The Lost Soul of American Polities
Howard, Dick
insky, which competently depict different scenes from the book. Mostly, it is Mak's crucified hands that appear throughout the story -- not as an image, but as a reality: Jozef Mak 9 must...
...DAVID TOOLAN is both assistant editor and book editor of Commonweal...
...Stem 'Calvinism is surely a fundamental ingredient, but not the only one...
...Meanwhile, the world of conflict stemming from private-interest liberalism continued, as did the injustice, and the protest against it...
...Lincoln was willing to impose political unity to preserve the principles of the Declaration of Independence...
...Everything here will become the same as soon as the dragging hymn flows over their heads, for everyone here is like you and you are like all the others...
...J.G.A...
...Are we then to live with liberalism...
...America, said Hartz, was "born free...
...Tocqueville noted that where the individual is defined by a society of self-achievers there is no possibility of self-sacrifice for the public good...
...The oldest is the "progressive" orientation best known through Charles A. Beard's "economic interpretation" of the Constitution...
...Mostly, it is Mak's crucified hands that appear throughout the story -- not as an image, but as a reality: Jozef Mak 9 must continuously travel to sell his labor as a lumberjack's helper, as a digge/" for the railroad -- anything -- merely to exist in a world, where, alone, he lias "no voice...
...Daniel Boorstin's explanation of the "genius" of American politics stresses its refusal of ideology and willingness to compromise...
...But to believe that this state will be permanent is the stuff of novels...
...To be left with such "spiritual ecstasy" is rather disappointing...
...Diggins is searching for what might be called a legitimating culture of political morality...
...But Diggins shows that by the nineteenth century, "virtue" had become a feminine quality to be nurtured in the privacy of the family...
...When Dewey tried to renew the reforming impulse, he turned ultimately to the education of the private individual...
...Emerson despised and Thoreau pitied the politician...
...In another, he shows exasperation at the greed that permitted American merchants to traffic shamelessly with the enemy...
...The Declaration has no legal standing in the American political system...
...Classical political republicanism, Diggins agrees, is more noble...
...The novel JozefMak has endured, too...
...That, however, would require a different book...
...What this means is often unclear, but usually interesting...
...He is "just one of millions, a mere statistic," but he is one who endures...
...Hronsk)~'s sensitive and complicated treatment of his female characters is notable...
...The fact that the Framers neglected the underlying liberal consensus only reflected how deeply and thoroughly it shaped American politics--and could be taken for granted...
...The Frenchman talked little about freedom, and he returned home before the new Constitution of 1787 stabilized the Republic...
...He then continues the religious motif through an interlude dealing with Henry Adams's passage from Washington muckraker to mystical devotee of the Virgin in his St...
...This is not, however, a political novel, and although Jozef Mak is aware of the occasional resistance of others to injustice and servitude, he never considers rebellion9 Less than resignation, or an embrace of suffering, Mak carries an infinite human patience, an unrealized sense that wisdom is possible for the ordinary person, but is only achieved through life's trials...
...Diggins neither defines nor tells us how to recover the "lost soul...
...Having noted this lowered vision, Diggins's quest for the "lost soul" turns toward the search for a legitimation which could replace the lost transcendence provided by religion...
...Melville, Diggins claims, is condemning Vere, a desiccated intellect caught in abstractions...
...Where mothers and sons are not left without husbands and fathers...
...His search for the "lost soul" has brought him to a "belated appreciation of an older Marxist and Progressive perspective emphasizing conflict...
...But he is himself neither a Marxist nor a Progressive...
...His essay is cautionary and negative, if not downright pessimistic...
...He is director of EuroLinks, and author of the forthcoming From Marx to Kant (SUNY Press...
...But no, this would not be, reasoned the diplomat: exactly that pettiness he had described explains why ambitious men turn their attention anywhere but to the political arena...
...The liberals and the humanists are said to share an attitude towards politics: it...
...You are not just Jozef Mak, you're the whole village...
...t e.w-, _ .~,r 17 January 1986:23should be free from private moral passion...
...he rejects the distinction between public and private, politics and religion...
...This must have some relation to the "lost soul," but Diggins doesn't come right out with it...
...Labor was becoming industrial, and was hardly free...
...Perhaps, as it was for the Framers whose realism he so admires, the solution may lie in a rethinking of politics and its peculiar American institutional forms...
