REALISM LIBERAL TRADITION - idr.abu.edu.ng

R E A L I S M

L I B E R A L T R A D I T I O N

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Realism and the Liberal Tradition

Whittle Johnston David Clinton • Stephen Sims

Editors

Realism and the Liberal Tradition

The International Relations Theory of Whittle Johnston

ISBN 978-1-137-57763-4 ISBN 978-1-137-57764-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57764-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944031

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © Marian Sladek / Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York

Whittle Johnston American University Charlottesville , Virginia , USA

Editors David Clinton Baylor University, USA Waco , Texas , USA

Stephen Sims Baylor University Waco , Texas , USA

Dedicated to the memory of Whittle Johnston

vii

THE MISSING MAN Reading the manuscript of Realism and the Liberal Tradition brings back to all of us who had the good fortune of studying with Professor Whittle Johnston the breadth of his learning and the clarity of his insights. Just as in these pages, we heard in the classroom the easy command of the works of all the masters of Western political thought, the effortless employment of illustrations from history ancient and modern, and the evocation of the wisdom or folly of statesmen throughout the ages and throughout the world, all fl owing in an unbroken stream of careful argument and exposi-tion. Professor Johnston—“Mr. Johnston” to all who encountered him during the years of his fi nal academic appointment at “Mr. Jefferson’s University”—was a superb lecturer, not only because of the care that he had obviously devoted to the preparation of his remarks to us but also because of the commitment to the academic enterprise that he brought to his task. He was, as the colleagues noted who authored their tribute to him following his untimely death, unfailingly courteous and even gentle toward those of any political point of view, and especially toward students, but he nevertheless brought to his teaching a passion for truth, justice, and liberty—all goods that were as essential, in his view, to scholarly life as to political life. 1 He could in fact become highly animated in the course of his exposition (balling his fi sts, his face reddening), because he was con-vinced of the deep importance of the issues he saw at stake. While never employing the lectern as a place to launch partisan political comments, he was always clear in advocating freedom over tyranny, prudence over both

PREF ACE

viii PREFACE

undue combativeness and dangerous sloth, and clarity of thought over oleaginous phraseology, no matter how superfi cially appealing the latter might seem.

Johnston saw himself, correctly, as a sympathetic critic—or perhaps more accurately a critical admirer—of both the liberal tradition of political thought and the realist tradition of international thought. As someone who treasured the achievements of individual liberty, constitutional government, and the rule of law, he believed that the modern world owed much to liberalism, even as he feared that in the hands of some of its adherents that tradition could become foolishly confi dent of the goodness of human nature and blind to the frequent harshness of the political world. As someone who, infl uenced by those cautionary objections to the excesses of liberalism, was alive to the ever-present element of power in politics, particularly in international rela-tions, and therefore appreciated the realist critique of the errors of liberalism, he nevertheless thought that realists sometimes went too far in dismissing the intellectual accomplishments of liberalism and the benefi cent consequences of institutions founded on a conviction of the worth of freedom.

Johnston therefore gives us a carefully nuanced view of both liberal-ism and realism. In these pages, we fi nd John Locke praised more than Thomas Paine as a political thinker, while liberal practitioners of politics such as Thomas Jefferson and William Gladstone receive distinctly mixed reviews. Sometimes in Johnston’s words one has the sense that the liberal tradition has been fortunate in seemingly surmounting the inadequacies of every one of its practical adherents. Likewise, in his treatment of three great twentieth-century international relations thinkers associated with the realist reaction against a shallow liberalism, he made distinctions. His critique of Edward Hallett Carr remains perhaps his best-known work, and he rarely misses an opportunity to remind his reader of the fl aw that he insisted lay at the heart of Carr’s work—a recognition of the role of power untethered to any system of moral thought that could justify restraints on or criticisms of the use of power. 2 As Stephen Sims’ intro-ductory essay makes clear, Johnston was fully alive to the immense contri-bution made to our theoretical understanding of international politics by Hans Morgenthau, recognizing Morgenthau as a formative thinker who transformed the intellectual environment within which every subsequent analyst had to work. Yet he contended that Morgenthau’s rejection of the excessive confi dence of the liberal tradition was often phrased in terms too absolute and uncompromising, so that characteristics that differenti-ated better regimes from worse faded into a universal contest for power

PREFACE ix

in which the individual contestants could not be readily distinguished. His fullest respect seemed given to Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps because in Niebuhr Johnston recognized that grounding that Johnston feared Carr lacked. In Niebuhr’s Augustinian Christianity, Johnston believed that he discerned a clear-eyed recognition of the potency of the will in turning seeming selfl essness to self-interested ends, coupled with an insistence on the ultimate worth of each individual human being and the capacity of men and women to recognize and curb their delight in exercising power over others.

All of these evaluations will be familiar to those who encountered Johnston in the seminar room or the lecture hall; one can almost hear him voicing the formulations found in these pages. Yet one immense fi gure in international relations theory to whom Johnston often referred as a source of wisdom seems to make relatively few appearances in the manuscript, at least at the stage to which Johnston had brought it by the point when his advancing illness made it impossible for him to continue his work. That missing fi gure is Raymond Aron. My recollection, confi rmed by conversa-tions with others who studied with Johnston at roughly the same time, is that he cited Aron (and “Aronian” thinkers such as Stanley Hoffmann) perhaps more than any other single thinker. 3

This reliance on Aron is not surprising when one recalls that Aron, as with Johnston, saw himself as an inheritor of the liberal tradition, but one with no illusions. For decades, Aron defended liberalism and liberal institutions when that stance was a lonely one to take among French intel-lectuals; he criticized the USA when he thought it was mistaken or ill intentioned in its foreign policy, but he left no doubt that in the con-test between liberal and socialist democracy he stood with the former. Yet he claimed the mantle of “realist” for himself, not least because he recognized that, for all the achievements of “diplomacy,” the world of “strategy” in which war remained a real possibility among the participants in international politics always loomed in the background. 4 Even within this realm of power, however, Aron—and Johnston—insisted that the character of specifi c regimes led them to behave differently in confront-ing the demands of security and the lure of predominance. Some tended to behave in ways that were more moderate, respectful, and construc-tive than others, and these tended to be the liberal democratic countries; such was the insight of liberalism that Aron and Johnston shared. The dual nature of the international conduct of states, combining a necessary determination to acquire and maintain suffi cient power to remain secure

x PREFACE

in a dangerous world, on one hand, with a readiness to attempt all the softening effects of diplomacy, international law, and a general attitude of restraint and respect for others, on the other—this complex view of the world was something that Johnston admired in Aron. Yet for neither man could restraint alone keep this complex mechanism going. Johnston, like Aron, suspected that Carr was correct in contending that an imbalance of power in favor of a benevolent regime committed to the preservation of the whole was necessary to its survival. The belief that power was neces-sary to the continuance of an international order that operated not simply according to power, and that this power would be best exercised by a liberal democratic regime, was summed up in the title of another work of Aron, The Imperial Republic . 5 It was a view fully endorsed by Johnston.

Drawing, then, upon both the progressive contributions of liberal-ism and the cautionary contributions of realism, Johnston takes his place alongside Aron as an acute observer and theoretician of international rela-tions. His extended treatment of the intertwining of these two intellectual traditions has long been denied to the world. It is fortunate that it now sees the light of day.

David Clinton

xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Our fi rst and greatest debt must naturally go to Whittle Johnston, whose clarity of thought and expression launched a great ship of scholarly study on the decks of which we have spent a bit of time polishing the brass and inspecting the lines. We shall be forever grateful to him for leaving us this admirable work of study, thought, and exposition. Our second debt is to his widow, Martha Johnston, and to the Johnstons’ children and their spouses, for allowing us to assist a signifi cant contribution to knowledge, which its author had brought within sight of completion, in those last few steps that would carry it over the fi nish line. Without the support of the Johnston family to their husband and father, Whittle Johnston, we are certain, would never have exhibited the calm judgment and broad reading that distinguish this important work. Without their generous confi dence in us, we would never have had the opportunity to read this manuscript, much less edit it for publication.

David Clinton wishes to thank all of the graduate students who have worked on this manuscript since it was entrusted to the care of the Political Science Department at Baylor University. As a group, they are brilliant, conscientious, and—perhaps of greatest importance to him—tolerant of the foibles of their professor. His most heartfelt appreciation must go to his coeditor, Stephen Sims, who somehow managed to write a brilliant dissertation and earn a PhD while chasing after innumerable citations and determining the author’s intent from handwritten notes added at widely varying times. It has been a distinct privilege to work with him, and it will be a great pleasure to watch his ascent to the prominence to which his high character, his rare intelligence, and his constant collegiality entitle him.

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Stephen Sims thanks his mentor and coeditor, Dr. David Clinton, for the opportunity and privilege to work on this manuscript. Dr. Clinton’s nobility of soul and gentleness of character remain polestars for a young man setting out on his career. He would also like to thank his family and wife. They made the labor over this manuscript much lighter than it could have been.

NOTES 1. See David Jordan, Jonathan Rice, Robert Turner, Michael Cairo, and

Christina Smith, “Stafford Gorman Whittle Johnston,” in PS: Political Science & Politics (March 1997): 89–91.

2. See Whittle Johnston, “E. H. Carr’s Theory of International Relations: A Critique,” Journal of Politics (November 1967).

3. Hoffmann is in fact extensively quoted throughout the work. 4. Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations , trans.

Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1966), 21–46.

5. Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic: The United States and the World 1945–1973 , trans. Frank Jellinek (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974).

xiii

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Part I “The Long Road to Theory” 27

1 Politics and Science 29

2 Politics and Value, Part 1 35

3 Politics and Value, Part 2 53

4 The Scientist, the Moralist, and the Historian 67

Part II International Relations and History 95

5 The States System 97

6 The Balance of Power 119

xiv CONTENTS

Part III Liberalism and History 153

7 The Development of the Liberal Tradition, Part 1 155



Part IV International Relations and Liberalism 225

10 The Problem of Community 227

11 The American Alliance System 245

12 Democratic Theory and International Relations 255

Works Cited 279

Index 285

1© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016W. Johnston, Realism and the Liberal Tradition, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57764-1

The condition of international politics in the 1960s was not conducive to optimism. The state system witnessed increasing antagonism between the two great powers of the time, the USA and the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s pugnacious responses to the aggressive intrusions of his Soviet coun-terparts, especially signifi ed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, caused many to worry that the world might yet end in fi re, and by mankind’s own hands at that. In this unsettled time, when measured words were often exchanged for hyperbole, calm for anxiety, Whittle Johnston, Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, taught a series of courses and wrote a number of essays on this remarkable turn in human history. The coolness of his writing and teaching bespeaks a mod-eration and intellectual clear-sightedness which is all too rare in periods of fear and crisis. This volume is a collection of his writings, either adapted from lectures or specifi cally written for publication.

OVERVIEW OF THE WORK Whittle Johnston’s main concern in the following essays is the develop-ment of a theory for the study of international politics and how that the-ory might address the relation between liberalism and realism. Johnston saw the contribution of realists, such as Morgenthau or Niebuhr, as neces-sary and welcome—an important advance in theoretical understanding of international politics. Nonetheless, he also believed it was an advance only

Introduction

2 W. JOHNSTON

and that further work was yet to be done. He was particularly interested in what realism could say to a liberal democracy like the USA or Great Britain, if anything at all.

It says a great deal about his conception of international relations the-ory that Johnston considered realism too abstract and ahistorical to be of much use as a guide for foreign policy. Ironically, this was the same cri-tique made by Hans Morgenthau about liberalism and idealism in Scientifi c Man vs. Power Politics , that liberals mistook the contingent for the eternal and the historically conditioned for the natural. Johnston believed that change, and accounting for change, was an essential part of any theory, and thus it was not enough simply to study the international system as a collection of forces or powers. One must also study how the international system came to be, its growth and alteration, and even the possibility of its death. Thus, for Johnston, the idea of a parsimonious theory and its abstractions, simply based on consideration of power, was not only unreal-istic and unhelpful but also symbolized a refusal by international relations theorists to take seriously what the other sciences had long ago realized: the importance of the dynamic as well as the static.

It was the desire to uncover the international system’s dynamism that led Johnston to believe that international relations had to be stud-ied historically rather than abstractly. This did not mean abandoning the abstractions of theory, but rather, using them as a framework and way of organizing concepts. As Johnston understood it, the purpose of theory was to analyze and predict human behavior. Practically speaking, however, a theory had to be applied to particular facts, and when one speaks of particular facts, he is talking about beings with particular histories. This is especially the case for international politics, which deals with particular political communities, each with its own “historic image” of itself. It was this very historic image that Johnston thought had shaped the idealistic theories in the early part of the twentieth century, for most theorizing had been done in the USA and Great Britain. He understood such theories to be a “projection” of the archetypical liberal experience onto the stage of world politics. As such, it was no surprise that idealistic theories based on the unique Anglo-American political experience should be the product of the English-speaking democracies. That made the realist critique of idealism all the more pressing for Johnston, while it also raised the ques-tion of whether realism could offer anything substantive to the liberal democracies. 1

INTRODUCTION 3

Without realism, Johnston argued, international relations theory at best could only remain in an immature state. As the science of chemistry arose out of the alchemist’s search for gold from baser elements, so the theory of international relations arose out of the idealist’s desire to achieve peace from anarchy. As they were for the advancement of chemistry, so rational-ism and empiricism would be necessary for the advancement of interna-tional relations. The theory could not rest with realism, however; indeed, Johnston saw certain elements of the old idealism in the new forms of real-ism, especially in the concept of the balance of power. He saw realism as an essential step down the road of theory, but a step that must be followed by another. Realism’s static abstractions of power had to face the critique of the dynamics of history; it was only in this way, Johnston argued, that we would be able to move to something more like a science of international politics. It was important for Johnston that we understand history to be truly dynamic; as he saw it, “theories of progress” took the smooth route of establishing an intelligible purpose to history, making history too easily comprehensible. Such theories, Johnston argued, smuggle static concepts into a supposed science of change to do away with the diffi culty of under-standing motion. Progressive history in general, Johnston argued, both gutted history as an art and tended to make human beings inhumane. It is not surprising, then, that Johnston preferred Ludwig Dehio’s The Precarious Balance to the histories of E.H. Carr. Whereas Carr saw history as progressive, Dehio explained the path of history and international poli-tics in terms of competing values, tensions, or antinomies. These antino-mies showed the true depth and complexity of the changes wrought in the international system and showed that there is little that is inevitable in international politics. Human choice still dominated supposed impersonal forces. Included in the following volume, then, is Johnston’s consider-ation of the relations of science to history, the place of motion and values in scientifi c investigations, and, perhaps most importantly, his history of liberalism and the state system.

The argument of these essays is more or less a consideration of the pros-pects for liberalism as a genuine ordering principle for the state system. Johnston understood that it was diffi cult to say precisely what “liberal-ism” is; historical contingencies could lead us to identify liberalism with individual liberty in the form of rights, a powerful or extensive state, or whatever else a liberal may claim to profess. Johnston studied liberalism through the analytic device he calls “the problem of community”—or how to deal with the disintegrative effects of individualism and the tyrannical

4 W. JOHNSTON

effects of coercive order. Although the problem of community is latent in every collective body, Johnston shrewdly saw Europe dealing with it in a very particular way. He notes that medieval Europe, through its common Christian religion, had what he called a “metaphysical unity” that allowed for a surprising amount of individual freedom. The effect of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of scientifi c rationalism did much to destroy this metaphysical unity, and so the stage was set for what Johnston called the dreadful “oscillation” between fi ssiparous individualism and coerced uni-formity, captured so well in the experience of France. Johnston believed this cycle of order and chaos was endemic in many European states, but, notably, not in Great Britain and its child, the USA. What was it about these two English-speaking states that allowed them to mitigate the effects of the problem of community?

Drawing on Dehio, Johnston saw the same oscillation occurring in the state system. A tendency toward unity that can be observed particularly during the medieval experience but also in post-World War I Europe was counteracted by pulls toward diversity, especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Often particular forces act against the grain, as when Louis XIV attempted universal monarchy in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, Johnston thought it possible to descry patterns of behavior cast broadly over centuries. His worry was that both poles of the oscillation that shook the international system had a good to promise—in the one case freedom, in the other case peace. This oscillation became particularly troubling in the late twentieth century due to the progress of technology, which produced a hitherto unknown ability to unify and liberate, to tyrannize over all or destroy all. This made the problem of community for the state system all the more urgent for Johnston and thus made political and historical analyses of Great Britain and the USA a mat-ter of the fi rst order for scholars of international relations.

Johnston believed that the secret to success for Great Britain and the USA lay in liberalism. As liberalism evolved in the historical experience of these countries, it dampened harmful effects of the oscillation between individualism and uniformity. It accomplished this harmonization by mak-ing freedom the goal of the political order: the maximization of individual freedom and the ability of the individual to pursue “self-fulfi llment.” At the same time, the liberal recognizes the need for strong and coercive gov-ernment and the uniformity that government entails. Without energetic government, there can be no self-fulfi lled individual, and yet the individ-ual must not be absorbed into the artifi cial being of the state. According

INTRODUCTION 5

to Johnston, it was Britain’s connection to its medieval past and the refusal of the British people to allow any monarch to arrogate absolute power to himself or herself that permitted the individual to fl ourish in a genuine way under the gentle coercion of the British state. Emphasizing the values of toleration, freedom of speech and trade, and most importantly, a con-stitutionalism that ultimately had its roots in medieval political thought and experience, Johnston saw Great Britain as a unique state in the inter-national system and one that held out unique promise. America, as far as Johnston was concerned, was heir to the British experience and thus the system’s last best hope. Without the USA, the prospects for liberalism as an ordering principle of the state system were very dim indeed.

Thus the USA plays the central role in Johnston’s consideration for the future of the international system. The USA did not simply have a prepon-derance of power, although it was important that it did. It also was the heir to liberalism and the Anglo-Saxon way of politics that, as far as Johnston was concerned, made it successful where others were not. 2 Nonetheless, power in the hands of a truly liberal state still left the problem of com-munity for the state system unsolved. Under the shadow of nuclear weap-ons, within a heterogeneous system, where were to be found the forces of uniformity that might allow the international system to survive? What was the answer beside world domination of a tyrannical state? Johnston had no clear-cut answer for these questions other than that the USA must not be afraid to acknowledge its preponderance and play the part of true leader, as Great Britain had before it. A preponderance of power does not in itself create the uniformity needed to mitigate the problem of commu-nity, but rather it provides the conditions necessary for such uniformity to come into being at some point in time. As far as Johnston was concerned, power precedes freedom. In this vein, Johnston thought that “pluralism” with its diversity of centers of power was undesirable; the world could no longer afford the freewheeling state system of centuries past. For states to split infi nitive maximize their freedom, they must be able to act without fear of nuclear annihilation. For the international system to become truly liberal, a preponderance of liberal power in some form is necessary.

JOHNSTON AND REALISM A persistent subject for Johnston was the question of realism as a way of studying international politics, rather than as an abstract theory. While it is clear that he did not consider himself a realist in the usual sense of the

6 W. JOHNSTON

term, his intellectual debt to the great realist thinkers reveals a compli-cated intellectual foundation. To advance our thinking about international politics, one had to “internalize” the image of international relations bequeathed by the realists, especially Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Carr. But one also had to observe the defi ciencies of their theories and move toward a truer theory. Understanding Johnston’s relationship with realist think-ers, and his relationship to “realism” as a mode of thinking, is challenging but necessary. In what follows, I shall attempt to characterize this complex relationship, showing Johnston’s debt to realism, his criticisms of realists, and how precisely he went beyond realism.

As many have noted, “realism” is not a monolithic set of ideas, nor is it even a theory in itself. It is more accurately described as a stance or attitude through which one considers the world of international politics. Johnston was aware of this, perhaps more than most students of international rela-tions. He knew that “realism” most properly meant a wariness of utopian thinking and the mental preparation to be consistently disappointed by the intractable, and often brutal, characteristics that mark international relations. Thus “realism” for Johnston was primarily a kind of intellectual fortitude to see the world for what it is and not to be dismayed by it.

If realism is a kind of intellectual fortitude, then there were three think-ers in particular who either discovered this fortitude or displayed it par-ticularly well. These thinkers were those who later became known as the “classical realists,” namely, Carr, Morgenthau, and Niebuhr. From each of these thinkers, Johnston took valuable insights, and yet none of them did Johnston think suffi cient in his own right.

CARR E.H. Carr could be considered a founder of realism and to a certain extent seems to have coined the use of the word with regard to international rela-tions. Thus it is no surprise that Johnston took particular care in consider-ing Carr’s work, especially The Twenty Years’ Crisis , and the philosophic approach Carr outlined there. Johnston points out the signifi cance of that approach in the way Carr “discovered” the “phenomena of power.” Carr “discovered” power through “the recognition of the conditioned character of our perspectives,” especially in “the historically conditioned” nature of supposedly “absolute” or “a priori” principles. 3 In particular, Carr aimed his destructive realist perspective at liberal thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century who believed in a “harmony of interests” wherein,

INTRODUCTION 7

if each agent pursued his own self-interest in a rational manner, each agent would also unconsciously bring about the common good of the whole. Rather than attacking the idea of something like Smith’s “invisible hand” which undergirded such a rosy portrait of international politics, Carr attacked the rationality that liberal thinkers like Smith, Locke, or Cobden exemplifi ed, in particular their penchant for taking their own historical experience and universalizing it, making absolute principles out of histori-cal contingencies. In response, Carr states that the absolute is beyond reach because all the human mind can do is observe its own historical circum-stances—reality, in Carr’s view, is neither self-evident nor intelligible, and so the human mind must interpret reality rather than understand it. The insight into the conditioned nature of human experience led to Carr’s the-ory of historical work, wherein he claimed that there were no simple facts to which the historian could point as the simple truth. “The historian gets the facts he wants ” and consequently “history means interpretation ,” as Carr claims in his work on history. 4 The line between facts and values does not really exist for Carr, because our values govern what we take to be facts. Thus, was the fall of the USSR the destruction of an evil empire or “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century?” It depends a great deal on what one’s values are, and it only stands to reason that an American and a Russian will have two very different answers regarding the “fact” of the USSR’s collapse.

Johnston thought that Carr’s view of the historically conditioned nature of human perspectives was a valuable insight. He accepted Carr’s critique of Enlightenment rationality and his insistence that human beings under-stand “facts” in light of “values.” Johnston nevertheless departed from Carr in what he saw as Carr’s “simple faith in the fl ux itself as a benevolent absolute,” a “harmonic monism” that propelled the progress of history. Johnston, by rejecting Carr’s theory of historical progress, saw himself as a better exponent of Carr’s historical insight than Carr himself. The condi-tioning of human thought by social and historical circumstances lies at the root of Johnston’s thinking about international relations. For him, values, whether given to us by society or tradition, will always color the way the world, especially the social world, appears. That Johnston gives a kind of preeminence to values over facts allows him to avoid the supposed “fact/value” distinction so common in the political and moral philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers, such as Hume.

Rejecting Enlightenment rationalism, and its distinction between facts and values, might lead to postmodernism and critical theory. Indeed,

8 W. JOHNSTON

some scholars have turned to Carr as if to a prophet and claim his realism is nothing other than the approach that was later taken by critical theorists. 5 Another way of dealing with the rejection of Enlightenment rationality, however, is to return to the ancients, those whom Enlightenment think-ers themselves rejected. The Aristotelian tradition held that certain virtues and qualities of soul are necessary before one can truly understand the “facts” of human experience, that is, the human soul must be educated before it can grasp truth. 6 True judgment of political things belongs to the prudent man and thus the properly virtuous man; without prudence, we cannot grasp the “facts” of political existence except incidentally.

