which the individual exists as both a knobby lump of selfinterest and as an agent who acts by connecting with others. The prudential actor literally doesn’t know what he or she thinks until after the action has been completed, because acting was not the leveraging of a given set of interests but rather a dynamic process of drawing together varied interests into a composite identity. Thus, whether the prudent action is the cautious or innovative alternative, in either case the self is redefined by the choice and as it is played out with greater or fewer resources and more or less finesse. It is only
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
304
Page 304
.
Prudence
by extending the self into these larger and contingent arrangements that one’s actions might be intelligible at all, much less understood to be in one’s selfinterest. In other words, the theory of prudence contains within it a concept of the nodular self. The individual is extended through action to connect with a larger, dynamic social network. A modern dictionary definition of “node” suggests the multiple senses of agency that can be involved: 1. a knot, protuberance, or knob. 2. a centering point of component parts. 3. Anat. a knotlike mass of tissue: lymph node. 4. Path. circumscribed swelling. 5. Bot. a part of a stem that bears a leaf or branch. 6. Math. Also called joint, knot, in interpolation, one of the points at which the values of a function are assigned. 7. Geom. a point on a curve or surface at which there can be more than one tangent line or tangent plane. At any time, the agent can appear to be an irreducible node of self-interest or a specific point in a system (with all its advantages or disadvantages of position relative to others in respect to any objective), as well as a vital switching mechanism that coordinates and activates alternative arrays of other points to mutual advantage. Likewise, prudential decisions are those to which systemic functions can be assigned, while they also are points from which the system does or not grow, or grows in one direction or another. And if the individual pontificating about prudence appears much like “a circumscribed swelling,” that still is a variation on a larger morphology that coordinates individual and systemic development. Any single node can become part of several pathways for growth, any one of which can become clogged at any point. This conception of the nodular self is one solution to the endemic problem in social thought of coordinating individual and structural perspectives. The problem for modern social thinkers is that it is a model that could only be recognized after recent developments in systems theory and especially in evolutionary biology.51 Thus, when looking either for an autonomous agent or a strong, mechanistic structure (that resonates with modernist science, engineering, and bureaucracy), the easy mistake is to see prudence as a solely agent-centered theory with a weak sense of personal agency. By contrast, the classical sensibility presumes an individual, but one who always is connected to others and not in a fixed system. One might say that in prudential agency intentionality is focused while identity is distributed—a personality structure that is suited to the coordination of mutually advantageous outcomes. Thus prudential values such as “moderation” or “balance” are not so much speci-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 305
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
305
fications of a single, universal temperament for any prudent person, but commitments to maintaining the dynamic equilibrium of the social system. Likewise, prudence is a theory of personal agency but not of self-consciousness—it is much more a language of roles than of subjective states—because the nodular self is itself fully activated only by fulfilling its centering function in respect to a potential group. This pattern for reformulating oneself according to those qualities that constitute an individual capable of acting in a given environment also accounts for some of the residual conservatism in the history of prudence. Currently conservatives may be drawn to the concept because it allows one to imagine a stable sense of individual responsibility amidst the destabilization of all hierarchies of value, while also keeping the individual situated in respect to traditional attributions of identity. The deeper attraction, however, will be that the agent is most easily understood with respect to known features of scene, act, agency, and purpose. (Conservative suspicions about a relationship between liberalism’s weakening of individual responsibility and its acceptance of linguistic ambiguity rest on the same intuition.) But because there is no single definition of any political actor, prudence should not be pigeon-holed ideologically. Even revolutionary innovators who are relatively unintelligible in terms of the established order can be mundanely prudential with respect to the internal affairs of the movement that constitutes their zone of familiarity, often to the puzzlement of both their detractors and their supporters. Whatever the cause, those looking for prudence are likely to find something both more fixed and less reliable than they might expect.
audience A performative perspective requires attending to how meaning is constituted by audiences. A prudential rhetor will do so “naturally,” and often quite consciously. “Audience” is a missing term in discussions of prudence, however. This should not be surprising: the history of prudence is a story of preparing and judging elite individuals, and in the modern era prudence has lost its close connection to rhetoric while every idea has become refracted through a pervasive individualism. This should not be the whole story. Prudence, like the art of rhetoric, has a portability that allows application to groups, subcultures, institutions, and publics. By fusing prudence and individual judgment, we overlook how it operates collectively, which in turn can lead to misunderstanding specific crises of leadership. The shift in perspective I have in mind
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
306
Page 306
.
Prudence
can be illustrated by examining one such crisis—one not known for its gravity, or for any virtues at all. Presidential studies also have been criticized for being fixated on individuals while overlooking more structural explanations. This criticism has stuck even during the recent ascendancy of interest in the “rhetorical presidency,” which focuses on how presidents appeal directly to the American public to achieve their policy objectives.52 If it is the case that presidential power is now shaped by its rhetorical options in a plebiscitary context, then it follows that audiences and particularly that audience constituted by the public media should be understood not as manipulanda, but as political actors who can be more or less discerning, thoughtful, temperate, and otherwise prudent.53 In looking over the events of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, one would be hard pressed to claim that President Clinton was a model of prudence. Nor could we find such virtues in the special prosecutor, and certainly not in the Congress.54 Indeed, the story is one long chronicle of human folly. Despite years of being hounded by his political enemies about his private life, despite already having had to face several public accusations of marital infidelity, and despite being under investigation by an energetic special prosecutor who had repeatedly expanded his investigation to encompass a wide range of possible offenses, President Clinton engaged in oral sex with a White House intern. The intern disclosed the affair to a disaffected employee who also was a Republican appointee not above wire-tapping. Through some yet to be fully known combination of accident and collusion, the information ended up in the hands of two sets of lawyers who were interviewing the president under oath at the behest of his enemies and the special prosecutor. The strange result was that the president ended up both lying about and admitting to his infidelity—in varying degrees in various venues, depending on whom you ask. The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives quickly initiated impeachment proceedings. Not to be outdone by the president, however, they produced an eye-popping run of lies, abuses of power, revelations of their own wrongdoing, political miscalculations, and rhetorical incompetence that left their leadership shattered and their legitimacy in shreds. The president was impeached, the matter quickly dismissed in the Senate, and—contrary to all conventional wisdom—the affair ended with Clinton quite able to continue to govern, his approval rating far above that of the Congress. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this story is the extent to which public opinion never buckled during a year of comprehensive, unrelenting pressure from the press and political professionals. Many have since remarked that they have never seen the media so united across the political spectrum,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 307
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
307
and for so long.55 Everyone was agreed that Clinton must go and would go. By contrast, the public insisted that he ought to stay, and their support for his presidency increased after every dramatic confrontation or presidential statement (but one)—including those designed by his opponents for his humiliation.56 Certainly the rhetorical presidency was alive and well, as the president appealed directly to the public to circumvent not only the Congress but those who supposedly are the gatekeepers of public opinion. But how could this success be an “exercise in prudence”? There were no rules to follow, but there was little evidence of balance or deliberation either. Unlike their supposed betters, ordinary citizens exemplified each of the qualities I have outlined in the first chapter of this volume.57 Once we see how that is so, we can better understand the current puzzlement and outrage regarding their performance. On the one hand, many commentators now concede that the public was smarter than the politicians and the media, but they can’t say why or how.58 On the other hand, noted conservatives are still railing against a public they consider both stupid and corrupt.59 Both reactions are instructive: the puzzlement points directly to prudence, because it acknowledges such a thing as good common sense; the criticism illuminates prudence indirectly by assuming that morality is lacking when not absolute (the bogeyman of “relativism”) or when tainted by expediency (assuming that the ordinary person’s judgment is clouded by rising wages). On the one hand, you can see prudence but lack a name for it or wonder how it can exist in a group. On the other hand, you might want to mix politics and morality, but you don’t like the way it often happens in practice.60 We can understand and perhaps appreciate the public’s reaction once we recognize it for what it is: practical wisdom. Faced with a new, complex situation, the public rejected decisively the argument that they should apply a universal moral rule. One should not lie, but one also should adjust that rule to the circumstances of the specific case. In addition, the public insisted on a sophisticated description of the circumstances. Rather than limit it to the facts that lying under oath is illegal and the chief executive is sworn to uphold the laws, they distinguished between public character and private character, held that each emphasized different virtues, assessed that this lie was no threat to the public interest, and asserted that lying in public about adultery ranged from being understandable to an obligation one owed the families of those directly involved.61 This perspective explains the role of Hillary Clinton and her striking rise in public esteem, for she became the personal embodiment of the judgment preferred by the public. Note the similarities between them: both Hillary and
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
308
Page 308
.