...Three schools have dominated the debate among historians of the American Revolution...
...Nineteenth-century reform turned inward...
...the technological intelligence that conquers nature replaces the historical wisdom that founds the City...
...though there have been years of neglect...
...The Framers, insisted Hartz, had indeed stressed conflict -- for example, in Madison's lOth Federalist of which Beard made so much -- but this was deceptive...
...And so the character Jozef Mak remains with the reader, inarticulate still...
...But the "lost soul" is clearly just such an ideal...
...was 1776...
...DICK HOWARD teaches in the philosophy department at the State University of New York, Stony Brook...
...But Hronsk~ reveals more -- fidelity, sacrifice -- in the figure of Marusa (later depicted quite differently) who kneels by the bed she shares with her husband, knowing that Jozef is across the room, awake: "Marusa was stronger than Jozef Mak, and she lay down next to her husband only after Iozef Mak had fallen asleep...
...The wooden spar from which he was suspended is sought by the sailors as "a piece of the cross...
...Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America is its most complete presentation...
...Jozef Mak is replete with observations of human behavior -- small, wise observations...
...But what does this realism say about their thegry of politics...
...nor are his revolutionary Founders the virtuous republicans of Bailyn and Wood...
...Commonweal: 24...
...Thus, Mak's wife Jula asks herself, "Are there any countries in this world where a person is not forced to leave his native village and go to work out in the world...
...Diggins reads the tale from Billy's side...
...In this, Mak could be Everyman...
...At the close of the book Hronsk: speaks directly to the miserable Jozef Mak, whose wife has died: "In a novel something would happen to remove Jozef Mak from the world...
...In the book's preface she mentions that the Slovak people sustained themselves with their "laboring hands and the nearly inarticulate though beautiful voice of (their) folk art" during the "tragic political and economic conditions that followed the breakup of the Great Moravian Empire...
...Four score and seven years ago...
...We still live under and with its liberal institutions...
...but liberalism, he observes, is more attainable...
...He restores good and evil to political discourse...
...A third dispatch goes to the heart of American politics9 Evidence of dissension within the army and the misfunctioning of the Confederal Congress had sparked rumors of a coup...
...The two themes sit awkwardly together, and are never reconciled...
...Clearly, the rights that ground Lincoln's moral Republic are not the liberal rights to property and to the "pursuit of happiness" in private life...
...point to Machiavelli's willingness to risk his soul for the sake of the City...
...More recently the pathbreaking work of Bernard Bailyn (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Belknap/Harvard, $18.50, paper $6.75,343 pp...
...The epiphany of Jozef Mak, the villager, transcends time and space...
...Something like an answer is suggested in the book's final chapter which presents a reinterpretation of Melville's tale of Billy Budd...
...For Franklin's heirs, work, not politics, is the highest human activity...
...We are a forest: tree next to tree -- and only that is important I An awkward fit THE LOST SOUL OF ANERICAN POLITICS VIRTUE, SELF-INTEREST, AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM John P. Diggins Basic Books, $23.95, 409 pp...
...but he refused to risk the political unity of the country for the (presumably private) moral cause of its abolition...
...Both consensus and civic humanist views ought to honor Douglas, therefore, over Lincoln...
...Douglas hated slavery as much as did Lincoln...
...Diggins doesn't mention that the South could have justified secession by that same Declaration, as did Jefferson and Madison in their conflict with the administration of John Adams...
...Diggins demurs...
...And yet, Mak can clearly represent the Slovak people, writes Norma L. Rudinsky, general editor of the Slovak literature and language series that this book inaugurates...
...He finds only its shell, a conflict-ridden liberalism where private interest has replaced public virtue...
...So, when the young Jozef Mak returns from the military service to find that his lover, Marusa, has married his half brother, and finds too, that he has to share a cottage with them, the reader is prepared for tension...
...But life is not a novel...
...Diggins uses the Lincoln-Douglas debate to illustrate the resulting dilemma...
...Life is a cliff, a valley, mountain, tree stumps, an ax, bread, and hoarfrost, and all those things are not just pieces of scenery and stage props which one can move about to suit one's fantasy...
...Diggins cites Melville: "Billy ascended...
...and, in ascending, took the full rose of the dawn...
