To See Ourselves

...She is not telling us literally to read backwards from the last word to the fi rst, of course, for probing medieval mysticism or coyly announcing a breakthrough in esoteric reading is not her intention or style...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain’s view in her fi ne new book is that the willful, or sovereign, self is indeed the cause of our troubles, but that we must follow its origin to an earlier beginning...

...Augustine through medieval nominalists such as Ockham, and from thence to, among others, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Hawthorne, Hegel, Nietzsche, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir...

...Elshtain indicates some of this, of course, but does not make enough of it...

...She is following the journey of an idea—sovereignty or will—not examining it analytically...

...Its principle of equal rights is less excessive, and is suited to natural ends...

...that goods we naively believe to be natural are, in fact, values relative to time, place, and person...

...Indeed, she advises those “more concerned with contemporary cultural criticism” than with the “history of political and theological thought” to begin with her fi nal chapters...

...The effect is to tie together views which claim that will, not reason, does (or should) dominate us...

...We scholars should not pretend that our need to awaken somnolent students with a bracing jolt of their own vulgarity is a virtue to be displayed publicly...

...Political sovereignty names “self determination for a territorial, collective entity,” and “it is altogether unsurprising that the logic of sovereignty came unbound and migrated, becoming attached more and more to notions of the self...

...That beginning is not opinions about political or personal domination, but Christian views about God...

...Politically, Nazi and Stalinist willfulness and tyranny attempt to destroy communities guided by justice and the common good...

...We often trace the intellectual beginning of this personal and political willfulness to Rousseau near the end of the 18th century, and its fi rst culmination to Nietzsche at the end of the 19th...

...Chronologies and authors, nonetheless, sometimes seem jumbled as she moves back and forth among different medieval thinkers...

...Liberalism is not nihilism, and the man who holds rights equal to others is not the willful Nietzschean or existential self, let alone a would-be god...

...She would like to recapture or revivify selves who are enmeshed in the virtues of our everyday dependencies, but still aware of their own dignity...

...Moreover, Elshtain concentrates so much on sovereignty’s roots in notions of nihilistic willfulness that she forgets to say enough about the fear of punishment that gives the ruler’s arbitrariness or his laws, even his rational laws, their teeth...

...Her discussions of papal and kingly rule, pretensions to rule, and theories of rule are enlightening, but they give little sense of Christianity’s overall effect on human spirit, freedom, and earthly satisfaction...

...She is generally friendly to the merits of sensible liberal democracy...

...Exercising rights requires effort, responsibility, and industry...

...It also might have controlled her tendency to identify will with mere willfulness, and to make too great a split between will and reason...

...She never works out explicitly her subjects’ many forms, causes, and connections...

...Liberal democracy carries within it an inherent tension between individuals and majorities, neither of which is altogether powerful...

...One most of all misses in Elshtain’s historical account a clear view of the meaning of Christianity for thinkers such as Machiavelli and Bacon...

...Hobbes, whom she considers with an open mind, if not with pleasure...

...If we do not account properly for human strength, self-assertion, competition, and our ability to shape nature’s material, we risk a quietism that Elshtain might decry but against which her arguments (in my judgment) provide insuffi cient defense...

...Our human goal is not just to love and be loved, but also to educate and be educated, and to stand up for ourselves...

...Her remarks on Hawthorne, Bonhoeffer, and Camus are illuminating...

...Her discussions of Augustine and Luther are sympathetic and thoughtful, free of condescension or unwarranted veneration...

...She traces these problems to the victory of hard and soft versions of the sovereign self...

...Elshtain understands her book to be intellectual history...

...Consequently, she believes she more carefully embeds her discussions historically than do many other writers...

...She discusses Machiavelli narrowly and Bacon not at all...

...Intellectually, the best parts of Sovereignty are Elshtain’s accounts of fi gures she has studied carefully and also admires...

...Above all,” she writes, “we are created to love and be loved...

...She concludes with contemporary themes...

...To See Ourselves ‘The willful, or sovereign, self is . . . the cause of our troubles.’ BY MARK BLITZ Scholars—“we scholars,” as Nietzsche mockingly calls us and himself—often trace today’s personal and political excesses to the triumph of the self over the soul...

...One would like sequences to be discussed more precisely or, failing that, a clear analysis of why such precision is unavailable and why Hegel, the grandfather of the intellectual history she is practicing, is wrong...

...She does not bring out the fi rst modern thinkers’ attempts to overcome what they understood to be Christianity’s dehumanizing and stultifying impact...

...She overlooks, for example, important differences among Kant’s moral will, Hegel’s rational will, and Nietzsche’s self-overcoming will...

