On Modern Tyranny: A Critique of Western Intellectuals
Chiaromonte, Nicola
RECENTLY, CONFRONTED by the renewed repression of intellectual life in the Soviet Union and the rebellious movements in Czechoslovakia and Poland, the following argument has often been...
...Besides, it seems to us that these methods are doubly antiquated: on the one hand, because borrowed from the arsenal of defunct police states, and on the other, since they do not have the character of the systematic terror of the not-too-distant past and are applied to repress more than to crush, they cannot possibly, in the long run, prove to be effective...
...Utopia tends to overestimate these three means and to underestimate social inertia...
...As an extreme example, in Plato's case, "the favorable conditions" are themselves conceived of as absolutely "ideal"— "That which exists solely in our discussions," says Glaucon at the end of the ninth book of The Republic...
...d) is by definition "impossible," that is, incompatible with the present situation and the received and current ideas as to good and evil, just and unjust...
...Strauss continues his discussion by observing that classical political science was based on an idea of perfection, that is, of "how men could live...
...This is the part that wants to live, that resists and, when all is said and done, is the only part that counts...
...Perhaps we have reached this point today...
...Thus he remains uncertain on both counts...
...If we accept the suggestion, it will liberate us from the tyrannical moralism which would want each individual to be a slave of the inhuman obligation of justifying his own thoughts and actions before a nonexistent yet terroristic tribunal of a generic Humanity, raised to the position of an implacable judge over everything and everyone: namely, History, a much more jealous God than the God of the Old Testament...
...On the other hand, not to recog nize how adamant is the set of circumstances with which they have clashed and continue to clash would be foolish, not to say ungen erous...
...while, on the other hand, the "conditions"—favorable or unfavorable—can be corrected and dominated by the "virtue" of the prince...
...And not only this...
...If therefore it is true that the equalitarianism typical of modem industrial society necessarily entails a more or less serious degree of uncontrolled and uncontrollable authority, it is also obvious that authoritarian measures inevitably generate not only oppression and injustice but inequality...
...Against every Utopia, except that of his own opportunistic realism, Machiavelli— Strauss continues—maintains that the question of "how one should live" has no meaning, and what counts is solely the real, ordinary, everyday behavior of men...
...The path seems to be simply the seduction exerted on the individual by a mode of thought whose postulate is that the individual himself as such can now consider himself freed from all teleology or superior intellectual order, equipped with an autonomous awareness not subject to any other authority but that of the solicitations and decisions of his own nature...
...Or drugs...
...One performs miracles [Strauss observes at this point] with the use of syntheses...
...Yet there remains the "mass," that is, the collectivity taken and reduced to the smallest possible common denominator of material as well as moral exigencies...
...in the West we have an "obsolete freedom" accompanied by a rather crude idealization of exotic governments, such as, for example, Maoism...
...it also reflects the point reached, among intellectuals, in their feeling for freedom and their awareness of the fundamental ideals of the "associated" life in society.* * The author uses the phrase "associated life" tosuggest all those gratuitous, spontaneous, friendlyrelations among men in society, outside the framework of the state and often despite the state...
...But, while the mass is an artificial entity artificially maintained, the existence of a minority which believes that there is in man a nucleus that can never be reduced to mechanical manipulation and brutalization is undeniably real...
...And since science gives itself the aim of the conquest of nature and the efficient regulation of human society, it must be diffused and vulgarized— that is, it imposes itself with authority, though without assuming an explicitly dogmatic form, but rather the guise of empirical certainty...
...And, furthermore, does there ever exist a moment in which one "realizes" a new civilization...
...In fact, independence would mean isolation, isolation would mean that one is outside History, flotsam abandoned on the shore of the great currents of events, and therefore by definition in the wrong: dons les tenebres exterieures, as the French phrase effectively puts it...
...This "natural freedom," together with the artificial servitude which is its corollary, signifies also a lack of awareness, a disregard of and obliviousness to that natural and inexorable servitude of man to that which in himself and in his very nature he does not know, will never know, and will never be able to dominate and rule...
...nor even, simply, what the word "society" means...
...This was the ideal which (besides Campanella) animated that fervor of thought which made its appearance around the 16th century and which we call "naturalism...
...But it is also the intellectuals who today follow all the extremisms, whether political, literary, or artistic...
...The observation seems judicious, and it would be worthwhile following it up with others of the same author on the theme of the technocratic futurism of both "capitalist" and "socialist" inspiration...
...For their part, the intellectuals in the West either overlook, or in fact don't even see, what a great fact the resurgence of the demand for freedom is in a situation where it should in theory not be needed any longer, inasmuch as it has been supplanted by "concrete freedom...
...T T o RETURN to Leo Strauss and his distinction between ancient and modem tyranny, and above all between the ancient and modern ways of considering tyranny...
...Received ideas" in this context are also and above all the ideas of social progress, humanitarianism, revolution, the total transformation of the human world with the help of technology and the radical abandonment of all ties with tradition...
...and this simply because by now there was no other principle that could have validity...
...But "freedom" for Russian intellectuals and students, as for Czechs and Poles, means not only freedom of speech, press, and assembly (which in itself would not be little, indeed it would be almost everything...
