A Discourse on Statesmanship
Schaefer, David L.
Book Review/David L. Schaefer The Corruption of the Public Spirit The aims of A Discourse on Statesmanship are threefold, according to the author: first, "to generate a new school of...
...While Eidelberg is strongly critical of Charles Beard's view that the Constitution was an oligarchic document designed to advance the economic interests of the few, the main thrust of his argument is directed against Martin Diamond's contention that the American regime was from the outset essentially democratic, and against the claim of the "Straussian school" (in which Diamond is numbered) that the Founding Fathers "lowered the ends" of political life in accordance with the teachings of John Locke...
...Drawing extensively on The Federalist as well as on other writings of the Founders, Eidelberg, who is Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Dallas, mounts a powerful case against the purely democratic interpretation of the Constitution...
...Was not the era of rampant economic laissez faire, to which Eidelberg presents Wilson's teaching as an over-reaction, facilitated by the Founders' own emphasis on the promotion of commerce...
...Fenwick did not have time to em)ellish her speech with detail, but the ransfer of power in Lithuania was an orierly one...
...He is less successful, however, in establishing that the American regime can adequately be understood as an Aristotelian "polity," and in attempting to refute the view that the Founders lowered the goal of political life as compared with the teachings of the premodern classical and Christian thinkers...
...This corruption has subsequently been increased by other intellectual developments, notably the propagation of "religious indifferentism" and moral relativism, in the twentieth century...
...The Soviet Union had clearly become Lithuania's basic reality...
...While admitting that The Federalist emphasizes "the passions of self-interest" to a degree unparalleled in Aristotle's Politics, Eidelberg notes that Aristotle did provide a comparable discussion of these passions in his Rhetoric, and suggests that The Federalist, as a work of political rhetoric, ought rather to be judged against the latter work...
...10011 Shouldn't you be reading this intelligent quarterly edited by Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer...
...He supports this contention with a trenchant analysis of Wilson's writings, beginning with his student years, that reveals the remarkable extent to which Wilson pursued a consistent political "strategy" throughout his lifetime, aimed at transforming the government from an impartial protector of men's equal rights to the engine by which their economic and social condition might be equalized...
...But this argument fails to take account of the fact that The Federalist is a public exposition of the principles of a particular regime, rather than merely a practical manual for statesmen and orators...
...Eidelberg's scattered account of this synthesis is too hazy to constitute a demonstration that it is either necessary or possible...
...Russia oc:upied Lithuania on June 15, 1940, conlucted rigged elections in July, and the text month incorporated it into the Soviet Jnion...
...These are observable violations of personal freedom...
...EMINENTOES (continued from page 2) the subject of one of Mrs...
...The long suffering of the Lithuanians, however, might be nearing an end...
...The very principle of "limited government," as propagated by the FounA Discourse on Statesmanship: The Design and Transformation of the American Polity by Paul Eidelberg University of Illinois $16.00 ders, is likely to have an important influence in shaping the views of the citizens who live under it concerning the goals of the common life...
...Whatever the causes of the decay of American statesmanship, we may agree that Eidelberg has identified a centra...
...he does not sufficiently consider what elements in the original structure of the regime may have made this decay possible...
...In 1945-46,145,000 Lithuanians were removed from their homeland, and in 1949 another 60,000 of them were taken to Siberia and northern Russia...
...The Nazi-Soviet nonaggression )act was signed on August 23, 1939, and n October the Red Army garrisoned sev!ral Lithuanian localities...
...since then, Mr...
...Eidelberg presents Wilson's rhetoric, and the subsequent decline in the theory and practice of American politics, as an abrupt break with the Founders' political teaching and intention...
...Within that year eighty thousand Lithuanians managed to reach the West...
...Mrs...
...Eidelberg's failure to give adequate consideration to the public effects of the Founders' teaching, on which the Constitution was based, constitutes a second defect in his quasi-Aristotelian interpretation of that document...
...Chicago is the largest urban center in the state of Illinois, which is somewhere in the Midwest...
...and .third, "to advance a new interpretation of American history...
...second, to facilitate "a synthesis of classical and modern political science...
...I have no doubt," Mrs...
...Soviet control has Seen complete over news and emigra-ion...
...The only remedy for our condition, Eidelberg believes, is the resurgence of a statesmanship rivaling that of the Founders...
...It is difficult to determine the meaning of statements like Eidelberg's remark that "[t]he measure of the individual is the intensity of his relevance for his society," and to recognize in them an improvement over, say, Aristotle's political science...
...While all statesmen have made use of men's self-interested passions, The Federalist gives these passions a public respectability and suggests that their channeling through the right kind of institutions can greatly reduce the need for virtue in both statesmen and citizens...
...In the first place, the Founders explicitly aimed, in adopting a written constitution, to limit the scope of government...
...This subscription will begin with the next issue...
...To be sure, as Eidelberg notes, Aristotle did not expect a "polity," in practice, to secure much more for the mass of its citizens than the satisfaction of these basic bodily needs...
...And (as Eidelberg partly concedes), must not the principle of absolute religious toleration ultimately soften men's religious attachments, thus contributing to "religious indifferentism" and further unleashing the pursuit of narrow self-interest...
...A Discourse on Statesmanship is a thoughtful and thought-provoking work of scholarship, well worth the attention of all serious students of politics, philosophy, and history...
...In July 1944, power was transferred back to the Soviet Union, whose army slaughtered much of the native population, this time without keeping a count...