There is some ambiguity about which direction away from Enlightenment rationalism Johnston took. Although his insistence on the radically sub-jective character of knowledge and questioning of the “perspectiveless” attitude of Enlightenment rationalist thought seems to undermine the possibility of truth, several things should give us pause. Johnston does point to Aristotle as a preeminent political philosopher who understood that virtue is not correlative to knowledge, which is more or less the error of the Enlightenment, in Johnston’s mind. Johnston argues that what makes the “liberal” different from the “relativist” is his understanding of the political nature of the human being and the radical dependence that the liberal must place on tradition, because political existence depends on “enduring” relationships between “the past and the present.” And here, the thinker that Johnston turns to is none other than Edmund Burke, the political liberal par excellence . As many have noted the similarities between Aristotle and Burke, it is not surprising that Johnston has a preference for Aristotle over Plato. It is also not surprising that we see a kind of apparent ambiguity in Johnston’s attitude toward truth and relativism, as he pre-fers to take his orientation from “what works” in politics. In this prefer-ence for practical achievement rather than philosophic subtlety, Johnston’s thought is like Burke’s, who himself is not easy to pin down on the issues of nature and history, being and becoming, or philosophy and law. 7 For while Johnston admits that all “facts” are interpretations of reality fi ltered through the categories of our values, he also believes that political liberal-ism presumes a truth independent from the determination of government. Philosophy, and the possibility of truth that its quest for wisdom implies, addresses the need of political liberalism.

Thus, the debt that Johnston owes Carr is in fact immense, even if Johnston was more true to Carr than Carr was to himself. But this does not mean that Johnston was overcome by “normless relativism.” One could

INTRODUCTION 9

say that Johnston’s commitment to the “political things,” which Carr him-self denigrated, was the source of both his norms and his political thought. For as Carr preferred to think of international relations in pseudo-Marxist categories, thus revealing his values, Johnston understood the signifi cance and importance of constitutional government as the preeminent gift of the liberal tradition to political science. And so when Carr characterized the question as to who would rule the planners of his utopian socialist society as “a mere debating point,” Johnston replied in the spirit of Churchill, “Some debate! Some point!” 8 For Johnston, the signifi cance of constitu-tionalism and rule of law could not be lost, for they were in fact the very political things that formed the starting points for political philosophy and were also its fruits. Thus Carr, contrary to his own intentions, pointed Johnston back to Aristotle and Burke rather than Marx, Nietzsche, or Foucault. For as Johnston saw it, the very strength in political liberalism lay in its pessimistic view of human nature and the need for institutions and laws to preclude the possibility of tyranny. Carr’s rejection of consti-tutional liberty for the sake of socialized planning was nothing more than a rejection of the very realist mind-set that Carr had been so infl uential in bringing about. This tough-minded approach of liberalism to politics, not placing too much faith in reason and in the virtue of fallible human beings, is ably, though not consistently, captured by Carr. And thus, in a sense, Carr’s political philosophy, far from pointing us away from political liberalism, points back toward it. And this is the second great infl uence of Carr we see in Johnston’s work, a fi rm acknowledgement of human vices and the need for the rule of law.

MORGENTHAU This unwavering acceptance of the fragility of human nature leads to the second great realist with whom Johnston deals, Morgenthau. For while Carr rejected Enlightenment rationality in a manner reminiscent of the pessimistic attitude of the liberal, Morgenthau both deepened this insight and showed what the implications were for international politics. Morgenthau, unlike Carr, did not see the international realm according to the dichotomy of have and have-not and thus did not equate interna-tional morality with heroic sacrifi ce of the haves for the sake of the have- nots. 9 Morgenthau understood the international system to be the scene of a perpetual struggle for power among all states, regardless of whether they were haves or have-nots. At the same time, however, Johnston noted

10 W. JOHNSTON

that Morgenthau seemed to have no explanation for, nor even interest in, the radical differences among the regimes that made up the international system. As Carr, in abandoning his critique of Enlightenment rationality and accepting the “harmonious monism” of inevitable rational progress in history, ended up supporting a centralized socialist authority unfettered by law, so Morgenthau, making similar critiques of Enlightenment rational-ity, failed to see the immense political difference between the American republic and the Soviet republic.

Morgenthau arguably made Carr’s critique of Enlightenment rational-ity even more radical. While Carr ended up giving a quasi-Marxist theory of international relations, which as Johnston understood it, constituted one of the most philosophic Marxist views of the international system, Morgenthau rejected the entire notion of a political “science” which took its bearings from mathematics or the natural sciences. For Morgenthau, political existence is not a “problem” to be “solved,” but rather a mystery which must be understood, if at all, by philosophic wisdom. Thus while Carr always carried the epitome of Enlightenment rationality through his at least partial adherence to Marx, Morgenthau rejected the entire tradition of thought that produced Marxist economics and politics, arguing that it was of a piece with laissez-faire rationalism in trying to reduce human exis-tence to something like the “laws” of gravity. This total rejection of the Enlightenment did not jeopardize the possibility of truth for Morgenthau, for while there are no “eternal verities” to be found in Enlightenment political philosophy, those eternal verities could indeed be found in older, wiser thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes. Thus truth was a pos-sibility for those who study international relations and it is possible for statesmen to act according to truth, but to do so for Morgenthau meant jettisoning the inheritance of the Enlightenment. For Johnston, the most signifi cant distinction between Morgenthau’s mode of theorizing about international affairs and Carr’s lay in Morgenthau’s consistent antipathy to everything the Enlightenment promised, including Marxism, whereas Carr succumbed to Marxist illusions. And thus Johnston himself is much closer to Morgenthau than to Carr in terms of intellectual standpoint.

Yet, if to Johnston it seemed that Carr was not entirely true to himself by his acceptance of historical progress and Marxism, so in Johnston’s view Morgenthau was not true to himself, insofar as he attempted to make timeless verities out of things which were actually the product of histori-cal contingency. Johnston notes that there are two distinct approaches to international relations in Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations . On the

INTRODUCTION 11

one hand, there is the attempt to establish “timeless abstractions” which “underlie international politics,” while on the other there is a historical look at the international system and an attempt to observe the changes it has undergone. Johnston, as he makes clear, does not think that the search for “timeless abstractions” is a bootless task, but he suspects that they are of limited value at best. Moreover, Johnston argues that Morgenthau’s efforts to fi nd the eternal verities led to a warped view of what we could actually know about international politics. This warped view was most easily seen, in Johnston’s mind, by Morgenthau’s distaste for the politics of the twentieth century and his attempts to locate underlying continu-ities between the modern era and the more elegant politics that existed before modernity, rather than admitting the vast gulf that lay between the two ages of international politics. This in turn, Johnston claims, led Morgenthau to take an earlier kind of international politics as a norma-tive standard—international politics ought to be done in the manner of a Bismarck or a Richelieu—a point from which the twentieth century fell very far indeed. As far as Johnston was concerned, in his reverence for the past and disgust with the present, Morgenthau, far from being a “realist,” was in truth an “escapist.”

But this escape to the past and the attempt to use the past as a standard, while at the same time locating continuities between past and present, led Morgenthau to odd conclusions. In particular, Johnston noted that while Morgenthau admitted that nearly anything could be considered the “national interest,” more often than not Morgenthau solely spoke of it in terms of materialism. Thus Johnston suggested that if Morgenthau meant to say that the objectives of diplomacy and strategy could vary a great deal, his discussions which focused on the national interest seemed to belie that statement and tended to understand interest in terms of material goods. In Johnston’s view, this was a critical error, one that led to a distorted view of the international system. It is no surprise that if we look for continuities in international politics, we will fi nd a consistent concern for the material needs of life. At the same time, this obscures what is different, namely, that the eighteenth century saw an international system dominated by monar-chies, while the twentieth century saw the awakening of the masses. This difference was no small matter, for it revealed the importance of “senti-ment” and “political values” that are critical to understanding the realities of the international system. In particular for Johnston, it helped explain and unify the Anglo-American preponderance of infl uence in international affairs for hundreds of years.

12 W. JOHNSTON

The importance of “political values,” which explained a great deal more about strategic and diplomatic behavior of states than mere material necessity could, stemmed from a concern with regimes and domestic poli-tics that was crucial for Johnston. Morgenthau’s quest for timeless abstrac-tion led him to downplay the signifi cance of differences between the regimes which existed in the contemporary international system. Indeed, Morgenthau seemed at times to think of democracy as nothing other than a defi cient form of government, at least regarding foreign policy, inferior to government by detached monarchs and aristocrats. Because a detached aristocracy could safely avoid being moved by popular passions, the state could more safely be steered by the lights of rationally understood objec-tive self-interest. Johnston, however, worried that Morgenthau’s look-ing toward aristocratic governments of yesteryear meant he had no real answer to the pressing questions of his own time, especially in the context of the Cold War. Not only that, but by simply casting all regimes of the twentieth century as democratic, or at least nonaristocratic, Morgenthau obscured vital differences between regimes that he ought to have kept in the light. Particularly in Scientifi c Man vs. Power Politics , Morgenthau noted a profound difference between the foundings of the American and French republics. The former was informed by centuries of political expe-rience against the perpetual possibility of despotism. The latter, in con-trast, was characterized by a boundless optimism informed by a heady and naïve belief in the possibility of scientifi c politics and the exaltation of the goddess “Reason” to overcome political problems. Morgenthau himself traced the worship of that barren goddess from the French republic all the way to the Bolshevik revolution. And thus Morgenthau himself saw the American republic as founded through an act of political prudence, the preeminent virtue of statesmen, and the Soviet Union established through the zealous belief in an impotent divinity. This is also the view of Johnston—after all, liberalism for Johnston does not mean belief in the “rights of man” or “autonomy.” Liberalism is not a moral philosophy as much as the culmination of the political wisdom of the West, with that most sublime product of prudence, constitutionalism and the rule of law it embodies.

It is curious, then, that Morgenthau’s understanding of the difference between the American and Soviet experiences plays little role in Politics among Nations . There, Morgenthau casts the Cold War as a simple confl ict between imperial capitalism and Communism in which each side believes

INTRODUCTION 13

itself to be in the right, so much so that each embodies the phenomenon of “nationalistic universalism” according to which a particular people wishes to remake the world in its own image. Elsewhere, Morgenthau recognizes the political dimension of the confl ict, but again obscures it by calling it a struggle between “democracy and Communism,” each claiming universal validity. What is curious about both these generaliza-tions is how the particularity of each regime becomes obscured, some-thing that Johnston saw as vital. The Cold War was not, primarily, about capitalism and Communism, or democracy and Communism, but about the American regime as ordered by the Constitution, the inheritor of the political wisdom of the West, and the Soviet Union, which embodied and indeed perfected the Enlightenment rationality of which it is the inheri-tor. And so the struggle was indeed between liberalism and absolutism, but not in the sense of competing catalogues of human rights, say politi-cal rights as distinguished from economic rights. It was nothing other than the question of the West: would its future be ruled by the prudence embodied in the American Constitution or the despotic and impotent Enlightenment rationality of the Soviet Union?

Morgenthau’s failure to note the vast political distance between the USA and the Soviet Union seemed to stem from his desire to fi nd universal truths in a science of international politics. And as Johnston points out time and again, this desire simply repeats the errors of Enlightenment rational-ity to which Morgenthau was so opposed—it made universal truths where there was really historical accident. Furthermore, the desire to universalize made Morgenthau untrue to his own view of the nature of the American Constitution and the origins of the Soviet Union. As Johnston points out, Morgenthau seems to focus entirely on the “fi rst image” of Kenneth Waltz and lets the “second image” drop out entirely. 10 For Johnston, while the structure of the state system and human nature are of vital importance, so too is the interactions between states that arises from similarity or dif-ferences between regimes. By ignoring the second image, Morgenthau obscured the signifi cance of liberalism itself. Morgenthau seemed to think the USA and the Soviet Union could be understood as similar entities in the international system, while his very work Scientifi c Man vs. Power Politics revealed that the two were entirely different. Johnston, then, as with Carr, breaks with Morgenthau by being more true to Morgenthau’s insights than Morgenthau himself. Liberalism, not democracy or capital-ism, is at stake, and Morgenthau’s realism obscures this.

14 W. JOHNSTON

NIEBUHR This leads to a consideration of Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent “Christian realist.” For if Morgenthau strayed from the genuine truth of liberalism and made it simply the mirror image of Communism, Niebuhr himself saw the importance of a sober realism that undergirds traditional liberal think-ers and their preference for democratic institutions. As Niebuhr famously observed, “man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” It was from the pithy defense of democracy that Johnston drew inspiration to set forth and defend liberalism against its realist critics.

While Johnston inherited much from Carr and Morgenthau (as Johnston put it, any analysis of international politics had to be “post-Morgenthau”), he inherited even more from Niebuhr. For Niebuhr was the fi rst of the “classical realists” to recognize the strength of liberalism, to realize that its existence was an accomplishment of mankind and one of its greatest ben-efi ts, and, perhaps most of all, to contend that it was well worth defending against the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. 11 Niebuhr was also vital for Johnston’s thesis that any theory of international relations which ignored normative concerns, or the necessary relationship between order and justice, would be at least half-blind. For justice, according to Niebuhr, required the active ordering force of government; there can be no justice within anarchy. At the same time, no order can be long lasting and stable if it does not approximate justice to some extent. Thus, for Niebuhr, the relation between power and justice is always “ambivalent,” in Johnston’s terms. As justice requires the power of government, so the power of gov-ernment at the same time is a vital threat to justice itself. In this way, Niebuhr landed on what for Johnston was the central insight of liberal-ism: “the wisdom of political liberalism has lain in the theoretical insight that government is, at the same time, both necessary and dangerous.” 12 This means that government must be established for the sake of justice and peace, but it must have restraints to prevent tyranny—and it was from Niebuhr, again, that we discover that those restraints cannot consist primarily in moral or social pressure. Power must counteract power, and thus, even though there must be a preponderant power that can establish an order which it is to be hoped approximates justice, there must also be a balance of power to prevent tyranny on a world scale. 13

Johnston took to heart Niebuhr’s famous categorization of theorists and political movements into the “children of light” and the “children

INTRODUCTION 15

of darkness.” The children of light, as those who emphasized the moral unity of the human species and belief in the power of international orga-nization and reason to disentangle the confl icting aims and purposes of various states, failed to understand the “particularist forces” and “egoism” that stemmed from original sin, clouding man’s judgment and his ability to live according to the “law of love.” The children of darkness, under-standing such forces, emphasize only the effect of original sin and the diverse interests that characterize politics, so that liberalism itself becomes an impossibility. While the children of light are tempted to think that there is a universal moral law, easily grasped and submitted to by all, the children of darkness, despairing of the fallen state of human nature, are tempted to slip into moral relativism. Johnston identifi es Morgenthau as a child of darkness, at least partly because Morgenthau fails to see the historical signifi cance of constitutional polities. 14 Niebuhr believed that the way for-ward was to hold the universal belief of a child of light while acknowledg-ing the truths of the children of darkness; Johnston argued that liberalism as a political tradition had long since been pointing out this “middle way.”

Such a middle way was best expressed by the use of the balance of power as a way to prevent the overweening lust for power that fi lled the human soul from fi nding a violent outlet on the global stage. The “inter-national community” did not have the “inner cohesive factors” that would have made world government possible. Thus, when describing in 1944 the conditions for a stable peace, Niebuhr emphasized the need for the great powers to work together in some sort of alliance, rather than try-ing to circumvent great power politics by the establishment of a world political authority. A balance of power, however, is not enough for inter-national stability, because the balance of power is nothing other than a “kind of managed anarchy” which would sooner or later slip out of con-trol. To subdue the inherent chaos of the balance of power, preponderant power was needed. Thus Niebuhr stood as a strange philosopher of power who had little to no faith in the balance of power; as far as Niebuhr was concerned in 1944, a preponderance of either British or American power would be necessary to maintain peace and, indeed, to establish a cohesion in the non-Communist world that had hitherto not existed.

It is not diffi cult to see the effect of Niebuhr throughout Johnston’s work. Johnston’s emphasis on the ambiguity of power and freedom, as well as the partial truths that all human beings have, his recognition that legitimate complaints may be made on either side of a confl ict, and his insight into the prevailing tendency of those who make claims of justice

16 W. JOHNSTON

to press their claim as far as they can unless counteracted by another’s power all bear the stamp of Niebuhr’s theorizing. And of course, Johnston saw his own concern for justice and his belief that justice had to be the ordering principle of international politics as the proper inheritance of Niebuhr, as well as the operation of the balance of power as the pos-sible instrument of justice. 15 It was for this reason that Johnston thought there was no tension in being both a committed disciple of Niebuhr and a committed liberal. For if Niebuhr was the thinker most committed to justice in international politics, so justice is the “earmark” of liberalism as a political tradition. This went hand in hand with Johnston’s belief that liberalism was not the child of the Enlightenment, but rather of British constitutionalism—a political wisdom developed over the course of cen-turies. Johnston believed this to be so because the fundamental question of liberalism is how to relate the concepts of freedom, equality, and order in a sustainable manner. The further concept which governs these three concepts is nothing other than justice.

THE ARGUMENT The chapters of this volume are organized, as much as possible, as an argument revealing Johnston’s views on international politics and liberal-ism. There are four main parts: a discussion of theory generally and how to theorize about international politics, a brief history of liberalism that attempts to unify its apparently disparate emphases and incoherencies, another brief history of the international system, and fi nally a discussion of a liberal world order and America’s place within that order.

There are four chapters in part I, “The Long Road to Theory.” In Chap. 2, we begin with a short essay adapted from Johnston’s lecture notes, “Politics and Science.” Johnston provides us with an essential start-ing point—what is science, and why do we think we can have one of poli-tics? Within this essay lies one of the bases of Johnston’s position, namely, a dismissal of structural realism as either realistic or cunning. Whatever the science of politics may be, it cannot be so by aping economics as structural realism, quite explicitly, does. 16 He ends his brief introduction by echoing Aristotle in calling politics “architectonic” and contending that, consequently, politics is concerned with the whole of man. Thus, he follows up in Chap. 3 (“Politics and Value I”) with a discussion of Kenneth Boulding’s view of “the image.” We are thrown into the thick of Johnston’s thought; in this diffi cult essay, he brings together the themes

INTRODUCTION 17

of necessity and freedom, arbitrariness and choice, which he believes make up the consciousness of human beings. The main thrust here (there are many thrusts) is that human beings must see themselves and their place in the world in some way, and this will always include arbitrary choices that exclude the choices of others. We must begin here, because human beings are not simple—there is no one conception of what it means to be human, which further means there is no single conception of being rational or being reasonable. In providing this foundation, Johnston provides a fi rm grounding for a confl ictual world, a realist world.

In the fourth chapter (“Politics and Value II”), a continuation of the previous one, Johnston takes up the question of human freedom again, noting once more that freedom is more likely to result in confl ict than in harmony. The art of politics, it follows, consists in knowing the limits of “permissible” offense. Indeed, to a certain extent, Johnston identifi es the political with those mutually exclusive claims that are the product of different images. He concludes with a question about political education, and so we turn to the question of education toward good practice.

The fi fth chapter, “The Scientist, the Moralist, and the Historian,” out-lines three fundamentally different approaches to studying and learning about international politics. Here Johnston reveals his fundamental pur-pose as both political and ethical, questioning the moral order that was the great promise of the Enlightenment. He notes that the scientifi c revolu-tion of that time laid the groundwork for hopes in a future moral revolu-tion, one which could unify all humanity in moral truth as it had been by scientifi c truth. Johnston questions whether a scientist is equipped to deal with questions of politics and morality and fi nds the scientist wanting. Johnston, however, does not leave us without guidance in making moral and political judgments. He points to history rather than science as a way of understanding the human condition and the competing claims states have on one another; moreover he asserts that history reveals that the issue underlying many world confl icts is not so much the question “who is right?” as “what is justice?”

In the second section, “International Relations and History,” we turn toward considering the system of states in particular and what history teaches us about it. “The States System” (Chap. 6 of this book) is an in- depth look at the international system and how it has developed over time. Johnston, true to his critique of progressive history, does not see anything like a goal or purpose to international political history. He sees trends, ten-dencies in tension with other tendencies. Most generally, one can say there

18 W. JOHNSTON

is a pull toward disintegration and particularism and another pull toward uniformity and universality. Johnston does not claim that either one or the other is inevitable—the future of the international system lies in the hands of individual statesmen, who one hopes will not be too jaded by Johnston’s nonprogressive view of history. We also see a brief critique of the balance of power, which was foreshadowed in Johnston’s dismissal of systems analysis.

This critique is carried forward in the next chapter (Chap. 7), “The Balance of Power,” where we consider whether the balance is a useful concept at all and whether it has actually been an ordering principle in international politics. Johnston does not abandon the notion of a balance altogether, but he does criticize its advocates for their unthinking reliance on the goodwill of states, their blindness to the possibility of total anarchy, in short, their lack of awareness of the problem of community. Johnston concludes that if the balance of power is to fulfi ll the role its advocates claim for it, there must be a preponderant power which is able funda-mentally to infl uence the behavior of other powers. The relevant kind of power, furthermore, is not so much material power as political power, a kind of loyalty felt toward the institutions and regime of the preponderant state. Without this preponderant state, Johnston argues, the balance of power will destroy itself as a laissez-faire market destroys itself. With this in mind, we turn to the possibilities and limitations that face the liberal when he considers international politics.

Following the conclusion of the discussion of methodology and theory, namely, that history is the surest guide in making political and ethical deci-sions, the third section, “Liberalism and History” is primarily a historical discussion of liberalism as a form of political life and of the central concept of the work as a whole, “the problem of community.” In Chap. 8, “The Development of the Liberal Tradition I,” Johnston begins to describe “the problem of community” or the struggle between diversity and uni-formity, the individual and the collectivity, or freedom and equality. This is a perpetual problem that political communities must handle in some way. Generally the forces of tyranny and disintegration are held at bay by tradition, which allows the individual to understand his place in both the cosmos and the community. Modernity, Johnston argues, is marked by a revolt against tradition, thus causing the problem of community to reappear again, more forcefully than in ages past. Originally contained to Europe, there is now a “world revolution” that brings the destabilizing forces of modernity against traditional societies across the globe. The problem of community is now a global issue, not merely European.

INTRODUCTION 19

From this rather bleak picture, Johnston turns to liberalism proper in Chap. 9, “The Development of the Liberal Tradition II.” Here he dis-cusses what he believes to be the fi rst and coequal founders of the liberal tradition, Locke and Hobbes. Both are necessary for liberalism and reveal why liberalism is able to weather the storms of “the problem of commu-nity” better than other political forms. Hobbes powerfully makes the case for the necessity of government. Locke makes an equally powerful argu-ment for the dangers of powerful government. Liberalism needs both as founders so that it may stand in tension with itself. Here Johnston takes note that traditional liberal approaches to world politics have often ended in complete failure, the reason being the lack of uniformity that Hobbes’ state provides. Without some basic agreement regarding our images, world politics will tend toward disintegration rather than cohesion. Power, the great insight of the realists, must be employed toward establishing some sort of uniformity to allow for truly liberal politics.

Chapter 10, “The Development of the Liberal Tradition III,” reinforces and fi lls in the argument of the previous two chapters. Here Johnston reaffi rms that the great driving force of our own era is not capitalism, nor socialism, nor equality, but rather what he called earlier “the world revolution.” That revolution may resolve itself in a number of ways, such as liberalism or Communism. Neither is inevitable; there is no progress in history that demands that liberalism or Communism must be victori-ous. Johnston points out that particular contingencies of history made both liberalism and Communism possible, not to mention a great many individual statesmen and revolutionaries. Here again, human choice rather than the forces of history is the cause of world events and regimes, and we must have recourse to human choice again if we wish to see the establish-ment of a liberal international order.