...But at the same time these intellectuals want to overthrow the so-called capitalist (or neo-capitalist) system, or (as in the case of the progressives and the disciples of absolute efficiency and technical advance) ask for the introduction of social mechanisms maneuvered from on high and calculated by the experts...
...By rediscovering this, they put in question not so much and not only the so-called "socialist" regime, but the very conception of socialism as the overwhelming victory of "Marxism-Leninism" has fixed it in the minds of the majority of people: that is, the idea according to which socialism is reduced to the statification of the economy, and therefore a rigidly centralized political system all the more oppressive insofar as it claims to be striving toward the realization of a universal goal, in fact the unlimited reign of freedom...
...There are only two motives by which men can be compelled to work: personal profit or police terror, and even police terror must be compensated for by a modest tariff of economic stimulus...
...For (and here is the crux of the matter) it is intellectuals—literati in particular, though with a broad participation of the representa tives of high and middle culture—who pre sent the argument that says that the more or less violent revolt now spreading in the West ern countries represents a more advanced NICOLA CHIAROMONTE political movement than the reformism of the countries of the East...
...Here is the contradiction and, with it, the relative weakness of the position of these in tellectuals...
...What does such an intellectual misunderstanding mean...
...One can therefore conclude that, when Polish, Czech, and Russian intellectuals demand freedom of expression and democratic legality and at the same time proclaim themselves socialists but without putting the regime as such in question, they are either performing a realistic act of mental reservation dictated by the intention of challenging the regime on the basis of a principle which the regime itself lays claim to, or—since yielding to their demands cannot occur without shaking the regime to its foundations— they will succeed in obtaining no more than some rather minimal concessions accom panied each time by a more or less severe in tensification of political or police control...
...Let us admit, however, that to us Westerners the sentencing of writers for having written what they felt and thought, the expulsion of professors from their jobs for crimes of opinion, the methods of ideological intimidation and the use of arbitrary police power with which the satellite governments proceed to "put on the brakes"—all these methods produce the spectral effect of a resurrection of the repressive methods common to the absolute monarchies of the 19th century, from the Russian Czars to the Hapsburgs, and from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons...
...In any event, those who simply have a horror of servitude, enslavement, and of the stupidity which accompanies enslavement, do exist...
...But] the distinction between classic profit and collective profit will never be readily understood by the nonascetic individual (who cannot, by definition, form the majority...
...It is therefore also in the name of freedom that the individual can today be made into a slave, and in fact he is...
...Indeed, this last position naturally enjoys greater prestige than the other, and to become identified with it is much more fashionable...
...And one must not take it for granted that they are all, or even in their majority, privileged beings and persons who scorn the vulgar masses...
...The sole condition which the intellectual in the West does not seem, nowadays, to consider attractive is that of independence...
...But at this point, the Utopian optimism of the capitalist or socialist technocrats is confronted with the fact that "the historical inertia of mental habits and behavior is infinitely greater than the inertia of material...
...So one can gloss both Tocqueville and Aron by observing that the contemporary equalitarian regime, even if taken in its purely ideal form, necessarily entails a serious degree of the uncontrollable exercise of authority...
...To conclude this discussion of modern tyranny and the part intellectuals play in it, one might ask what in the end is the principle of authoritarianism, and in what specific form it appears nowadays...
...He starts from the hypothesis that what matters is the fact—the event—and that thought comes afterwards, and it is the thought of the "historian," ex pert at grasping the true significance and true tendency of events, exactly in the sense that the nature of the atom has been recognized by Rutherford and the great physicists who followed him...
...Finally, the examination of this argument also allows us—a far from negligible advantage —to broach the problem of modern tyranny, isolating its specific form and weighing the justifications presented in its support...
...Therefore, Strauss says, today we find ourselves confronted by a tyranny which, thanks to science's conquest of nature (including human nature, which both contemporary psychology and sociology claim to be able to define) can become perpetual and universal, that is to say, can impose its significance— its mode of progressing—once and for all on the subjugated societies...
...The first fact is the organized and centrally directed violence aimed at taking power on the part of a minority either well-prepared or already installed in important centers of the governmental apparatus...
...This holds true not only for Bolshevism but also for Fascism and Nazism as well as the tyrannical aspects of capitalist or democratic governments...
...In brief, Strauss's answer is that this has come about because the situation of culture and contemporary society is such that intellectuals have become the accomplices of tyranny on three counts: first, because modem tyranny is based necessarily on ideology and science...
...In his book On Tyranny (which, in the French edition published by Gallimard in 1954, includes, besides a detailed exegesis of Xenophon'sdialogue Hiero, a very enlightening discussion with Alexander Kojeve, the Left-wing Hegelian philosopher) Leo Strauss demonstrates how impossible it is today to think about politics unless one goes back beyond Machiavellianism and opportunist historicism to the premises of classical thought and the recognition that what characterizes modern tyranny is the fact that "when we were faced by it, we did not recognize it...
...Every opinion that affirms that one thing is better than another: a) implies that there exists an idea of good and not that there is but one idea of it...
...ON MODERN TYRANNY A A T THIS POINT one must ask whether such a method of argumentation does not conceal a very real "comedy of intellectual errors...
...on the contrary, it is necessary to break with tradition, using it as an instrument of technical science...