Prudence
the public were courted by Clinton, both were betrayed by him (and more than once), both chose not to dump him. We can assume he also apologized to both Hillary and the public, and if that apology was not as abject as his enemies and the press said it should be, it was for precisely that reason the more realistic apology within the context of married life—more grudging than would be ideal, but insistent that both sides remain equals and each respect the other’s limitations. Likewise, against the claim that the presidential example would trigger a wave of deception across all of society, the public could assume that, first, deception was already deeply imbedded in ordinary life as a necessary evil, second, that it was well under control by the very form of judgment they were practicing, and, third, that Clinton actually provided an object lesson, since he was indeed paying dearly for his actions. This appraisal of Clinton reflects key elements of prudence. The public was interested less in the law and more in the character of those involved in the scandal. Their assessment of Clinton was based on a long familiarity, and his weaknesses were no surprise, thanks to the inoculation effect created by his enemies’ long pursuit of him. (If nothing else, this story is a study in the law of unintended consequences.) Needless to say, the character of Linda Tripp and others made for easy comparisons much to the president’s advantage. Such assessment also would include reflection on the character of the public—was it becoming dangerously divisive or corrupted? Here the continued support became self-validating (and was another unintended consequence: by dragging out the proceedings, the prosecution encouraged deliberation, taxed the public’s patience, and demonstrated that civil society could get along quite well without a model president.) Unlike the press, the public also seemed to recognize that any quality can have contrary consequences, depending on the situation. Presidential duplicity might be useful, while moral righteousness can be too much of a good thing. Thus, public opinion became formulated around a comprehensive awareness of the personal limitations of the political leader, but according to a form of judgment that assumed all aspirations are constrained by both circumstances and character. The larger questions become how to balance the inevitable contradictions within each situation and each actor, and whether living with those constraints and compromises serves the public interest. Here Clinton’s enemies played right into his hands. First, they seemed to be sacrificing public goods—including the election, congressional deference to public opinion, and the other work of the government—to partisan ambitions. (The conjunction of the Paula Jones case and Starr’s investigation may have been an adroit strategic maneuver, but it exemplified a vice of democratic
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 309
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
309
polity that we still recognize, though we don’t have a word for it in English. The Greeks did: polupragmosune, or excessive meddling in public affairs on behalf of partisan interests.) Second, as his opponents became more insistent, and more shrill, it became necessary to support Clinton simply to keep the polity in balance. This is why there is no inconsistency when the public excuses Clinton’s lying while condemning the lies by his prosecutors about their own extramarital affairs. The same act reveals differences in character relative to the relationship between the polity and private interests. Clinton’s deceit protected private vice, but it didn’t threaten the public interest. He was weak, but discrete. Those elected officials who would pull down an elected official for private vices they also possessed, however, were seen as ambitious hypocrites. As Cicero advised in De officiis, it is one thing to lie in defense and quite another to lie while conducting a prosecution.62 Thus, the public reasoned that Clinton was no threat to others, while his prosecutors needed to be restrained. (As a corollary, the one Clinton speech that misfired was his first apology, which was adversarial enough to suggest that he might be willing to put self-interest over the public good. He soon recovered, however, and since then has continued to effuse a sense of good will toward the public that equals that of Reagan or FDR.) So it is that the public would look for policies that secure mutually advantageous outcomes, while they would expect the issue to be resolved through successful rhetorical performance. These features of prudential judgment were also borne out in this case: the many variations on impeachment, conviction, censure, fines, civil prosecution, and the like all play to the first norm. Indeed, the consensus that emerged is prudence in a nutshell: everyone lost something, no side lost everything, and the Constitution was vindicated. This is practical reasoning to manage complex, contingent situations and incommensurable goods on behalf of the sustainability of democratic polity. This sustainability is also maintained through appreciation of rhetorical performance. Clinton’s ratings always spiked after his public speeches (and the videotaped deposition) and stayed up there. Conversely, it was the poor performance by the congressional Republicans during the impeachment proceedings and trial that finally turned editorial opinion. A prudential judge values rhetorical skill, in part because it is assumed to demonstrate the character needed for political deliberation and action. To summarize, during the Lewinsky scandal the American public was smarter than its political representatives and media elite. The difference in intelligence is that the public was thinking prudentially, while the others were
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
310
Page 310
.
Prudence
by turns excessively moralistic or expedient. The public’s sense of prudence was not just a preference for the mean, but also a mode of judgment that was oriented toward the study of character, appreciation of constraints, balancing incommensurable goods, securing mutual advantage, and rewarding rhetorical skill. President Clinton was able to use the powers of the rhetorical presidency to stay in office precisely because he was able to appeal to and satisfy these criteria of prudential judgment. The fact that he could do so to escape prosecution for acts that themselves demonstrated a stunning lack of judgment points to the complexity of political action and underscores its obvious opportunities for deception and injustice. But that is the lesser point, if only because it is the most typical reaction. We also should appreciate that this episode in our political history demonstrates how the public can uphold the rationality and stability of the political system.63 Those interested in prudence should ask whether a particular president was prudent or not, but they also should consider how a structure of prudential reasoning was or was not in place to be used as a means of persuasion. When such a structure of reasoning is in place, it provides the rhetorical presidency with a basis for action. For a while the American public coheres as an audience exercising prudential judgment. Such an audience has many parts, but the whole can be characterized by a specific pattern of attentiveness, discernment, assessment of claims, and criteria for judgment. Instead of explaining the support for Clinton in terms of a moral or economic common denominator, or as a composite of demographic inclinations (women, blacks, civil libertarians, and so forth), or as the triumph of the more irrational elements of the rhetorical presidency, we should see it as a reasoned response to complex events. Instead of measuring public rationality in terms of its approximation of expertise or insider knowledge, we should consider how it will follow the pace and assume the structure of prudential thinking. That is the good news. Despite—indeed, because of—the imprudence of our national leaders in both the government and the mass media, the public was goaded to develop a structure of prudential reasoning that it could use to make sense of events as they were spinning out of control. That structure then could be used to further resolve the issues of the controversy (ranging from additional allegations to the special prosecutor law), to restore the government to working order, and perhaps even to address specific questions of public policy. But then there is the bad news: prudential structures do not last forever. Prudence is acquired from reflection on experience, and it involves the reciprocal adjustment of general principles and particular circumstances. Therefore,
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 311
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
311
a prudential mentality is limited by events and always will be on the way to obsolescence. Prudent individuals can compensate by absorbing a wide range of experience that is then lodged in that complex of memory and personality we call character. In addition, the individual has a relatively secure sense of personal autonomy and integrity to sustain one amidst change. Publics, however, are more dependent on external events, they have shorter memories, and their coherence depends on a host of educational, cultural, and journalistic practices that are themselves constantly changing. The prudential public is a contingent, provisional, unstable formation. It requires time to develop and it is sustained largely by public debate on the specific issues of its formation. These qualities are evident whether discussing the bank veto, opposition to the Vietnam War, the Lewinsky scandal, or many other controversies centered on the presidency. It is not evident that the public can easily transfer its good sense to other issues or maintain discernment over a long period of time. Typically, it then falls back into more conventional attitudes as its members return their attention to private life. The public gets stupid again, and so it can be easily manipulated for a while. We also should note that even the most sophisticated formations of a prudential public involve relatively arbitrary alignments of ideas in response to specific circumstances of the political controversy and historical period. Various precepts of American political culture—from “All people are created equal” to “Don’t Tread on Me”—might or might not be activated, and those which are activated can be aligned in various configurations. In the Lewinsky scandal, the public/private distinction was activated and aligned with the defense of personal liberties. In another controversy, that distinction could become aligned with the defense of executive privilege, or it might not be used at all. These strong though arbitrary configurations of ideas (and specific examples, in response to specific events) are one reason transference of public wisdom to later controversies is not automatic. In addition, it cautions against too literal an imitation of historical examples: a particular structure of public judgment might have been sound in one case, yet would be mistaken in another. Recognition of the prudential public adds important support to John Dunn’s argument for “democratizing prudence” beyond a narrow focus on elite leaders, but we need be aware that the result need be no more stable or reliable than its elite counterpart.64 The final point to be made about the role of audiences in prudential judgment is this: the formation of prudential publics is not merely an interesting phenomenon, but one that is increasingly important. Political leaders today are faced with the complexity of a global environment of technologies that
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
312
Page 312
.
Prudence
are no longer merely “extensions of man” but capable of redesigning nature, including human nature. The new class of problems challenging the political systems of today are no more amenable to centralized management than they are to personal charisma. Problems of resource depletion, environmental contamination, workplace routinization, social and moral enclaving, the concentration of wealth, and other such dilemmas cannot be understood wholly by one person or solved adequately by one government.65 In such a world, prudence has to be more than the means of self-control for an elite manipulating the masses. A better alternative is to understand and nurture its development as a characteristic of public opinion formation, among diverse audiences, as they are contending with unexpected problems of judgment.
postmodern prudence Further delineation of prudence leads us back into the intellectual history of the term, as it also invites the formulaic exposition of the rhetoric handbooks. Thus, we could set out a lexicon of terms that have been used to identify prudential thinking. These would include a series of paired terms such as phronesis and techne, calculation and chance, the universal and the particular, the expedient and the ethical, stability and innovation, and so forth. It also would involve terms linked in loose arrangements of complementarity, such as the several virtues and propriety and timeliness and grace or serendipity or style. . . . Eventually, one might conclude with a term used to synthesize the others— “character” is the obvious candidate, but others such as “balance” or “compromise” might be used. Obviously, I believe this format would be of limited usefulness here. Its pedantry is hardly consistent with the attempt to appreciate prudence as a dynamic mode of social cognition and a language game dedicated to political sustainability. It also might fix prudence in a particular pattern, whereas there can be multiple incarnations of prudence adapted to relatively autonomous spheres of discourse and decision making. Furthermore, if there are to be lexicons, they need to be developed from newer prudential languages such as the language of ecology. A lexicon is used primarily to augment a larger mode of erudition (or to serve as a carrying-case for ideas when outside of one’s familiar context). Let me suggest an additional simplification: there have been two, concurrent forms of erudition in the history of prudence—perhaps we can think of them as alternating phases of the tradition—each characterized by a distinctive sense
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 313
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
313
of written composition, intellectual role, and social practice. The “first” phase is pedagogical: prudence is written about to the extent that it is to be taught to or reviewed by a student preparing for political office. The orientation is thoroughly imitative, and instruction is grounded in rhetorical handbooks, famous speeches or other political literature, and practical treatises on ethics. This approach culminated in the mirror-to-the-prince genre that was a primary source of political studies throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Prudence was codified in an educational program designed to produce a wise ruler. The intellectual produced the book, and the prince was to embody it in action. This pedagogical discourse finally was exploded by Machiavelli, who was also the progenitor of the second, philosophical phase of prudence. This is one measure of the justice of Garver’s remark that Machiavelli is equivalent in the history of practical reason to Descartes in the history of pure reason.66 Machiavelli did not provide philosophical prudence with its characteristic mode of exposition, however. He is the transition figure, while prudence becomes thoroughly reworked into a philosophical language by Kant, as emended by the Scottish Enlightenment. In this mode, prudence has no fixed relationship to any social practice or political elite, who not incidentally are no longer the audience for the prudential theorist. Prudence is rewritten in the language of philosophical reflection on the thinking subject, from which it can develop in either of two directions: as a mode of reasoning or as an ethical system. In each case, it is doomed: practical reason is subordinated to pure reason (or scientific reason), and prudential precepts to universal rules (whether utilitarian or deontological doesn’t matter). More important than this status hierarchy, however, is the deformation of the phenomenon that goes with it. Whether as political ethics or practical reasoning, prudence is described as a single, uniform set of cognitive operations and constraints. In addition, it is set apart from other modes of cognition with which it actually has a complicated relationship. Thus, philosophy minimizes or severs the ties between various modes of judgment, rather than appreciating how each contains elements of the others. No such approach can see how politics, ethics, and aesthetics are alternative reductions of an overdetermined sociality. The philosophical phase may have run its course for our time. Perhaps Gadamer’s discussion is one sign of its exhaustion. Even when he liberates prudence from the major constraints of modern philosophical method and elevates its status, he leaves it more disembodied from politics than ever. I don’t foresee a return to the pedagogical routines, however, if only because they are so out of step with the social and technological changes redefining
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
314
Page 314
.