Part IV, “International Relations and Liberalism,” is the capstone of Johnston’s project. We begin in Chap. 11, “The Problem of Community,” in which we return to this fundamental notion and begin to apply it to international politics. We begin to see the themes of previous chapters bear fruit, although at fi rst in a negative light. The realists were correct in their original critique of idealistic liberalism—what is needed is a force that creates basic uniformity before the comparatively easy mechanics of laws can be brought to bear within international relations. Indeed, the question that bedevils the problem of community—how is obedience to the laws possible with a minimum of coercion?—begins to fi nd a solution in Johnston’s discussion of freedom and order and the interdependency

20 W. JOHNSTON

of the two. Freedom is not possible without some order or uniformity. At the same time, political order is not possible without freedom, a notion perhaps fi rst discovered by Aristotle, as Johnston notes. Nonetheless, we would be wrong simply to place liberal insights onto international politics. Johnston argues at length that there is no simple analog between the two and that while equality and freedom are the conditions for stable order domestically, they are causes of chaos internationally. We are again pointed toward the need for power, and indeed a kind of hierarchy, for world gov-ernance to take place.

In Chap. 12, “The American Alliance System and World Order,” Johnston takes up the question of America’s role in world politics explic-itly, albeit briefl y. He suggests that the American system of alliances is important precisely because it can act as a principle of unity in a world that is tending toward disintegration. Here Johnston shows great prescience: he predicts the continued relevance, indeed centrality, of American alli-ances in shaping the future of international events. He also notes that the American people are up to this task, as they wish for leaders who work toward strengthening and further integrating alliances, rather than dis-mantling or ignoring them. To ignore the alliance system for the sake of “pluralism” is to stride obliviously toward nuclear anarchy. Concluding, Johnston claims that the current task is to constitutionalize the American imperium, rather than to take it apart. The fate of the world depends on it.

The book concludes with “Democratic Theory and International Relations” (Chap. 13) in which Johnston ties together many of the threads we have followed with him. He reaffi rms the signifi cance of the work of realists, especially Morgenthau, in piercing the balloon of idealistic liberal-ism. Nonetheless he argues that Morgenthau’s work itself is insuffi cient because it fails to deal with how states understand themselves; Morgenthau fails to understand the signifi cance of Boulding’s theorizing about the importance of images. Not only does Morgenthau fail to appreciate cul-tural difference, but he also fails to understand that the system of states has undergone a profound change since its inception. It is no longer an arena where small or medium powers may easily become great or profoundly affect the workings of the system of states. It is now profoundly oligopo-listic, in Aron’s terms, one in which only the great powers have freedom of action and security. As such, realism, with its freewheeling views on the balance of power, is no longer suffi cient. It neither guards against nuclear destruction, nor is it even just. What is the place of the great powers, espe-cially the USA, in this new world? Johnston argues for cautious attempts

INTRODUCTION 21

to prevent the world from becoming any more illiberal than it already is. At best, Johnston wonders whether America’s policy can be guided in this way: what course of action lies before us, which will result in less coercion and force in consequence, if not immediately? The political man cannot abjure force, but the liberal man disdains it or perhaps even fi nds it evil. In an effort to build up community and the requisite liberalism community requires, the USA must be willing, though cautious, to use force in order to make community possible in international relations.

THE AUDIENCES OF JOHNSTON’S WORK The subjects that Johnston touched upon to make his argument were numerous and diverse; he was a man of liberal learning, in the older sense of the term, and expected his students to share that learning. Given the wide scope of his thinking, it is not surprising that his writings will speak to more than one audience. To make clear the importance and extensive nature of his work, there are four distinct audiences to whom this book is directed: international relations theorists, theorists of liberalism, those who wish to consider the nature of modernity, and especially students of politics and international relations, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level.

International relations theorists themselves are concerned with ques-tions of the content and intelligibility of their discipline, methods and approaches in grasping that content and intelligibility, and the possibilities and limits of reason on the “long road to theory.” While it may be true that a serious theorist of international relations is a rare thing, nonetheless there are many academics who profess to study and write about the theo-retical underpinnings of international relations (IR). Within the essays that make up this book are international relations theorists like Morgenthau or Carr, economists such as Heilbroner, philosophers like Fromm or Aristotle, and historians such as Dehio. Johnston saw these diverse disci-plines as important and necessary for true theorizing about international politics; the range of ideas he employed and discussed is nothing short of remarkable. Johnston’s work is unique in the skill with which he deals with questions of political philosophy, history, economics, and psychology, weaving them together to provide a whole which deals with the problems facing IR as an intellectual discipline. In its particular aspects, Johnston’s work provides intellectual starting points and principles from which to theorize about relations between states.

22 W. JOHNSTON

Liberal theorists and political philosophers are a second audience for this volume. As much as international relations theory, Johnston saw liber-alism, its promises and prospects, as a central theme to his work. Johnston reaffi rmed that liberalism was not only a theory of the individual, taking its purpose as fulfi lling the individual, but also a political theory, and a wise one at that. Emphasizing economics or taking an ahistorical attitude threatened to make liberalism rather blind to glaring realities, both domes-tically and internationally. Johnston’s writing will interest anyone who is curious about the intellectual foundations of liberalism and its historical development. The relationship between individual rights and state power, the need for coercive foreign policy and free domestic life, or economics and political theory are illuminated by Johnston’s essays.

The third audience consists of scholars interested in the intellectual nature of modernity and modern political philosophy and its manifesta-tions in progressivism, conservatism, behavioralism, “value-free” social science, socialism, or even existentialism. Johnston was profoundly aware of, and at times apparently even uneasy with, his own historical context and wrote partially to uncover the nature of what it meant to be “mod-ern.” He was partly aware of this status as a modern man because he thought so deeply about politics. He understood that politics was not a self-suffi cient science, but had to include other sciences as well, whether economics, ethics, or even at times metaphysics. Seeing the connections of the sciences to each other allowed him to grasp the development of politics in his own time and reveal those developments to others for their comprehension and appreciation.

This leads to the fourth audience this work is directed toward, one dis-tinct and yet intimately related to the three above. It is the young and new students in international relations and political thought more generally who are open to viewing their discipline in a holistic manner and to consid-ering the implications of international relations theory in general. Whether one is a graduate student or a veteran academician who has studied IR for a lifetime, this volume of essays opens one up to considering the most fun-damental questions of politics and human existence, questions which may not be available for consideration in today’s academy. Thinking about poli-tics fundamentally, indeed philosophically, is central for our way of life and its worth. Without the work of those like Johnston, there is no answer to those who say “why not the Soviet Union?” or pronounce vague platitudes about the evils and joys of globalization. Johnston argued that liberalism was a good, not just for a particular people but for world order as well. The breadth of his history, his facility with principles, and his desire to unearth

INTRODUCTION 23

the roots of problems give readers of Johnston a prime opportunity to expand and deepen their grasp of politics and international relations.

It is not just that Johnston considers a vast array of individual thinkers and their ideas. He also understands how they relate to each other, how history, philosophy, economics, and politics form a picture which grants some intelligibility to the reader. For this reason, Whittle Johnston has unique value as one who did not just focus on one thought or period of time, but had some grasp of the whole and brought it to bear on the political problems of his own age. This leads to the question: what pre-cisely does an IR theorist writing in the midst of the Cold War, and very preoccupied with the problems of the Cold War, have to offer those of us who have seen the collapse of the Soviet Union?

As noted above, Johnston was not interested in writing a how-to man-ual for political success. The bulk of his work presented in this volume is a unique defense of liberalism as a political philosophy. As a political philosophy, liberalism is especially equipped to deal with the problem of community, a problem Johnston saw as both fundamental and perennial. Liberalism’s response to that problem led to Johnston’s historical inves-tigations of the roots of liberalism. Thus, despite Johnston’s emphasis on the contingent and the dynamic, the importance of historical conditions and accidents, his work remains valuable both for liberalism’s own self- understanding and as we consider what the future of liberalism may be. Johnston fi rmly believed that an international system that was friendly toward liberalism, even if never fully embodying liberal ideas, should be the goal of both academics and American statesmen. The concerns that prompted Johnston to search for this “relevant utopia” 17 remain with us today: a preponderance of American power, coupled with widespread instruments of terrible destruction, and an international system that some believe may be returning to something more like multipolarity, although that has yet to be borne out. Johnston understood but had little patience for American diffi dence on the world stage, and this is undoubtedly at least partially why he made his careful yet robust defense of liberalism and indeed claimed that the success of American values permeating the inter-national system was perhaps the only way to prevent a catastrophe greater than World War II. It is a concern as valid in our day as it was in his, and thus those who trust in the goods of liberalism should remain grateful to him and his labors to give both direction and pride to us as inheritors of the liberal tradition.

Stephen Sims

24 W. JOHNSTON

NOTES 1. It is worth noting that Hans Morgenthau was an immigrant to the USA,

and one could argue that he brought his European background to bear when he wrote his scathing critiques of liberalism and idealistic interna-tional relations theory.

2. As Johnston noted regarding those who claimed that France was a more mature member of the international system than America, “Whatever the glories of French cooking, for political recipes English is a richer language.”

3. W. Johnston (1967) “E.H. Carr’s Theory of International Relations: A Critique,” Journal of Politics Vol. 29, Issue 4, 861–884.

4. E.H. Carr (1962) What is History ? (New York: Knopf), p. 26. Emphasis added.

5. A good statement of the interest of critical theorists is given by M. Babík (2013) “Realism as Critical Theory: The International Thought of E.H. Carr” International Studies Review Vol. 15, Issue 4. 491–514. More generally, in the following contrast between ancient political thought and the Enlightenment, I follow D.C. Jordan et al. (1997) in “Stafford Gorman Whittle Johnston” PS: Political Science and Politics , Vol. 3, No. 1, 89–91. Jordan insists that Johnston’s thought was neither nihilistic nor relativistic, but rather anti-utopian.

6. See, e.g., A. MacIntyre (1991) Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press); C. De Koninck (1941) “Metaphysics and International Order” American Catholic Philosophical Association Vol. 17, 52–64.

7. See, e.g., L. Strauss (1953) Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 294–323; C.N.R. McCoy (1963) The Structure of Political Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill), 243–250. J.L. Pappin III (1993) The Metaphysics of Edmund Burke , (New York: Fordham University Press); A. MacInytre (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), 217–219.

8. Johnston, “E.H. Carr,” 880. 9. The only hint Carr gives regarding international morality is the morality of

status quo powers appeasing revisionist powers, with no explanation as to why status quo powers ought to do so.

10. K.N. Waltz (2001) Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press). Waltz describes the fi rst image as human nature and the second image as the state.

11. W. Johnston (1959) The Primacy of Justice: A Study of Liberalism and Its Role in World Politics . PhD. Harvard, 431.

12. Johnston, The Primacy of Justice , 133.

INTRODUCTION 25

13. See R. Niebuhr (2011) The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness ; (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press), “The Possibility of a Durable Peace.”

14. Johnston, The Primacy of Justice . 415–416. 15. Ibid. 144. Kenneth Thompson argued that Niebuhr’s concern for the law

of love and its proximate manifestation as justice made him return to the moralistic abstractions of the children of light, for Niebuhr’s view of the law of love was nothing other than a kind of natural law ethic. Thompson seemed to think this marks a diffi culty for Niebuhr. Johnston, on the other hand, seemed to take it for granted that Niebuhr was at heart a child of light. Indeed, since justice is nothing other than the way a political com-munity deals with the “problem of community,” Johnston was intellectu-ally committed to seeing justice as the fundamental question of all politics, including international politics. See K.W. Thompson (1955) “Beyond National Interest: A Critical Evaluation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Theory of International Politics” The Review of Politics , Vol. 17, No. 2, 167–188

16. It is worth noting that the aim of Johnston’s critique is Morton Kaplan. Nonetheless, the critique could easily be leveled at Kenneth Waltz or any of his many intellectual descendants.

17. Stanley Hoffmann’s term, one which Johnston uses frequently to describe his own work.

PART I

“The Long Road to Theory”

29© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016W. Johnston, Realism and the Liberal Tradition, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57764-1_1

CHAPTER 1

We cannot begin to deal with the question of whether or not we can have a “science of international politics,” or with such related questions as whether or not history is a science, unless we fi rst make clear the con-cept of science we have in mind when we ask the question. For the word “science” often means nothing more than systematic knowledge, and in that sense, we must give a positive answer to the question. For I should be hard-pressed to justify why it is I am here giving a series of lectures and why you are spending your time listening to them, unless I felt that some-thing in the way of systematic knowledge could be transmitted. In this very loose sense, then, I should certainly say that a science of international politics is possible and that, indeed, we already have something of one.

If, however, we shift from this general and modest defi nition of science to a more precise, ambitious, and tight-knit one, I should have to give a dif-ferent answer. As Stanley Hoffmann has pointed out, the work of Morton Kaplan admirably sums up the scientifi c purposes of systems theory:

To discover laws, recurrent patterns, high-level generalizations; to make of predictability a test of science; to achieve as soon as possible the ideal of a deductive science, including a “set of primitive terms, defi nitions and axi-oms” from which “systematic theories are derived.” 1

As Hoffmann points out, this rather tight model rests in part on a mis-understanding of the role of law in natural science; laws are not as rigid there as we sometimes assume, nor are they able to predict the fate of

Politics and Science

30 W. JOHNSTON

particulars. E.H. Carr has made the same point in What Is History ?. 2 They merely can say that, under certain circumstances, if this and that happens, then this will follow. Thus it follows that in our conception of “law” and of “prediction,” we should not be disturbed if the best we can do is, to quote Hoffmann, “project into the future a limited number of possible trends, and rank them conditionally (‘other things being equal’).” In this modifi ed sense of “law” and of “prediction,” I also think it is possible to speak of the theory of international relations as a “science.” Indeed, in our studies on “relevant utopias,” we are asked to make a prediction in the above sense, that is, the projection into the future of a limited number of trends and a conditional ranking of them.

[To dwell on this at somewhat greater length, in your paper on a “rel-evant utopia,” you will be asked to spell out your “views on the purposes, the prerequisites, the possibilities, and the procedures of an ideal inter-national order.” 3 In writing this paper, you will be asked to relate your conception of what you think would be a desirable international order (i.e., your values, as applied to international relations) to your knowledge of the actual structure of international relations today (i.e., your estimate of international reality). In short, you are asked to show the relevance of the values you hold to what you take to be realistic trends at work in inter-national relations. This is designed to be a corrective for utopianism, in which certain values are postulated, but no meaningful discussion is given of the way in which we are to move toward them. As Hoffmann has put it, one should “not only plead for the destination” but also “tell us in detail how he can reach it.” It is also designed to avoid the pitfalls of involve-ment in a purely empirical theory, in which your values are introduced in unconscious fashion and often in such a way as merely to preserve the status quo. I think Hoffmann is right when he argues that conceptions of “equilibrium” and of “systems analysis” often tend to put the bias in favor of the maintenance of the status quo.

However I think you would err badly unless you realized that all such projections are conjectural. They are contingent on the skill with which (1) you are asked to grasp the principal forces at work in that area of world politics on which your paper centers, (2) the judgment you show in the weight you assign to these several factors, and (3) the time which you think it will take to move toward the posited goal. Your “interpretation”—the relative skill or lack of it in your analysis—will thus depend on these three factors: (1) Did you grasp the important factors at work? (2) Did

POLITICS AND SCIENCE 31

you assign roughly the correct weight to them, that is, set up roughly the correct hierarchy among them? (3) Did you estimate with rough accuracy the time it would take to move toward this or that stage of the postulated goal? Such forecasts are, of necessity, conjectural, and they must be sub-jected to recurrent “feedback” from experience. The skill of a statesman is in part determined by “how fast he is on his intellectual feet,” so to speak, that is, how rapidly he can reassess, in the light of new developments, the whole prior pattern of his projections. Unless the need for constant reassessment, and probable readjustment, is seen, such projections can do more harm than good.] 4

Once these qualifying remarks are made, it remains true that such pro-jections are indispensable. They are somewhere, in usefulness, between a compass and a map. It is surely a fool who think we can have a precise and detailed map of the international political future. But it is also foolhardy to start on this journey without such compasses and rough charts as we can discover. The failure to sense the necessity for such projections—other than in vague and rather ineffectual terms—is great in a culture as prag-matic as that of the USA. America’s vices are the defects of its virtues. This culture is freewheeling, pragmatic, skeptical of abstraction and speculation, but is it capable, on these terms, of bearing the enormous responsibilities of leadership it carries? One wonders, at times, if there is not something of a vacuum in the national intelligence, as suggested, for example, in Henry Kissinger’s important discussion of the need for strategic doctrine or Dean Acheson’s appreciation of the importance that a workable body of theory might make to the navigation by America of uncertain international seas. James Reston gave an indication of this diffi culty in the following passage:

I once asked him [President Kennedy] in a long private talk at Hyannis Port what he wanted to have achieved by the time he rode down Pennsylvania Avenue with his successor. He looked at me as if I were a dreaming child. I tried again: Did he not feel the need of some goal to help guide his day-today decisions and priorities? Again a ghastly pause. It was only when I turned the questions to immediate, tangible problems that he seized the point and rolled off a torrent of statistics about the diffi culty or organizing nations at different levels of economic development. 5

The pronounced pragmatism of President Johnson is probably even less inclined to the large projection than was the case under President Kennedy.

32 W. JOHNSTON

The third aspect of a science of international politics, as described by Kaplan, is the ability to achieve deduction. Though there may be some hope to move in this direction, there is danger in the attempts now before us of pure formalism. It is well to bear in mind that the model of the deduc-tive science is mathematics, which is also the most formal of sciences. In a science like physics (as Cohen and Nagel have pointed out), one clearly has an interdependence of induction and deduction. However the extent to which you can rely on the deductive model is closely related to the extent to which one has quantifi able entities that can be assimilated to mathemati-cal analysis. It is clear that one has this, at least to some degree, in physics, in chemistry, and in economics. However it is clear that economics as a “science” would be radically transformed without money, which can be treated more or less in quantitative terms, as a roughly measurable quantity. Now in politics there simply does not exist any such measurable quantity. One might appropriately take “power” to be the basic unit in politics, but all attempts to “measure” power have been failures. (See, e.g., the effort of Bertrand Russell in this direction.) 6 The difference between economics and politics may be illustrated by an example. It is meaningful to ask what one would have bought with a thousand 1965 US dollars in the USA in 1910 or what one could buy with this money in the Soviet Union today. It may not be easy to answer these questions, but it is, at least, meaning-ful to ask them. When one turns to the political realm, by contrast, it is a meaningless question to ask “What is a thousand units of power worth in the United States today?” and even more meaningless to try to compare its worth now to its worth in 1910 or its worth in the USA to its worth in the Soviet Union. Thus the quantitative measurements , which link the formalism of mathematics to the empirical world in physics or economics, are missing in politics . As a consequence, one of two results is likely to follow from the attempt to make politics “scientifi c,” in a mathematically deduc-tive sense. The fi rst is pure formalism, which achieves its systematic nature largely through its irrelevance to actual life; the real world never seems to break through to such a system. The second is triviality. I think Hoffmann is correct in his indictment of Deutsch’s tendencies toward triviality:

Often, the scientist included in his model only the variables that can be measured; in this case, he is likely to leave out some of the more decisive…Hence, far from explaining reality, many such models seem only to give mathematical substance to shadows, and to drive research into the chase and measurement of shadows. This, it seems to me, is one of the dangers of Mr. Karl Deutsch’s recent efforts at arriving at a quantitative theory of national

POLITICS AND SCIENCE 33

integration, and at taking measureable factors as indices of community for-mation. For instance, a sudden increase on the fl ow of communications between neighboring areas (mail, trade, travel, intermarriage, and so on) may well refl ect a collective desire for integration or a determination on the part of the leaders in those areas to promote integration; but it may not: we can fi nd out only if we look at such non-measurable factors as the role of political elites, the attitudes and mores of various groups, the nature and effects of political and economic organizations, and so on. 7

Now part of the diffi culty in determining the method proper for the study of international politics—indeed of politics—is the inadequacy of the conception which is held of politics. The method one takes to be appro-priate is, after all, to be determined by the nature of the subject matter one is studying, and the inadequacy of the methods previously attempted has been a consequence, at least in part, of an inadequate conception of the subject matter. Hans Morgenthau has been a leading proponent of the emphasis on politics, in the study of international politics, and in the emphasis on power as the essence of politics. However Stanley Hoffmann takes Prof. Morgenthau to task—and properly so—for the dual meaning he attaches to the concept “politics.” At one stage, Prof. Morgenthau talks as if we can abstract the “political” from human relations in the same way in which we can abstract the “economic” or the “biological” or the “legal.” At this level, politics is viewed as a coordinate discipline to be ranked horizontally with other disciplines. This view of politics is, in my mind, an erroneous one. In Hoffmann’s words:

…the decision to equate politics and power would be acceptable only if power were analyzed, not as a limited and specifi c set of variables, but as a complex and diffuse balance between all the variables with which the social sciences are concerned. Political man should properly be seen as the “inte-grator” of moral man, economic man, religious man, and so on—not as a creature reduced to one special facet of human nature. 8

And it is in this generic sense that Morgenthau often does use the con-cepts politics and power. It is this generic usage that, I would argue, is the correct one. As Hoffmann points out, this is the conception also devel-oped by Talcott Parsons in The Social System . 9

If one accepts this conception of politics, the implications for the method taken to be proper are important. And I do think this is the correct meaning, as well as the operable meaning. In politics, we fi nd the total man engaged.

34 W. JOHNSTON

In an age accustomed to think in terms of the fi xed categories of an estab-lished division of labor, we do not (at least in the academic world) like to be reminded that all the pieces of humpty-dumpty must be put together again in the real world. What is more, much of politics transcends the “natural” and calculable dimensions of human behavior to which the scientists like to reduce man. (One of the reasons that politics has such a strong appeal to Reinhold Niebuhr is probably to be found in his realization that there is an important link between the “transcendent” dimension of man revealed in politics and that revealed in religion.) Thus we may speak of politics as the “synthetic” discipline. As a consequence of its very sweep, it may also be taken as the discipline in which scientifi c analysis, as described by Kaplan, has the least to offer. It is this character of politics which makes it a particu-larly precarious venture to try to reduce it to a “science”—even in the gen-eral sense of that term, much less in its more precise and narrow defi nition.

Now if politics is a synthetic discipline, an “architectonic” science, what implication does this have for the methods proper in its study? If politics is an architectonic discipline concerned with the total man, we must con-sider the determinants of the behavior of the total man. And this brings us to a consideration of the concepts of the “image” as developed by Kenneth Boulding.

NOTES 1. Quoted in S. Hoffmann (1960) Contemporary Theory in International

Relations (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall), 42. See M. Kaplan (1957) System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley and Sons).

2. E.H. Carr (1961) What is History ? (London: MacMillan), 88. 3. Hoffmann, Contemporary Theory , 189. 4. This material was intended to be spoken to Johnston’s students, but we have

retained it both to respect his authorship and because it helps clarify his views on historical trend, historical “laws,” and the role of science in the study of international relations.

5. “What Was Killed Was Not Only The President But The Promise” New York Times Magazine , November 15, 1964.