...To examine it more effectively, it would be best to return to the situation of the intellectuals in the East European countries, that is, the situation of those who, having known in all its severity one of the essential forms of modern tyranny, now reject it either implicitly or explicitly, and yet are considered "reformists" and not "rebels," even when they radically reject the dominant ideology...
...Only conformism always succeeds: the attitude of those who everywhere sniff out the wind of success and avoid at all costs and at every moment the danger of failure and misfortune...
...Now, if one does not start from the totalitarian presupposition, according to which politics is action on men to forcibly transform their relations in line with a specific ideological program, it seems difficult to admit that a political belief—founded as it is by its nature on the relative, on chance, and perhaps even on the "virtue" of one or more individuals—can satisfy a need that concerns the intimate relations between man and the world...
...This freedom, which goes hand in hand with the equally unknown yet incontestable nature of things, cannot be alienated but only humiliated...
...The utmost in the direction of universality that one could expect is, then, an absolute rule of unwise men who would control about half of the globe, the other half being ruled by other unwise men...
...improbable insofar as its realization depended on "the most favorable conditions...
...In the last analysis, politics is conceived at one and the same time as the terrain on which a new vision of life is nourished and ON MODERN TYRANNY the instrument to realize the new civilization that this vision implies...
...And to apply technique efficiently means to treat society as a uniform material to be molded and an energy to be regulated...
...and it is also clear that it indicates countries in which plutocracy, technocratic state control, and democracy coexist in a somewhat confused manner...
...Rather than "obsolete" demands, privileges of the intellectual class, secondary or partial reforms, what seems to be at stake in the countries of the East is a fundamental political protest, even if one can express oneself only in the secrecy of small groups, and even if that protest remains partly veiled by nationalistic motives...
...The facile protest against a "consumers' society" which one enjoys, whose advantages one does not intend to renounce (and to which, moreover, one does not see what the alternative could be once one has accepted the premise of an industrial society) could conceal a mis apprehension involving not only and not so much politics as the very value of life and human works...
...The situation in Eastern Europe, therefore, appears similar to that which classically seems to mark the history of the 19th century...
...There is no one, save for Western intellectuals, who does not see the capital significance of such a demand, which implies a truly new and "global" fact, namely, the rebirth of the problem of pure and simple, and let us also say it, formal freedom, where people had thought it could be replaced by that of the famous "concrete freedoms...
...But lone individuals are the majority...
...The classics...
...And one might add, brains to understand and do not understand...
...And it does not much matter whether the "prince" is actually installed in power or is merely considered the probable successor of the presently reigning prince...
...Translated by RAYMOND ROSENTHAL...
...Of course, throughout history, this is also the part that most often, indeed almost by its very nature, is destined to be defeated...
...What is involved here is a particular conception of freedom, which Tommaso Campanella defined as "the reduc tion of every man to a natural freedom," defined by him also as the reduction of society to a strict order, which also reflected nature since it reflected wisdom and a perfect knowledge of human nature...
...Things being as they are in contemporary society, it would seem that there is no reply to such an objection...
...And this is not only true of the natural sciences but also of the so-called human sciences...
...For this very reason just because it is a question of freedom, the freedom he thinks he owns as if it were a piece of furniture— the Western intellectual, faced by the movement of protest in the countries of Eastern Europe, believes he is watching something already well-known and so not really significant...
...P P ERHAPS AT THIS POINT one might say that modem tyranny—the apparently irresistible tendency of contemporary society toward autocratic yet impersonal forms of organization— derives, even more profoundly than it does from chance social, economic, and political causes, from the fact that modern man cannot conceive of anything absolute outside the political absolute, and therefore of no other duty superior to that of political action, and no other ultimate means of resolving action outside of technically organized violence...
...Lone individuals are the majority...
...But the regimes based on the masses, on power, on enforced cohesion, are also defeated and crushed...
...Substantially, this is still the basis of po litical science today...
...Yet it would not be true to say that the majority of intellectuals in the West now make common cause with the rebels...
...It recalls Tocqueville's remark: "There is nothing worse than a bad government that tries to correct itself...
...Yet, Dumitriu concludes,] it is not by the drive for efficiency nor by way of the intention of serving the collectivity that one will succeed in reducing administrative inertia, but only by means of such counterforces as criticism and the free play of opposing interests...
...The system, that is, the socialist regime, is not being put in question...
...RECENTLY, CONFRONTED by the renewed repression of intellectual life in the Soviet Union and the rebellious movements in Czechoslovakia and Poland, the following argument has often been repeated in conversation and advanced in the press: The protest of intellectuals and students in the countries of the East concerns partial demands—greater freedom of speech, a less strict political regime, a more efficient management of the economy—demands which, among us in the West, have become obsolete...
...The division between capitalist countries and noncapitalist countries has in fact today little or no meaning: the true question is to be found elsewhere...
...For the paradox of the associated life lies exactly in the fact that, while the majority of people seem to be indifferent to freedom and are content to be supplied with grub and prefabricated entertainments, the individual in the group—that is, the ensemble of individuals, that same majority which, seen from a certain perspective, seems passive—always opposes his own inertia to whatever "system" one wishes to impose on him, disconcerts it, indeed prevents it from being a "system," and as a result in fact denies and confutes it...
...And this is the fact which, more than any other, the intellectuals of the West seem to have forgotten...