Prudence
educational institutions today. We can’t write without conventions, but at times we can ask—as a real, open question—what conventions might be best for writing about a particular subject. Many of the writers in this volume have identified how prudence has thrived in public discourse, and John Nelson has suggested that it is active today in some of the major genres of popular culture. If there is to be a third phase in the history of prudence, it probably will be developed by those who are working at the edge of new fissures in the established social order. The reorganization of private life, the attempts to refabricate community in urban wastelands and suburban deserts, the migrations of capital and peoples across the globe, the alarming rates of change in communication and biotechnologies, the nature of education in a postliterate society, the production of violence—these and similar problems will require and test the many discourses of prudence.
notes 1. For one version of this perspective, see David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 2. The literature is extensive, which helps make the point. Recent representative discussions include Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Hillary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995). For discussion within the philosophy of education, see Bruce A. Kimball, The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition, ed. Robert Orrill (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995). For the relationship between pragmatism and rhetoric, see Steven Mailloux, ed., Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For several continental perspectives, see Chantal Mouffe, ed., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (New York: Routledge, 1996). 3. James A. Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), and F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Ankersmit situates his work in the history of prudence on pages 14–15. 4. Historians would say, “Yes, this is what we do.” But they do much more as well, and there are few who zero in on the elements of practical judgment. The best example I know of such a study is “The Essence of Statesmanship: George Ball and Prudence,” chapter 6 of James A. Bill, George Ball: Behind the Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1984), is also relevant, although she seems more committed to a pessimistic idea of human nature than to an interest in managing wisely. 5. Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 6. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), 312–24. See also James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany:
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 315
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
315
State University of New York Press, 1997), 105–10, and Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: “Phronesis” and “Techne” in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993). 7. The term is taken from Alexis de Tocqueville’s remarks on the preference for abstraction among democratic societies. Democracy in America, vol. 2., trans. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pt. 1, chaps. 3, 4, and 16. 8. The concept of legibility is adapted from James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 89–90. My usage here is consistent with but more limited than Scott’s. See also John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 9. The English text is: “That a judge worthy of the name has no true model to guide his judgments, and that the true nature of a judge is to pronounce judgments, and therefore prescriptions, just so, without criteria. This is, after all, what Aristotle calls prudence. It consists in dispensing justice without models.” Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 25–26. See also Bill Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 105–27, and “Pseudoethica Epidemica: How Pagans Talk to the Gods,” Philosophy Today 36 (1992), and Shaun Gallagher, “The Place of Phronesis in Postmodern Hermeneutics,” Philosophy Today 37 (1993): 298–305. 10. Heidegger also underscores the connection with classical rhetoric: “Aristotle investigates the pathê [affects] in the second book of his Rhetoric. Contrary to the traditional orientation, this work of Aristotle must be taken as the first systematic hermeneutic of the everydayness of Being with one another.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarries and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 178. Michel de Certeau notes a similar affinity between practical intelligence and the Sophists, in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 30, 47. Michel Foucault adopts a similar perspective regarding classical sexuality (while also citing Aristotle’s Rhetoric): “It was not a question of what was permitted or forbidden among the desires that one felt or the acts that one committed, but of prudence, reflection, and calculation in the way one distributed and controlled his acts. In the use of pleasures, . . . the moral rules to which one conformed were far removed from anything that might form a clearly defined code. It was much more a question of a variable adjustment in which one had to take different factors into account.” The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 53–54. 11. John M. Sloop and James P. McDaniel, Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998). I address the issue in an afterword: “Justifying, Positioning, Persuading in the Intermediate World” (237–49). 12. Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Prudence in the Interpretation of the Constitution,” in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, ed. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 171–95. 13. The followers of Leo Strauss provide additional, and more extreme and simplistic, examples of this attitude. For an essay on prudence that points down that road, see Richard S. Ruderman, “Aristotle and the Recovery of Political Judgment,” American Political Science Review 91 (1997): 409–20. 14. Scott, Seeing Like a State; Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). 15. See his chapter in this volume.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
316
Page 316
.
Prudence
16. One example is the Statement of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Global Climate Change: A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence, and the Common Good” (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, June 15, 2001), which is available at Social Development and World Peace, http://www.nccbuscc.org/sdwp/international/globalclimate.htm#scientific, January 15, 2002. See also James A. Nash, Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1991), who calls for cultivating the “ecological virtues” of sustainability, adaptability, relationality, frugality, equity, solidarity, biodiversity, sufficiency, and humility. 17. Scott uses the Greek word metis to denominate practical intelligence generally: he calls it “a useful portmanteau word for what I have in mind” (Seeing Like a State, 6) and uses it interchangeably with “prudence” and other synonyms. For other purposes it may be necessary to parse the terms more carefully. In that case, metis would refer to the inherently slippery, nomadic, amoral intelligence that our species (but not ours alone) uses to travel, hunt, and otherwise survive within a natural environment, while prudence would become a domesticated metis better suited for the world of settled places, civic institutions, and routine cosmopolitan exchange. There are no classical treatises on metis, in part because the concept is indigenous to the period in Greek culture before the ascendancy of philosophy. Indeed, it is “the sophists who occupy a crucial position in the area where traditional mêtis and the new intelligence of the philosophers meet.” Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 4. I discuss metis as an aesthetic element of the practical arts (including the art of politics) in “Terrible Beauty and Mundane Detail: Aesthetic Knowledge in the Practice of Everyday Life,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (1998): 10–18. Generally, a rigid distinction between the two terms is not pertinent to this volume, and the distinction between different modes of prudence, which I set out later, provides one model for integrating different forms of practical intelligence. 18. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 316. Aristotle defines rhetoric as “an ability to observe the available means of persuasion in the particular case” (Rhetoric 1355b, my translation). Note also how Scott elaborates his point: “The rule of thumb is akin to formal grammar, whereas metis is more like actual speech. Metis is no more derivative of general rules than speech is derivative of grammar” (319). Isocrates (Against the Sophists, 10–12) makes a similar distinction between the art of rhetoric and grammar. 19. For an attempt to fuse liberatory politics with a strong sense of local knowledge, see Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Culture (London: Zed Books, 1998). Esteva and Prakash synthesize the work of Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, and others who resist globalized modernization through revival of local cultures, sustainable practices, and radical democracy. The project is a powerful articulation of prudence— from a commitment to “clearly defining the limits of intelligent, sensible action” (21) to realizing a “pluriverse” of autonomous localities whose interactions would in turn regenerate the “public virtues” (200). It also could be labeled another modality of prudential theory: romantic prudence, with both the appeals and the weaknesses common to other forms of romanticism. 20. Ibid., 340. 21. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 47. 22. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 23. In the essay “Prudence,” Ralph Waldo Emerson makes the point well, while also preparing the way for a commitment to ecological sustainability: “Prudence does not go behind nature, and ask whence it is. It takes the laws of the world, whereby man’s being is conditioned, as they are, and keeps these laws, that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth, and death.” Indeed, “nature punishes
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 317
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
317
any neglect of prudence.” In Essays: First Series, vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903), 224–25 and 228. 24. Aristotle’s distinctions rest in turn on the difference between making and doing, which he parses into practical and productive arts. Prudence would seem to be firmly on the side of the practical arts, yet its relationship with technique complicates the distinction, as does its association with rhetoric, itself a practice that can be theorized as either a productive or a practical art. I believe a hard distinction between making and doing has problems enough even within the classical context, and that those problems multiply the more you take a languagecentered view of human affairs. More important, the distinction will soon be obsolete in a society that can redesign the human being. The problem then is how to reflect on practice when one has no recourse to a reliable distinction between making or doing, or between character and technique. For sustained discussions of the relationship between phronesis and techne, see Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground; Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric; and Janet M. Atwill, Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 25. Jean Bethke Elshtain outlines a perspective according to the same attitude in Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). Although she scants prudence per se, Elshtain’s journey from “the pridefulness of philosophy” to “a politics of limits” certainly prepares the way for its recuperation. For a more thorough statement of how to live with a commitment to working with natural constraint, see the ecological theologians such as Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth Community Earth Ethics (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books). For discussion of how Elshtain’s earlier work on the just war theory exemplifies a strong version of prudence, see Robert Hariman and Francis A. Beer, “What Would be Prudent? Forms of Reasoning in World Politics,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 (1988): 299–330. 26. See the chapter in this volume. 27. I am not attempting to identify the basic elements of practical reasoning that underwrite the function of maintaining sustainability (or conversely, how prudential motives regulate practical reasoning). Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), provides one part of that puzzle when he defines prudence in terms of operations of temporality (such as seeing relationships between present and future states, and between timely and timeless reasons). Nagel’s conception parallels a rhetorical perspective in another significant way as well, which is to define prudence as a structure of motives. From there it is an easy step to considering how prudence structures discourse to motivate action, and how understanding prudence has to include the critical study of persuasive texts. This conception of rhetoric comes from Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969) and A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). 28. This tendency is not absolute, however, and prudential reasoning also can recommend bold action. See John Casey’s chapter on practical wisdom in Pagan Virtue: An Essay on Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and James Jasinski’s chapter in this volume. 29. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2d ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). I elaborate this idea slightly in my review of Rhetoric and the Arts of Design, by David S. Kaufer and Brian S. Butler, Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 109–11. 30. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1140b. 31. Ibid., 1141b–1142a. 32. Ibid., 1141b10. 33. For earlier and somewhat longer presentation of the claims in this section, see Hariman and Beer, “What Would be Prudent?” I also have realized subsequently that this structure of terms parallels Aquinas’s model, which requires that prudential action fulfill calculative, normative, and performative criteria in turn: “The activity of reason goes through three stages. The first is deliberating the possibilities, in order to discover the means to the end; the sec-
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
318
Page 318
.