6. B. Russell (1938) Power (London: Allen & Unwin). 7. Hoffmann, Contemporary Theory , 45. 8. Ibid. 31. 9. T. Parsons (1951) The Social System (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Ltd.), 551, ff.


CHAPTER 2

Although an animal may very well have a consciousness of himself, it is inconceivable that he should have a consciousness of history in any way analogous to that of man. Let us take for purposes of illustration a dog—in this instance a pug, that friendly little breed good primarily for sitting on the laps of old ladies. It is quite clear that the pug has an image, and a complex image, of the world. He has a memory; although it may be dependent more on the sense of smell than on other senses (and certainly more dependent on this sense than is man), this is not the point. The fact is he has a memory. And this is fairly well developed, as in the capacity to distinguish among a whole series of toys by name. In the second place, it is quite obvious that they have a rich range of emotional responses; they are sensitive to joy and sadness. I am inclined to think the range of emotional responses is wider than that of the human being, or at least of many human beings. They have a strong sense of sympathy and will comfort a suffering or unhappy child or adult. The ears are very expressive and go down in times of contentment and up in times of danger or excitement. The tail, needless to say, registers a whole range of emotions! What is more, they also have wills, which become quite apparent every time one passes the favorite fi re plug or oak tree. They also have multiple forms of self-expres-sion, as revealed in Daniel Schorr’s story about the dog in East Germany. Why then did you leave? Well every now and then I sort of wanted to bark!

If these then are some of the traits the pug possesses, what does he lack? It is inconceivable to me that he has any extended sense of the past. It is

Politics and Value, Part 1

36 W. JOHNSTON

clear that he has a memory, but to the extent that this exists, it is only within the span of his own lifetime. He cannot in the nature of the case have any knowledge of experience before that time. He cannot carry in his mind a sense of his ancestral Chinese background and hence become involved in the politics of the Chinese question. He is supposed to have been brought from China to Europe by British and Dutch sailors, but to my knowledge, he has no views on imperialism and on the reduction of British and Dutch power in East Asia. Nor has he expressed any defi nite feelings on the ques-tion of the admission of Red China to the United Nations.

The point is an important one. Humans differ from dogs in that every human being carries with him some sense of his collective past. This point struck St. Augustine and fascinates his contemporary disciple, Reinhold Niebuhr: this awareness that man is not just in time but time is within man. The time sense of man, that is, is enormously enlarged. He has this sense of the past only through communication, originally by word of mouth and now by written word. In short, a man’s world of consciousness is extended into the past not by direct experience, but through a capac-ity for communication which transcends direct experience. The “direct experience” in this case is the word or the written page. The dog can respond to this, but not the symbolic experience, which is a representation of something else. (Boulding has made the distinction between a sign and symbol .) Because the animal cannot read, or talk, or understand the speech of others, he cannot have the capacity of experience.

Something else of great importance follows from this (John Herz has touched on this point, and it is at the basis of his delineation of political realism). 1 It is hard for me to see that there is much anticipation of the future in an animal’s world. No doubt there is some sense of the future. The pug does expect certain things to happen on a regular basis, but these are happenings projected, once again, from his own direct experience. If he is fed every night at seven o’clock, then he comes to expect to be fed at that hour. But I think this rules out expectations of things that have not happened to him. He may have vague premonitions of hope or anxiety, but not specifi c expectations. Thus I would doubt that the pug can antici-pate death, and I fi nd it hard to see how it would be possible for him to have such anticipation. (This indicates that a higher level of consciousness may bring burdens as well as blessings. There is nothing automatically liberating about a heightened consciousness, for the larger and larger uni-verse into which it projects is one full of hazards as well as opportunities.) The animal’s sense of time is greatly abridged, in short. I would not think

POLITICS AND VALUE, PART 1 37

that he could have any consciousness of birth, since he would have no direct memory of this, though the female of the species no doubt has some awareness of it.

Furthermore, I doubt if there is any consciousness of kind beyond a general “recognition” that other pugs are in some sense “like” him. However there could not be any consciousness of the pug as a species. This is something we cannot know through direct experience, but only through indirect experience. We are conscious that the USA is a nation of some 190 million people, with so many in this region and so on. It is obvious, however, that this is not a direct experience. It is a composite experience, made possible by the extensive labors of the census bureau, and an indirect one. No one has this knowledge directly . Boulding has made mention of his faith in this existence of Australia. This has not been a direct experi-ence, but it is capable of being made one. Our knowledge of the territorial extent, or the total population, of the USA is something that can never really be a direct experience. It is a composite experience, made possible by communication . (It is striking, when one visits the British Museum, to see the extent to which man has gone in his efforts to transcend death, through enormous stone monuments designed to defy “time and tide.”)

My point, then, is that if we rely on direct experience alone, the range of our experience is very narrow, and we must hug the shore of the imme-diate quite closely. A consequence of this is the recognition that changes in the immediate environment have far more drastic impact on the psychol-ogy of the dog than they have on a person. Since the dog’s world is much more restricted, changes in it have far larger proportionate effect than they would on the image of a human being. Each time I took my suitcase out for the trip to Philadelphia, it was an occasion of anxiety to the dog. The move from our Arlington apartment seemed to disorganize him almost entirely, and he underwent a serious loss of appetite. The changes seemed of cataclysmic proportions.

This is true, although in lesser degree, of children as well. The world of their image is really a very small one, and the impact on it of changes which to an adult might seem of small importance is often quite funda-mental. I think we are now coming to a better awareness of this, through such studies as those of Erik Erikson on Childhood and Society , for exam-ple, Why did we not gain this awareness earlier? 2 In good part, I think, because we saw the child’s world through adult eyes, that is, through our own images rather than through those of the child. The child’s range of images is much more restricted, and the central fi gures in it usually count

38 W. JOHNSTON

for much more than they do in the life of an adult. If in adult life you are brought into contact with this or that diffi cult person, you can learn pretty rapidly how to “neutralize” him. The child lacks such fl exibility. One of the contributions of modern Freudian psychology has been to point out the enormous importance of these basic relations. The demonstration that these intimate family relations are of critical importance to the security and richness of the child’s image is a fundamental insight. It is also important from this insight to bear in mind its implications for the adult’s conception of his own role. What the adult does in his own world may be of more or less importance, to be sure; it makes some difference how one performs his job, for there are better or worse doctors, better or worse naval offi -cers, better or worse lawyers, and so on; I doubt, however, if the difference can be described as critical, except when one is dealing with people in posi-tions of outstanding power. In the world of the child, however, the way in which one’s role is played may make all the difference, as the phrase goes.

If in the above we have tried to “bring the child back into history,” I think it is well if we bring the woman back also. I would consider one of the most neglected areas of history that which deals with the wives of great men, for behind most great men there stands a most unusual woman. There was wisdom in Prof. Elliott’s toast to the women of Russia, in his visit to Khrushchev.

We must not dwell too long on these points. They are designed to serve as a sort of “domestic introduction” to my central point: the images we have of reality are of the most basic importance. They vary in range and complexity, indeed, in all the ways Boulding has discussed. A second point: the beginning of wisdom in human relations is the recognition of the extent of this variation. One may therefore say that the most basic apti-tude in politics is a sensitivity to the images of others, at different stages and circumstances in life. There are always variations here. If we take the family as an example, we realize that it cannot be held together unless there is an extensive ability for each to enter, at least in a degree, into the image of the other. The intelligent parent must be able to enter, at least in part, the world of the teenager. But it is also important that the teenager be able to enter the world of the parent, and this is in some ways a more diffi cult undertaking, since it must be wholly anticipatory. Families break down, as do nations, when this interchange is missing and when relations come to be governed by wooden authoritarian formulas. These become a substitute for the more diffi cult, but more meaningful, attempt to achieve real communication, for each to come to understand the governing inter-ests, hopes, and anxieties of each other.


As we just suggested, success in politics—particularly in democratic politics—is dependent on this ability to communicate among a wide vari-ety of images. The requirements of democratic leadership are an ability to be detached, in very good measure, from one’s own particular image. For to be receptive to the world images of others, it is necessary that one be somewhat removed from one’s own. One of the consequences (hope-fully) of college education is that one comes to take a more critical stance toward his “inherited” image and a more fl exible approach to the inevi-table divergence between that image and the image of others. Democracy really depends on the existence of this ability in a very large body of the citizenry. However there is more than knowledge involved in this abil-ity to transcend one’s image. The ability is closely related to the relative security with which that image is held. There are those who are so deeply committed to their own image that they really do not “see” the images of others at all. How do they relate their own image to that of others? They may try to isolate themselves from that image altogether—to go their own way as if these divergent images did not exist at all. However, when avoidance becomes impossible, that is, when interdependence becomes unavoidable, the reaction of those with the tightly closed image is to greet divergence from it with anger and hostility; the concern becomes to pass a condemnatory judgment upon divergent images. As I have suggested, this reaction is related to the relative security of the person (or the nation) concerned. If the image is tenuously integrated, its holder must rely rather heavily for its reinforcement on the condemnation of the images of others. Alternative images are seen as a threat to the integrity of his own. People under these circumstances can feel quite literally threatened by diversity. The predominant motive under these circumstances is not to understand, but to condemn. This shades easily over into paranoid politics. The sources and consequences of this have been discussed by Richard Hofstadter, Erik Erikson, and the authors of The Authoritarian Personality . 3 We shall have occasion later to look at their views in greater depth. The important point at this stage is that for those who have this orientation, they are at a loss to know how, if the image of others is “true,” their own can be true.

Our most elemental proposition is, therefore, that life is impossible unless it is organized around an “image,” but that the image is always in a measure arbitrary, certainly more arbitrary than we are willing to admit . Behavior is governed by the image, and we must believe in this reality if it is to serve its role as governor with effectiveness. We thus try to give it solid-ity to strengthen it against our vague awareness of the arbitrary elements

40 W. JOHNSTON

which underlie it. These tendencies are particularly strong in collective images, which are harder to construct, more arbitrary in their construction, and hence more inclined to be “jealous gods” that condemn allegiance to alternative bodies of experience . (We thus fi nd support in our analysis of the role of images in individual and collective experience for Niebuhr’s distinction between “moral man” and “immoral society.”) 4 A police state may thus allow certain of its citizens to go beyond the borders of the state and be “tempted” by alien allegiance, but it cannot allow the state itself to be open to such diverse currents. (In Prof. Friedrich’s volume on Totalitarianism , George Kennan has given an eloquent discussion of the meaning of totalitarianism for human freedom.) 5 Thus there is a sense in which dogmatism, the closed image, is at the root of all evil, as the human-ists were aware. And the assault on this dogmatism prompted the most bitter of Voltaire’s satires, as in Candide , and the humanists saw the clear-est examples of the hazards of dogmatism in modern religious warfare. As Watkins pointed out in The Political Tradition of the West , this horror of religious strife in a sense was the subterranean memory which underlay the Enlightenment opposition to religion and its feeling of the need to attack the superstition of the churches. (This may be illustrated from the account given by Roland Bainton in his study of the Reformation.) 6

The diffi culty in the Enlightenment assessment was in the notion that one could somehow eliminate the sources of this tendency, which it wrongly placed in certain specifi c errors of religious dogmatism, rather than in the “enduring traits of human spirituality.” Thus it was wholly unprepared for the wars of nationalist imperialism of the Napoleonic era, as one can see in the writings of Paine and Jefferson. It was likewise unprepared for the systematic savagery of World War I, to say nothing of the nightmare of totalitarian brainwashing and thought control. (Eric Hoffer has come to an understanding of this in The True Believer .) 7 Watkins is in error when he assumes that the sources of this are to be found in the crises of industri-alization, although I think one may say these crises intensify it. 8 They are not, however, its cause , nor are they the sole factors which intensify this tendency. Many factors occasion such intensifi cation. The cause is to be found in the human predicament itself, in the fact that, as Aristotle said, man is a metaphysical animal or, as Reinhold Niebuhr has put it, in the enduring characteristics of human spirituality itself, rooted in man’s darkly unconscious sense of his insignifi cance in the total scheme of things.

As we have seen, the Enlightenment thinkers were perceptively aware of the hazards of this type of dogmatism, and I think we should all repeat


once a day, “for the good of our souls,” Jefferson’s marvelous affi rma-tion: “I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” The enormous contribution of the Enlightenment was its revelation of the danger in this type of premature closing. All the paeans to liberty it sang are the other side of the coin of its fear of “the tyranny of false absolutes.” This emphasis has become, in a sense, the main theme of American social thought. 9 The grand hope and chief contribution of the Enlightenment was the idea that it could work out a system by which man would be freed, in collective as well as indi-vidual life (for it is in his collective life that the most formidable problems arise) from the tyranny of false absolutes. That was the central purpose which the social philosophy of John Dewey was designed to achieve. The hope was that one could extend the scientifi c method into human rela-tions, and science and democracy became the twin pillars of Dewey’s faith. Many have shared the faith: Holmes, James, Peirce, Bronowski, and so on; this attitude carries over into persistent liberal concern with the abuse of state power, for the state was the most dangerous (or at least the most obvious) of all the false absolutes, though religion itself was looked on as a close contender. Internationally, the attack was directed against imperial constructions.

The defect in this approach was the failure to see the inevitability of some such image. (In a sense, the existentialists have come to see the inevitability of this as rooted in the conditions of human spirituality and have often reacted with a sense of despair in the face of it.) In the liberal tradition, much of the transfi guration centered around the recognition of the insuffi ciency of the original view of the state. The recognition that the state was not only dangerous but also necessary came home with a certain shock to doctrinaire liberalism. The recognition was the concomitant of the collapse of faith in natural harmony. A somewhat similar process took place in the view of the universe. Here the role of faith as the underpin-ning of reason came home and with it a shock perhaps more formidable: the fading of faith in a rational universalism. Also, as I have suggested, in world politics every avenue has been tried in quest of a self-balancing pluralism, but none has been found. As I have suggested, the implication is that imperial structures (whatever we offi cially name them) are of crucial importance as agencies for the maintenance of order—otherwise one faces not a natural balance, but chaos.

To put the matter in other terms, the condition for security in life is the reduction of the number of variables one must face in experience—the

42 W. JOHNSTON

process of exclusion and inclusion. However the very condition for such security is a hazard in that it is always partial and runs the risk of making a limited insight into a “permanently valid” one. The very basis of a com-munity’s integration—so laboriously achieved—becomes itself a peril to the achievement of a more widespread justice. Hence, to save itself from the unsettling forces of change, a given image will pretend to be above time, and the way it does this is to assume that it has “mastered” the general direction in which history is moving and hardly needs to adapt itself in the light of these changes. It is this monstrous pretense of hav-ing “transcended time” that accounts, as much has anything else, for the brutal and rigid policy of the Communists. In the second place, to protect itself against the awareness that its vision is parochial (or particular), it will maintain it is in accord with a universal vision and in the service of a universal cause. In Communism, one has a particularly vicious doctrine, because both tendencies are involved and each reinforces the other. It pretends to be both “above time” and “universal.”

It is not clear that there is any way, over the short term, that this shell can be penetrated. What is more, we fall into a serious mistake when we fail to see the “organic foundations” of this hard-shell utopianism. It is rooted in the several factors I have given in the lectures in “Foreign Policies.” In part the source is the pervasive disintegration of the old order in Russia and in China and the desperate urge for some meaningful basis of unity. In short, the dogmatism of the Communists has a “rational” foundation in the circumstances of Russian and Chinese national life, and no mere appeal to the inadequacies of the dogma, or the attempt to destroy its pattern of defense, will be suffi cient to transform or remove the circum-stances which have generated the dogma. In short, the situation of both Russia and China (and particularly the latter) is profoundly insecure, both internationally and domestically, and it is this situation that the doctrine fi nds its appeal and to which it constitutes, in a measure, a “rational” response.

The relation of the preceding discussion to the problem of identity can be seen. The individual really cannot survive and is condemned to a sort of psychological formlessness (not to say disintegration), unless there are principles of order by which his view of the world is structured, that is, unless he has a rather strong and coherent image by which to govern his behavior. Without such an image, the individual may be said to lack an identity (and both Herberg and Erikson have had interesting things to say on this question). However one must keep in mind the group dimension


of identity, for it is the group dimension which adds a limitation to the extensibility of the image. Most particularly, in the present era of world politics, identity is achieved through participation in the national group.

One thinks of himself as an American. However one cannot achieve such an identity without bearing certain burdens in return. The service is not “tax-free,” so to speak. Thus if the notion that you are an American is quite basic to your identity, it carries with it certain burdens. It cannot be very meaningful unless it carries with it a sense of responsibility for the actions—past, present, and future—of that entity. For example, it has never occurred to me not to ask the question: Should we have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan? I think this is a meaningful question, and I think the use of the word “we” in asking it is meaningful. However I would not think it meaningful to ask: Should we have revolted in 1789 against Louis XVI? I think it is meaningful to ask should they have revolted, but it seems silly to me to ask should we have done so. This is because I simply do not identify with France or the French revolutionaries in any meaningful inner way. However I can ask, although I was hardly around at the time, should we have revolted in 1776 against Britain.

Another illustration of this can be seen, in vivid fashion, in the open-ing pages of General de Gaulle’s Memoirs . 10 It would be unwise to treat these sentiments lightly. For one is dealing here with something quite basic to the integrity of the person—to the entire basis of his integration. When any slight is directed against the integrity of a group, then a slight is directed at the basis upon which many individuals integrate their own per-sonalities. This brings us to another question—and one that is central in Boulding’s book—the question of the factors behind changes in identity. We shall have to return to this later. It is only necessary here to suggest the extent to which such changes do take place, for example, in Mattingly’s account in Renaissance Diplomacy that, at the outset of the state system, the average person in Europe thought of himself as being Christian and Roman. 11 We shall return later to the problem of changes in identity.

I think we should see, however, that there is no way in which the clash among images can be resolved simply through an emphasis on “live and let live.” For where his security is under serious threat, man can never simply “live and let live.” Where he as an individual, and his group as a collective entity, is threatened by loss of life, by the threat of “nothing-ness,” he cannot simply fall back on a “live and let live” policy. One may take these anxieties to be exaggerated, to be signs of paranoia. And yet in the light of the history of violence in this century, and in the history of

44 W. JOHNSTON

mankind itself, and in the history of the state system in particular, and in the policies (domestic as well as international) of our antagonists, it seems to me that there are many grounds of a rational nature on which these anxieties rest. On top of these more “traditional” anxieties, there are the very special anxieties of the nuclear age. Thus to the extent that the age is aware of itself, it may well be an “age of anxiety.” The best one can hope for is that the anxieties will not crowd out the more hopeful elements in the situation and reduce the capacity for positive action. There is an important sense in which the policy of “live and let live” is a consequence of the establishment of an elemental security as much as it is its condition. We are brought back to the elements of validity in the Hobbesian logic.

The problem of the role of norms would not arise in a situation of simple harmony. After the simple harmony has been broken and man tries through conscious effort to recapture it, he turns to the role of norms as one means for its accomplishment. Norms represent a conscious effort to order society in accordance with certain explicit standards. However it is an error to think of the problem of community as that of bending a recal-citrant reality into conformity with the norms. For the norms themselves are in confl ict and the “natural harmony” we desire is often found on the empirical level. Hence the traditional fact-value dichotomy is a mislead-ing way to put the problem of relating ethical principles to the achieve-ment of harmony. There is a central confl ict among the norms themselves: between an emphasis on freedom which may pass over into anarchy and an emphasis on equality which may pass over into uniformity. We have seen the tension also in the ambivalence toward the role of the state and also with regard to law and morality.

When we realize the “the good” itself involves an effort to harmonize indi-vidualities with one another, rather than swallow them up into some pat-tern of uniformity, we realize that the tension in the ultimate norm itself is fundamental. The traditional fact-value dichotomy is a misleading way to put the problem of moral action because it implies, at least, that “moral” action consists in the transformation of “fact” to conform with “norms.” The situation at once take on a greater complexity with the recognition that there are conditions of “natural harmony” which exist in the realm of fact and when, further, we see that there is a fundamental confl ict within the realm of norms itself. Thus if “the good” be defi ned as the “har-mony of part and whole,” we shall have to recognize that the realm of fact is often in closer correspondence with the “good” than is the realm of norms. When man brings norms to bear, he may very well disturb a preex-


istent realm of harmony, though he may also help the movement toward a pattern of higher harmony.

In truth the need for norms stems from the fact that the harmonies of life are never “natural,” or if they may ever be considered so, they persist for but fl eeting moments. Most myths have some place in their pattern for an era in which norms were unnecessary, because there was no freedom. This is well illustrated in the Garden of Eden myth, which is indispensable to any ethical philosophy. For it points out that the problem of good and evil becomes a problem, emerges, only when man discovers the radical nature of his freedom and senses his distinctness from the natural world. He sensed this distinctness quite early ethically, and the religious sense was an outgrowth of it. He came to sense it “empirically” with the devel-opment of modern science, though he had had intimations of it earlier. (Burtt shows the force with which the awareness came home empirically with the development of modern science—the essential estrangement.) 12 The folly of naturalism is the assumption that there is some way in which this estrangement can be brought to an end. Many thinkers today have developed “myths” by which to describe this primitive society of Eden, for example, Rostow’s “traditional society.” The notion was very popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: that man lived in a state of nature where, if he enjoyed freedom at all, it was a very different type than that he later was to know and in which there is little recognition of the need for norms. With Fromm this “age of innocence” is placed in the Middle Ages, and the awareness of the ambivalence of freedom is seen as awakening with Reformation and Renaissance. 13 However the Garden of Eden myth is vastly superior to that of Fromm, for the era of idyllic innocence is put at the very dawn of history itself. This is where, indeed, it should be put, rather than in so recent a date as the Renaissance which, in its very name, pays respect to a past which it feels is being reborn.

The important point, however, is that man discovers his freedom, and the problem of norm arises. The myth is of value because it shows the ambivalence of the experience: primitive innocence is ended, and with the discovery of the potential for greater freedom, greater possibilities emerge. But at the same time that primitive innocence is ended, the possibility of evil as conscious action enters the world, and the troubled conscience is born. This is shown graphically, as Cain slays Abel, and thus evil, in its most brutal form, violent death, is placed at the very dawn of his-tory. What one sees, therefore, in this myth is the condensation of tens of thousands of years in the awakening racial consciousness. The other great

46 W. JOHNSTON

myth in the Western tradition which gives expression to this is the myth of Prometheus, who steals fi re from heaven (used, it is signifi cant to note, in the discussion by Henry Kissinger of atomic weapons). Both myths see the main thing: that the dawn of human history itself begins with the dis-covery of the radical freedom of man over the natural process and that the problem of evil is intimately related to the reality of freedom.

Once man has become aware that he is outside of nature, he cannot be put back into it again. There is a charming innocence in the Enlightenment attempt to put man back in the garden, and Smith has argued that this notion has had a particular appeal in America, where Enlightenment expectation and the natural setting reinforce one another. However, developments in science, as I have attempted to show, tend to widen the gap, rather than close it.

Kant has rediscovered the reality behind the myth of the Garden of Eden for our own time, in the awareness of the manner in which morality presupposes freedom, which is itself intimately related with consciousness. The notion that human actions are determined, in some way analogous to the determination of events in nature, is an attempt to assimilate man to the natural process. The link is usually established by the argument that all actions have causes—as indeed they do—but one might reply “What’s in a name?” For in human relations the actor’s consciousness is itself a cause and you know it to be one. The “cause” therefore is totally different from the “cause” in the natural world. It is a particularly “fl exible” “cause.” From it comes a sense of guilt (had I only known more, then this or that might not have happened) and a sense of rightful pride (it is because I did this or that that things worked out this way).