...Yet, contrary to what the pragmatic historian affirms, this does not take away any validity from the conception that animates Utopia, that is, from the ideal of perfection it proposes and explains...
...By and large they make common cause with the established, recognized interests, whether these be the powers of the state or of the most active parties and political groups...
...Long before it is enforced by the laws, freedom is guaranteed by the feeling that in a given society there has been formed that tie between the individual and the world and that consciousness of human destiny, that is, the dignity characteristic of man, which is the most profound and indestructible of facts—against which no tyranny can prevail, and not even the artifice of the intellect...
...Perhaps, at least for the majority, it would be less important than that evil caused by the disappearance of the auto and washing machine...
...It means that we in the West no longer know what freedom is, are not concerned to know it, and in fact are more or less of the opinion that political freedom (but moral freedom too, and with it the dignity of man in and of itself) is a sort of commodity: one commodity among others that our advanced society lavishes on us and which we make use of because it is there, as we use the automobile or the washing machine because they are there...
...Thus man's thought can become subordinated to the collectivity by basing itself on the idea that every thought is "historic," that is, relative and deprived of its own truth, true only in respect to a specific and changing situation...
...In short, they want to occupy the position of those who in the past were called "the prince's advisers...
...That being the situation, the intellectual who would want to teach the modem tyrants what they do not know—namely, the "laws" of history and society—must asume the attitude of a man hardened by the negative exaltation of stripping himself of any sort of "ideal" view so as to see only either the factual reality or the "opportunity...
...e) essential conclusion: the proponent of Utopia, whether he be a philosopher, an intellectual, or a simple conscious protester, has no ambition to rule or to become one of the prince's advisers, but only to persuade those who share his condition and his dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs...
...T T HIS SOCIALIST MISUNDERSTANDING is a particular part of a more general matter that has been set forth with great simplicity by Leo Strauss, an American philosopher of German origin...
...And, furthermore, the most serious insult that can be visited on the poor and oppressed ON MODERN TYRANNY is to presume that they are only concerned with being given work, being fed, clothed, lodged, and entertained...
...Being obliged to serve the collectivity as a whole and to balance forces, tensions, and conflicting needs, this regime must necessarily base itself on a complex system of authoritarian measures that guarantee the functioning of both production and political power...
...We need something else: stronger medicines, one would say...
...But in the end, one believes, it will have to yield...
...Their motive, both turbid and grotesque, is the great motive of not missing the train (or plane) of the future and of finding oneself at the head of the tumult of the young...
...the majority represents human nature with its inertia...
...Kojeve's or Hegel's synthesis of classical and Biblical morality effects the miracle of producing an amazingly lax morality out of two moralities, both of which made very strict demands on self-restraint...
...Here too one must choose...
...Or systematic violence...
...For the mass, however, the only things that count are subsistence, a quiet life, and the possibility of escaping from the tedium of everyday servitude: the idiocy of private life on one hand, the orgasmic excitement of public frenzies or violences on the other...
...This dogmatism and conformism receive formidable support in the idea of science as a universal language and a superior 1963 by the Free Press...
...Which is to say that for such a government the temptation until the decisive crisis will always be to react with force to the increasing momentum of demands which, hesitating continually between concession and repression, the government itself will have fomented...
...To which one is prompted to ask: how can a political belief satisfy the yearning for an absolute which accompanies and torments man...
...To do this, tradition is of no help...
...Still, if freedom weren't, the evil would not be so great...
...The second is the simplistic notion, shown to be false by harsh experience, that such an accomplished fact can in itself bring about a radical change for the better...
...If, after having defined so summarily the principle of modern authoritarianism, we must mention what meaning freedom can have today, we would first of all make an observation that does not directly concern political freedom yet is no less essential...
...The demand for freedom on the part of these intellectuals means the rejection and denunciation of Stalinist terror and its methods, and therefore the demand for a formal and effective legality that would embrace the relations between the government and its citizens...
...In sum, because he wishes to be part of the avant-garde, the contemporary intellectual finds himself functioning as the fulcrum of conformism, a manipulator of ready-made ideas, hostile by his very situation to that mission of spokesman of doubt and heresy which used to be his pride...
...It is worthwhile at this point, interrupting for a moment the paraphrase of Strauss's thought, to ask by what path not only the intellectual but also the common man has come to accept such a point of view, indeed, to be precise, such an explanation of the world...
...that is, if there does not exist for everyone a free space in which each person can give proof of his value, or simply manifest his true nature...
...The simplest reply seems to be that the authoritarian, principle is inherent in the very fact of placing oneself, as regards social and political problems, at the point of view of the ensemble, the totality, of the necessary and mechanical congruence of the parts and the efficient functioning of the whole...
...c) issues in a Utopia, that is, we repeat, in a reality that exists only in the mind...
...In any event, despite the many signs, one would have to be very wise to affirm this with certainty...
...for in political power and the way in which it is exercised lies the crux of the problem...
...And it is also a fact that, to these truly "engaged" intellec tuals, the revolutionism of their colleagues in the West merely seems not quite serious...
...In other words, modern man believes that political action can be legitimately substituted for that which in the past was the religious need of an absolute...