Prudence
ond is making a judgement about the results of deliberation (so far this is like theoretic reason); but practical reason, which is connected to action, goes further; its third state consists in executing the results of deliberation and decision. Since the last stage of action is the one closest to the whole point of practical reason, it is the principal act of practical reason and of prudence” (Summa Theologiae 2a2ae. 47.8). Translation by Daniel Westberg, in Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 5; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 36, Prudence, trans. Thomas Gilby (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1974). There are differences here as well, including an emphasis more on material result than on the performative act, and a sense of logical development within the prudential action. Reconstituted in terms of the agent’s experience, however, one can start in any mode, and the sense of an outcome can vary accordingly. 34. Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 1140b5, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1985). 35. There has been significant discussion of prudence in recent moral theory that can be used for a more nuanced understanding of normative thinking. David R. Mapel provides a good review of many pertinent issues in “Prudence and the Plurality of Value in International Ethics,” Journal of Politics 52 (1990): 433–56. 36. I use the term “incommensurability” according to its common usage in political theory since the term was advanced by Richard Rorty, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For detailed discussion of the term that ultimately remains consistent with my usage, see James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). See also Charles E. Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Nola J. Heidlebaugh attempts to bring various elements of classical rhetoric to bear on the topic, in Judgment, Rhetoric, and the Problem of Incommensurability: Recalling Practical Wisdom (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). 37. Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in Studies on Machiavelli, ed. Myron P. Gilmore (Florence: Sansoni, 1972), 201. 38. For a good discussion of the relationship between the ideas of value pluralism in moral philosophy and in political theory, see William A. Galston, “Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 769–78. Galston invokes prudence to resolve the friction between liberal universalism and value pluralism, but doesn’t develop the concept. Also relevant are the arguments by Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983); and Mapel, “Prudence and the Plurality of Value in International Ethics.” 39. Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 1144a20. 40. Desiderius Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Lester K. Born (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 187–88. Sounds like Machiavelli, doesn’t he? The sleight of hand is here to warn against oversimplification as we draw on specific authors to demonstrate various facets of prudence. If Erasmus and Machiavelli have different emphases (and they do), there is much they also share. 41. Garver, Machiavelli, 12. For early discussion of this point, see Robert Hariman, “Prudence/Performance,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 21 (1991): 26–35. To get a sense of the need for a language that can better articulate performance, consider how Garver could just as well have said, “The problem is . . . whether one can find consequences midway between principles and consequences.” 42. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Essays in Sociology, ed. J. J. Gerth and C. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). 43. Cicero Orator 71–74, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library (1962). For review
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 319
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
319
of the classical concept, see my entry “Decorum,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 199–209. 44. Douglas J. Den Uyl, The Virtue of Prudence (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), provides extensive discussion of the role of the agent in prudential theory. Alberto R. Coll summarizes the conventional wisdom: “In today’s philosophical and political discourse the prudential is regularly equated with the self-interested.” “Normative Prudence as a Tradition of Statecraft,” Ethics and International Affairs 5 (1991): 35. For sophisticated development in moral philosophy of this conception of the autonomous agent maximizing self-interest, see David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). This perspective in turn is grounded in rational choice theory (also known as decision theory), which undergirds a great deal of work in the social sciences. Appeals to a public interest or common good are deeply suspect, while the existence of cooperation, altruism, and other forms of moral behavior becomes a major explanatory problem. For one attempt to wiggle out of this dilemma within decision theory, see Mariam Thalos, “Units of Decision,” Philosophy of Science 66 (Proceedings, 1999): S324–338. For a grand theory written for the general reader that cheerily squares the circle, see Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Random House/Vintage, 2000). Of course, within the ambit of prudence, the coordination of self-interest and collective goods is a given, albeit one that requires continual negotiation. See Nagel, Possibility of Altruism, on this point. 45. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1166a30. At one time, there was no greater disparity between Aristotle and neo-Aristotelianism than in regard to the attention paid to friendship. Recent scholarship has corrected this serious oversight. I am among those who believe that Aristotle’s discussion of friendship is the linchpin for full development of his political thought. Likewise, perhaps now we can see how the Greek sense of self was more social (and more tuned to social construction) that was assumed when earlier scholars were celebrating the Golden Age as the font of Western virtues of individual liberty and initiative. We also should appreciate how friendship had enormous importance for Cicero, and how his account (Laelius de Amicitia) is another example of how received ideas can be expanded through textual performance. For provocative discussion of the variations in the concept of friendship throughout antiquity, see David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 46. See my analysis of Cicero’s letters to Atticus in chapter 4 of Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). An emphasis on the social self is not entirely Ciceronian or Roman, however. See Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), for a clear presentation of the relationships between virtue, character, phronesis, and habituation in Aristotle’s ethical theory. For literary statement of these relationships, however, it is hard to beat Cicero. 47. This is not to deny the role prudence can play in developing subjectivity. See, for example, John Martin, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1308–42. We also need to remember that my discussion is set out as a relatively ahistorical statement. It is not intended to displace historical study of the unique configurations of ideas or specific processes of change in a particular time and place. Application to a particular text or event should of course involve such considerations. 48. Uyl, Virtue of Prudence, 26. Julia Annas offers an instructive though failed attempt to escape this dilemma: she contests the egotistic interpretation of classical ethics, but she also seriously distorts classical prudence by reducing it to wholly self-interested means-ends calculations. “Prudence and Morality in Ancient and Modern Ethics,” Ethics 105 (1995): 241–57. See also the response by T. H. Irwin, “Prudence and Morality in Greek Ethics,” Ethics 105 (1995): 284–95.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
320
Page 320
.
Prudence
49. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski argues that all high-quality thinking is socially based, with prudence providing the model for this relationship. See Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): “If I am right that the intellectual virtues have the same relation to phronesis as do the moral virtues, it follows that good thinking is socially based as well. We acquire intellectual virtues, just as we acquire moral virtues, by imitating those who are practically wise. We learn from others how to believe rationally, just as we learn from them how to act morally. The social basis of belief formation is in some ways even more striking than the social basis of acting since we are probably even more dependent upon other people for the rationality or justifiability of our beliefs than for the rightness of our acts. This means that the intellectual healthiness of the whole community is vitally important for the justifiability of our own beliefs” (228). 50. Uyl, Virtue of Prudence, 225. 51. For an introduction, see Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity (New York: Touchstone, 1994). For an analysis more committed to modernist assumptions, see Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 52. Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). See also Richard J. Ellis, ed., Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). For attention to prudence, see Erwin C. Hargrove, The President as Leader: Appealing to the Better Angels of Our Nature (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). 53. The definition of the current context comes from Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 54. Reliable accounts of the scandal include Jeffrey Toobin, A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President (New York: Random House, 2000), and Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). For a succinct review of the story, see Anthony Lewis, “Nearly a Coup,” New York Review of Books, April 13, 2000, pp. 22–28. 55. For one chronicle of the errors in professional judgment by the press corps, see Marvin L. Kalb, One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and 13 Days that Tarnished American Journalism (New York: Free Press, 2001). 56. How do I know? As an informed citizen, I suppose. I would not bet the farm on these claims, but they are based on digesting a year’s worth of news reports, public opinion polls, letters to the editor, reports of on-the-street or in-the-mall interviews, editorial cartoons, editorial commentary, news analyses, internet jokes, and sundry other forms of publicity in a range of media, as well as my own ongoing conversations, lurking on listserve discussions, and so forth. For discussion of the theoretical and methodological assumptions regarding the reconstruction of public opinion from a field of discourses, see Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). 57. See my analysis in Chapter 1 of this volume of Pericles’ speech to the Athenian assembly. This application of the model extracted from Thucydides exemplifies how we can both use classical models in a relatively literal sense and also adjust them for more comprehensive application in line with the conditions of our own era. Clinton is no Pericles, which we can prove through direct comparison in order to judge the individual. More can be learned about how good judgments are made in our democratic system, however, by making the adjustments that allow application of the Periclean model to the other side of public opinion formation— what goes on in the audience.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 321
Prudence in the Twenty-First Century
.
321
58. For example, Ronald Dworkin chalked up the outcome to Clinton’s political skill and “our sheer good luck.” Ronald Dworkin, “The Wounded Constitution,” New York Review of Books, January 14, 1999, p. 8. 59. Such diatribes reprise William J. Bennett, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). Nor was the problem, from this perspective, accidental: “Why is Bill Clinton still president? . . . His survival exemplifies a crucial and almost certainly insurmountable problem with modern democracy, one with vast implications for public policy: the problem of public ignorance.” Jeffrey Friedman, “Public Ignorance and Democracy,” Cato Policy Report 21.4 (July/August 1999): 1. 60. Conservative and liberal commentators have more in common than they realize, for academic and media elites across the ideological spectrum are unreflectively disposed to “routinely measure democratic deliberation against an inappropriate standard that promotes elitism and fosters fear of the demos. Rhetoric, we think, spreads democratic distemper.” Robert L. Ivie, “Democratic Deliberation in a Rhetorical Republic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 491–505. 61. Nor was this assessment unusual or odious, as is evident from the following discussions of the role of lying in everyday life: Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); David Nyberg, The Varnished Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Loyal Rue, By the Grace of Guile: The Role of Deception in Natural History and Human Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 62. Cicero De officiis 2.14. Cicero’s career as an advocate shows that he was no hypocrite on this count. 63. Likewise, as Hargrove (The President as Leader) and others advise, there should be continued consideration of the positive role that prudence can play in the rhetorical presidency. This classical virtue can be both the substance and standard of presidential performance, and also an important restraint on the power not only of the president but also of the media elite and other players on the national stage. To account for these factors, presidential studies will need a broader definition of prudence. The definition needs to be broadened in several senses that I have outlined in this chapter and Chapter 1 of this volume: first, by incorporating a wider set of concepts (identifying the elements of prudential judgment); second, by drawing on two complementary methods of definition, which are codification of the elements of prudential reasoning and imitation of historical models; third, by expanding the sense of agency for the exercise of prudential judgment from individuals to groups. For a recent study that applies a prudential model to presidential performance, see Keith V. Erickson, “Presidential Rhetoric’s Visual Turn: Performance Fragments and the Politics of Illusionism,” Communication Monographs 67 (2000): 138–57. 64. John Dunn, Interpreting Political Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 213–15. 65. The theme of a new class of problems is set out by Morone, The Democratic Wish, and Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics. Of course, these problems may elude more deliberative practices as well. For a discussion of deliberative theory that recognizes the problem of complexity along with other pressing conditions of liberal democratic societies, see James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 66. Garver, Machiavelli, 3.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 322
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 323
CONTRIBUTORS
STEPHEN HOWARD BROWNE is a professor of communication arts and sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue and Angelina Grimke: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination, and he currently serves as editor of Philosophy & Rhetoric. ROBERT W. CAPE JR. is an associate professor of classics at Austin College. He has published on Ciceronian oratory, Roman historiography, slavery, and Roman women’s speech, and is currently working on a book about Roman oratory and society. MAURICE CHARLAND is a professor of communication studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He works at the intersection of continental political theory and rhetorical studies, with particular attention to the rhetoric of nationalism. He coauthored, with Michael Dorland of Carleton University, Law, Rhetoric, and Irony in the Formation of Canadian Civil Culture. PETER DIAMOND teaches in the general studies program at New York University. He is the author of Common Sense and Improvement: Thomas Reid as Social Theorist, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the political thought of the Scottish Enlightenment. EUGENE GARVER is Regents Professor of Philosophy at Saint John’s University. He is the author of Machiavelli and the History of Prudence and Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character and the coeditor of Pluralism in Theory and Practice: Richard McKeon and American Philosophy. ROBERT HARIMAN is Levitt Professor of Rhetoric in the department for the study of culture and society at Drake University. He is the author of Political Style: The Artistry of Power, coeditor with Francis A. Beer of PostRealism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, and editor of Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law.