If we take the term “values” to mean the categories through which we look at, or organize, our experience, I think we see that our view of reality is always conditioned by such categories. We often use the term “values” much too narrowly, to mean explicit conscious judgments about good and bad. However most people are not particularly articulate about their val-ues in this sense. To be articulate in this sense may characterize the theolo-gian or the ethical philosopher, but the “man in street” is rarely articulate about any explicit hierarchy by which he consciously governs his behavior. Yet, as I have insisted, such a hierarchy must be there, for without it the personality would lack structure. Values are the joists and beams, the foun-dation and frame around which we build our existence. They are, in short, the principles in terms of which our personality is ordered.


Of course there may be different principles in terms of which integra-tion is achieved, but there must be some principles . The person who lacks such principles may also be said to be one who lacks any identity. The person who lacks identity is one who cannot settle on any agreed pattern of integration, who is caught between two or more confl icting patterns of integration and cannot pull them together into any tolerable pattern of harmony. We have some vivid illustrations from literature of this situation, and if the imbalance grows, it clearly leads to madness.

I am therefore using “value” in a very broad sense, as the principles in terms of which integration is given to the personality: the principles, fi rst, of selection of the facts—among all the facts, the ones which are taken to be signifi cant. Second, with regard to causes and the hierarchy we estab-lish among these. And then questions of “good” and “bad”—the question of value in its more restricted sense. I think developments in modern psy-chology confi rm the enormous role played by values in ordering our lives.

There are differences in breadth of view: some have selected from the vast ocean of facts a very few and from the multiple principles of causation have fi xed on some very simple arrangement. That is to say the princi-ples of integration are simple and rigid. What one sees is a narrow, hard- shelled, closed system. However all systems that are satisfactory to their holder are in a sense “closed,” or they have attained, in a sense, a state of “equilibrium.” We must distinguish what is meant by an “open” system and what is meant by no system. There is a difference, but it is not often seen. Democracy is a system of orientation toward reality. We may distin-guish between systems which have within them a capacity for growth, an ability to adapt to new circumstances, and integrate these into its view of reality. This is Erikson’s “wholeness.” Wholeness is a closed system in that there are established principles in terms of which new experience is to be absorbed, and there are criteria for the integration of new with old. The closed system, that of “totalism,” has relatively little capacity for growth. It has been frozen, for one reason or another, at a certain level of devel-opment, and it tends to go round and round the same mulberry bush forever and ever. There are personalities of this nature: you feel that if you met them after 100 years, they would still be expressing the same view of the universe, the same hatreds, the same anxieties, and so on. There are others that are different: they have grown. You can recognize continuities to be sure, but you can also see that something is new; the personality has broadened, it has its order of priorities more clearly before it, and so on. There are of course reverse moments of disintegration. A question of

48 W. JOHNSTON

central importance, to which we must later return, is that of the source of these values—where is it that these principles come from, in terms of which we select , arrange hierarchically , project ?

It is clear that values, in this broad sense, include habits. The Freudians have helped our understanding of the pattern of values by directing our attention to early habituation. They may have focused somewhat too nar-rowly on the sexual dimension of this habituation, but this depends in part on the meaning one attaches to the eros . If one takes the term eros to mean love in some generic sense, the Freudian are probably correct. In any case, as I have suggested earlier, the interplay with certain key person-alities is crucial. Freud has therefore made an enormous contribution to our understanding of the way in which our “values” are shaped, remem-bering always that we mean by “values” the categories through which we organize our experience.

The governing role of values in human life poses an enduring obstacle to political leaders that are in a hurry; they inevitably stumble across some quite elemental “realities” of the human self. The neglect of these reali-ties is characteristic, in part, of the very young, who have little awareness of self. It is also characteristic of the relatively isolated, who have never learned, by jostling over a prolonged period of time with the tangle of wills of other people. It is also a characteristic of the very aggressive, who in fact wish to bend others to their vision of reality and who therefore treat them as insubstantial factor in order to ease the path of triumph for their own imperial natures. Thus a nation like the USA, which has been cata-pulted from a position of prolonged isolation, and one that has amassed enormous power, is confronted with two hazards as it undertakes respon-sibilities of global leadership.

A fourth factor in the neglect of these “elemental realities” of the self—collective as well as individual—may be the consequence of societies which have not been involved in any very extensive inner debate with themselves. We see in nations like France, Germany, and Japan an intense inner dia-logue. However the nursemaid of the Communist Party has at present made the Russian baby sit in the corner and not talk to anybody, himself included. This, of course, does not end the debate. It lays down the basis for a more extensive one when the nursemaid shall relax her attentiveness or the baby grows suffi ciently in inner strength to wish to challenge its keeper. A searching inner debate will then be renewed; indeed, all is not quite as quiet in the nursery corner since 1953 as it had been before that date. (See, e.g., the article on slave labor camps.) 14


There is no assurance that these debates can have any very successful res-olution. Indeed, there is a sense in which they are never really “resolved,” and debate may merely have the effect of hardening the partisans in their commitment to their respective position. There is a time to talk and a time to remain silent or to defl ect energies elsewhere into less probing channels. The most formidable issues are rarely resolved in life by a direct confrontation in which conscious self confronts conscious self with the self-conscious desire to achieve a “meeting of minds.” Such a confronta-tion is designed to pierce the shell of particularism and strike through to common ground. It sometimes has this effect. However there is nothing automatic about the consequence. There is the alternative prospect that what is designed to accomplish a lowering of barriers, a mutual penetra-tion of defenses, will in fact lead to a hardening of the shell about each position. Prof. Morgenthau has shown the extent to which this was the case in efforts made to reach agreement in international law. More prog-ress is likely to be made through the techniques of bypassing, outgrowing, defl ecting, and so on the barriers to a more general outlook. This does not mean that there is a justifi cation in rejecting alternative procedures, but merely that more than one technique is needed, and no formula will tell you when the one or the other is needed and how much emphasis should be put on each. If you try to “buck the line” too directly, the opposing team may simply close ranks, and the end result will be a loud and painful banging of heads.

It was suggested earlier that it is diffi cult to implement the philosophy of “live and let live” in international politics. It is also diffi cult at the level of interpersonal relations, for any encounter of self with other may be said to have its “imperialistic” dimension to it. The roots of this imperialism may be traced to the insecurity with which individuals integrate their pat-terns of meaning or, to put it in more general terms, to the insecurity of their value systems. Although the most sustained and extensive efforts are made to shore up these value systems and to make them impregnable against assault, the effort can never be wholly successful. For there are always arbitrary elements in the process of selection and exclusion which any value system involves. It is true that we should not cast the mote out of another person’s eye before we cast the beam out of our own—but it is also true that it is inevitable that we should try to do so. 15

We see illustration of this in the study of American civilization, as well as in interpersonal life. For if we are not aware of the conditioned char-acter of our values, then others surely are. This experience is recurrent

50 W. JOHNSTON

when two cultures come into contact, and the foreigners often see things about the other culture that its own members miss about themselves. De Tocqueville probably remains the single individual who has told us the most about our own identity. In this respect, his work is superior to that of Bryce because Bryce was, in a sense, too close to our culture to see it with detachment. Tocqueville was able to see it with sympathy, but his own identity was different, and he therefore made no effort to identify himself with the object of his study.

The conditioned character of our own orientations and the elements of arbitrariness which lie at the root of it are most clearly seen, in all likeli-hood, in religion. The ferocity of confl ict among divergent religious per-spectives is very intense. Indeed, one may say that the level of ferocity is related to the arbitrary quality of the selective process. The more arbitrary the initial basis of selection, the more sustained the effort made to sup-port it. The problem of effecting cohesion is more diffi cult on the col-lective level than on the individual, because the arbitrary quality of the value system of collectivities is more pronounced, and they are ordinarily more ruthless in which they include and what they exclude. And the col-lective is more anxious about challenges to its identity. All the literature on national character is a “theological” attempt to prove the existence in substantive terms of that which is necessary as political underpinning to one’s undertaking.

An additional reason it is diffi cult to implement the philosophy of live and let live is that identities are always, to a degree, shaped by differentia-tion from other patterns of identity and in a self-conscious opposition to them. Whatever else the Irishman may be, he is not an Englishman; the Protestant, a Catholic; the Jew, a Christian; the Southerner, a Yankee; and so on. The extent to which identity is determined by these means gives us a clue to the paranoid dimension in that identity.

At the root of much American optimism in world politics is the feeling that its own identity is spreading. It is inclined to be insensitive to those who feel their identity threatened. This lies at the heart of the tension in the alliance. The mood is very different when one is dealing with a civili-zation on the declining arc of its power. There is missing in the American attitude what might be called, in a phrase, minority-group consciousness. However it faces within the alliance the rearguard action of alienated and threatened minorities, particularly in the French case. However we must be aware that to the extent that true freedom is the goal of our policy, the consequence of its advocacy will be the awakening of pervasive group


identities around the world, which will then come to challenge the basis of identity on which our own civilization is integrated. Every growing child poses this threat to the parent’s identity, and this is why the parent-child relation always has something of a bittersweet quality to it.

The role of the minority has often been to attack the dominant norms and to bring upon itself the wrath of the majority, because it has riffl ed the basis of their security. However I think it is well to bear in mind that there is nothing meritorious per se in undermining the basis on which a cul-ture—or an individual—gives meaning and security to its life. Undertaken for its own sake, it has to it a sadistic dimension. However, if it is a means through which the false self is broken in order that a truer self may arise, it is of great value. However the critique must contain within it some con-ception of the truer self; it must have, in short, some conception of utopia and some vision of how it thinks it can be made relevant. If it does not, then I think, by default, the case goes to conservatism. For under most circumstances, the stronger case rests with the conservatives. Liberalism is not the equivalent of brittle spasms of agitation designed to further the advancement of unexamined clichés.

NOTES 1. J. Herz (1951) Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago:

University of Chicago). 2. E. Erikson (1950) Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton) . 3. T. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswick, D.J. Levinson, and R.N. Sanford (1950)

The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper). 4. R. Niebuhr (1932) Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner). 5. G. Kennan “Totalitarianism in the Modern World” in Totalitarianism , ed.

C.J. Friedrich (1964) (New York: Grosset & Dunlap), 17–31. 6. R. Bainton (1952) The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Boston: The

Beacon Press). 7. E. Hoffer (1951) The True Believer (New York: Harper and Row). 8. F. Watkins (1948) The Political Tradition of the West (Cambridge, Mass:

Harvard University Press), 74. 9. See M.G. White (1949) Social Thought in America (New York: Viking

Press). 10. C. de Gaulle (1955) War Memoirs , vol. 1 The Call to Honour, 1940–1942

(New York: The Viking Press), 3–6. 11. G. Mattingly (1955) Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston: Houghton- Miffl in),

16–17.

52 W. JOHNSTON

12. E.A. Burtt (1932) The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 1–22.

13. Fromm follows Burckhardt in this analysis. 14. We have been unable to trace this reference. 15. “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their

tastes may not be the same.”


CHAPTER 3

In the fi rst part of this essay, [Chap. 3], we talked about the relation between norms and fact and suggested that the problem of the role of norms would not arise in a situation of simple harmony. We also suggested that the problem of norms arises as does the sense of human freedom—the awareness of the extent to which man transcends the patterns of “natural freedom” found in the world of nature. Thus the problem of the relation between fact and norm is an aspect of the problem of man’s freedom in general. To put the matter in other terms, the diffi culties in delimiting with any precision the area of human freedom are seen in the diffi culty in drawing with any precision or “objectivity” the line between statements of fact and statements of value.

It is interesting to note that statements of value are often taken to mean two quite different things in ordinary usage. On the one hand, they mean that things are “valuable,” that is, “good” and worthy of admiration. On the other hand, they refer to statements which obviously refl ect the subjective character of our knowledge, its conditioned character, and the proper response to them is the statement “de gustibus.” In this situation, when a “value statement” is made, the response is, with a shrug and a protest, “But that’s a value judgment,” which remark is meant to convey the view that “That’s merely a matter of opinion, and your opinion is no better than anyone else’s.” Now the realists have discovered the inevitabil-ity of value judgments in this latter sense and have pointed out the extent to which such judgments undergird and structure the way in which we see

Politics and Value, Part 2

54 W. JOHNSTON

the realm of “fact.” This is but another—and more basic—way of saying what I have said time and again: that the particular interests are more powerful than the general and that the common universal experience is always fi ltered and shaped by particular categories. If, as Mr. O’Neil has argued, it is true that systems theorists have tried to move toward a theory of international relations without values, then this means they have missed the most fundamental insight of the realists and are merely repeating the sort of mistake from which the realists have attempted to free theory. 1

It is clear that if value judgments are used in this more basic sense, then a major problem is posed: is there any way of making decisions among them? Have we any criteria by which to distinguish between better and worse value judgments? Or is it all simply a matter of tastes, in which any-one’s judgment is as good as anyone else’s?

We may approach this diffi culty from another angle: from the diffi culty of determining what it is that constitutes a social “fact” or a historical “fact.” I think E.H. Carr is correct on this: that what is taken as a “fact” is derivative from our interpretation. Now what this means is that when sev-eral individuals agree on certain things as being “social facts” or “historical facts,” their principles of interpretation are similar or, to put it in other words, their values are similar. What are taken as “facts” is determined by our values, and the important question then becomes: What determines our values? And here we see that the realm of freedom shades off into the realm of the organic, for if our values are the product of our entire past experience, plus our inheritance, then clearly they are in an important sense determined by factors beneath the conscious awareness and con-scious manipulation. Many theorists suggest the factors beneath the level of consciousness which thus could mold our values, for example, the psy-chological subconscious (Freud) and the economic subconscious (Marx).

I think it is well to start with the recognition that the “facts” of all indi-viduals are to a degree different and the solipsist is in this correct: No two individuals perceive the same set of “social facts.” This is true in the sense argued by Carr: that out of all the available facts, the historian selects some as historical facts, and the basis on which this selection is made is the histo-rian’s principle of interpretation. If this is accepted, his “facts” are taken as “historical facts”; if these principles of interpretation are rejected, the facts will lose their bid to become historical facts. But the infl uence of values on facts is operative on a far more basic level, as Boulding has pointed out at the level of simple sensation. This is even more true in the realm of social fact, as we have seen time and again when witnesses are called before a jury


or in the sort of experiment conducted by Leo Postman. The likelihood that values will determine our perception of the facts mounts as the facts come to us from afar. As Walter Lippmann pointed out long ago in Public Opinion , the public does not have a direct knowledge of the “facts”; what it knows is already fi ltered through the mind of journalists, editor, news service, and so on. 2 Thus the more remote the experience, the more inevi-table it is that it be fi ltered through someone’s or some institution’s value structure. It is obvious that this presents the most formidable possibilities for manipulation of public opinion to accord with the desired value system of those in control of it, and we have seen the terrifying potential for such manipulation in the totalitarian states of the twentieth century.

The reason for this subservience of “fact” to “value” of “messages” to the “image” (in Boulding’s terms) is related to what we have discussed in the previous section, the need for the personality to have a pattern of iden-tity or order—in short, to the dominating infl uence of “the image.” We may put this matter in other terms: the facts are the parts, the values are the principles by which the whole is integrated. If the integrity of the self is to be preserved, the facts must be brought into control by the whole. Experience, psychological and political, is not as “free” as the earlier liber-als, with their twin faiths in empiricism (based on sensationalist psychol-ogy) and the harmony of interests, had assumed.

As I have suggested before, there are quite basic reasons why this is the case—basic and inevitable reasons. We are aware of the compelling character of these reasons on both the individual and the collective level. Without such cohesion, disintegration is the consequence, both individu-ally and collectively. This is particularly clear on the collective level: where it is clear that societies are not possible at all unless these values, the prin-ciples of integration are, to a very large degree, shared. To put the matter in other terms, society is possible only through the reduction of diversi-ties and the imposition, by one means or another, of similar categories through which experience is seen. It is these categories which then deter-mine, very largely, what is taken to be “social fact.” Language is perhaps the most elemental of these categories, and, as Niebuhr pointed out, you must speak some language—that is, the child must be given some catego-ries through which to organize his experience. 3 By what might be called an unconscious instinct for survival, society protects these categories against intrusion, with varying degrees of jealousy, but with the common purpose that all will see social facts in a similar way.

56 W. JOHNSTON

When one moves from one society to another, the question of what is “fact” and what is “value” suddenly becomes fl uid, and thus it is at such times of crisis that the conditioned character of our knowledge becomes most clear. The crises may be sharp crises within a given culture or crises among different cultures. In world politics in our time, when the crisis among cultures is continuous, the question of what is “fact” and what is “value” is manifest in sharpest form. This is another reason why the attempt to achieve a “science” of international politics, based on a system-atic knowledge of the “facts,” is particularly implausible in this fi eld and at this time. This also casts light on why it is that the most fruitful social thought so often comes from those eccentric to a given culture and able to see the conditioned character of its knowledge. 4

Those, therefore, who hope that some precise and enduring line can be drawn between “facts” and “values” in “social science” are pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp. Boulding is correct in his observation that no sharp dis-tinction can be drawn. Frank Knight is correct in his argument that such imprecise demarcations as we are able to make are connected with the different layers in the structure of man. 5

On the other hand, those who refuse to face the issue, and who think that something fruitful can be said by sidestepping it, are in truth sidestep-ping the really basic question, and little that is signifi cant can be accom-plished from such evasion.

Thus there is no way to avoid the recognition that there is a radical subjectivism at the basis of all our knowledge about society (a subjectivism the harder to detect, and in a sense the more dangerous, when manifest in collective form—though subjective nonetheless, when seen from a uni-versal perspective). Stanley Hoffmann’s advice that theorists of interna-tional politics should “state openly their own values” is but a partial and inadequate corrective to this tendency, for a number of reasons. 6 For the statement of such values can be made only in such abstract terms that it really does not give us much of a clue as to what the author’s operative values are, in truth. What is more, the most basic of “values” by which the author’s approach is determined may very well not be known to the author himself. For the extent to which our knowledge is conditioned is often seen from without, in terms of the perspective of those that stand outside our given situation. And against the conditioning of our own knowledge by the times in which we live, there is no present remedy at all. The remedy can come only by those who live in subsequent eras, with very different climates of opinion.


In conclusion, therefore, there is no way in which we can consciously guard against the dominant values of the community entering into our theory. A self-conscious awareness of the inevitability of such entrance and of the distortion that follows from it is a necessary, but only partial, corrective. As Faulkner aptly put it about the South, he knew these things without ever having to be taught them. It is from this route which has carried us to a recognition of the radical element of subjectivism which enters into our thinking that we are brought back to a position in which we recognize the transcendent value of freedom.

In the fi rst section of this paper, we also discussed the relation between “norms” and “fact” in a more obviously ethical sense and posed the ques-tion of whether or not the attempt to bend “nature” to “norm” was always in accord with the dictates of morality. Since norms themselves are ambivalent, I think we can see that the attempt to bend the given to the free partakes of the ambivalence of human freedom itself and heightens both the destructive and the creative potential of human freedom.

The truth is that there are empirical regularities in nature which may be described as “natural” goods. There is a sense in which the natural is the good and in which evil is consequent upon the attempt of men to interfere with the natural order. As I have suggested in the previous chapter, this insight is contained in both the myth of the Garden of Eden and the myth of Prometheus stealing fi re from heaven. It is this which makes the effect of moral philosophy itself so conjectural and leads man into eternity to seek to buttress this intrusion (whose ambivalence he seems to sense, “beneath the level of consciousness”) with the argument that it is “natural.” This persistent concern to give the sanction of nature to intrusions with the given order is a refl ection of an awareness at the level of “folk memory,” if you will, that there existed a level of harmony before human conscious-ness, before human intervention, which was an element of the good. The Eden myth symbolizes this in the most graphic way, and the longing to recapture the primitive innocence of Eden is recurrent in human life. The most powerful of sanctions—save that of God himself—is the same sanc-tion of “nature,” and it is open to the most enormous forms of idolatry.

Thus the dilemma of the relation of norm to fact lies in its eternal ambivalence: norms always have the potential of corrupting the “realm of fact” as well as of bringing a more complete harmony to pass in that realm. Thus man is persistently driven to make his peace with nature and to do penance for his violation of its given harmonies and yet, at the same time, to recognize the futility of any such attempt at return. In this sense,

58 W. JOHNSTON

it is surely true that “you can’t go home again,” although the urge to try to return be recurrent. The Indians who resented the plow because it cut into their Mother the Earth gave vivid expression to this sentiment.

As I have mentioned earlier, Fromm is in error when he traces the awareness of the burdens of man’s separation from nature occasioned by his freedom to the “liberation” of man at the time of the Renaissance. It is simultaneous with the dawn of historic consciousness itself, as the great Biblical myths themselves show. As Niebuhr has said, this is also the basis of the dawn of religious consciousness, the search for a transcendent har-mony, consequent upon the breaking of the harmonies of nature. When this radical break with nature is forgotten, it must be rediscovered, for it is the most fundamental truth about the human condition.

As I have suggested above, a consequence of the recognition of the break between man and nature occasioned by the radical quality of human freedom means that there can be no sharp demarcation between the realm of fact (the realm of “the given”) and the realm of value (the realm of the “free”). Most particularly, we err when we slip into the notion that the realm of value is “the good” and the realm of fact is “evil.” At its roots, this is a Greek corruption, which stems from the notion that the good is an ultimate harmony and reality a disordered chaos to be transformed by the ideal of harmony. The situation is, however, far more complex and conjectural, and the dilemma of the human condition far more profound, than this would imply. Romanticism and naturalism periodically sense this, as with Rousseau, who argues that it is human intervention with the natural process which marks the beginning of evil and who yearns for the unconscious harmonies of the natural order. The theme is never absent from human experience. Its recurrence is periodic in medicine (e.g., the faith in “natural” birth control). It is also seen in many religious manifes-tations (e.g., Christian Science). In these views, there is a tendency to see evil as located not in the body, or in nature, but in spirit and in conscious-ness. (The light Existentialist thought casts on this should be explored.) However any versions of a simple naturalism are in error, for man cannot return to the order of nature. He must live with an awareness of his free-dom and the burdens this imposes. The consequence is that man is caught between the desire to return to nature and the awareness of the impos-sibility of such a return. (There is a sense in which the whole American experience is an effort to accomplish such a return, as Smith has argued in his interpretation of the myth of the garden and as fi gures like Jefferson and Emerson can be taken to illustrate.)


As I have suggested above, the consequences for moral philosophy are disturbing. For there is no meaningful way in which the problem can be reduced to a distinction between the realm of fact and the realm of value. The distinction is not between two different “horizontal realms,” so to speak, in which “lower” must be brought into conformity with the “upper.” The confl ict is “vertical”: it penetrates all “layers” of reality and makes the relation of each to “the good” conjectural. This is why there is no way in which one can reduce the problem of progress to that of sub-duing fact to norm. The realm of norm is the realm of human freedom: the realm of fact is the realm of the determined. But there are harmonies at the “determined” level of human existence which are always imperiled, and sometimes lost, as one moves upward to the realm of consciousness. The world of adults has anxieties, complexities, and turmoils unknown to the world of the child. The same is often true of the life patterns of simple peoples: they often have to them an “organic” harmony which is disrupted by the awakening consciousness of human freedom. Thus there is no sim-ple progress in the life either of individuals or nations, and the assumption that there is will lead, inevitably, to disillusionment. The (ultimate) symbol of the complexity of the human situation is expressed in the ambivalent effects of technology as revealed in the development of nuclear weapons. Einstein’s pessimistic remark when he learned of the fi rst successful chain reaction is deeply revealing: he said the Chinese sage was right, when he remarked that man should do nothing. One fi nds some echo or other of this sentiment in most conservative teaching: this rather pathetic longing for a simple, a “natural”, age.