...If in the last analysis what is at issue here is to introduce into the functioning of the socalled Socialist State not only "the unforeseen element of the will," but purely and simply "human nature," then the vital contradiction we have alluded to appears in all its virulence...
...Turning from the moderns to the ancients, Strauss observes that the Greeks rejected as contrary to nature precisely the two ideas which seem to be the fundamentals of mod NICOLA CHIAROMONTE ern political thought—that is, the conquest of nature thanks to science as well as (and perhaps even more) the other idea, which asserts that scientific and philosophical knowledge can be diffused and vulgarized...
...We have, therefore, in the East a socialism put in doubt by events, where the doubt as to socialism is accompanied by a vigorous upsurge of the demand for political freedom...
...and much more petty too, since in practice it is incarnated in rulers and their intellectual advisers and extollers...
...NICOLA CHIAROMONTE manifestation of objective truth...
...Provided, of course, the intellectuals— and especially the literati and artists —could continue to enjoy the privilege of writing, publishing, and producing whatever they pleased...
...In fact it still seems to us that, in Rousseau's phrase, "man, born free, lies everywhere in chains...
...Which means that in each of his choices he will know that he is in some way determined, but not by what and in what sense...
...What the term "capitalist" means nowadays is not at all clear: what is clear is that it no longer means what it meant for Marx...
...In this respect, whether the economy remains, generally speaking, "capitalist" is a secondary matter...
...The opposite is true and evident: our society, presumed to be democratic, is eroded by injustices, evils, and very serious disorders, besides being besieged by tyrannies all the more burdensome since they are less apparent and, what is worse, accepted as inevitable (if not indeed desirable) by the majority of people...
...The observation is this: man is free not because freedom is the essential of his thought and consciousness, but rather because he can neither demonstrate that he is necessitated by nature, history or divine will, nor that he is liberated from natural necessities and the conditions and constraints of society: causa sui, creator of himself, faber fortune suae...
...Everyone can see what a broad margin of ambiguity such a fact leaves not only to phraseology but also to political action today, and how naive it is therefore (not to call it something worse) to think that one is saying something striking when one appeals to democracy, social justice, or even freedom...
...To say this does not at all mean that we live in a substantially just, ordered, and free society...
...Today, however, the chains appear to be forged by the illusion of being able to attain "natural freedom" on the one hand through the release of the individual from all norms, and, on the other, through his subjection to a collective discipline which, it is supposed, will guarantee to each person at every moment the maximum of "natural freedom" (that is, of the satisfaction of his instincts and immediate desires) compatible with the concrete situation...
...It is enough to think of this to begin at least to see how the political problem has changed since the time when, before World War I, the Russian Revolution, and what is now called the Second Industrial Revolution, it seemed to reduce itself to the problem of introducing justice into the system of freedom, or of reducing the system of freedom to that of economic equality...
...By this path one will arrive instead at the factory, the barracks, the electronic bureaucracy, plus the police to maintain external order...
...The problem involves not only the countries of Eastern Europe but also, and perhaps even to a greater degree, those of the West, where tyranny hides behind various names, not excluding the name of "democracy...
...It is necessary to choose the mode of life one wants, the society one prefers, the significance one gives to being in the world...
...To have a community, one must have "equal laws...
...This is precisely the insult that industrial man suffers at the hands of industrial society: at the hands of capitalism, if you prefer, but also with the concomitant idea that, in order to abolish the evils of capitalism, what is required is to put everyone to work, distribute to everyone the same ration of commodities decreed as necessary from on high by the technicians, economists, and sociologists, and, above all, decreed by those who possess political power...
...The technocrat takes up his stand at the point of view of the State: this viewpoint is acceptable to the theoretician, not to the lone individual...
...And this naturally puts the aforesaid free and autonomous individual directly at the mercy of the mechanisms capable of influencing his solicitations and decisions: the "hidden persuaders...
...it has been reissued, in paper, by Cornell University Press in 1968...
...To put it accurately, the mass is indeed the very symbol of social inertia (and at the same time of instability), but it is also an eminently artificial entity, a statistic, a pure agglomeration, not a gathering of individuals...
...Evoked today, this simple thought takes on a singularly liberating significance...
...From one point of view, since it is a matter of "introducing [some changes] in the ON MODERN TYRANNY functioning of the Socialist State" and not of "confronting it globally," the revisionists do appear as reformists...
...By which one does not mean merely the techniques of advertising, since every appeal to the individual as such, to egocentric impulses and "received ideas" (of which he deludes himself into thinking he is the author, because it is he who has received them) is destined to persuade him only too easily...
...Now, whether one speaks the Marxist or the libertarian language, what else indeed is the source of inequality if not the prevalence of the authority of fact and force over the ordinary, in the long run irrepressible, needs of human nature...
...Thus one can only establish absolute power by claiming to free man...
...Then, and only then, the individual appears as an ultimate basis for thought and an insurmountable obstacle to authoritarian manipulations...
...Along with this, he has become the best and most useful instrument of modem tyranny, whatever name the tyranny may bear...
...Apart from its intrinsic value, which will be judged separately, it reflects quite accurately the point which a certain mentality has reached in Europe and elsewhere...
...Today we can still say that we share this ideal...
...and, third, because modem tyranny by its nature needs the collaboration of intellectuals, whether they be literati, scientists, or professional philosophers...