323
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
324
Page 324
.
Contributors
JAMES JASINSKI is an associate professor of communication and theater arts at the University of Puget Sound. His work on the history of American public discourse has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and a number of edited volumes. He is the author of the Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies. JOHN S. NELSON is a professor of political science and directs the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa. His publications include Tropes of Politics, Video Rhetorics, The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, Tradition, Interpretation, and Science, What Should Political Theory Be Now? and journal articles in a number of disciplines. CHRISTINE L. ORAVEC is professor emerita of communication at the University of Utah. Her published work includes an analysis of Aristotle’s concept of the epideictic, examinations of oratorical criticism and the conception of audience in nineteenth-century periodicals, and studies of the use of the sublime in the conservation movement. She coedited The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation of the Environment with James G. Cantrill.
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 325
INDEX
abolitionists, 168, 169, 170–73, 174, 176–77, 185 n. 71 absolute truth, 100 Acilius, Lucius, 40 Adams, John, 94 n. 22, 175, 209 Adams, Samuel, 180 n. 22 Adams, Scott, 238 Addison, Joseph, 116 aesthetics, 249, 276, 278 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 265, 274 Alarm, The; or, an Address to the People of Pennsylvania on the Late Resolve of Congress (pamphlet), 153–54, 156 algorithmics, 260 American Anti-Slavery Society, 170, 171–73 American Revolution audacity and accommodation in, 146, 149–57 Burke on, 129, 131, 133 Declaration of Independence, 100, 156 and slavery debate, 168–69, 170 American Treason Act, 133, 134, 135 Annales (Ennius), 37–39 Annas, Julia, 319 n. 48 Anthony, Susan B., 214 “Antidote to Toryism, An” (Whitaker), 154–55 anti-federalists, 157, 158–59, 165, 183 n. 53 appearances acting from necessity while seeming to act freely, 82–83, 84 instability as characteristic of, 87–88 Machiavellian actor operating in realm of, 89 as middle ground between possible and impossible, 85 neopagan morality and, 95 n. 27
notional options as apparent, 81 propriety identified with, 190 appropriateness. See also propriety (decorum) foresight and, 83 Lyotard and, 274, 280 and Paine’s Common Sense, 155 and performative tradition of prudence, 301 and real versus notional possibilities, 71, 72 Aquinas, St. Thomas, viii–ix, 36, 294 Arendt, Hannah, 100, 120, 233, 242, 248, 249 Aristotle account of prudence as canonical, viii, 6–7, 35–36 calculative tradition of prudence and, viii, 3, 299–300 in Cicero’s De oratore, 43 on four types of intelligence, 5 on friendship, 302, 319 n. 45 on the good, 271 Kant and, 101 on knowing agent required for prudence, 264 Lyotard and, 23, 266, 268, 269, 270, 271, 274, 275, 276, 278 making and doing distinguished by, 317 n. 24 on mutual advantage, 29 n. 27 Nicomachean Ethics, viii, 39, 61, 259 ontology of the contingent of, 178 n. 3, 262–63, 268, 269, 270, 274 on Pericles, 27 n. 17 on persuasion, 277 as pluralist, 270 on politics as virtuous practice, 272 on propriety and locale, 247 prudence as defined by, 261–62, 299 and prudence as a practice, 294
325
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 326
326
Aristotle (continued) Rhetoric, viii, 26 n. 9, 27 n. 14, 92 n. 11, 178 n. 3, 256 n. 65, 277, 315 n. 10, 316 n. 18 rhetoric as defined by, 293, 316 n. 18 rhetoric and prudence distinguished by, 75 Adam Smith compared with, 121 n. 16 on two approaches to prudence, 27 n. 16 as uniting prudentia and eloquentia for Cicero, 51 on virtue as not teachable, 70 on the young as unable to be prudent, 264 Arms, Consider, 165 Articles of Confederation, 157 Aubenque, Pierre, 262, 264 audience feminized audience, 219–20 Jacksonian audience, 192–93, 206 performative approach to prudence and, 305–12 Augustine, St., 294 Augustus Caesar, 60 Austin, James, 169 avant-garde prudence, 292 Bacon, Francis, 95 n. 27, 99, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 195, 196 Balaban, Oded, 93 n. 14 Baym, Nina, 205 Beard, Mary, 63 n. 40 Beer, Samuel, 157 Beiner, Ronald, 290, 292 Benhabib, Seyla, 261 Benjamin, Walter, 285 n. 37 Berlin, Isaiah, 67, 69–70, 72, 73, 85, 95 nn. 28, 29, 299 Bernstein, Richard, 266 Berry, Wendell, 233, 240, 244, 251, 316 n. 19 Bill, James A., 27 n. 15 Birney, James, 176–77 Bourdieu, Pierre, 31 n. 43 bourgeois prudence, 291 Bricker, Philip, 179 n. 6 Brody, Miriam, 193, 196–97 Browne, Stephen, 22 Brownstein, Oscar L., 25 n. 5, 26 n. 7 Brutus (Cicero), 58–60 Bunker Hill celebrations of 1825, 198–99 Burke, Edmund, 127–44. See also Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
.
Index
coarse texture of political thought of, 22, 131–32, 143 and conservatism, 130 defensive quality of works of, 129 excesses of, 127 on historical knowledge, 142 on imperial government, 137 on the philosopher in action, 129–30 on political parties, 139–41 as politician, 133 Speech on American Taxation, 133 Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, 133 Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 129 Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, 129, 140 on timely action, 141–43 on trust in constitutional government, 138 union of literary imagination and practical politics in, 130–31 on visionary schemes, 142 Burke, Kenneth, 95 n. 28, 179 n. 5, 192, 317 n. 27 Bush, George H. W., 14 Butler, Judith, 101 Butler, Pierce, 164 Caesar, Julius, 42, 43, 58–59, 60 calculative prudence, viii, 3, 277, 278, 299–300 Cannae, Battle of, 37–39 Cape, Robert W., Jr., 20–21, 181 n. 27, 216 carnivalesque, the, 195–97 bourgeois repression of, 217–18 Jacksonian women and, 197–201 politics and, 203 resistance associated with, 196 Carvey, Dana, 14 Castiglione, Baldassare, 301 Catilina, Lucius Sergius, 42 Cato the Elder, 37 Certeau, Michel de, 291, 315 n. 10 Chapman, Gerald, 130–31 character in Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, 308 prudence associated with, 6, 9–10, 19, 220 n. 1, 239–42, 302–5 Charland, Maurice, 23 Charmadas, 46–47 Choate, Rufus, 168–69 Christianity Machiavelli on Christian morality, 72–76, 79, 80–81, 84–85, 87, 88–90, 95 n. 27
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 327
Index
on prudence, 71 Scottish Enlightenment and, 104–5, 121 n. 24 Cicero, 35–65. See also De oratore; De re publica Brutus, 58–60 De inventione, 36, 40–41, 52, 59, 61 De officiis, 36, 39, 309 Epistulae ad Quintum Fratrem, 42, 63 n. 38 as model for imitation, viii on necessity, 94 n. 23 as “new man,” 42 and normative prudence, 299 performative tradition of prudence and, viii, 3, 20–21, 27 n. 16, 301 prudence among the Romans before, 37–40 and prudence as a practice, 294 prudence in works of, 40–60 Reid compared with, 21, 103, 105, 107, 108 the Renaissance influenced by, viii, 35–36, 43, 61 on sapienta and prudence, 39–40, 41, 44–45, 49, 50–51, 59 and the stable self, 302 Turnbull on, 104 civic republicanism, 22, 70 Civil War (American), 176, 177 Clay, Henry, 168, 173–75, 177, 187 n. 92, 204, 208 cleverness, prudence distinguished from, 7, 27 n. 14 Clinton, Bill, 24, 306–11 Clinton, Hillary, 307–8 Cmiel, Kenneth, 196, 222 n. 20 Coll, Alberto R., 319 n. 44 common sense affective connotations of, 116 as cognate for prudence during Enlightenment, 103 Reid on, 21, 103, 108–9, 110–19 Common Sense (Paine), 155–56 communitarians, 100, 265, 271, 276 Compromise of 1850, 173–74, 176 Connor, Robert, 8, 9 conservatism Burke and, 130 invoking classical virtues and, 2 liberal and conservative commentators compared, 321 n. 60
.
327
prudence associated with, 10, 15, 31 n. 41, 176, 296, 305 Constitution, The: A Pro-Slavery Compact (Phillips), 173 Constitution of the United States. See United States Constitution contingency Aristotle’s ontology of the contingent, 178 n. 3, 262–63, 268, 269, 270, 274 prudence as pertaining to, viii, 5, 12, 86, 103, 229, 298 cooperation, 83, 84 Cooper Institute address (Lincoln), 177–78 Corax, 272 courtiers, 137 courtroom dramas, 249–50 Crassus, Marcus Licinius in Cicero’s De oratore, 45–50 in Cicero’s De re publica, 53 in First Triumvirate, 42 Crichton, Michael, 229 critics, rhetorical. See rhetorical critics Critique of Judgment (Kant), 274, 278 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 261, 274, 278 Cronon, William, 240, 244 crowds and the carnivalesque, 195–97 early-nineteenth-century attitude toward, 192 feminization of, 219–20 mobs, 192, 196, 206, 210 as promiscuous, 195 Cynics, 268, 272, 275 “Dangers of the Nation, The” (Garrison), 171 Davis, Mike, 292 Dawes, Thomas, 166 De analogia (Julius Caesar), 43 Declaration of Independence, 100, 156 decorum. See propriety; appropriateness Defoe, Daniel, 196 De inventione (Cicero), 36, 40–41, 52, 59, 61 democracy, 203, 209 Demosthenes, 47 De officiis (Cicero), 36, 39, 309 De oratore (Cicero), 41–51 balance between theory and practice in, 55 De re publica as companion piece to, 52, 53 as dialogue, 43
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 328
328
De oratore (Cicero) (continued) Manilius and Scipio in, 54 medieval knowledge of, 36 political context of, 42–43 Renaissance influenced by, 36, 43 thesis of, 44 De re publica (Cicero), 51–58 Augustus Caesar and, 60 contemporary political function of, 58 and De oratore, 52, 53 “Dream of Scipio” episode, 52, 57–58 historical setting of, 53 in Middle Ages and Renaissance, 36, 52 as not surviving in its entirety, 52 and prudence as calculated self-interest, 62 n. 13 structure of, 54 Victorinus on, 41 Derrida, Jacques, 101, 115 Descartes, René, 99, 106, 113, 116, 260, 313 detective tales, 245, 247 Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze (Guicciardini), 147, 148 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume), 106 Diamond, Peter, 21 Dickinson, John, 150–53, 154, 155, 164, 180 n. 13 Diderot, Denis, 101 Dillard, Annie, 240, 244 Diogenes, 271 Discourses on Livy (Machiavelli) dedication of, 89 in development of pluralism, 67 in history of prudence, 86 imitation of necessity in, 76–81 partisans of the past attacked in, 74 real versus notional possibilities in, 73–74 Douglas, Stephen, 176 Douglass, Frederick, 177 Down the Long Hills (L’Amour), 232, 245 Dunn, John, 311 “Dutchman’s Flat” (L’Amour), 238, 239 easterns (martial-arts movies), 238, 242 Eco, Umberto, 284 n. 12 ecology. See environmentalists Elkins, Stanley, 157 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 317 n. 25 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 127, 316 n. 23
.