The awareness of this elemental ambivalence of human freedom, which intrudes itself into norms and makes itself felt in the ambivalence of all norms, means that no theory of progress, certainly no theory of auto-matic progress, can express the truth about the human situation and about man’s encounter with history. It means, further, that it is always an error to come to think of virtue as equivalent to knowledge and to fail to grasp the sense in which (as Aristotle pointed out) virtue is also dependent on heredity and habit. The Existentialists have rediscovered for us this basic truth about the ambivalence of human freedom.

What “practical” implication do these notions have for the understand-ing of international politics? The chief instrumentality through which man’s freedom makes itself felt on natural processes is that of science and technological and economic processes and consequences of scientifi c dis-coveries. We see the massive illustration of the intrusion of man’s freedom

60 W. JOHNSTON

over the natural processes in the dominance by man through technology of traditional societies, which are fi rst disrupted and then “reorganized” to coincide with the “rational universalism” of science and technology. As Niebuhr has pointed out, a society which extends beyond the obvious ties of “nature”—expressed most basically in ties of consanguinity—is in part a result of man’s freedom over the natural process. However man is always to a degree tied to the natural process and never able wholly to transcend it. This natural basis for homogeneity can be seen as an important factor in the achievement of group cohesion, wherever it has been achieved, in the modern world.

All theories of balance may be seen to be in error when they attempt to base themselves on a “natural” foundation. For any balance seen in terms of nature will be seen to have fl aws in it and the conscience of man can always see possibilities of making it a more just balance through con-scious contrivance. “Natural” balances always have a tendency, without conscious contrivance, to degenerate into injustice. We have one illustra-tion of this in what happens to the market economy under the theory of “natural” balance developed by such thinkers as Sumner. We have a further illustration of this in the theory of “natural harmony” in interna-tional relations, subjected to sharp criticism by Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis . The more consistent the effort to liken the balance with “nature” and remove it from conscious contrivance, the more grievous the corrup-tions that develop. Against those who wish to intervene in the natural balance is brought the naturalistic argument (again Sumner may be taken as an example) that such intervention will do more harm than good, that it will initiate processes of imbalance incapable of being redressed. Similar arguments may be applied by proponents of the balance of power—as if one had a form of unconscious ecological equilibrium at work. In general, therefore, any notion of “balance” must be used with extraordinary cau-tion as a device through which to analyze social situations. Any balance is in a measure arbitrary; all balances are temporary. At the very least, we must have a conception of a “dynamic balance,” which is related to the higher levels of organization discussed by Boulding. In short, once we recognize the ambivalent character of the realm of norms, we are led to an emphasis on some form or other of balance. But we must realize that, though this notion represents an advance over simple monism, it is far too simple a framework to do justice to the complexity and dynamism of human interrelation. Theories of balance are useful as steps beyond a


simple monism; they are, however, hazardous resting places—particularly if taken as fi nal resting places—for any theory of social relations.

I think we should bear in mind that the modern era has been at pains to obscure the ambivalence which characterizes human freedom, for the denial of this ambivalence has been a negative precondition for the main-tenance of the coherence of its own view of the world. That perspective has rested on a faith in the coherence of all experience under the expand-ing power of man’s reason. Science has been the coupling link between reason and technology, and technology has been the instrument of reason in the world of artifact. The careful concern of scientists to preserve the coherence of their world view, and to obscure its ambivalence, is seen in a writer like Bronowski, who has been concerned to absolve science from any responsibility for the terrible incongruities in which modern man fi nds himself and who has been concerned to assure us of the hopeful future sci-ence can make possible. In short, in Bronowski (as in the later Carr), one fi nds a restatement of the traditional theory of progress: the diffi culties are found not in the inadequacies of the approach, but in the failure of reality to conform to the harmonies of reason. The theory of progress has been part and parcel of this view. 7

When the ambivalence of the human condition has been sensed, there has been a tendency to trace it to a particular era in history, as in the writ-ings of Erich Fromm. In Hobhouse’s The Rational Good , one has a persis-tence of the Greek rational hope in reason as the instrumentality through which we can advance to the good. 8 However, whenever man rises above the “natural” tie, he is confronted with the problems—at least the risk—of alienation and rootlessness. One could no doubt fi nd wails of anguish at the disruption of the natural basis of human community when the fi rst families were linked in a clan and the fi rst clans in a tribe.

We have spoken earlier about the meaning of politics and suggested that, whatever else it may mean, it rests on the recognition that you “can’t please all of the people all of the time.” Seen in the light of an abstract ideal of harmony, it is quite clear that politics, based on a recognition of the inevitability of giving offense and concerned only to minimize offense rather than avoid it, falls short of the ideal. What is more, politics may seem to fall short when measured against not merely the ideal, but the pattern of life in a family or a small religious sect. As I have suggested, however, there is a sense in which the abstract good is itself “political,” in that there is an inevitable tension among its several elements.

62 W. JOHNSTON

The more diverse and confl icting the interests, the more “political” must behavior be—that is, the more obvious the “offense” given what-ever the course of action taken. This is why international politics, with its enormous diversities and tensions, is the fi eld of “politics,” in the pejora-tive sense, par excellence . However I think we should understand that any distinction between a “political” and a “nonpolitical” decision must be a strictly provisional distinction. It is impossible to distinguish, in any clear- cut way, between a “justiciable” and a “nonjusticiable” issue, in domestic and, even more clearly, in international law. Any such distinctions are mat-ters of degree, not of kind.

This is the case because all decisions are, in some degree or other, arbi-trary—that is, they affect differing interests in unequal manner and thus to some degree or other disturb a given equilibrium. Nonpolitical decisions are those in which there is so universal an agreement on the arrangement under discussion that there is no feeling that what is done gives offense. Or the situation may be that the authority which makes the decision is so august that, from the very fact that it has given the decision, it becomes clear that it is not offensive. However any, or almost any, change has within it the potential confl ict—indeed, it is probably redundant to use both the term “political” and the term “confl ict.”

The less important an issue, the less likely it is to be considered politi-cal. The point is revealing. It suggests that much of what is nonpolitical is that which really does not count for very much and those who pride themselves on being unconcerned with political issues may by that admis-sion make acknowledgement of the ineffectiveness and insignifi cance of their concerns. However it must be seen that there is another end of the spectrum, in which things count so much that that we consider it improper to look on them as political. Thus we are told, from time to time, that we should take questions of national security out of politics or that politics should stop at the water’s edge. The assumption is that we must all want what is best for the nation in its encounters with other nations and that it is improper to try to use the national image as a vehicle through which to gain one’s own advantage or lessen the advantage of an antagonist. Thus at the level of the things that count least, as well as the things that count most, we shade from the political into the apolitical. However the distinc-tion is, as I have said, strictly provisional.

It is often said that we should take this or that question “out of poli-tics.” For example, this was part of the thinking behind the establishment of the independent regulatory agencies. It is diffi cult to comment on these


proposals, for one can appreciate what is meant by the desire to “take issues out of politics,” while at the same time he recognizes the diffi culty, if not the impossibility, of accomplishing this result. In the most general sense, I think we can say that a group of issues can be taken out of poli-tics when there is a near uniformity of agreement on what line of policy is appropriate there. In short, the nonpolitical coincides with the area of uniformity in public evaluation. (I have discussed this at more length in the analysis of the distinction by E.H. Carr between “law” and “politics” in the Twenty Years ’ Crisis .) This is why it is possible to take questions of national security out of politics (i.e., to the extent that we do), for we assume that everyone should be interested in the most effective provi-sion for the national defense—that such a loyalty is a precondition for the existence of the nation itself and may be taken for granted by those who count themselves members of that nation. We also take religion out of politics, in part because we have realized, through experience, the impos-sibility of reaching agreement in this area and because we recognize the importance and incommensurability of these views on the nature of the ultimate reality.

It is also clear why the most “political” issue in domestic life centers around the concern for the control of the state, since this is the agency that has the power to set a wide range of other priorities in the society. The contest for control of the state must be political, must be open to dis-pute, for otherwise one has surrendered his most basic freedom, without consent, to others. In short, in any healthy society, this must be the area of political controversy.

We see then that effective political behavior depends on the aware-ness that one must inevitably give offense, but this awareness is coupled with the courage to act and the good sense to try to keep this offense to the minimum necessary for the effective accomplishment of the intended action. The essence of unpolitical temperament is found in those who are so troubled by the awareness of the offense they must give in the action that they retire from the effort to shape events in any signifi cant way at all. The “bad” politician is one who shows no concern about the offense he gives or who gives offense out of proportion to that necessary to the accomplishment of the objective.

The conception of what is permissible offense and what is impermissi-ble offense differs from community to community and from time to time. The skill of a politician is thus intimately related to his understanding of the limits of permissible offense . McCarthy interpreted these limits too broadly

64 W. JOHNSTON

and thereby became an offense to the democratic tradition. President Eisenhower interpreted them too narrowly and failed to exercise the sort of leadership which had come to be expected of a president. He failed to see what Jackson had been perhaps been the fi rst president to understand that if the president does not set priorities and make decisions, this does not mean that priorities will not be set and decisions will not be made. It merely means that they will be set and made by those less directly respon-sible to and refl ective of the national will. It is in this sense that there is a moral obligation on the president to be “political” within the broad range of activity which the tradition takes to be permissible.

On the world scene, the inevitability of giving offense is much greater, but the need for effective action is also much greater; hence the dilemma of political behavior is much greater there than it is domestically. The lib-eral tradition often fi nds itself in a quandary here because it tries to carry over the notion from domestic politics of what is, and what is not, the per-missible range within which to “give offense,” to the international scene. Diplomacy differs from politics in that the diplomat is aware of the need for greater caution and refi nement here. The old saying applies: we know each other well enough to disagree. This may be the case domestically, for however much one may disagree with this or that domestic antagonist, one is bound to him through a common loyalty to the nation. Internationally the bonds are frailer, when they exist at all, and the politician often walks on eggshells. In part this is true because an error in politics on the domes-tic scene means that one will give offense to public opinion, and the reac-tion will be in the form of a loss of votes at the polls. An error in politics on the international scene runs the risk of given offense to another nation’s national honor, which may very well mean that armies will move.

It takes great perception to know what actions are required and what are permissible. This perception is a very rare achievement. It is even rarer that a man should be effective in both the domestic and the international arenas. The tendency is to extend the techniques from the one to the other. This is what in a sense both Franklin D. Roosevelt and his antago-nist, Stalin, did. One might argue that two of the shrewdest politicians of World War II both avoided this error. Hitler—brutal domestically—for long made a pretense of sweet reasonableness internationally and was able to delude a fi gure like Neville Chamberlain, who had little clear aware-ness of the difference in attitude called for in the two areas. Churchill, a committed constitutionalist domestically, had a clear understanding of the role of force internationally.


What we have seen is the elusive nature of the art of politics. The politi-cal leader must act: this is the responsibility he bears as a leader. But he must always act within limits (this is true even within a totalitarian state, though it is true to far less a degree there). The crucial question is within what limits? And how are the limits defi ned? If he is to have an under-standing of the limits within which his action is to take place, he must have “long and subtle antennae.” This problem is of particular diffi culty in the presidency. For the higher the offi ce, the more the determination of limits is a consequence of the occupant’s own decisions—that is, the less he can rely on precedent. As Henry V said to his royal French fi ancée: We, my dear, are the makers of fashion and manners.

Can the sense of political leadership be taught? To a degree, yes, in that one can learn a great deal from a study of the actions of one’s pre-decessors: when they exceeded permissible limits, when they fell short of them. In either case, of course, they become the subject of criticism. What we know, however, is that there is no direct way in which one can carry over the sense of what is , and what is not , permissible from other areas of behavior into high political offi ce. There is a sense in which military expe-rience is the least relevant here: for the occupation of leadership, there is much more clear-cut and much more bound by traditional canons. One could almost feel President Eisenhower groping for a similar pattern of organization in his presidency—the “institutionalized presidency.” But the really big things cannot be institutionalized; they are too fl uid for this, and the “naturals” in the offi ce recognize this from the outset: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Johnson, and, to a degree, Kennedy. The experience in business also has little direct carry-over, although as the political element in business has mounted, this has become a better training ground. Yet one reads with amusement the account in Emmett Hughes’ The Ordeal of Power of Charles Wilson’s restrictive concept of business leadership, with which he approached his tasks as Secretary of Defense. 9

NOTES 1. We have not been able to track down this reference. 2. W. Lippmann (1945) Public Opinion (New York: MacMillan), 15–32. 3. R. Niebuhr (1956) Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Hamden:

Shoe Strong Press). 4. As examples: difference in view of colonial and Western worlds regarding

Communism.

66 W. JOHNSTON

5. F. Knight (1947) Freedom and Reform (New York: Harper and Brothers). 6. Hoffmann, Contemporary Theory, 172. 7. J. Bronowski (1961) Science and Human Values (London: Hutchinson), 73. 8. L.T. Hobhouse (1921) The Rational Good (New York: Henry Holt and

Company). 9. E.J. Hughes (1963) The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower

Years (New York: Atheneum), 50.


CHAPTER 4

In a general sense, the goal of theory in international relations may be said to be similar to the goal of theory in any other fi eld: we want generalized propositions from which, by deduction, we can explain particular facts. In all fi elds, the “facts” by themselves are chaos; we strive to put an end to this chaos by shaping the interrelations which exist among the facts. However the very notion of how much generalization is possible in the theory of international relations itself presupposes certain very fundamental assump-tions. Those who stress the scientifi c approach, and feel that numerous and signifi cant generalizations are possible, stress the uniformities which char-acterize international relations. Because they are convinced that signifi cant uniformities exist, they feel we can go quite a long way toward assimilat-ing this area to a pattern of analysis appropriate to the study of natural phenomena. Those who challenge the scientifi c approach take issue with the possibility of such assimilation. Thus the very adoption of a method of approach to the study of international relations already presupposes an important judgment about the substantive nature of the fi eld.

Of course more than one method may be appropriate in this area as in others. We should certainly recognize that modern medicine involves the interplay of a great variety of approaches, depending upon which particular aspect of man and what particular form of ailment one wished to deal with. If medicine be defi ned in its broadest sense as the science of healing, then good medicine may involve an entire spectrum of methods, from the most refi ned laboratory analysis to the most delicate interpersonal counseling,

The Scientist, the Moralist, and the Historian

68 W. JOHNSTON

with no thought of a test tube for miles about. In short, the method we deem appropriate for the study of a subject depends not merely on the nature of the subject matter but also on the particular aspect of it with which we are interested. There is a sense in which the purely scientifi c approach to the study of man will be appropriate; for example, if we want to know the speed at which a man will fall from the top of a tower to the earth, we can apply Galileo’s formula for acceleration to man, as we would to a stone or a block of wood. However, in politics we are hardly interested in Galileo’s law of acceleration. There is a sense in which we move to a level of increasing specifi city as we move from the “scientifi c” to the “political” in the study of human relations and, as a corollary, the relevance of general formulas declines. We shall return to this later in our discussion, when we try to make more precise what it is we mean by the term “politics.”

It is important at this stage to see that generalizations exist at all levels; it is wholly misleading to try to make any defi nitive distinction between “the facts” and “the generalizations” which presumably link them together in a pattern of meaning. The statements that these two objects are “chairs” or that those three objects are “black” are, of course, generalizations. They represent an elementary science, and life would be impossible if man lacked this capacity to generalize. For everything would be unique and experi-ence would have no cumulative effect. If each experience were new, there would be no carry-over from one experience to another and all our ener-gies would be absorbed in mastering each totally new, wholly individual, experience. Life would clearly be impossible under these circumstances.

Since life itself is impossible without science, without systematic knowl-edge, we err if we draw any sharp line between science and common sense. Science is essentially a projection of the effort of common sense to bring some order out of our experience. There remain, however, differences. In the fi rst place, the methods of elaborating the consequences of gen-eralizations are far more refi ned in science, through the use of logic and mathematics. Logic and mathematics may be likened to telescopes which vastly extend the reach of our mind by extending our ability to seek out the corollaries which follow from our generalizations. There is a sense in which the symbolism of Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall” serves also as fi tting symbolism for the deductive reach of the scientifi c talent:

Little fl ower—but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

THE SCIENTIST, THE MORALIST, AND THE HISTORIAN 69

In the second place, the experimental techniques and apparatus of sci-ence vastly strengthen our ability to determine which of several possible paths which logic may have opened up to us is in truth in accord with the facts.

But all science, and all “common sense,” is rooted in observation and deductive elaboration of observations. “Science” proper is distinguished by the sophistication with which its deductive “equipment” is developed and applied in the form of logic and mathematics and in the boosts which its observations are given, through such instruments as telescopes and oscilloscopes (which vastly extend the range of our senses and hence our “observation”) and by the controlled experiment (which enables us to intervene, so to speak, with nature’s processes in order to check the cor-respondence of our deductions with the facts).

However, as we remarked at the outset, scientifi c deduction and obser-vation (along with common sense, for that matter) do not yield the same fruits in all spheres. There are many characteristics which a subject matter must possess if it is to yield to systematic analysis in scientifi c fashion and if we are to feel we have made progress toward the achievement of some master generalizations from which all subordinate generalizations (and then from them the “facts”) can be deduced in a harmonious hierarchy. I shall mention only four prerequisite characteristics here—none of which is possessed by international politics. First, the subject matter must be one in which change is repetitive, as in the movement of the heavens; second, the subject matter (or the aspect of it with which we are concerned) must lend itself to quantifi cations; third, it must not be possessed of a con-sciousness of its self; and fourth, we must have before us a large number of instances for purposes of wide-ranging comparative analysis. With the possible exception of the last characteristic, international politics possesses few of the traits which encourage us to think a scientifi c approach will yield any very fruitful results.

This does not mean, of course, that no generalizations are possible; it merely means that the level of generalization to which we aspire must, because of the nature of the subject matter, be made lower than in the natural sciences. To clarify the point, the simplest generalizations may be made, as for example, in the containment policy, which rested on a gen-eralization about the likely course of Russian policy based on knowledge of Russian history and the internal structure of the Communist regime. But no one would be correct if he thought of the containment policy as a “theory of international relations,” unless he were using theory in a sense

70 W. JOHNSTON

far more modest than that in which it is used in the natural sciences. For a theory is not just a generalization. It is, at the very least, a master gen-eralization, from which lower-order generalizations are deduced, much in the same way as specifi c facts are deduced from lower-order generaliza-tions. To put the matter in its simplest terms, we may distinguish between (arbitrarily for the sake of clarity) three levels of analysis: the isolated par-ticulars; the low-order generalizations, which link these together; and the high-level generalizations, which link together these subordinate general-izations. What we call a “theory” is therefore in part a relative matter. The relativity of the terms is seen in an example. Kepler’s generalization about the movements of heavenly bodies, or Galileo’s generalization about the acceleration of falling bodies, might quite properly be called theories. However, when Newton integrates the two into one master generaliza-tion, one might choose to call his the theory and theirs the derivative generalizations. The matter can easily be reduced to a semantic irrelevance unless we recognize that there can be no clear-cut demarcation of what is to qualify as a theory and what is not.

Our primary concern here, however, is more substantive than semantic; it is to suggest what the limitations of the scientifi c approach are when applied to international relations and what the alternative approaches might involve. The alternative approach which is of most concern to us here is the historical approach. It might be useful to move into this topic with a few words about the approach E.H. Carr has taken in The Twenty Years ’ Crisis .

E.H. Carr has attempted to revive the faith in a progressive history as a meaningful approach in our time. The approach suffers from a diffi culty at the very outset: either Carr gives us no criterion by which we are to measure whether or not “progress” has taken place or the criterion he gives us is inadequate. At times, he seems to give no criterion, as in the statement that:

The absolute in history is…something still incomplete and in process of becoming—something in the future towards which we move, which begins to take shape only as we move towards it, and in the light of which, as we move forward, we gradually shape out interpretation of the state. 1

On the other hand, he gives a rather clear criterion—but one that is too narrow—in the following passage:


…[S]ince the preoccupation with economic and social ends represents a broader and more advanced stage in human development than the preoc-cupation with political and constitutional ends, so the economic and social interpretation of history may be said to represent a more advanced stage in history than the exclusively political interpretation. The old interpretation is not rejected, but is both included and superseded in the new. 2

The criterion here suggested—and made quite clear elsewhere in Carr’s writings—is that progress is measured by movement toward socialism. In short, Carr is a socialist progressive or a progressive socialist.

The fact that history “seeks to provide constantly expanding and deep-ening insights into a course of events which is itself progressive” is no guar-antee that it will provide such insights. A central theme in our analysis has been that there is no guarantee against a slippage backward in the human condition. For example, Burke was in sense closer to the proper order of priorities in his estimate of world politics in the 1790s than Cobden a half century later. In Cobden one gets a recurrence of the errors of judgment of the Enlightenment. Morgenthau has also argued that there is a sense in which the quality of the American understanding of world politics declines after John Quincy Adams in the nineteenth century, and George Kennan agrees with this judgment.

Carr might deal with this criticism by reverting to his notion of the broken line—but this becomes simply a means of evasion, for what we want to know is how long the line will be broken, and we want to know the criterion by which we can say that “forward movement” has been renewed. What we see is that Carr’s view of history as progress rests on empirical evidence, but the manner in which this is selected and arranged is a consequence of his values and is actually based on an act of secular faith. It is clear that Niebuhr would attack this foundation, since it must be undermined if his own “transempirical” orientation is to be taken as plausible. But a secular thinker like Brinton would also challenge it in his notion that it is questionable that we can talk above anything as cumula-tive in the sphere of the humanities. 3 Of course one can see the dilemma in which Carr’s affi rmation places him (there is no affi rmation that is not free of some dilemmas). Since he has committed himself to the accep-tance of the theory of progress, he must then defi ne the dominant trends which have taken place as good . In this sense, the only way he can retain his faith inviolate is to take his criterion of what is “progress” from what actually happens and to switch his criterion of “progress” in accordance

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with the trends that actually prevail. The vagueness of his “criterion” indi-cated above enables him to do this, though there are times when his com-mitment to socialism leads him to question the progressive character of history (as, e.g., in his comments in the “strength of the old order” in Germany, as revealed in Nazism. We shall explore elsewhere the tension between his vague criterion, which makes it possible to label whatever comes to pass “progress,” and his precise criterion, which puts in question the validity of any simple faith in history as progressive.) To the extent that Carr takes the fi rst “criterion” as a valid one, the charge by Morgenthau that Carr is a “utopian of power” is correct.

There are further diffi culties in Carr’s position. If our view of the future, and of the past, is determined by the problems of our own era, there is a sense in which these experiences cannot be cumulative. One view will tend to crowd out the others and exercise suzerainty over them. Each generation, like each individual, will have to learn largely for himself, through an elemental contact of “I and Thou” and there is very little that is cumulative in this. 4 To go a step further, the only way in which meaning-ful progress can be achieved in history is analogous to the way in which it can be achieved in individual relations, through the recognition of the extent to which we are inescapably “existentially” bound by our own situ-ation. The only way in which one can move beyond his own time and its limitations to achieve some “objectivity” is by a recognition (broken line or no broken line) that there is a very important sense in which history is repetitive and not progressive.