...The author has translated all quotes from On Tyranny from the French edition...
...In reality, what they yearn for above all is to be recognized as purveyors of ideas to these powers and movements...
...The evil from which Western civilization obviously suffers is not the plethora of consumption (which in any event is the consequence of a certain way of understanding life and the aims of life, not a prime cause), but rather the lack of freedom due to the advanced regimentation and mechanization of collective existence...
...the translator, in turn, translated Chiaromonte's quotes from the Italian trying, however, to keep it in line with the original English phrasing...
...This means that both the prince and his advisers regard themselves as intellectually in possession of history itself...
...So the road to absolute opportunism is wide open...
...The goal he sets himself is not the enforced realization of some sort of global plan, but rather the most honest possible personal conduct and the most intelligent reform of the present state of affairs...
...Now it is obvious that, if one starts from this point of view, one will never arrive at the autonomous individual, the free, self-assured man who is the support, not the part, as a gear wheel or organ, of any community that wants to be both civil and orderly...
...of such a relation, the political exigency can only be the expression and consequence...
...On the other hand, in the societies that enjoy a more or less well-ordered freedom, the intellectuals declare the most rigid forms of socialization and centralized power to be an ideal which they oppose to the "consumers' civilization" and as a remedy for the "alienation" of contemporary man...
...Yet everyone can also see how necessary it is, in such a state of affairs, to keep a firm hold, when confronted by whatever regime is being praised or proposed, on the principle of freedom and without qualification...
...Yet it remains true that when one asks for freedom, one asks for everything: this "confrontation" is truly global and does not involve class or corporation privileges, but the very form of the associated life...
...That is, the technocrat finds himself confronted by human nature: There are certain ways of behaving [Dumitriu continues] which are found, to different degrees, in all human societies: these are, perhaps, what constitute that which we call human nature and which remains indefina ble, but not for this reason less real...
...Yet what is called not without contempt "Utopia" only makes explicit what is implied in every attempt at social improvement...
...True enough, this ferment is concentrated on the question of freedom, indeed pure and simple freedom: freedom from oppression...
...In other words, despite everything, his choice will be a free and new act, an addition to the world and a modification of the actual state of affairs: something that not even he, the subject of the action, can foresee...
...And it means quite obviously, even if not always explicitly, an almost global confrontation of the prime characteristic of the regime, which consists in opposition on principle to any juridical, that is, objective and stable, limitation of the exercise of its power...
...But it is also possible—in fact inevitable—to see society as a gathering of individuals...
...It is certainly possible, and this is what rulers and political experts do everywhere, to treat human society as a massive aggregation of interchangeable units...
...As for the ideal, he will support it as one can only support ideals—by nourishing them with just thoughts (and so also criticizing them) and with actions in accord with such thought...
...But there is a reply, and it is that one must choose: this is what is at stake and not calculations of the probabilities of efficiency or utility...
...For this means first of all the recognition that this State excludes nothing less than "human nature" as such, and that logically and necessarily it is not in the end a question of reform but of radical change...
...It suffices to think on the one hand of the very high level of technique attained by industry —which is now inseparable from science— and on the other of the equally high level of technicality that the fundamental problems of politics, internal as well as external, assume today, in order to realize the constraints put upon the freedom of individuals and groups...
...and in the best case, the appeal to civic feeling...
...Here, Plato gives us to under stand, lies the true root of historical neces sity: in the depths of the human spirit and, for that very reason, in the ultimate nature of things...
...T T ins PARADOX is worth unraveling...
...From the depths of the human spirit to the ultimate and highest law which is the essence of the divine, there reigns a single inscrutable rhythm...
...Leo Strauss concludes, "did not dream of a fulfillment of History and hence of an ultimate meaning of History...
...ON MODERN TYRANNY Under these conditions, to ask that the "system" become efficient either through a state-planned economy, realized thanks to a rigorous centralization of political power, or (and the thing is different only in appearance) by way of that "revolutionary technology" which is already in operation and which is being invoked from many sides as the radical and more truly progressive remedy for the ills of contemporary society—to ask this is tantamount to asking that the present defective system be precipitated once and for all toward one or another form of tyrannical collectivism...
...Whether what is involved is "building socialism" or disposing of an ever-growing variety of material goods, the difference can be as great as one wishes in detail, but it is not crucial, since in every case the goal is considered an ultimate goal, beyond which there is nothing, and therefore the goal is not limited by anything...
...Among those who have been deprived of it with an unexampled severity, it has been discovered simply that freedom is the indispensable nourishment of the associated life, whatever its political form may be...
...This argument deserves to be examined in some detail...
...What should be asked, when one is faced by this "comedy of errors," is whether the real crisis of Western society does not consist precisely in the fact that the intellectual class, while it claims to guide toward the new, in reality no longer knows what freedom is or what socialism is or can be...
...In both cases, one can repeat on their account the Biblical dictum: "They have eyes to see and do not see, ears to hear and do not hear...
...And it is at the point of view of the effective functioning of the collectivity that, together with the technocrat and the politician, the intellectual in general today takes his stand, interested as he is in the coherence of systems (or, as some say, in the possibility of "total izing," that is, of excogitating total theoretical solutions), rather than the viewpoint of the lone individual, who on one hand seems to NICOLA CHIAROMONTE him incongruous and intractable, on the other reducible to specific and calculable physical, psychic, and sociological "structures...