Index
emotions, 28 n. 22 emulation, 175, 187 n. 93 Enlightenment, the. See also Scottish Enlightenment characteristics of, 260 concept of prudence as under threat in, ix, 21, 99–103, 230–31 Lyotard on failure of, 101, 267 on natural and moral philosophy, 104 Ennius, Quintus, 37–39 environmentalists ecological prudence, 292–93 on margins, 251, 252–53 the path as trope of, 244 and place, 247 and prudential character, 240–42 Epistulae ad Quintum Fratrem (Cicero), 42, 63 n. 38 Erasmus, Desiderius, 28 n. 24, 318 n. 40 Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (Reid), 114 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Reid), 111–12, 119 essentialism, 101 Esteva, Gustavo, 316 n. 19 ethos, 264, 265, 270, 275–76, 277–78 etiquette columns, 248 Euben, J. Peter, 94 n. 21 Fabius Maximus, Quintus, 38–39 factions, 77–78, 83–84, 87, 88 fairs, 196–97, 198, 202 Farr, John, 133 Federalist era, 196 federalists, 160–63, 165–66, 185 n. 63 Field, Samuel, 165 Finkelman, Paul, 183 nn. 50, 52 Fisher, Jeanne Y., 224 n. 87 Fleischacker, Samuel, 121 n. 16 Fliegelman, Jay, 175 foresight, 37, 83, 252, 301 fortuna, 77, 80, 84, 93 n. 14, 148 Foucault, Michel, 101, 315 n. 10 Franklin, Benjamin, 166–67 Free Enquirer, The (periodical), 194–95, 209, 211–14 Freud, Sigmund, 302 friendship, 302, 319 n. 45 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 264, 290–91, 313
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 329
Index
Galba, Servius, 46 Gallagher, Shaun, 279, 315 n. 9 Galston, William A., 318 n. 38 Gandhi, Mahatma, 265 Gaonkar, Dilip, 145 Garnet, Henry Highland, 177, 178 Garrison, William Lloyd, 170–71, 185 n. 71, 186 nn. 79, 82, 83 Garver, Eugene on ambiguity, 183 n. 52 on emotions and appropriateness, 181 n. 28 and grounded critical readings, 145 on imitating necessity, 295 on Machiavelli and Descartes, 313 on Machiavellian prudence, 21, 149 on modernity’s logics of action, 260 and performative prudence, 300–301, 318 n. 41 on persuasion on politics of opportunism, 182 n. 38 on politics of principle, 266 on prudence as always threatened by defeat, 178 on Renaissance political thought and prudence, 147 on rhetoric and politics, 26 n. 8 on shifts in circumstances, 180 n. 20 stoic prudence of, 292 on superfluous proclamation of moralizing principles, 186 n. 79 on unreflective imitation, 187 n. 92 Gellner, Ernest, 95 n. 30, 96 n. 32 Gerry, Elbridge, 158, 163 Goldberg, Sander M., 62 n. 17 Gorgias, 272, 276, 279 Grant, George, 265 “great men” conception of history, 265 Gregory, James, 105 Grey, Zane, 242, 250 Guicciardini, Francesco, 95 n. 27, 147–48, 153, 154 Haber, Honi Fern, 276–77, 279 Habermas, Jürgen, 261, 268, 269, 280, 284 n. 6 habituation, 9, 19 Hacking, Ian, 118 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 195 Hamilton, Alexander, 160 Hardball (Matthews), 234–37, 243
.
329
Hargrove, Erwin, 179 n. 6, 321 n. 63 Hariman, Robert, 23–24, 179 nn. 7, 10, 191–92, 221 nn. 2, 6 Harris, John, 133 Hauerwas, Stanley, 249 Heath, William, 166 Hegel, G. W. F., 72, 231, 237 Heidegger, Martin, 291, 315 n. 10 Heimert, Alan, 181 n. 25 Henry, Patrick, 166, 177 hermeneutics, 264–65, 270–71, 295 heuristics, 260 history Burke on historical knowledge, 142 “great men” conceptions of, 265 for Marxism, 261 Renaissance on learning from, 71 Romans on lessons of, 70, 92 n. 3 Hobbes, Thomas, 72, 102, 247–48 Howard, Simeon, 181 n. 24 Howitt, Mary, 214–15 human sciences, 2, 18, 24, 103–4, 287–88 Hume, David Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 106 and the Enlightenment project, 101, 103 on ideas, 106 on Reid, 111 Reid on, 105, 106–7, 110, 117, 119 and Reid’s account of first principles, 114 and religion, 105, 106–7, 121 n. 24 A Treatise of Human Nature, 103, 105, 106, 121 n. 26 on two approaches to science of man, 103–4 Hutcheson, Francis, 103, 104 idealism, 299 ideas, theory of, 106, 116 Illich, Ivan, 316 n. 19 imitation. See also emulation as central term for Renaissance, 71 Clay on imitating the Founders, 175 of necessity for Machiavelli, 76–81, 82–83, 84, 88, 295 Pericles’ speech as model for, 13 prudence and paradoxes of, 13, 70–76 Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, An (Reid), 110, 111 instrumentalism, 83, 260 Iredell, James, 166
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 330
330
.
Index
Isocrates, viii, 27 n. 16, 29 n. 27, 316 n. 18
Kuhn, Thomas, 249
Jackson, Wes, 240 Jacksonian period ambivalence toward the collective during, 192 as carnivalesque, 196 physical segregation of women during, 200–201 women and the carnivalesque during, 197–201 women in political arena during, 202–5 Fanny Wright as speaker and critic, 209–18 James, William, 93 n. 16 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 225 n. 91 Jasinski, James, 22, 221 n. 2 Jay, John, 160 Jefferson, Thomas, 156, 162–63, 184 n. 61, 209 Joachim, H. H., 29 n. 25 Johnson, Nan, 221 n. 6 Jones, Paula, 308 judgments, 248–50 juris prudentia, 37 Just Gaming (Lyotard), 274, 275, 276, 278 justice, Lyotard on, 271–73, 275, 280
Laelius, Gaius in Cicero’s De oratore, 46 in Cicero’s De re publica, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 65 n. 65 as “the Wise,” 40 L’Amour, Louis Down the Long Hills, 232, 245 “Dutchman’s Flat,” 238, 239 judgment in works of, 250 The Tall Stranger, 246 Lanham, Richard A., 29 n. 28 Lansing, 158 Larmore, Charles, 114, 115 Leff, Michael, 145 legal thrillers, 249–50 Leopold, Aldo, 240, 292 Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania (Dickinson), 150–53 “Letters from the Federal Farmer, The,” 159–60 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (Burke) argument of, 134–41 background of, 133–34 discourse of virtue in, 22, 128–30 implicit theory of prudence in, 130–32 as party document, 139 as rhetorical performance, 133–34 Levine, Lawrence W., 206 Lewinsky, Monica, scandal, 306–11 Lewis, Jan, 156 liberalism appearing to act liberally while acting from necessity, 82–83, 84 conservative and liberal commentators compared, 321 n. 60 and factions, 78 indifference to communal values of, 31 n. 41 pluralism associated with, 21, 67, 69 and prudence as personal agency, 305 limits language of prudence trafficking in, 296 modernity seeing as temporary, 24 necessary for good life, 2 Pericles’ sensitivity to, 10–11 and pluralism, 78 of prudence, 252 Lincoln, Abraham, 176, 177–78, 184 nn. 55, 61, 265
Kahn, Victoria, 4, 26 n. 6, 93 n. 14, 145, 147 kairos, 142, 171, 179 n. 11, 221 n. 5, 274 Kammen, Michael, 168 Kane, Francis, 188 n. 99 Kant, Immanuel Critique of Judgment, 274, 278 Critique of Practical Reason, 261, 274, 278 in the Enlightenment project, 100–102 Lyotard and, 268, 272, 274, 276, 278, 280 and philosophical discourse of prudence, 313 on prudence, 101–2, 230–31 and Reid, 111, 114, 122 n. 38 self-interest subordinated by, ix on synthetic judgments, 284 n. 12 Kapuscinski, Ryszard, 191–92 Kendall, Kathleen Edgerton, 224 n. 87 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 180 n. 13 King, Stephen, 251 Kirk, Russell, 130 Knupfer, Peter B., 187 n. 94 Kraditor, Aileen S., 186 nn. 82, 83
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 331
Index
Livy, 30 n. 40, 38, 184 n. 61 Locke, John, 106, 138 Lopez, Barry, 240, 244 Lovejoy, Elijah P., 169–70 Lowi, Theodore, 237 Lyotard, Jean-François, 259–85 and Aristotle, 23, 266, 268, 269, 270, 271, 274, 275, 276, 278 and community, 280–83 constitutive model of ethical performance in, 260 on the Enlightenment, 101, 267 and Gadamer’s bourgeois prudence, 291, 315 n. 9 Just Gaming, 274, 275, 276, 278 on justice, 271–73, 275, 280 and Kant, 268, 272, 274, 276, 278, 280 as postmodern, 267–68, 271, 276 The Postmodern Condition, 266 prudence as fundamental concept for, 266 on prudence without hermeneutics, 270–71 and radical rhetoricity, 276–80 as returning to Greek thought, 268–69 on science of politics as impossible, 263 on speech acts, 269 two moments of prudence for, 273–76 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 67–97. See also Discourses on Livy; Prince, The and audacity/accommodation antithesis, 147, 148 and calculative prudence, 299 and Christian morality, 72–73, 92 n. 8 Ciceronian tradition deconstructed by, viii civic action as middle way for, 21 on deceiving the people, 81–83 on factions, 77–78, 83–84, 87 imitation as central term for, 71 on incommensurability of ultimate values, 67–68 as limited by his own rhetorical situation, 91 moderation rejected by, 86–87 as no liberal, 69 and normative prudence, 299 and pedagogical discourse of prudence, 313 on the people making correct judgments, 81, 93 n. 18
.