In this respect, we should reverse the conclusion of C.P. Snow, who has argued that history, collectively, is progressive, while it is tragic, indi-vidually. 5 One might argue, on the contrary, that there is a sense in which one can talk meaningfully of individual progress, but that it is much more hazardous to do so on the collective level. Of course a case can be made for the argument that “collectively” (whatever that may mean) there are some respects in which history is progressive. However it is well to bear in mind the dilemmas which confronted the biblical peoples when they made the assumption of a progressive history. One might say that, as soon this becomes the chief “operative principle” of an individual or a civilization, it encourages the sort of hubris that is the occasion of downfall. One sees the lessons of a similar myth, and the same cycle, at work in Greek tragedy. 6 This orientation produces a measure of indifference to the experience of the past, a gap between the generations, a certain patronizing attitude of youth to age, and a general disrespect for traditional verities.


It may also produce an indifference to the importance of standards in the present: a present observance of the elemental decencies, on the grounds that the future course of events will justify their violation. There is an enormous danger of an “ends justifi es the means” philosophy in any uncritical progressivism. The faith in progress is, therefore, a dangerous altar at which to worship, unless the faith is tempered by a humanist rec-ognition that, in terms of the meaningful unit by which human values are registered and measured—individual selves—all ages are equidistant from eternity. Life is all too easily drained of its deeper sense of meaning if we affi rm, in some straightforward fashion, its progressive character. I think this is one of the values of a deeply humanist education: the insight that there is an important sense in which human life is repetitive. The process of transformation of a dependent infant creature into a civilized being, with a sense of inner integrity and a due sense of the rights of others, is hardly different today than it was at the dawn of history. Is the infant of today any less dependent than the infant six thousand years ago? Are old people any the less old? Is “the course of true love” any the less uncertain? Is the individual any the less unsure of his place in the cosmos and any the less troubled by his sense of loneliness in it? Whatever formula be appropriate for the measurement of “collective history,” in the most meaningful units in which we measure human values, there is much in life that is repetitive.

Those general refl ections have certain implications for our view of our-selves and for our view of others. With regard to ourselves, it should put us on guard against the domination of an uncritical “success” philosophy in which we are thrown, as a matter of “principle,” onto the defensive by the most powerful trends of our time. Not only in our attitude toward youth but in our attitude toward our cities and toward what might be called the elemental decencies is the warning appropriate. In our attitude toward other civilizations, this is in danger of leading to recurrent errors of judgment, in the assumption that there is an “automatic validity” in what “modern” civilization represents. However, if what has been argued above is true, it follows that other civilizations may not only start on an equal footing with us when it comes to the elements of simple gracious-ness which are the foundations of civilized life but that they may start from a superior footing, in that they have not had their sense of the enduring civilities corroded and have not been thrown so completely on the defen-sive by technological advance. This advance has not been without its cor-rosive effects in our own civilization. Its prospects may be looked upon with greater uncertainty in other lands, where the potential of material

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plenty as justifi cation for the high price of technological turbulence may not be achieved. It is one of the great tragedies of our age that for much of the world “modernization” has meant the exchange for rural squalor of an even more degrading slum existence in urban jungles. Delicate and gracious systems of manners often go over the board, and a squalid and rootless and alienated existence may be its replacement. It would seem to me that this has been the fate of many of our cities in this century. The development of civilizations may strengthen or corrode patterns of life for stability and continuity; you cannot do much with a either a child or a civilization unless the conditions of its life are fairly constant over a pro-longed period of time.

Finally, we have argued that, to grasp the qualities and meaning of another self, one must be governed by a sense of restraint and one must have the capacity to show a measure of sympathy for the condition of another. This applies as well to historic eras. Thus, to understand the “spirit” of the Enlightenment, one must approach it in sympathetic fash-ion. However the assumptions of history as progress do not encourage this sympathetic approach. For you do not really approach another as an equal if you assume that he stands on a lower level of historic develop-ment and you on a higher. One often sees this gap in perspective in the slightly patronizing attitude taken by the youth toward the aged, by those whose power is ascendant to those whose power is in decline. There is no more revealing indication of a person’s character than his attitude toward the aged. In any case, the assumption that history is progressive to some degree incapacitates the historian from that effort of at sympathetic imagi-nation which must be the very foundation of his art. In this sense, as well, there is much to be said for the historian as artists.

Carr puts forth a suggestive thesis on the stages through which the development of a theory passes. We do not start, in his view, with the collection and analysis of the facts; we start with a purpose. It is pur-pose which gives thought its initial impetus: “the wish is father to the thought.” Since wish or purpose starts the engine of thought moving, Carr maintains that there is an initial stage in which the element of wish or purpose is overwhelmingly strong. During this stage, the thinker does not concern himself with the analysis of cause and effect so much as with “the elaboration of visionary projects for the attainment of the ends which they have in view.” 7 It is only when these projects break down, “and wish or purpose is shown to be incapable by itself of achieving the desired end, that the investigators will reluctantly call in the aid of analysis.” 8 As an


illustration of his point, Carr cites the alchemist; he thought gold was a good, and since the end was good, the means must be available for con-verting the baser elements into gold. When this hope broke down, the scientifi c study of chemistry could begin. Carr thinks the study of interna-tional relations has passed through the same stages. Since it emerged as a separate “discipline,” it has been “markedly and frankly utopian”:

It has been in the initial stage in which wishing prevails over thinking, gen-eralization over observation, and in which little attempt is made at critical analysis of the existing fact or available means. 9

Carr cites as evidence of this the reply given by Wilson, when he was asked by his advisors (on the way to the Paris Peace Conference) if he thought the League would work: “If it won’t work, it must be made to work.” This, to Carr, is the equivalent of the alchemist’s conviction that, if the goal be worthy enough, the means for its achievement must be available. What interests us here, however, is Carr’s “theory” about the stages through which the development of thinking on international rela-tions passes: the utopian background, the realist critique, and fi nally, the attempt at synthesis. He looks upon his own work as an effort at synthesis.

The question Carr has posed is a signifi cant one, and we should give further consideration to it: Can we theorize about the stages though which the development of theory passes? I would suggest that some useful things may be said about this process, and I should like to offer another interpretation about the “stages of intellectual growth.” One might argue that theory, in its early stages, tends to focus on the static aspects of its subject matter and to formulate propositions in terms of “timeless abstrac-tions.” A second, and more sophisticated, stage of theory comes when a more diffi cult task is undertaken: the effort to formulate generalizations which will account for the processes of change in the subject matter.

We may see examples of these two stages of development in several of the natural sciences. Newton, for example, generalized about the solar sys-tem on the assumption that it was created by God in a single moment of time. He excluded from his range of inquiry the question of the origin and development of the solar system. His successors (beginning with Laplace) push on with this problem and thereby open up a whole new range of inquiry. By 1830, Lyell, building on the work of Nutton and Smith, may be said to have “created” the science of geology; in the effort to explain how the present characteristics of the earth came to be what they are,

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another whole range of problems is opened up. Until then the earth had been taken as a “given,” and few hypotheses (other than those of religion) had been put forth in the effort to explain how the earth had “developed.” In biology and botany, we observe a similar process. In the eighteenth century, Linnaeus, tireless collector and classifi er of plant and animal types, worked on the theory that “we reckon as any species as issued in pairs from the Creator.” This approach gave way, of course, to that of Darwin who, with The Origin of the Species , broke through this static world view and put forth the theory of evolution.

If we move from the natural sciences to philosophy and the study of human interrelation, the pattern seems to be similar. The traditional quest by metaphysicians for an eternally static metaphysical framework has been supplemented in modern philosophy by an effort to conceive of ultimate reality in terms of change. It is no accident that the title of one of Whitehead’s major works is Process and Reality . Other prominent twentieth-century philosophers (e.g. Bergson, James, Dewey) have also been concerned to see ultimate reality in dynamic terms. Thus one seeks a “metaphysical” sanction for the notion that theory of international relations must attempt to wrestle with the realities of change (and must, therefore, be persistently concerned with history). I think he could do no better than point to the perspectives of such philosophers as Whitehead, who might be taken to reinforce these assumptions.

Finally, it is now a commonplace that seventeenth- and eighteenth- century theories of man were largely static. Locke, Hobbes, and to a lesser extent Rousseau have little concern with change. Adam Smith might be said to have a rudimentary theory of economic growth, but he is primar-ily concerned with unraveling the eternal principles of political economy. In their analysis of human nature, the philosophers sought to discover the fi xed and unchanging elements in that nature and strove to model their approach on the method which had brought such brilliant success to Newton in the analysis of natural phenomena. It is true that the eigh-teenth century did develop theories of change and philosophies of history, but they tended to be rather simple predictions of some pattern of “inevi-table progress.” The nineteenth century (and the twentieth) carry us for-ward in the fact that Burke, de Maistre, Hegel, Marx, Spencer, Hobhouse, Spengler, Toynbee come to assign to history a central place in the study of man, and they begin, with a new sophistication, to seek for generaliza-tions which will account for the course. However, though these thinkers have made a break with static analyses, the break is only partial. In such


dogmatic closed system as those of Hegel and Marx, for example, what we see are essentially static theories of change, that is, change is looked on as “inevitably” proceeding toward some predetermined goal—a view of change that is as “static” as is the ancient classic view that change is cyclical. Both of these approaches, while pretending to deal with change, actually very largely evade it by the attempt to subordinate it to fi xed patterns. Neither approach comes to terms with the elemental reality of human freedom, which makes all theories of change conjectural at best. Nevertheless such thinkers have made a beginning. And some very impor-tant fresh advances have been made in this century by the sciences of man, for example, the brilliant Freudian clinical generalization, that one cannot understand the personality unless it is seen in its time dimension and one has a thorough knowledge of its early conditioning and growth.

Thus an initial justifi cation for the historical approach to the study of international relations is to be found in the assumption that, as a discipline grows more sophisticated, it comes to emphasize the dynamic more than the static aspect of its subject matter. A second justifi cation may be found in an analogy. If we are dealing with a room full of people, all of the same age (let us say they are all 50), we might be justifi ed in arguing that the time factor did not count in our efforts to “theorize” about these people. In other words, since the time factor could be taken as roughly equal in its effects, we could discount it as a variable. Let us suppose, however, that ¼ of the people are over 50, ¼ between 25 and 50, ¼ between 5 and 25, and ¼ under 5—dare we then attempt to generalize about the behavior of the people in the room without taking the time factor into account without attempting to understand as carefully as we can the stages through which human life passes? To be sure, we run risks in any attempt to impose upon many different life situations any uniform and rigid theory of the life cycle of man. But are not the risks of developing a fatuous theory far more grave if we neglect the time factor than if we are somewhat too heavy handed in the effort to fi t unique life situations into a systematic conception of it?

How do we link our analogy to world politics? This enormous room, the globe, is crowded with over 100 entities, “states,” at vastly different stages of development. As Robert Heilbroner has put it, Saudi Arabia is now rushing madly from the eleventh century into the twelfth. When Americans move out from their shores, they in most instances not only move outward in space but also backward in time. How can we formulate a theory in neglect of the time factor when a major difference (perhaps the

78 W. JOHNSTON

major difference) occurs in the entities about which we are theorizing in the stage in time of their development?

At the outset of our discussion, I suggested that the very range which one feels open to fruitful theorizing about international relations is itself a theoretical question of fundamental importance, the answer to which itself presupposes quite basic assumptions about the substantive nature of international relations. I should like to elaborate that point and in the pro-cess suggest a third justifi cation for the historical—as distinguished from the “scientifi c”—approach to the theory of international relations. We may begin with a somewhat arbitrary, but useful, distinction between the artist, who we take to be concerned with the distinguishing and unique traits of a given entity, and the scientist, who may be said to look for the traits a given object shares with others. The bias of the artist is toward the unique and the particular; the bias of the scientist toward the common and the general. Let me hasten to add that no absolute distinction can be made between the results of the undertakings. In his absorption with the exploration in depth of a particular experience, they artist may strike the wellsprings of some very powerful currents which course throughout all human experience. Indeed, the greatest of artists often uncover these universal wellsprings. The discovery remains, nevertheless, incidental to the artist’s undertaking, which is to capture in its full richness the depths of a given experience or cluster of experiences. There is no better guar-antee of failure in an artistic undertaking than for the artist to approach his subject matter in a scientifi c spirit and self-consciously go about the creation of general types who embody “universal” truths. In great art, universality comes in through the backdoor, so to speak. We become fully absorbed with the particular personal glory and plight of a Hamlet, of a Willy Loman, of a Pierre Bezukhov, and it is only after we have felt our way into the intensity of these personal experiences that we see their larger and more universal implications. The implications often have a signifi cance greater than those any scientifi c analysis can convey; for example I would fi nd in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard the fi nest of all analyses of the col-lapse of Tsarist Russia, an analysis which captures more of the reality of the old order with its charm and its corruptions than any of the more scientifi c attempts of the students of society. However the point remains that, for the artist, it is a whole-hearted absorption in the rich particularities of a given experience that is his concern, and his skill must fi rst of all be mea-sured by his ability to convey to others the full texture of that experience.


The scientifi c approach is different from the fi rst, and it calls forth quite different traits of mind and spirit.

My point for the study of international relations is a simple one: we shall learn more of the important things we want and need to know about this fi eld if we carry to it, fi rst of all, the instincts of the artist, modifi ed here and there by a dash of the scientifi c spirit. If we reverse this order of priorities and try to storm the fortress in self-conscious scientifi c fash-ion, we shall fi nd that the things we would most like to know will slip like sand through the fi ngers. The great historian must also be primarily an artist, in love with every particular nuance of his own chosen subject matter, concerned to let the chips fall where they may so far as universal and timeless generalizations are concerned. Thus the talented historian is the indispensable ally (and often the master) of the “theorist” of interna-tional relations. His sharp-pointed arrows help puncture the overinfl ated balloons of the theorist from time to time sent aloft. In short, a study of history brings home to the theorist the irreducible uniqueness of much of the material with which he is dealing and serves as a brake on his itch for the sweeping generalization. Plato is said to have placed over the door-way to the Academy the inscription, “Let only those who know geometry enter here”; over institutions concerned with the study of international relations, one might inscribe the words: “Let only those who have studied history enter here.”

The above suggestions about approach presuppose, as I have said, views on the substantive characteristics of international relations. They also pre-suppose views on the achievements we can expect from the theoretical enterprise. To be sure, theory is important; it is intellectual anarchism, pure and simple, to say that theory is “bad” and we will simply “stick to the facts,” and it is surely not my purpose to defend this juvenile proposi-tion. It is my purpose to suggest that the end results we can expect in this fi eld will remain somewhat modest and to suggest that, as a consequence, we should approach the undertaking with a fi tting humility and fi nd satis-faction in such half-loaves as may come our way. The whole loaf we shall never see.

There are inevitable dangers which follow if we allow our study to become separated from history. Two may be here singled out: distortion (which follows if we fi t a particular element into a general category in which it does not belong, because it does not share the trait which it is said to share) and superfi ciality (when we “fi t” the particular into the general category, to be sure, but in the process of doing it we are told

80 W. JOHNSTON

nothing really signifi cant about the subject, and our understanding is in no signifi cant way enlarged). The tedious folly of much work in the social “sciences” is involved with such undertakings. Without a rich sense of the particularity and complexity of our materials, we shall always run the risks of superfi ciality or distortion. It is therefore a risky business to theorize; “the problem of community” presents itself at the intellectual as well as the political level. Here the extremist poles are dogmatism and empiricism. It is not an easy task to avoid both pitfalls, and a poor abstraction may be worse than no abstraction. But we cannot order our intellectual life, any more than we can order our political life, without principles of authority. Liberalism has been one eyed in its approach to academic undertakings as well as political ones; it has seen the risk of arbitrary authority, but it has not seen the imperative necessity of some authority. Empiricism or prag-matism has therefore been its characteristic philosophical aberration—an attempt to evade the problem of authority by the assumption that there is a “natural” order in the data themselves. The libertarian and empirical- pragmatic orientations are therefore quite closely related, and Louis Hartz is accurate when he sees pragmatism as the characteristic philosophy of the American liberal tradition. 10

It is therefore necessary to see that there can no more be an ultimate resolution to the problem of the relation of “theory” to “fact” than there can be to the relation of “order” to “freedom”—both are manifestations of the eternal tension which lies at the root of the “problem of commu-nity” on the theoretical as well as the practical level. The structures of meaning, as well as the structures of institutions, by which we order our lives at the same time confi ne those lives and may shut out quite profound truths. It is against the recurrent danger of conceptual tyranny that the historian as artist is one safeguard in the study of international relations. He is an essential safeguard, for the notion (so popular among such sci-entifi c humanists as Dewey and Bronowski) that the scientifi c method is itself an adequate safeguard against the exclusion of vital insights fails to see the arbitrariness axiomatic in the very conception of that method itself.

This leads us to a consideration of a second danger which follows if theory and history are for long separated—a danger which affects not our intellectual but our moral perspective. For it is not only misleading in a theoretical sense to think we can generalize about human relations in such a way as to fi nd the key; it is also dangerous in an ethical sense. In the study of the full range of human encounters, it is essential that individu-als be approached as entities which deserve respect in their own right and


are possessed of depths no slide rule will ever measure. They are not so many similar objects to be classifi ed into appropriate scientifi c categories. Surely the brutality of the Communists is not unrelated to their lust for the “scientifi c” answer and to their determination to root out particularity wherever it does not mesh with their preordained dogma. The pure scien-tifi c spirit is incompatible with a society in which the irreducible reality of individual experience is valued. The appreciation of such uniqueness must have an ethical and religious foundation. In a moral as well as an intellec-tual sense, one authentic humanist insight is worth a thousand “scientifi c” redefi nitions of old experiences in technical vocabularies. We shall return to this point near the conclusion of the essay.

A fourth justifi cation of the historical approach is related to the third. Fruitful theory is an imaginative undertaking; the key to advances in this fi eld is to be found in the perception of new relations in the pattern of events which were not seen before. In a sense, a theorist is looking at his-tory is like a child looking at the clouds and seeing a thousand and one images there. The more “clouds” we look at, the more possible interrela-tions of the data reveal themselves. History exercises the imagination; it reveals to us a vast diversity of possible combinations; it supplies to us the raw materials from which the theorists must then fabricate their sev-eral goods. It is also one testing ground (the course of future events is the other) for such general hypotheses as the theorist formulates. History is thus in a sense a “laboratory” and in another sense a source of “raw material.”

A fi fth justifi cation of the importance of history is found in what I would call the “law” of “international inertia”—using all these terms in a most unscientifi c way. Through the study of history, we become aware of the traditions of the several tribes of mankind, which are often the most powerful single determinants of their actions. By the “law” of “interna-tional inertia,” I mean that a nation will continue to move in its tradi-tional path unless it is defl ected by massive countervailing pressure, either external or internal. This, of course, is in some respects a purely formal statement that adds nothing new to our knowledge. Such addition as it makes depends upon the manner in which it is applied in a substantive instance. It is most certainly not meant to be the fi rst step in the erec-tion of a theory of historical determinism. Such an approach, unsound in any era, is particularly out of place in a revolutionary era, where the traditions of all states are under powerful countervailing pressures, in the form of the changed technology of warfare, to mention but one. I think

82 W. JOHNSTON

it is childlike to argue that one can somehow understand what the present Russian leadership is likely to do if one knows what Ivan the Terrible or Catherine the Great did; nor can one foreshadow some future American withdrawal from Europe because of the strength of the American tradi-tion of isolationism. But I think it fair to argue that we cannot understand either contemporary Russian or contemporary American policy without taking into account these historic considerations. An understanding of the traditions in a nation’s foreign policy is a necessary prerequisite to the understanding of the present aspects and future prospects of that nation’s policy; it is by no means a suffi cient prerequisite.

To put the matter in other terms, we may say that a study of the per-sistent traditions in a nation’s foreign policy helps us, in part, to grapple with one of the variables on that policy. Many other variables, of course, operate. But the soundness of our theory is determined in good measure by the skill with which we disentangle these various factors and the judg-ment we show in the assignment of weight to them. In this sense, the historic approach is more valuable as a fi rst stage in the analysis of the problem. Few people would be inclined to disagree with this rather mild proposition, but all might not assign the emphasis to such study as is here assigned. Yet it is important to see that the continuing traditions of a people are not something extraneously and fortuitously imposed upon them; they are the refl ections of the organic life conditions of a people. They are not lightly changed and there is a sense in which we are justifi ed when we speak of the massive inertia of history.

Tied closely to this point is the whole conception of what it is we want in, and expect from, a theory. At the outset of our discussion, I talked of higher-level and lower-level generalizations and suggested that, in a rather fl exible way, we use the term theory to apply to the higher-level general-izations. Now, in the study of politics, one of the things we most want to know is the answer to the following query: What factors are peripheral and what are central? Which are transitory and which are persistent? We can make such a determination only if we study the action, say of a state, over a sustained period of time. The historical approach is one of the character-istics which distinguishes journalism from scholarship; in most journalism, we are given no leverage with which to make the essential distinction, for a slice is taken through time and the tendency is to present the facts on the same fl at level. An astute grasp of history should enable us to make the distinction between the peripheral and the central with greater skill. And I would argue we are justifi ed in assigning more “weight” in our analyses


to the persistent factors than to the transitory one. In a sense, therefore, persistence comes to take the place of the “higher-level generalizations” in the natural sciences. One might also add that the risks in an error of judgment are very great; to take as a permanent trend what is in truth, a temporary one (or the reverse) is comparable to the inability, in scientifi c analysis, to distinguish a fundamental law from a particular manifestation of that law. The latter failure does not make for distinguished work in the natural sciences nor the former for signifi cant advances in the study of international relations.

Although the historical approach is of value in the study of politics in general, it has an especial value in the study of international politics. This derives from the fact that many of our most valuable insights come to us from the comparative approach. We know this to be true on the indi-vidual level, where a sense of our own “identity” comes primarily from our interrelationship with others and our increasing awareness of our own particular traits in comparison with the traits of those with whom we come in contact. We also know it to be true in the study of languages, where a new grasp of our own language comes from the study of a foreign tongue or in the study of government. The comparative approach to the study of governmental institutions is essential if any very profound perspective is to be gotten of the American government. However, in world politics—where the “system” is by defi nition global in its sweep—the comparative approach is possible only through the historical; that is, we must compare different international “systems” in time, if we are to get the perspective on our own system that comparative government gives us on our national government. (It is of course possible to enjoy some of the advantages of the comparative approach by studying different subsystems of interna-tional relations which operate within the dominant system of a given era. This, however, does not afford us a basis for the comparative analysis of major systems themselves and is always subject to criticism by those who argue that the shape of lesser systems is intimately infl uenced by the “line of major tension” in the principal system.)

We move into a sixth justifi cation of the historic approach when we turn to those elements in human nature which most clearly set man apart from “nature,” that is, the fact that man is a being possessed of conscious-ness and freedom. Much of the folly of the narrowly “scientifi c” approach to the study of politics is derivative from claiming too much—from a false pride in its turn derivative from a superfi cial view of human nature. This “false pride” found a full expression in the high optimism of the

84 W. JOHNSTON

Enlightenment. The Enlightenment in good measure rested on the belief that the spread of science would bring about an intellectual and moral unity among men. If we bear in mind the unity which had already been evidenced in the acceptance of, say, Newtonian science, we may better understand how it at fi rst seemed plausible to assume that a comparable unity could be achieved through the spread of a scientifi c ethics, a scien-tifi c religion, a scientifi c economics, and a scientifi c politics. A great moral hope underlay the Enlightenment, and one living in that era might well have felt the moral unity of mankind to be inevitable. It is important that this great moral purpose that lay behind the Enlightenment be under-stood, if the tenacity of its persistence into our own age is to be under-stood. The “science of man” was not so much the foundation of the hope as was the hope the foundation of belief in the “science of man.” Had the hope proved successful, then the universality achieved in the one sphere would indeed have been achieved in the other.

