Statecraft as Soulcraft

...Will wants his ideas to appear new...

...Political liberty and democracy would not be eliminated but finally realized in these conditions of relative economic equality...

...The Constitution does not just distribute powers...

...And now columnist George F. Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft wreaks havoc on the Administration's theory of minimal government...

...I have met few people on the Left who have even deigned to read Will's book...

...Will has gone out of his way to distance himself from contemporary conservatives, even like-minded ones...

...Will dismisses as "the Cuisinart theory of justice" the liberal-individualist view that justice will accrue naturally from the conflict of interests and passions...

...Will is correct in attacking those on the Left and the Right who use a facile libertarianism to justify their views...

...According to Will, its ascendancy has had two undesirable consequences for American politics...

...Will writes, "Tax deductions and tax exemptions are not alternatives to social problems...

...If Will cannot see Marx's socialism as a plausible alternative to libertarianism and conservative political economy, neither can most Americans...

...by John B. Judis It is ironic that conservatives rather than liberals have made the most damaging criticisms of Reagan Republicanism...

...He can limit the field to the bogus libertarianism of Reagan et ah, the conservative political economy of Will and Connally, and the more liberal variant of Kirkland and Rohatyn...

...It is obvious that Will's model is the Middletown of the 1920s or the Champaign-Urbana of the 1940s, where he grew up...

...When I read Will's book, I expected it would become a small sensation in political circles...

...Even if they are interested in them, they don't want to hear what someone identified with the Right rather than the Left has to say about them...

...it does so in a cultural context of principles and beliefs and expectations about the appropriate social outcome of these powers," Will writes...

...Will spends an entire chapter trying to dispel any comparisons between his recommendations and Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy...

...Probably the most grievous omission from Will's endless citations is philosopher Leo Strauss...

...Will has always been worth reading— unless one reads for the sake of self-confirmation...

...But Will's welfare state would be run on "conservative principles"—for instance, it would employ tax deductions for medical insurance rather than a government universal insurance plan...

...The most plausible response to Burke and his descendants like Will was not made by Paine, but by Marx...

...Last year, Kevin Phillips's Post-Conservative America exploded the populist pretensions of supply-side economics...

...This is, of course, a more accurate and complex picture of politics and economics than one might get from Lyn Nofziger or George Gilder, but it is far from complete...

...Will also has little patience for the related view that capitalism, left to itself, will create justice, prosperity, and a safe environment...

...And it would promote a spirit of altruism rather than self-interest and an "ethic of friendliness, of neighborliness...

...Marx, following Hegel, combined the classical and the liberal-individualist traditions...

...These last seven words would make a fitting epigraph for-a study of Reaganomics...

...Quite a few conservatives consider him an "opportunist" who has shaped his views to win acceptance as the liberal establishment's "house reactionary...

...Government, unlike an economic market, has responsibilities...

...A democratic socialist alternative is certainly not on the immediate horizon of American politics...

...Will argues that current attempts to remove government from moral questions or the economy are equally grounded in unstated presuppositions...

...In the economic realm, his defense of strong government is perfectly compatible with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s defense of "affirmative government...

...Supreme Court decisions allowing abortions sanction behavior that was formerly considered criminal...

...Many leftists are put off by Will's views on social issues and on foreign policy (he has been to the right of the Reagan Administration...

...The classical ideal has been betrayed by a century of war, depression, poverty, crime, derangement, and civic corruption...

...Marx also argued that socialism would transcend and absorb, rather than simply negate, the economic liberty of capitalism...

...But it doesn't appear to be getting anywhere...

...Will is also correct in arguing for a more assertive role by government and the public sector, if not on questions of sexual morality, at least on questions of economic justice...

...According to Will, the values cherished by conservatives are "threatened less by 'big' government than by an abdication by the Government...

...It is one of the better attempts to lift political discussion out of the dungeon of campaign gossip and legislative detail...

...Will's basic argument rests on a distinction between the classical theory of government put forth by Plato and Aristotle and revived by Edmund Burke and the liberal-individualist theory put forth by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Paine...

...Ignorant of the 1844 Manuscripts or The German Ideology, Will argues that Marx "defined man in terms of man's experience rather than his essence...

...As Thomas Paine put it, "Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness...

...Capitalism's evolution has frustrated both the classical ideal of human excellence and justice and the modern ideal of individual liberty...

...According to Will, the Ancients believed that the purpose of government was to move human beings toward "a characterizing excellence of which man is capable...

...Under socialism, economic liberty would be based on universal social rather than increasingly unobtainable individual ownership of the means of production...

...Strauss was the pre-eminent postwar conservative philosopher—an influence on academics and intellectuals from Wilmoore Kendall to Irving Kristol...

...One does not have to accept Will's social or moral proclivities to appreciate his larger argument...

...Having identified Marx with Stalin, Will can safely dismiss any alternatives to capitalism...

...It is simply inconceivable that Will was unfamiliar with his ideas...

...Decisions to eliminate governmental regulations or taxes favor particular groups over others...

...Of course, on the specifics, Will is much closer to Connally...

...According to Will, "politics is the business of weighing values against one another and preferring some to others...