...Yet during the 1945-53 period tens of thousands of young Lithuanians were reported to be hiding in the country's forests...
...The hypothetical quesTHE PUBLIC INTEREST • BOX 542 • OLD CHELSEA POST OFFICE • NEW YORK, N.Y...
...34 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1979 problem of our times, to which few political scientists have devoted attention...
...This should be one of the goals of our discussions of detente with the Soviet Union...
...Eidelberg contends that Woodrow Wilson, more than any other of ourstatesmen, was responsible for the alteration of the American "polity" into a democracy...
...but Eidelberg never works out his own doctrine of "nonfinalistic teleology" sufficiently to show that it represents a superior or even a meaningful alternative...
...On the night of June 14, 1941, '0,455 members of the Lithuanian inteligentsia (i.e...
...Book Review/David L. Schaefer The Corruption of the Public Spirit The aims of A Discourse on Statesmanship are threefold, according to the author: first, "to generate a new school of statesmanship...
...But the Lithuanian mind was clouded by superstition—the nation's majority then being devoutly Roman Catholic (there were exceptions—an embryonic Libertarian movement...
...Fenwick told the House, "that they will again one day achieve self-government...
...In a House speech she reviewed the history of this short-lived republic, concluding -starkly: "In 1940, Russia occupied Lithuania, held a phony election, and in:orporated Lithuania into the USSR...
...Had he moderated his passion and limited his rather grandiose aims, Eidelberg might have written an even better book...
...There were more than five thousand political executions, and an overall disappearance of 45,000 thousand Lithuanians from their homeland...
...Granted that the original Constitution was not simply democratic, did it not place the balance of political power in the hands of the majority, and hence make inevitable over the long run the further democratization of the regime...
...Mrs...
...There may indeed be critical difficulties in the classical as well as the modern views of politics...
...Part I is an account of "the politics of magnanimity" as practiced by the American Founding Fathers, whom Eidelberg presents as models of the statesmanly art...
...Part II describes the way in which the American polity has been transformed from the Founders' plan, under the influence of Woodrow Wilson's "revolutionary rhetoric...
...This was a flight from reality...
...THIthlic Interest Please open the following subscription to THE PUBLIC INTEREST and bill me...
...Eidelberg appears to give insufficient weight to two features of the Constitution, and of the Founders' exposition of its principles, that differentiate it from Aristotle's account of the polity...
...This defect also weakens the otherwise provocative and insightful interpretation that Eidelberg sets forth of the "transformation of the American polity," in Part II of A Discourse on Statesmanship...
...the whole intelligentsia) vere rounded up and sent to Siberia...
...The specific intention of Part I of the Discourse is to demonstrate that the American regime as originally conceived corresponded to the requirements that Aristotle lays down for the best generally practicable regime, the "polity" or mixed government...
...In 1947 more than a thousand of the country's 1,332 surviving priests were sent to Russia, where apparently it was felt they could be of greater use...
...Eidelberg is also occasionally careless with respect to details (John Rawls' "original position" is mislabeled the "ordinary position...
...sixty thousand others were sent to Siberia...
...Less intelligible than this practical intention of Eidelberg's, however, is his theoretical project of bringing about a "synthesis" of ancient and modern political science...
...Interesting as is Eidelberg's analysis of the causes of the American polity's "decay," it is weakened, I have suggested, by the author's exaggeration of the "Aristotelian" character of the Constitution itself...
...Fenwick's study of the basic international realities during her first months in office led her to the view that America's defense posture must be at once responsible and sane...
...Such a consensus is beginning to emerge, particularly in regard to Chicago...
...That month the Nazis invaded, exterminating the country's Jewish population over the next three years...
...We must have a solid capacity for defense," she wrote...
...Speaker, we have heard ittle from Lithuania...
...Aside from the difficulties in Eidelberg's argument that I have mentioned, however, the book ismarred by a doctrinaire and unnecessarily contentious tone (in one of the author's frequent asides, for instance, we are suddenly informed that Iiincidentally, the superabundance of sentimentalism and moral purism in contemporary political oratory is symptomatic of an effeminate age wavering between adolescence and senility...
...The book is divided into two parts...
...By replacing the Founders' "politics of magnanimity" with a "politics of compassion," Eidelberg argues, Wilson corrupted the character of the American public, encouraging a spirit of envy and selfishness instead of industry and public-spiritedness...
...This principle implies, in accordance with the teaching of Locke, that government exists to satisfy the selfish desires of individuals, rather than that the individual (as Aristotle asserts) exists for the sake of the community...
...We must have a clear foreign policy, soundly based on public debate and consensus, about our responsibilities...
...and the corresponding decline in the theory and practice of statesmanship as a result of economic and intellectual "laissez faire" and "religious indifferentism...
...one year $7.50 ^ two years $14.00 Name Address City State Zip 1 -le Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 35...
...Such a statesmanship would not merely resurrect the practices and institutions of the past, however, but would contribute to its "redemption in novel arrangements" based on a synthesis of the classical and modern teachings...
...However broadly one may interpret the powers granted to the three branches, it is clear from the Constitution and The Federalist that the Founders understood the legitimate purposes of government to be primarily the maintenance of domesticorder, security against foreign nations, and the promotion of commercial prosperity...
...Fenwick's major foreign policy addresses...
...But the scope of the government described by Aristotle includes the maintenance of a civil religion and the regulation of the citizens' lives in innumerable ways that are clearly prohibited under the American Constitution...
Vol. 8 • August 1975 • No. 10