...In one of them, he explains that the colonials have the same self-seeking passions he knew from home, yet they lack the manners which make "ours" tolerI able...
...Later, the author uses the image of a sleeping child to describe the peace felt by Jula, Jozef's wife: "Then everything around her came to rest, because a child with dried milk on its lips is a powerfully strong force that can sometimes accomplish what a hundred adults cannot...
...Nor are they found in that civic virtue that the humanists want to stress...
...presented an alternative which could tempt the radical as well as the conservative...
...Its forty-year dominance was replaced by the "consenCommonweal: 22sus theory" in the 1950s...
...his is a "Niebuhrian corrective to the pretensions of American virtue...
...They lived, says Diggins, a Protestant ethic without the transcendent justification which had animated their ancestors...
...Abrasive manners, aggressive private profiteering, and uninspiring political opportunities: was that the -- was that a -Revolution...
...Poeock's civic humanists (in The Machiavellian Moment, Princeton, $48, 576 pp...
...One is reminded of Thomas Merton's epiphany on a Louisville street corner, when he felt thankful that he was only one man among others, "that they were mine, and I theirs...
...Diggins is especially critical of the latter, whom he accuses (in lengthy appendices) of the methodological error of taking rhetoric too seriously...
...Is that why politics today has remained a petty, uninspiring vocation for our liberal society...
...Michel and Chartres...
...Therefore Jozef Mak becomes aware of his unity with other men, their common humanness, while in his village church, where no miracles occur: "Jozef, no one in church will notice who you are, that you are Mak...
...Lincoln, in fact, is Diggins's exemplary hero...
...But Americans continued to labor and to pursue property as happiness...
...and Gordon Wood (The Creation of the American Republic, Norton, $25,653 pp...
...In place of an answer, he demonstrates amply that the revolutionary generation was well aware of the role of self-interest and economic conflict...
...Yet Lincoln has not been the only radical to appeal to the "inalienable rights" it affirms...
...Hannah Arendt's On Revolution (Penguin, $6.95) had offered a brilliant interpretation of this tale as justifying the primacy of politics over private morality when Captain Vere decides that he must hang the morally innocent Billy for the good of the whole...
...Perhaps the wisdom of the worldly French Ambassador should be reconsidered...
...Who's afraid of John Locke," he asks...
...HOLLY METZ has just completed a book on war resisters of the 20th century...
...No feudalism, no socialism -such was the message of the liberalism of the 1950s...
...which waters the roots equally and which rocks the treetops in unison...
...I II Dick Howard T HE BEMUSED dispatc.hes of the first French ambassador to the rebel colonies whose de facto independence was assured by the French alliance in 1778 can serve to introduce John P. Diggins's quest for a "lost soul" of American politics...
...So you cannot disappear just like that, Jozef Mak...
...At the basis of the revolution Bailyn and Wood found a tradition of republican humanism founded on political virtue which sacrifices private interest for the public good...
...It waits patiently to tell a story at once cruel and hopeful, to a whole new world of readers...
...In Hronsk)~'s depiction of village life there are no miracles -- he never sentimentalizes: "The candles, gilt, and statues tried as hard as they could to help her, but their desperate efforts were futile because gilt and statues are no longer permitted to move or speak, the age of miracles having long since passed away9 But he does show that an ordinary man can experience what James Joyce called an epiphany (with a small "e"), transcendence through the everyday...
...His Framers are not the Lockean liberals stressed in the fifties...
...Both orientations stress the protection of property, as either the product of free labor or as the condition permitting virtuous action...
...The iconoclasm of which Diggins is so proud consists in his stress on the reality of material interests underlying proclaimed ideals...
...To what did Lincoln appeal...
...For some contemporaries as well as for later historians like Beard, as perhaps even for Lincoln, that Constitution was a counterrevolution against the principles of the Declaration...
...Diggins begins with the historical foundations of American politics...
...The reason may be that Diggins is seeking their unification in a culture of political morality, where culture and morality dominate over politics...
...The chapter concludes with Lincoln with whom, "American political thought ascended, and, ascending, reached spiritual ecstasy...
...I REVIEWERS ROBERT G. HOYT recently resigned as editor of Christianity and Crisis and is now a freelance writer, editor, and consultant...
Vol. 113 • January 1986 • No. 1