331
and pluralism, 67–70, 71 and prudence as a practice, 294 relativism rejected by, 75–76, 90 stories used by, 243, 245 and theorizing about prudence, 230, 231, 253 n. 5 westerns compared with, 239–40 MacIntyre, Alasdair After Virtue, 26 n. 11, 265, 274 on character and prudence, 241–42 on Enlightenment’s failed project, 100–101 on external and internal goods, 295 on modernity identifying goods, 260 modernity renounced by, 259 on prudence and narrative, 249 on republican education, 240 Maclaurin, Colin, 104 Madison, James, 160–63, 164, 173, 182 n. 40, 185 n. 63, 209 “Maiden Speech, The” (story), 201 Maier, Pauline, 180 n. 22 Mandela, Nelson, 265 Manilius, Manius, 54 margins, 250–53 marketplaces, 196–97, 198, 202 martial-arts movies (easterns), 238, 242 Martin, Judith (Miss Manners), 248 Martin, Luther, 159, 164, 183 n. 53 Marxism, 261 Mason, George, 158 Matthews, Christopher, 234–37, 243 May, Todd, 281, 282 Maynard, Malichi, 165 McKitrick, Eric, 157 memorial petition, 166–67 Menedemus, 46–47 metanarratives, 267, 273, 274, 282 metis, 293, 316 nn. 17, 18 Mill, John Stuart, 78 Miss Manners (Judith Martin), 248 mobs, 192, 196, 206, 210 moderation, 86–87, 132, 152, 155, 173, 304 modernity Aristotelian prudence as retreat from, 271 growing disenchantment with, 259 limits of, 260–62 limits seen as temporary in, 24 as living without the virtues, 1–2 as “monotheistic” for Lyotard, 268 ontology and epistemology of, 260–61
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 332
332
modernity (continued) prudence and, 14–20 prudence requiring an overcoming of, 259–60 representation and subjectivity as axes of, 18–19, 31 n. 42 subject-independence as hallmark of, 263 valorization of prudence in, 289 on value, 261 monarchies, as relativist, 79, 80 Montaigne, 95 n. 27 Morgenthau, Hans J., 30 n. 33 Morris, Gouverneur, 163, 164 Mott, Lucretia, 214–15 “Murder of Lovejoy, The” (Phillips), 169–70 Nagel, Thomas, 317 n. 27 nationalism, 88, 90, 95 n. 28 necessity artificial, 82, 83, 86 Cicero on, 94 n. 23 Machiavelli on imitation of, 76–81, 82–83, 84, 88, 295 making a virtue of, 83, 87–88 Nelson, John, 23, 292–93, 314 neopagan morality, Machiavelli on Christianity versus, 72–76, 79–81, 84–85, 87–90, 93 n. 15, 95 n. 27 Newton, Isaac, 104, 109, 110 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), viii, 39, 61, 259 nodular self, 304 nonlinear systems, 230 normative prudence, 298–99 Oakeshott, Michael, 99–100, 120 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie, 180 nn. 15, 18 Oravec, Christine, 22–23 Owen, Robert, 209 Owen, Robert Dale, 194, 209, 213 pagans Lyotard and, 268, 270, 272, 273, 275, 276, 278, 282, 283 Machiavelli on Christianity versus neopagan morality, 72–76, 79–81, 84–85, 87–90, 93 n. 15, 95 n. 27 Paine, Thomas, 155–56 Parel, Anthony, 96 n. 32 parties, political, 139–41 pathetic fallacy, 246
.
Index
paths, 244–46 Patterson, William, 158 Paul, St., 10, 28 n. 24 Peloponnesian War, 7–14 Perelman, Chaim, 180 nn. 15, 18 perfectionism, 73 performative prudence, viii, 3, 20–21, 27 n. 16, 273, 278, 300–301 Pericles, 7–14, 27 n. 17, 29 n. 25, 320 n. 57 Phillips, Wendell, 169–70, 172, 173, 177, 186 n. 77, 187 n. 93 Philosophical Society of Aberdeen, 106, 110 philosophy. See also Aristotle; Hume, David; Plato; Sophists becoming a private pursuit, 119 Burke on the philosopher in action, 129–30 Cynics, 268, 272, 275 the Enlightenment on natural and moral, 104 philosophical discourse of prudence, 313 Plato separating rhetoric and, 41, 46, 70 Reid’s laws for the practice of, 105–10 Socrates, 27 n. 17, 43, 51, 262 Stoicism, 107, 292 phronesis. See also prudence Cicero equating with prudentia, 39–40, 61 in classical rhetoric, 3–4, 220 n. 1 and Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, 264 as historical term for prudence, 3 Kant rejecting Aristotelian, 101–2 the proper displacing, 219 and Adam Smith’s use of “judgment,” 121 n. 16 phronimos, 7, 19, 29 n. 28, 271, 275, 279 physical sciences, 90 Pinckney, C. C., 158, 163 Pitkin, Hannah Fenichel, 94 n. 24 place, 247–48 Plato Aristotle’s ontology of the contingent contrasted with, 262 in Cicero’s De oratore, 43 and Cicero’s use of prudentia, 40 Demosthenes and, 47 as inventing “rhetoric,” 70 philosophy and rhetoric separated by, 41, 46, 70 on prudence as cardinal virtue, vii–viii
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 333
Index
Plautus, 40 pluralism Aristotle as pluralist for Lyotard, 270 for avoiding relativism, 78–80 civic republicanism as, 70 competitive, 86–91 factions and, 77–78, 83, 88 liberalism associated with, 21, 67, 69 Machiavelli in development of, 67–70, 71 our limits as requiring, 78 realism and, 87 republics as pluralist, 79–80, 87 rhetoric and prudence and, 71, 75, 87 plurality, 298 Pocock, J. G. A., 146, 147–48, 176, 179 n. 11, 182 n. 40 polis, 264, 270, 271, 272, 273, 275, 277–78 politics for bourgeois prudence, 291 Burke on parties, 139–41 as dependent on realism, 19 factions, 77–78, 83–84, 87, 88 Lyotard on, 263, 267, 269–70, 271–72, 274, 276–80 modernity’s ontology and epistemology and, 261 of principle, 266 principles of, 232–39 prudence as a practice, 293–97 women in Jacksonian political arena, 202–5 Pollan, Michael, 240–41, 242–43, 244, 247, 251 Pompey, 42, 58 popular culture detective tales, 245, 247 horror fiction, 251 legal thrillers, 249–50 martial-arts movies (easterns), 238, 242 prudence as republican politics in America, 229–57 science fiction, 251, 252 westerns, 238, 239–40, 245, 250 possibilities, real and notional, 71–73, 85, 86 Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard), 266 postmodernism as drawing on traditions that modernism has suppressed, 2 on the Enlightenment project, 101 environmentalism and, 240 Lyotard as postmodern, 267–68, 271, 276
.
333
Lyotard on prudence, 259–85 Lyotard’s definition of, 267 on margins, 251 postmodern prudence, 312–14 prudence articulating a version of, 4, 20 in recovery of concept of prudence, 189, 230, 259 Prakash, Madhu Suri, 316 n. 19 praxis, 298 preaching, by women, 197–98 presidential studies, 306 Prince, The (Machiavelli) in development of pluralism, 67 in history of prudence, 86 on imitating virtù virtuously, 81, 93 n. 17 imitation of originals as animating, 76 and performative tradition of prudence, 301 political principles in, 235–37 principles, 232–39 property, 247–48 propriety (decorum) aspects of, 221 n. 2 collective dimension of, 190 and conformity, 221 n. 6 deceptive potential of, 190 feminization of in nineteenth century, 190–91 foresight and, 83 Miss Manners and, 248 and performative tradition of prudence, 301 and real versus notional possibility, 71 relation to prudence, 189–90, 219–20, 246–48 and timeliness, 221 n. 5 women and, 22–23, 189–225 Fanny Wright as alternative model of, 215–17, 224 n. 87 Protagoras, 271 prudence aesthetics and prudential judgment, 249 in American constitutional convention, 157–67 in American revolutionary agitation, 149–57 in antebellum American controversies, 145–88 Aristotelian, 261–62, 263, 264, 265, 266, 299 audacity and accommodation as rival strategies of, 147–49
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 334
334
prudence (continued) and audience, 219–20, 305–12 avant-garde theories of, 292 and balance, 8, 11, 152, 218, 261, 301, 304 bourgeois theories of, 291 Burke’s conception of, 127–44 calculative tradition of, viii, 3, 277, 278, 299–300 character associated with, 6, 9–10, 19, 220 n. 1, 239–42, 302–5 in Cicero’s works, 40–60 classical, 4–14 cleverness distinguished from, 7, 27 n. 14 conservatism associated with, 10, 15, 31 n. 41, 176, 296, 305 contingency and, viii, 5, 12, 86, 103, 229, 298 contrasting political programs appealing to, 18, 31 n. 41 cultural change and valorization of, 289 dictionary definition of, vii and ecology, 292–93 the Enlightenment as threat to concept of, ix, 21, 99–103, 230–31 as expediency for Kant, 102 hermeneutic, 264–65 historical referents of, 288–90 historical terms for, 3 judgments, 248–50 knowledge of particulars in, 6, 27 n. 13 limits of, 252 as link between various sciences, 4 Lyotard on, 259–85 in Machiavelli, 67–97 and margins, 250–53 and modernity, 2, 14–20, 259–60, 289 in nineteenth-century America, 218–19 normative tradition of, 298–99 in ordinary people, 13, 29 n. 29 and paradoxes of imitation, 13, 70–76 pedagogical discourse of, 312–13 performative tradition of, viii, 3, 12–13, 20–21, 27 n. 16, 273, 278, 300–301 philosophical discourse of, 313 and pluralism, 75 postmodern prudence, 312–14 as a practice, 293–97 premodern views on, vii–ix and principles, 232–39 principles and circumstances aligned by, 128, 134
.