...If we do not see that countries based on equal rights require and promote certain virtues, and are thus not as morally neutral as they sometimes seem, we risk diminishing these countries, and our appreciation of their merits...

...She too often employs today’s irritating device of interrupting serious discussions with unilluminating references to popular culture...

...Were she to announce a mystical breakthrough, she would do so, I fear, by referring to the hidden message in some Beatles record played counterclockwise...

...Elshtain’s decision to begin with Augustine is refreshing, but it does leave one asking about the Greeks, whom she mostly ignores...

...The masterful expression of each special one replaces the soul’s love of common intellectual and ethical perfection...

...Elshtain’s historical approach leads her to downplay conceptual issues...

...Liberal regimes require a liberal education which, from the standpoint of mere equality, is inherently illiberal...

...Although her theme is sovereignty, she does not say in detail just what sovereignty is...

...Although I would not advise THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s harried cultural critics to read the last chapters fi rst, it is useful for those unfamiliar with the author to know how her book comes out politically in the end...

...The power of punishment is one effectual truth of sovereignty, and is especially central politically...

...Elshtain does not suffi ciently plainly distinguish teachings of willful sovereignty from teachings of individual rights or, indeed, give a clear account of the origin and justifi cation of individual rights...

...Without these characteristics one will be overwhelmed by nature and by others, however sovereign one believes one’s self to be...

...John Locke, for example, connects individual rights to will and reason, but also to preservation, comfort, property, and satisfaction...

...and that politics is primarily a matter of history’s stages and direction, and the clash of ethnicities and identities...

...While we once thought our humanity to be distinguished by souls with common powers of reason, love, and spiritedness, we now claim instead to be defi ned by unique selves...

...There is a bit too much talk of migrating thoughts and currents of ideas...

...Medieval controversies about divine sovereignty are the chief source of later arguments and positions: “As sovereign state is to sovereign God, so sovereign selves are to sovereign states...

...Here, she seeks to buttress her views by reestablishing political thought in a theological framework so that the better elements of that framework can modify, and to a degree guide, our liberal polity...

...A clear analysis of the basic elements or possibilities of “will”—choice, desire, spirited pride— would have been useful conceptually...

...She bypasses the inevitable tension between faith and the unbridled attempt to know, or between theology grounded in revelation and reason grounded in nature alone...

...To advance freedom, of course, is not fully to guide its proper use...

...At times she praises what sovereignty has accomplished, but on no clear grounds...

...These goals sometimes confl ict because we and what is ours differ from the perfections for which we strive...

...If we do not convincingly distinguish equal rights from individual willfulness, we risk contributing to the very license that rightly concerns her...

...Securing equal rights and their conditions both directs and limits government, so that government neither altogether forms souls nor ignores them...

...For this one needs to understand moral, intellectual, artistic, and political excellence...

...Sometimes she dissolves in the acidic sameness of self-sovereignty important intellectual and practical differences in the ways modern thinkers understand individuality...

...She is no friend of radical feminism, genetic manipulation, and easy abortion...

...After all, both Aristotle and Kant, the two great secular teachers of ethics, understood virtue or morality through the connection, or even identity, of practical reason and choice—Aristotle’s deliberate desire or Kant’s rational will...

...Perhaps these limits show us most clearly that, as Elshtain reminds us in this intelligent book, we are “less than sovereign...

...One wonders just how the willful selves she examines differ from Plato’s tyrants, medieval law from the classical discussion of law, and the nihilism she connects to notions of divine willfulness from Plato’s discussion of sophistic negation...

...Professor Elshtain follows her theme from St...

...She also has interesting things to say about Nietzsche and Mark Blitz, the Fletcher Jones professor of political philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, is the author, most recently, of Duty Bound: Responsibility and American Public Life...

...What we fi nd in Augustine is certain universal claims about human dignity and value—we are all God’s children— but this recognition can only be specifi ed and realized concretely, in and through speech and fellowship and loving and serving one another...

...Yet her invariably thoughtful and sometimes courageous arguments do not always support her friendship...

...Just as the equality and reason that shape and limit individual rights show liberal freedom’s difference from tyrannical, willful, self-assertion, so, too, does unalloyed political mastery differ from the liberal state’s sovereignty, for this seeks to regulate its own scope and methods...

...These conceptual and historical issues lead to the book’s most signifi cant theoretical problem...

...As Elshtain has throughout her career, she defends sensible, moderate practices...

...So, although it certainly is true that liberalism can favor or degenerate to the sovereign selves Elshtain fears, it need not...

...Individual natural rights and dominant individual wills are not the same...