...but even before equal laws, there must be an immediately "natural" solidarity, not explicitly formulated in a body of beliefs and norms, and the coherence of the community should be confirmed by each person's mode of being, and each person should contribute toward making it exist and bring something new and better to it every day...
...In fact, just the opposite is true: they are a minority, the restless minority that prevents the social body from succumbing to the lethargy of the "dark ages...
...It is even more symptomatic that these accomplished facts are not only of a political order but also literary, artistic, ideological, and, more generally, social...
...These days it is only in the name of democracy that an authoritarian regime can be established, inasmuch as all modern governments are based on the equalitarian principle...
...This is the aspect freedom assumes when matters are observed from the point of view of the ensemble of individuals...
...Thus the revolt fermenting in the West is more advanced than the basically romantic and 19th-century one, which agitates the countries of Eastern Europe...
...Confronted by the mechanical complexity of contemporary society, the appeal to human nature is not persuasive: it seems weak, precisely because in the last analysis this is an appeal to the social acedia of the lone individual, whereas what is at stake is the effective and, if possible, just functioning of the collectivity...
...The "consumers' civilization," in its apparent absurdity and lack of goals other than material ones, actually expresses and symbolizes a misapprehension from which springs the impulse that leads a great part of the intellectuals and the young to a kind of gratuitous rebellion, bereft of true reasons as well as true aims, and of which we have begun to have striking examples among us here in Italy, too...
...But perhaps not even at this, for, after all, this is only an abstract hypothesis and, just to give an example, a factory requires more flexible rules, seeing that there one aims at real utility and efficiency, not the absolute NICOLA CHIAROMONTE guarantee that "not a leaf can stir unless the leaders want it to," and that everything is always regulated in the same fashion...
...He believes that these relations are the living nucleus ofall social life and that their persistence, in the face of regimentation and all forms of tyranny, accounts for whatever is left of gracious, polite, humanistic values in all spheres, from the depthsof everyday life to the summits of art and culture.— Translator's Note...
...The existence of such a space certainly does not depend only on the laws, nor even on that which the ancient Athenians called, with a word that remains hard to translate, isonomia...
...Hence the widespread general idea that the ferment for freedom which is shaking these countries, although it merits our sympathy, does not at bottom concern us, since it is a matter of gaining a social benefit which we already enjoy—indeed, among us, by dint of using it, is already worn-out and cheapened...
...How could this have come about...
...The important thing is that the demand persists, despite the repeated repressions and the great difficulties imposed by the objective situation...
...Here one finds expressed in a way that could not be simpler and clearer the vital contradiction (that is, living and not sterilely logical or, worse yet, "dialectical") in which those struggle whom Dumitriu calls "the progressives of the East...
...Therefore it becomes incomprehensible to them that a state not based on economic privilege, profit, and the private ownership of the means of production can prove in practice more tyrannical and exploitative than a capitalist state...
...Instead, as one well knows, socialists consider political power simply a consequence of economic power...
...This is a Utopia in the original sense, a reality that does not exist in any place, save that of the mind...
...In other words, in the test of events one sees that between so-called abstract freedom and socalled concrete freedom, one has either a propagandistic play on words or no difference at all...
...In reality, this is a negative, indeed nihilistic ideal since, to begin with, it does not even lead to the serious acceptance of the type of regime it professes to admire...
...second, because as a consequence the regime naturally seduces the intellectuals, who see the realization (or the possibility of realization) of their ideas, and especially that total palingenesis of society which in the modem era for the first time has seemed desirable and attainable...
...In other words, the paradox we are faced with today is that the European intellectual, who, at least from the 17th century on, has represented, at times at the price of martyrdom, the critical spirit and the demand for freedom, finds himself today, insofar as he is the member of a class, playing the role of theoretician (or, worse, glorifier) of accomplished facts...
...And it is exactly on this point—the necessarily authoritarian mechanization of collective existence —that East and West meet in the selfsame NICOLA CHIAROMONTE crisis and could meet in the same movement of reform and liberation...
...and the more violent the tumult is, the more they consider it promising, in the same way that, in the sphere of letters and the arts, the more incoherent the words, the more tortuous the forms and the more disordered the ideas, the more they find them "new...
...From this descends the duty of the free and thinking man to concern himself with the common good and to speak out about the events in his community...
...According to Leo Strauss, the difference between modern and ancient tyranny lies in the fact that the modem is dominated, first of all, by the idea of the conquest of nature on the part of man (collectively organized) thanks to science, and, second, by the vulgarization of scientific and philosophical knowledge, which produces a new and, one should add, completely unexpected kind of dogmatism and conformism, since it is based on the idea of a continuous criticism of reality and on empirical knowledge, not on any sort of revealed truth...
...This, unfortunately, is not so certain as one might think when one refers to the examples of the past century, probably worthless for our time, or valid only up to a certain point...
...Furthermore, in the modern tyranny the difference between good and bad is supplanted by "historical necessity...
...On the contrary, among us the New Left rejects (in the current jargon the word is confronts) the system—that is, neocapitalism or the consumer civilization—in a radical fashion...
...Applying Tocqueville's idea to contemporary industrial society, Raymond Aron writes: "All democratic societies are hypocritical, and they cannot help but be...