Index
propriety’s relation to, 189–90, 219–20, 246–48 and realism, 15–16, 18, 29 n. 25, 30 n. 33 refitting for our time, 2, 293 in Reid’s philosophy of common sense, 99–123 Renaissance as high-water mark for concept of, 21, 230 republicanism associated with, 230 as republican politics in American popular culture, 229–57 revival of interest in, ix, 189, 220, 259 and rhetoric, 3–4, 25 nn. 4, 27 n. 16, 71, 75, 86, 87, 128, 131, 230, 275, 297, 305, 315 n. 10 among the Romans after Cicero, 61 among the Romans before Cicero, 37–40 in rules and exemplary individuals, 7, 13, 27 n. 15, 29 n. 29 as second nature, 240 seen as simplistic and vernacular, 2 self-interest and public interest coordinated in, 12 as situational, 229, 231, 244 in slavery debate, 168–76 and social engineering, 17–18 stoic approach to, 292 stories for exemplifying, 243–46 structure of, 297–302 substantial theorizing about, 229–32 systematic theory of as impossible, 19, 31 n. 43, 229 theoretical approaches to, 290–93 as timely action, 141–43, 152, 171 women becoming associated with, 218 “Prudence” (Emerson), 316 n. 23 public, the bourgeois repression of the carnivalesque in, 217–18 in Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, 306–11 formation of prudential, 311–12 nineteenth-century American attitudes toward, 192 women as epitome of public behavior, 193 women excluded from public sphere, 191–92 women in nineteenth-century political audience, 192–93 purpose, 301 Quartering Act, 150
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 335
Index
Rahe, Paul, 185 n. 63 Raimondi, E., 94 n. 20 Randolph, Edmund Jennings, 158 Rankenian Club, 104–5 rational choice theory, 319 n. 44 Rawls, John, 93 n. 13, 261 Rawson, Elizabeth, 63 n. 40 Raz, Joseph, 92 n. 6, 96 n. 32 Readings, Bill, 282–83 realism critique of, 15–16 and normative prudence, 299 pluralism and, 87 politics as dependent on, 19 prudence associated with, 15–16, 18, 29 n. 25, 30 n. 33 in Reid, 117 Reid, Thomas, 99–123 as Church of Scotland minister, 121 n. 24 on common sense, 21, 103, 108–9, 110–19 and the Enlightenment, ix, 21 Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, 114 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 111–12, 119 on Hume, 105, 106–7, 110, 117, 119 Hume’s response to, 111 on ideal theory, 106 An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, 110, 111 and Kant, 111, 114, 122 n. 38 laws of practicing philosophy, 105–10 on philosophy and practice, 105, 117–18 on self-evident first principles, 111–15 on teaching moral principles, 115–19 tension in work of, 117, 119 relativism, 75–76, 78–80, 84, 86–87, 90, 260 Renaissance. See also Machiavelli, Niccolò Cicero influencing, viii, 35–36, 43, 61 heritage of republicanism of, 146, 147–49 as high-water mark for concept of prudence, 21, 230 imitation as key in, 71 pedagogical discourse of prudence in, 313 performative tradition of prudence in, 301 valorization of prudence in, 289 republics civic republicanism, 22, 70 as pluralist, 79–80, 87 prudence associated with republicanism, 230
.
335
Renaissance heritage of republicanism, 146, 147–49 republican education, 240 stability of, 82 rhetoric Aristotle’s definition of, 293, 316 n. 18 in Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, 133–34 in Cicero’s Brutus, 58–60 in Cicero’s De inventione, 40–41 in Cicero’s De oratore, 43, 44–51, 63 n. 40 of Dickinson’s protest, 150 Lyotard and radical rhetoricity, 276–80 Machiavelli’s pluralism and, 70 modern denigration of, 230 Plato as inventing “rhetoric,” 70 Plato separating philosophy from, 41, 46, 70 and politics, 26 n. 8 prudence and, 3–4, 25 nn. 4, 27 n. 16, 71, 75, 86, 87, 128, 131, 230, 275, 297, 305, 315 n. 10 Reid’s rhetoric of common sense, 115–19 the rhetorical presidency, 306, 307 and virtue for Burke, 129 women and Jacksonian political, 203–5 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 40 rhetorical critics in construction of female audience, 193–94 women and, 205–8 Riders of the Purple Sage (Grey), 242, 250 Robinson, Donald L., 183 nn. 51, 52, 185 n. 63 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 240 Roland, Madame, 212 role, 301 romanticism, 267 Rose, Ernestine, 214 rules of thumb, 233 Rutledge, John, 164 Ryan, Mary P., 191 sapienta Cicero equating prudentia with, 39–40, 41, 44–45, 49, 50–51, 59 in Roman empire, 60 in Roman usage before Cicero, 37 Scaevola, Quintus Mucius, 45, 47, 53 Schumpeter, Joseph, 85
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 336
336
science advancement of physical, 90 aesthetics in, 249 in denigration of rhetoric, 230 the Enlightenment on natural and moral philosophy, 104 human sciences, 2, 18, 24, 103–4, 287–88 Lyotard on, 267 and modernity’s ontology and epistemology, 260 as normative, 115 science fiction, 251, 252 Scipio Aemilianus, 52–53, 54 Scott, James C., 16, 17, 292, 293, 316 nn. 17, 18 Scottish Enlightenment. See also Reid, Thomas and Christianity, 104–5, 121 n. 24 and philosophical discourse of prudence, 313 prudence retained in, 21 the Rankenian Club, 104–5 on two approaches to science of man, 103–4 Second Great Awakening, 197–98 Second Nature (Pollan), 240–41, 242–43, 244, 247, 251 self. See also self-interest prudence and the, 302–5 Self, Lois, 3 self-help books, 237–38, 255 n. 32 self-interest of gardeners, 241 Kant on, ix Pericles on, 11, 12 prudence and, 14, 16, 37, 303–4 in realism, 15 Seneca, 61 Sennett, Richard, 198 Servilius Geminus, Gnaeus, 37–38 Shaftesbury, third earl of, 116, 118 Sherman, Roger, 166 Sidney, Sir Philip, 76–77 slavery in debate over U.S. Constitution, 163–67, 174–75, 176–77, 182 n. 45, 183 nn. 52, 53 idioms of audacity and accommodation in debate over, 146, 168–78 women compared with slaves, 193
.
Index
World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, 214, 215 slave trade, 163–64 Smith, Adam, ix, 101, 103, 114, 121 nn. 16, 24 Smith, Christopher, 26 n. 9 Smith, Kimberly, 180 n. 13 Snyder, Gary, 240, 244, 248 social engineering, 15, 16–18 social theory, 261 Socrates, 27 n. 17, 43, 51, 262 Sophists and Lyotard, 268, 270, 272, 274, 275, 276, 278 and Machiavelli, 86 and prudence’s range, vii on speculative philosophy, 19 versus Platonic philosophy, 70 speakers, women as, 197–98, 209–10 Speech on American Taxation (Burke), 133 Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies (Burke), 133 Speech to the Electors of Bristol (Burke), 129 Spooner, Lysander, 176–77 Stallybrass, Peter, 195, 196, 198 Stamp Act, 149, 150, 151 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 214 Starr, Ken, 308 statistics, 263 Steele, Richard, 116 Stewart, Alvan, 176–77 Stewart, Dugald, 123 n. 49 Stewart, Maria W., 187 n. 93 Stoicism, 107, 292 stories, 243–46 Storing, Herbert J., 183 n. 52, 184 n. 61 Strauss, Leo, 315 n. 13 Struever, Nancy, 93 n. 15 style, 249, 297 sustainability, 296–97 Tacitus, 61, 80 Tall Stranger, The (L’Amour), 246 telos, 271 Thomas Aquinas, St., viii–ix, 36, 294 Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (Burke), 129, 140 three-fifths provision, 163, 183 n. 50 Thucydides, 7, 8, 13, 28 n. 21, 92 n. 3 Tiffany, Joel, 176–77
Hariman/book/new/new
1/17/03
2:56 PM
Page 337
Index
timely action Burke on prudence as, 141–43, 152 Fanny Wright’s, 214 Garrison on, 171 kairos, 142, 171, 179 n. 11, 221 n. 5, 274 and Machiavellian virtù, 179 n. 11 and propriety, 221 n. 5 Tonkovich, Nicole, 195 Townshend duties, 150 tracking, 238, 240, 242, 245, 255 n. 34 tradition, progressive potential of, 266 trailing, 238, 240, 242, 245, 255 n. 34 Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume), 103, 105, 106, 121 n. 26 Tripp, Linda, 306, 308 tropes, 242–43 Turkey, 84 Turnbull, George, 104 unintended consequences, 68, 78, 93 n. 14 United States Constitution idioms of audacity and accommodation in debate over, 146, 157–67 on slavery, 163–67, 174–75, 176–77, 182 n. 45, 183 nn. 52, 53 Uyl, Douglas J. Den, 26 n. 11, 303, 319 n. 44 Vico, Giambattista, 230, 254 n. 5 Victorinus, 41 Virginia proposal, 158 virtù as audacity, 147–48 Machiavelli on imitating, 75, 77, 78, 81 as timely action, 179 n. 11 virtue ethics, ix, 26 n. 11, 28 n. 22, 31 n. 43 virtues Aristotle on prudence as a virtue, 262, 264, 270, 271 discourse of virtue in Burke, 22, 128–30 modern age as living without, 1–2 as not regularly leading to success, 71 as not teachable, 70 prudence integrating, 6 reactionary politics associated with, 2 rhetoric and virtue for Burke, 129
.
337
Sophists making technique of, 70 in westerns and easterns, 238 Ward, John, 41 Weber, Max, 184 n. 60, 301 Webster, Daniel, 168, 184 n. 55, 199, 204, 205, 207–8 Weinsheimer, Joel, 123 n. 47, 133 West, Samuel, 157, 181 n. 24 westerns, 238, 239–40, 245, 250 Whitaker, Nathaniel, 154–55 White, Allon, 195, 196, 198 Wiecek, William, 176, 183 nn. 49, 52 Wilkins, Augustus S., 44 Williams, Bernard, 71, 72, 73, 85, 92 n. 9 Wilson, James, 158, 163, 164–65 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 269 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 214 women excluded from public sphere, 191–92 in nineteenth-century political audience, 192–93, 210–11, 214 physical segregation of, 200–201 preaching by, 197–98 and propriety, 22–23, 189–225 prudence becoming associated with, 218 rhetorical critics and, 205–8 as speakers, 197–98, 209–10 Wong, David B., 85 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention (1840), 214, 215 Worster, David, 244 Wright, Fanny, 209–18 as alternative model of propriety, 215–17, 224 n. 87 assessment of, 215–18 as drawing crowds, 209–10 as Free Enquirer coeditor, 194, 195, 209, 211–14 as lecturer, 209–11 Nashoba, Tennessee, experiment of, 209, 211 and women’s suffrage movement, 214, 224 n. 87 Zabzebski, Linda Trinkaus, 320 n. 49
