Guide for the Unperplexed
PADOVER, SAUL K.
Guide for the Unperplexed THE PREDICAMENT OF DEMOCRATIC MAN By Edmond Cahn Macmillan. 195 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by SAUL K. PADOVER Professor of Political Science, New School for Social...
...The real dilemma (if that is the word) of modern democracy lies elsewhere...
...The book has a threefold aim: first, to explain the nature of man's moral involvement in the wrongdoings of his government...
...second, to show analytically that the sense of guilt and responsibility connected with such misdeeds is, in fact, not "too burdensome" but "tolerable...
...Modern psychology and the findings of the social sciences cast serious doubt on all these assumptions...
...he assumes, also, that such information is available in an age of mass media...
...In this way, "they have little room for remorse, self-accusation, or fretful penitence because they are too deeply involved in performing a community agenda which they implement by making use of the state and its legal machinery...
...Reparation is both material and psychological...
...Cahn argues that there is a difference between political representation and legal agency...
...Cahn's previous books, The Moral Decision and The Sense of Injustice, showed a deep concern with the question of justice...
...Here he concentrates on the problem from the point of view of personal responsibility...
...Given the contents of the book and Professor Cahn's superb philosophic temper, a better title might have been, "Guide for the Unperplexed...
...Cahn places a citizen's responsibility under three rubrics: prevention, reparation and protest...
...The answers would then be not quite so simple...
...To test such "accessory guilt," he suggests a series of queries that he calls the "Citizen's Self-Search": • Did I incite the official to commit a wrong...
...Hence injustice will and does occur, even in the best regulated democracies, as Cahn reminds us in his references to a number of cases where justice slept...
...author, "The Genius of America" The central idea of this brilliant and challenging book is the limit of democratic man's civic responsibilities and his opportunities for action...
...Did I ratify the act of wrong or knowingly accept its fruits...
...Did I authorize the wrong...
...Suppose the "Self-Search" test were applied in the Sacco-Vanzetti case...
...Reviewed by SAUL K. PADOVER Professor of Political Science, New School for Social Research...
...Yet, to be effective, prevention requires in public affairs a degree of prudence, human perfection and what Montesquieu called "virtue" that is not easily come by...
...Action, according to Cahn's "social agenda," can take the forms of reparation and protest...
...To what degree, Cahn asks, is democratic man involved in "the misdeeds of government...
...Within the framework that Cahn set for himself—namely, the problem of justice as determined mainly by the courts—The Predicament of Democratic Man enriches democratic theory and widens its scope by making a concrete linkage with proper action...
...In this instance, Cahn rules the public "innocent" on each of his seven questions...
...Here the citizen can act in his community to repair the situation...
...The motivations implicit in The Predicament of Democratic Man are more noble and hopeful than actual...
...Did I suppress the truth when it came to my notice...
...Thus, acting individually or collectively, citizens accomplish the double objective of assuming responsibility and dissipating personal guilt...
...This question defines the "predicament" of the individual in a free society...
...The guilty act of a political representative, that is, of a public official, cannot be morally assumed by the citizen who elected him...
...and third, to elucidate those "dynamic incentives" of democratic life that diminish the burden of our responsibilities and enlarge our capacity to bear them...
...Prevention is obviously the best way of avoiding injustice...
...Cahn feels that not enough legislatures have provided for unequivocal and substantial monetary amends...
...In a sense, Edmond Cahn, Professor of Law at New York University, has written a manual of conduct for free men...
...Did I contribute to the vulnerability of the victim...
...In Cahn's view, a citizen's moral responsibility for misdeeds—more specifically, acts of injustice by the judicial apparatus—perpetrated by his government is limited...
...Knauff was held on Ellis Island for more than three years...
...Did I help to install a conspicuously dangerous public instrument...
...Cahn assumes that the democratic citizen is troubled by a sense of guilt, is anxious to repair it and desirous to acquire objective information...
...The question of guilt and responsibility enters only when the citizen, knowing about wrong and injustice, does nothing about it...
...and Mezei, without a hearing, for four and a half...
...Did I remain silent or passive when I might have prevented a wrong...
...Since there is no scientific formula for the determination of individual responsibility, the question is how democratic man can tell under what conditions to hold himself personally accountable for some act of injustice committed by his government...
...To illustrate the applicability of this "Self-Search," Cahn refers to the cases of Ellen Knauff and Ignatz Mezei, both of whom suffered injustices at the hands of the United States Immigration authorities (Mrs...
...Financial compensation and public vindication for the wrongs suffered are due the victim of injustice...
...It becomes serious in the second stage, in the process of repairing the wrong...
...It involves a complex network of political, legislative and juridical safeguards...
...Were American citizens guilty of the wrong committed against these two people, who were ultimately found to be innocent of the charges under which they were held...
...Cahn proposes a "sincere internal search" by each citizen to determine his own degree of involvement and hence responsibility...
...It is when the miscarriage of justice becomes known that the citizen has a moral obligation to act for its redress...
...His proposals do not contain a list of specific suggestions but are, rather, based on general principles which serve as rational guidelines...
...But these were immigration cases, removed from the public eye and operating inside a Kafka-like labyrinth of bureaucratic regulations...
...It lies in the field of information, and in the question of enlightened leadership in a world of almost unmanageable complexity...
...It lies, among other things, in the citizen's desire to assume genuine responsibility...
...Fundamental questions, however, remain unanswered...
...As for protest, it is both a technique for the achievement of redress and an expression of citizen participation...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 39