...This change will not call itself "revolution" only because the word is now equivocal and implies two facts that contradict the goal it sets for itself...
...To obtain a collectivity, one must have a group of rules and norms that permit each individual to have both rights and duties, and to know who and what they are...
...We should note above all the surreptitious, certainly obscure (and therefore all the more symptomatic) will to ignore the real significance of the ferment of the intellectual classes in Eastern Europe...
...b) is free, that is, does not correspond to a factual material necessity but only to an aspiration of the spirit...
...For the ancients, this ON MODERN TYRANNY Utopia was at the same time "realizable" and "improbable": realizable insofar as it did not entail any change in human nature but only the attainment of a certain perfection and harmony...
...Besides indicating in the most simple way how from the cor ruption of one regime another is born through germs which already existed in the preceding one, Plato in fact shows through Socrates' mouth how, in the end, the suces sion of political regimes depends on an un governable demonic element, that very ele ment which constitutes the depths of the hu man spirit...
...According to the Greeks [Strauss notes], the diffusion of true knowledge among the unwise would be of no help, as knowledge that was acquired by the wise inevitably would be diffused and weakened, and transformed into opinion, prejudice, or mere belief...
...and also the duty, even more serious, to abandon the field of political struggle and to withdraw with the few to save what can be saved when one sees that "there's nothing to be done," that necessity must follow its course without anyone being able to oppose it, indeed every effort to oppose it can only accelerate its fulfillment...
...Dumitriu observes that the political idea characteristic of our time is that man must adapt himself to the second phase of the scientific, technological, industrial, and social revolution initiated by the Renaissance...
...As regards not only the democratic regimes but also modern society in general, one should never forget Tocqueville's lesson, according to which the establishment of the equalitarian principle in America meant that in the future attempts to set up an authoritarian regime would also be obliged to appeal to the principle of equality...
...As for the more strictly political freedom, the freedom of the individual, first of all, is a trap and a deception if the society in which man lives is not free...
...Both doctrines [Hobbes's and Hegel's] construct human society by starting from the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks the awareness of sacred restraints or as a being that is guided by nothing but a desire for recognition...
...It seems equally difficult to admit that a new civilization can be born from political action and, more generally, that the birth of a civilization can have a date...
...In fact, the preoccupation with the totality implies the idea that human society is an organism whose laws are essentially known and, by implying that, it also implies the idea that one can, indeed one must, modify it from on high by means of more or less violent external interventions...
...And it is from this very lack of awareness of, and obliviousness to, his dependence on an arcane order that the slavery of modern man springs: "Accessible everywhere, nature is everywhere unfathomable," Thomas H. Huxley said...
...But the modern histor ian, Leo Strauss argues, is not necessarily a Machiavellian, even if many of the conse quences of his thought are...
...Petru Dumitriu, a Rumanian intellectual who fled to the West, discussed the "revisionist" movement of Eastern Europe in the August 1961 issue of Preuves: "As revisionism has revealed, the progressives of the East want to introduce into the functioning of the Socialist State conflicts of opinion and of open and legal interests, the unforeseen element of the will—in a word, human nature...
...On Tyrrany, by Leo Strauss, was originally published in English in This means that we moderns, and especially we modern intellectuals, set face-to-face with the fact of the implacable and absolutely authoritarian exercise of power, have taken this (which by tradition we should have regarded as the worst of regimes) for a new and progressive form of government, or at least an historically necessary phase, and therefore in substance good, of the evolution of our society...
...At the same time, Machiavelli takes for granted a certain average, unchangeable human nature (l'homo naturalis or homme moyen sensuel) and offers to political ambition the model of a realistic, opportunistic, unscrupulous "vir - tue" employed with the aim of achieving the only political goal that had meaning for him —a state that was as great and as strong as possible...
...But precisely here, one could object, lies the heart of the problem...
...In truth, the cycle of political regimes de scribed and discussed by Socrates in the eighth book of The Republic remains until today the image that best expresses and ex plains both the relationship between politics and human nature and the necessity that reg ulates political changes...
...The technical mentality tends to use direct, propulsive forces—in politics, the decree and, in the worst case, terror...
...collective profit will never succeed in stimulating the utmost individual effort as, on the contrary, selfish personal profit does...
...1/N HUMAN AFFAIRS," Petru Dumitriu re marks in the article already mentioned, "efficacy proceeds by different paths from those of technical efficiency...
...The fact is that they are involved in a real political struggle, accompanied by a real challenge of received ideas...
...They are, it seems, forms of resistance or temporizing, when confronted by a social situation that boils up every day more threateningly and will end by bursting through the dikes...
...Moreover, this demand for freedom in the countries of the East signifies an explicit demand for a "socialist democracy" or, in substance, the dissolution of that single party NICOLA CHIAROMONTE that remains the fundamental pillar on which the regime rests—indeed, the basis of all these states and the first obstacle to serious reform...
...But from another point of view, to say that the changes concern the introduction "of conflicts of opinion and of open and legal interests" implies the rejection of the centralizing and authoritative State to which until now the socialist ideal was re duced in practice in the countries of the East, and to which it is still reduced in the theory and programs of many countries of the West...
Vol. 16 • March 1969 • No. 2