...At the level of policy, Will believes that America has reached a point where only strong governmental action can arrest its economic, moral, and political decline...

...Will's philosophical background gives him depth...

...Will's basic argument— his contrast between the Ancients and the Moderns—must have been drawn, either directly or indirectly, from Strauss's path-breaking 1953 book, Natural Right and History...

...Will does not address Marx's argument but the usual version of Marx advanced by political scientists who have read only the Communist Manifesto and a few conservative commentaries...

...Marx's views remain buried beneath the rubble of revolutions made in his name...

...Will's government would also promulgate "less extreme" (and more censorious) standards in regard to abortion, sexual relations, and pornography...

...Will argues that the American political tradition, beginning with Paine, Jefferson, and Madison, has been dominated by this optimistic liberal-individualistic tradition...

...While Will says his aim in Statecraft as Soulcraft is "dusting off old ideas, not generating new ones," there are no references in the long line of quotations to any contemporary conservatives like Russell Kirk who share his views or influenced them...

...But the lingering question—first posed by Fourier and Owen and then by Marx—is the extent to which capitalism can be so shaped...

...The son of a University of Illinois political scientist, Will received a Ph.D...

...Where I differ with Will is on the desirability—even possibility—of a conservative political economy...

...But Will argues that the Founding Fathers assumed a certain moral and religious context in which government would function...

...Its rejection by conservatives like National Review's Joseph Sobran is not entirely unexpected...

...Second, Will maintains that the ascendancy of liberal-individualism has led to moral atrophy and injustice...

...He began writing a Washington column for National Review and The Washington Post in 1973, dropping the former when Newsweek hired him in 1976...

...He also defies political categorization...

...From this fundamental error, he concludes that "Soviet totalitarianism cannot be considered an accident of Marxism...

...First, it has clouded political discourse by creating a contradiction between theory and practice...

...But many leftists also appear to be uninterested in the questions of government and freedom that Will raises...

...They are social problems...

...With the possible exception of "getting government off the backs of the people," there is no more tendentious slogan in American politics than "pro-choice...

...When government fails to take one course of action because it would constitute intervention of the State into private morality or the economy, it nevertheless sanctions and legitimizes the existing morals and economy, often to the detriment of the classical and conservative goals for society...

...The argument must go beyond an abstract assertion of "rights...

...The liberal-individualist ideal, based in America on the promise of widespread property ownership, has been frustrated by the rise of giant corporations...

...These revolutions have produced societies that bear little resemblance to his idea or ideal of socialism...

...He writes, "It is unreasonable a priori to assume that the unregulated consequences of unfettered industrialism...

...John B. Judis is a senior editor of In These Times and a contributing editor to The Progressive...

...in political science and taught political philosophy briefly at the University of Toronto...

...According to the increasingly optimistic Moderns, if government weeds out the more destructive passions, then society on its own, through the complementary interplay of passions and interests, will create happiness, prosperity, and even justice...

...And his view of government could as easily justify Felix Ro-hatyn's or Lane Kirkland's version of corporatism as John Connally's...

...Socialism would abolish alienated labor and unite human beings with the products of their uniquely creative labor...

...Will owed Marx and socialism a fairer hearing...

...He needn't have bothered...

...Will argues that Ronald Reagan's theory of government, which posits that "big government" is responsible for society's ills, is dangerously mistaken...

...The subject of Will's new book—the first that is not simply a collection of columns-is the province of government...

...Against the claims of an unregulated free market, Will asserts the need for a "conservative political economy" that would incorporate an "affirmative doctrine of the welfare state...

...The Moderns contend that government can be both minimal and neutral with respect to morals and economics...

...He argued that a democratic socialist society in which a nation's citizens owned and controlled their economy would fulfill humanity's "characterizing excellence," which he called humanity's "species-being...

...Without government, human beings cannot achieve this excellence, which the Ancients identified variously as justice, virtue, reason (nous), and happiness...

...he is aware of distinctions that elude the Tom Wickers and Pat Buchanans...

...The Ancients viewed government positively...

...the Moderns have viewed it as a "necessary evil...

...Will is not a blind apologist for capitalism, but he does believe that there is no acceptable alternative to it...

...In America today, the only economic liberties enjoyed by most citizens are the freedoms to sell their labor and to buy and own their homes and personal belongings...

...Unless the Left can perform an adequate excavation, George Will and those who understand considerably less about government and freedom will dominate political discussion in America...

...According to Will, "government must take the long view...

...If abortion is murder, as its opponents believe, then no one who presently condones abortion would...

...Government must "supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not conveniently competent...

...For the Moderns, its function is to prevent conflicting human interests and passions from destroying society...

...The purpose of his conservative political economy, like the purpose of the New Deal, is to shape capitalism in the light of higher social ideals...

...are compatible with, let alone identifiable with, conservative aspirations...

...The Left, however, must take to heart Will's successes and failures in Statecraft as Soulcraft...

...But while politicians must concern themselves with the next election, a columnist who aspires to philosophy must address the more remote possibilities as well as the more immediate...

...His early attacks on the Nixon Administration for Watergate earned him many enemies on the Right...