It is only in our own era that the “identity” of the disciplines concerned with the study of man and society has begun to emerge from beneath their subordination to the scientifi c disciplines proper. However there is a sense in which one may go as far as back as the philosophy of Kant to fi nd the true watershed on this issue. For there is a sense in which the chief pur-pose of the Kantian philosophy is to confi ne the reach of reason to limited spheres. By showing the limitations of reason in his critical philosophy, Kant may be said to have dealt a crippling blow to the notion of a rational universalism. It is not necessary to elaborate this historical point here, but in his A History of Political Theory , Sabine has given a careful develop-ment of this theme. All that I am here concerned to point out is that Kant saw that there was no direct way in which the methods which had been developed for the analysis of natural phenomena could be extended to plumb the particular mysteries of a creature possessed of freedom of will and moral choice. Burke was well aware, albeit in more poetic terms, of the same reality when he insisted that the lines of politics were not like the lines of mathematics. The recognition that political philosophy, of which the study of international relations in theoretical terms is an aspect, has an identity quite distinct from the natural sciences is a precondition of signifi -cant work in this fi eld. A difference in method follows as a consequence from this elemental difference in the nature of the “subject matter.”

We may put the issue in more colorful terms—at the risk of a measure of distortion—if we emphasize that the Western tradition is a blend of the Greek orientation and the Biblical orientation. The former was predominately


(not solely , of course—just predominately) scientifi c in its spirit; it showed a marvelous skill in opening up to us a knowledge of the world as it is—a knowledge of the structure of an order which no doubt is to be found in nature. The Biblical tradition was narrower in its focus than the Greek, but it was interested in a range of problems surely no less important; it was con-cerned with the pursuit of righteousness and justice, with the questions of what ought to be. It sought in human history and in the universe structures of purpose, whereas the Greek intelligence was more concerned with the quest for structures of fact. In our own age, the tendency has been powerful for the Greek tradition to swallow up the Biblical; one of the reasons the professional wise men of our society often reveal so little of wisdom is that they worship only at the altars of the Greek tradition. Yet the difference between the Greek and the Biblical traditions is fundamental; there can be no very profound knowledge of the dynamics of politics (as distinct from a sort of botany of politics, that is, the collecting of all sorts and varieties of institutional infor-mation, with no feeling for what it is that gives the breath of life to all these parts) without an insight into the type of problem with which the prophets were absorbed.

We may put the distinction more sharply by saying that in a scientifi c inquiry a presentation of the facts of the situation and a logical demonstra-tion of how they are interrelated constitute the termination of the inquiry. We have then “solved” the problem at hand. As I said at the outset, the goal of a scientifi c theory is the achievement of general propositions from which, by deduction, we can explain particular facts. The more facts we can achieve among them, the more advanced our scientifi c theory. In a moral inquiry, we are faced with a radically different situation. Here the statement of the facts usually constitutes but the beginning of the prob-lem, rather than its resolution. The problem does not stem, essentially, from a dispute over what the facts are ; it stems from a clash over what changes in a given situation will be just . And although there are of course in science divergent interpretations over what meaning is to be attached to a given set of facts, in the moral encounter, the divergence over “mean-ing” is really a divergence over “justice,” not a divergence over “truth,” as in the scientifi c inquiry.

We may give an illustration of the difference between the scientifi c problem and the moral-political problem by an illustration of the latter (no illustration seems necessary of what is meant by a scientifi c prob-lem and what is taken to constitute its resolution). In my commentary on Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy, I have suggested that Jefferson’s

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opposition to the iniquities of kings, and the ancien régime in general, involved a simplifi cation of the longer-run complexities of history, in which Jefferson laid the indictment for evil too neatly at the door of the old order and traced the source of virtue too neatly to liberalism. I have also suggested that the illusions of the liberal tradition are magnifi ed and compounded in the Communist, where one sees a failure in communica-tion more fundamental than that between the liberals and the members of the old order. Through an understanding of the intensity with which the conviction of the corruption of the ancien régime can act on the lib-eral mentality, we are given a better understanding of the staying power which the Communist myth of our own corruption may have. The vitality of monarchical forms of government, and the subsequent diffi culties of some more purely liberal forms, was the cause of some inner doubts in the liberal tradition, but its general assumptions about monarchical deca-dence are not dead to our own day. We should thus ponder seriously the infl uence that empirical data have on deeply held convictions; the notion that, somehow, accurate information will bring about an automatic trans-formation of viewpoint to coincide with it is highly questionable. It is much more likely that such parts of the information as sustain deeply held prior convictions will be retained and such parts as challenge deeply held convictions will be rejected. For one must see that the most deeply held convictions of mankind are rooted as much in aspiration as in fact. This is probably particularly true of the visions that great collective entities have of themselves and of their destiny—but it is also true of every individual.

What is involved, therefore, in the failure to communicate between the liberal and the Communist worlds is not some issue of fact which can be resolved by bringing forth the “true” evidence. The problem is a more diffi cult and deeply rooted one than that, and it is a mistake to approach it as if a graduate seminar in political theory could accomplish its resolu-tion. What is involved in this encounter (as was the case in the encounter between liberal and ancien régime perspectives) is an assessment of the way in which the whole trend of modern history is moving. Fundamental con-victions are here in confl ict, and the confl ict is not to be resolved by an appeal to the facts, but by a struggle of will to see who is to shape the facts. Of course the Communists themselves have gone as far as the liberals in the confu-sion of the nature of the encounter, by their pompous claim that they have uncovered the actual “course” of history. This is their own particular way of reducing a fundamental clash of wills to the “empirical” level, as if there were only one set of “facts” and the “capitalist” world were incapable of understanding them.


We may give as a second illustration of our fundamental point an exam-ple taken from A.D. Lindsay’s book The Modern Democratic State . In the latter part of that book, Professor Lindsay raises a question of fundamental importance to democratic theory: What is the sort of knowledge possessed by the man in the street (he asks) which gives justifi cation to the claim that the rulers in a democracy should consult the ruled? 11 This question has of course concerned political thinkers since Aristotle argued that he who wears the shoe best knows where it pinches and thereby showed that “the people” do have a form of knowledge from which their rulers can benefi t. Aristotle’s point is of course true, but it is not the most important point. Indeed, the most important point cannot even be seen at all unless we ask the right question. And the right question is not : What form of knowl-edge can the man in the street give that be valuable? The right question is: What end do we feel the state should serve? This will then determine the sort of knowledge we take as “important.” The fundamental question, in short, is an ethical question, not a scientifi c one. If we start, as an act of will and aspiration, with the conviction that the state should serve the individual, we shall then determine that the form of knowledge which the average man has to give is important, for without it we cannot achieve the goal in terms of which our entire undertaking takes on its moral meaning. The ethical decision is blurred if we try to assimilate it to the question of the type of knowledge, in the abstract, that is necessary to run a state and the type of knowledge the common man, in contrast to the expert, can contribute. If we start with a different notion of the end that state should serve, for example, rapid modernization of the society and its advance-ment in power terms, we shall most assuredly not consider the “knowl-edge” of the man in the street to be relevant. It will, on the contrary, be an inevitable drag on a regime in a hurry.

Thus what is accepted as important and valid “knowledge” in the politi-cal sphere is derivative from the more basic ethical affi rmation which lies at the foundation of the given society, which is in its turn related to that soci-ety’s entire historic experience, its relative measure of external security, of inner cohesion, and so on. All these really determining factors are pushed aside when the problem of political knowledge is reduced to a problem of knowledge similar to that in the natural sciences. The confl ict of wills between the liberal and the Communist worlds is made all the more dif-fi cult by the confl ict in conceptions of what constitutes political knowl-edge, a confl ict rooted in different collective aspirations which are in turn rooted in divergent historical experiences stemming, one might say, from

88 W. JOHNSTON

time immemorial. Central to the ethical convictions of a liberal society is the desire for a form of social cohesion which rests on as wide a measure of diversity as is compatible with it. From this basic conviction derives the hostility to concentrated power and the belief that, in so far as is possible, every citizen should be consulted and that every individual has something to contribute to the forging of the national will. The Communist con-viction that there is a “science” of politics, by which the initiates can lay their hands on ultimate truth, is intimately related to a historic tradition in which the conception of cohesion resting on free diversity has never seemed plausible—When in the long annals of Russian history can one cite instances to sustain this conception?—but rather it seemed an invitation to anarchy and discord. Freedom as we know it is virtually inconceivable in the Russian historic tradition—to say nothing of the Chinese. The notion that there should be some ultimate source of “wisdom” in the society which speaks “the truth” is an ancient Russian tradition, and before that it has deep roots in the Byzantine past; it has been given a new form in the Communist priesthood.

Now all these facts are rather commonplace, but the inference from them about the relation between “knowledge” and “value,” between “sci-ence” and “ethics,” in the study of politics is not always or often drawn. I will not elaborate the argument any further at this point. I have also touched on it in the essay on “The Development of the Liberal Tradition II.” I shall only repeat the point elaborated there: throughout history, the normal determinant of what will be taken as “true” in the sphere of poli-tics has been determined by what was taken as politically necessary.

We are therefore concerned to stress the central difference between the type of knowledge for which we can hope in the natural sciences (and the methods appropriate to those sciences) and the type of knowledge for which we can hope in the study of politics (and the type of approach for which we can hope in the study of politics). This, indeed, might be taken as the central purpose of our entire essay. It is of course possible to stress the “unity” of the two disciplines and of the method appropriate to them if one defi nes “science” in a suffi ciently broad fashion, but this obscures more than it reveals, and to preserve a sense of the uniqueness of “politics,” I have preferred to reject the word science and treat with skepticism the prospects that any “science of society” will ever give us the answers to the questions in which we are most interested. We may try to pull together our thoughts on this matter with the suggestion that the spirit with which we approach the two disciplines should be quite different. In science, the


watchwords are “fi nd the truth” and “push back the frontiers” of the unknown; in the study of human relations, the central maxim is “know your limits.” The spirit of the one is daring; the spirit of the other, caution. In short, at the foundation of the study of human relations lies a central ethical proposition, which warns us that no two people ever see social “real-ity” in quite the same terms and that we shall never quite know how and why others see that reality in terms different from those in which we see it. The greatest wisdom in human affairs comes from the recognition of this fact and from the corollary recognition of the virtue of humility. The very quest for a “science of society” is often but a sublimation of the frustrated power drive of the academicians, who would compensate for their limited exercise of real power with imaginary venture in the exercise of total power.

We thus see the sense in which a fusion of the study of man and the study of “nature” is fraught with danger and the risk which attends the fashion-able talk about a “science of man.” As I have argued elsewhere, it is always dangerous to treat human relations as if they were but another, somewhat more complex, variant of natural relations. This notion, pressed through with vigor, has as its inevitable accompaniment a violation of the central ethical imperative—“know your limits”—and as its inevitable corollary monstrous social injustices. Just as the achievement of true “knowledge” in human relations comes from the inner recognition of the limitations of our attempt ever to fully understand how and why others see the world as they do, such possibilities of justice as exist in human affairs are deriva-tive from the recognition that ultimate justice is never attainable. Pride, in communities as in individuals, is the greatest source of corruption, and the greatest perversions of justice are corollaries of the notion that one has achieved a perfect justice. The scientifi c hubris, which leads to the conclu-sion that the “essential uniformities” which govern human relations have been discovered, must always be checked by the artistic perception of the particular uniqueness of the individual and the religious awareness of the transcendent freedom of man.

When we swallow up the tangle of norms and the confl ict of wills that characterizes human relations in the symmetrical vision of the scientifi c approach, we are not brought closer to the truth about man. We are usu-ally taken farther away, into a “scientifi c” shadow world where the great disputes in human affairs are swept under the rug because they prove intractable to scientifi c analysis. For the great disputes in human affairs usually involve confl icting visions of justice, which in turn involve con-fl icting visions of the future which rests on the complex totality of past

90 W. JOHNSTON

experience and inner endowment. We are thus brought back to history. One of the recurrent problems with which any attempt to theorize about international politics must deal is the area of disputes over values. If, for example, we deal with the theoretical implications of the “Cold War,” we are brought to a whole cluster of specifi c points of friction. To take the Yalta Conference as one of the more emotional symbols of the Cold War, we cannot begin to weigh the complex question of “justice” here without a knowledge of the Russian vision of what constituted a “just” settlement, the Polish vision, and the Western vision. All of these, particularly the fi rst two, were heavily colored by the tangled history of the Russian-Polish border disputes. The Russian demands at Yalta were at Polish expense, but how justifi ed were the Polish claims? History of course will not give us an answer to this question, but it cannot be kept in the wings either. For surely one of the things in the Russians’ minds in 1945 was the Russo- Polish War of 1920, when Poland has pushed her boundaries far to the east of the Curzon Line. As I have stressed, history will not “solve” these questions for us, but any discussion of these issues will be seen to involve a Russian historic vision of its own “legitimate” demands and a Polish his-toric vision, and we cannot begin to get into the question of a “just” settle-ment until we have wrestled with these historic visions. Bruce Hopper put the whole matter succinctly when he remarked, “To understand people, one must know what they remember.”

This consideration brings us to another justifi cation which might be given of the historic approach. As we have said earlier, no generalization can be more valid than is its knowledge of the entities about which it theorizes. Now the “particularities” about which we are concerned in the study of the theory of international relations are states, which are very often the voices of national communities. These communities, even more than individuals, derive their characteristics, their “identity,” from an his-toric image of themselves, as we have just argued. When the individual suf-fers from amnesia, when his memory of his past dissolves, he is nothing: he has no identity because he has no past. The social instinct of man, as well as the insight of great statesmen, teaches them that this is even more true for groups of men. Thus the entities about which we are so presumptuous as to theorize cannot themselves be understood unless we have a sensi-tive appreciation of their image of themselves, and to even begin to get a “feel” for such group images calls for the greatest humility on the part of the observer. For this undertaking requires an ability, at least in part, to transcend the blinders of one’s own culture and win some appreciation for


the totality of another culture—an undertaking in which total success is clearly impossible and moderate success is dependent on an awareness of the elusive diffi culty of the task.

The chief national embodiments of the liberal tradition—the USA and Great Britain—are nations which have a powerful sense of collective iden-tity. The Americans and the British often, therefore, fail to see the breach between their own experience and that of most other national entities. In both America and Britain, the past has a fairly clear meaning, and projec-tions into the future enjoy a corresponding assurance. Indeed, for long the liberal view of world politics was, essentially, a projection outward of its reading of its own domestic experience. Eric Goldman has caught the spirit of this venture in the following passage:

We are a people whose history has made us the land of the swift, total solu-tion, brought about by ourselves alone. We faced a wilderness; we hacked it down. We were vexed by slavery; we cut it out of our system. We fought Britishers, Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, Germans plus Japanese, and licked them all with short shrift. No wonder our movies have a happy end-ing, and in ninety minutes. No wonder we are the only country in the world which has produced a popular saying like: “The diffi cult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little time.”

Americans were the more inclined to believe in the quick, total solution of any world problem because they were sure that the world was no great problem anyhow. Republicans and Democrats, New Dealers and anti-New Dealers, they tended to assume a general international trend, a trend so cer-tain that it took on the cast of a law of history. Human beings everywhere and at all times, the law ran, seek peace and democracy, want to get ahead to a farm of their own or a house on the right side of the tracks, prefer to do it all gradually and with a decent regard for the amenities. The history of man is consequently a long slow swing toward a world consisting entirely of middle-class democracies. Once in a while, the trouble comes when some country falls under an evil leader, who forces it along a road forbidden by the law of history. Then it is only necessary to remove the leader and let things fl ow back along their proper…If the natural swing of the world was toward peaceful, democratic middle-class ways, how could foreign policy be a problem requir-ing anything except the occasional surgical removal of an unnatural growth? 12

This tendency at projection helps account for the tendency (at times) of Americans to bring the mentality of the construction engineer to the vast “geological” transformations of international politics.

92 W. JOHNSTON

It also helps account for a certain failure on the part of liberals to sense that other peoples may have a far more troubled sense of “self” than do the Americans or the British. What, for instance, is to serve as a meaning-ful basis for German identity? Few peoples enjoy a reading of their past as certain as that of the Americans and the British; few, therefore, can make projections into the future of comparable certainty. Now the diffi culty of giving a certain reading to the past and a confi dent projection for the future is all the more formidable in world politics, where all the images held by all the groups of mankind cross and clash. A knowledge of history will at least save us from the notion that we can give any simple reading to this drama.

We may put the point in more basic terms if we bear in mind that part of the identity of individuals is derivative from the fact that they are physi-cally discrete; they do after all have a single will and mind. The depen-dence of collective entities on history is intimately related to their need to build up a collective will and mind, which presupposes a wide measure of concurrence in the wills and minds of large numbers of individuals. Such concurrence is not easily brought about; it is normally the result of the gradual spread of common ways of doing things, which are refl ected in and transmitted by common traditions. We cannot understand this “com-mon mind and will” unless we understand the circumstances under which they were shaped and the patterns in which they are refl ected.

As we draw our account to a conclusion, we might say a word about a few positive examples of theoretical studies in international politics which make fruitful use of the historic approach. In Hans Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations , there are two approaches. 13 The fi rst is that in which Morgenthau seeks the timeless abstractions which he feels underlie inter-national politics; the second is that in which he seeks to account for the evident changes between the pattern of world politics in the eighteenth or nineteenth century and its pattern in the mid-twentieth century. In this latter aspect of his study, Morgenthau is in fact following the historic approach. It is possible to maintain, as an initial stage in a theory, that the struggle for power is the major characteristic of world politics. Some fruitful general conclusions can be deduced from this assumption. But a vital question remains unanswered by this approach: How do we account for the vast differences in the intensity of the power struggle in certain eras in contrast to others? I would think the latter question to be of at least equal importance to the more general question, but to answer this,


as Morgenthau himself shows, one must modify the abstractions of theory with the specifi cs of historical analysis.

A second illustration is to be found in E.H. Carr’s suggestive little book, Nationalism and After . 14 Carr here attempts to correlate three stages in the development of modern nationalism with three stages in the domes-tic history of the modern state: fi rst, when the monarch and the nobility ruled; second, when the middle class was predominant; and third, when the working classes became major infl uences on the determination of state policy. Carr does not amplify his thesis in any great detail, but I fi nd it a very useful fi rst step in the attempt to establish correlations between certain stages in the development of the modern state and major turning points in the history of world politics.

A third illustration is to be found in the framework used by Henry Kissinger in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy . 15 His basic distinction is that between periods in which a legitimate framework prevails in world politics and periods in which no such legitimate framework exists. In the latter instance, world politics often takes the aspect of a struggle between a revolutionary power that challenges the existent framework and seeks to overthrow it and the legitimate powers who still want to work within a given framework. Henry Kissinger looks on much of the nineteenth century as having been a period in which the framework of legitimacy was agreed upon. He discusses two major periods of revolutionary tur-moil: when the traditional order was challenged in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon and when the Communist revolution challenges the legitimacy of the present world order. Many of the insights Kissinger develops in his analysis of Communism are derivative from his earlier study of the revolutionary Napoleonic challenge in his book A World Restored . 16

A fi nal illustration of the possibilities of the historic approach may be seen in some parts of W.W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth . In Chap. 9 of that study, where Professor Rostow discusses “Relative Stages-of- Growth and Aggression,” he makes some interesting suggestions about the linkage between internal economic development and the principal stages of world politics, and in this sense, his work is linked with that of Carr. 17 Whatever conclusions one may draw from his specifi c examples, he gives us a suggestive paradigm in terms of which we can bring some order into the snarl of problems we face in the underdeveloped world.

In what follows, the attempt will be made to illuminate such generaliza-tions as are put forth with illustrations from the history of the state system.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57764-1_9

94 W. JOHNSTON

NOTES 1. Carr, What is History? , 115. 2. Carr, What is History? , 118. Emphasis mine. 3. C. Brinton (1951) Ideas and Men (London: Jonathan), 498–526. 4. See M. Buber (1937) I and Thou (New York: Scribner). 5. C.P. Snow (1959) The Two Cultures and the Scientifi c Revolution (New

York: Cambridge University Press), 23–29. 6. We have been unable to trace this reference. 7. E.H. Carr (1946) The Twenty Years’ Crisis (London: Macmillan), 5. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 8.

10. L. Hartz (1955) The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace), 10.

11. A.D. Lindsay (1947) The Modern Democratic State (New York: Oxford University Press), 273–281.

12. E.F. Goldman (1956) The Crucial Decade (New York: Knopf), 114, 115. 13. H.J. Morgenthau (1948) Politics among Nations (New York: Knopf). 14. E.H. Carr (1945) Nationalism and After (London: MacMillan). 15. H. Kissinger (1957) Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York:

Harper & Brothers), 316–361. 16. H. Kissinger (1957) A World Restored (Boston: Houghton-Miffl in). 17. W.W. Rostow (1968) The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press).

PART II

International Relations and History


CHAPTER 5

Ludwig Dehio has argued that “It is possible to imagine a history of the Western world that relates all events to the two principles of unity and diversity.” He continues:

It could, after all, be said that for more than a thousand years the pendulum has swung back and forth between a tendency toward unifi cation, which never led to complete unity, and a divisive tendency, which never led to complete disintegration….

Let us begin by taking a look at the Middle Ages, which will also provide us with an introduction to the actual theme of this study. In that period the unifying tendency was carried along by two currents that had their origins in late antiquity: man’s yearning for the salvation of his soul and the memory of the political institutions of the Roman Empire. The exponents of these two currents were the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire.

However the “dynamic diversity” of Western life was too great to be restrained by the Medieval tendencies toward unity, and the political dimen-sion of this vitality took on new and more intense form with the emergence of the new system of states.

… the new structure came into existence at a quite defi nite moment, the new beginning of the struggle among the great powers in Italy in 1494. 1

In the development of his theme, Dehio traces the tension between the forces of diversity and the forces of unity—which was recurrent. In

The States System

98 W. JOHNSTON

explanation of the failure of the latter to enjoy any enduring success, he offers the following observation:

If the consolidation of the European states into one unit nevertheless failed again and again to materialize, the main reason was that regularly, just before the moment of achievement, new powers were brought into the maneuvers to serve as counterweights…. 2

Within the European system, the tension between the forces for unity and the forces for diversity may be described as the tension between those in favor of “universal monarchy” and those in favor of the “balance of power.” If we follow Mattingly, we are led to stress the forces of unity as dominant in the Western world in 1400:

Latin Christendom still knew itself to be one….

To describe it as if it depended upon the functioning of some system of political or legal administration, or as if it ever attained, or even ever, as a whole, sought to attain, to a given ideal as stated by St. Thomas or Dante or Nicholas of Cusa is to go surely wrong about it. But not so far wrong as it would be to deny a belief in the actual unity of Christendom, however vari-ously felt and expressed, was a fundamental condition of all medieval political thought and activity. 3

Mattingly illustrates his argument by consideration of the “identity” he takes to have been central at this time:

We shall understand medieval diplomatic conventions better, therefore, if we begin, not with the various magistrates, among whom in complicated patterns allegiance was apportioned, but with the collective unity, the peo-ple. They had no common name for themselves except Christians…Besides thinking of themselves as Christians, the people of Latin Christendom also thought of themselves, more or less consciously, as Romans….Even in Ireland, and among Norwegian fi ords, and on the Polish plain, literate Celts and Norse and Slavs whose ancestors had never seen the eagles thought of themselves as belonging somehow to the world, not merely of papal, but also of imperial Rome. 4

In his discussion of “balance of power” among the several Italian city- states in the latter half of the fi fteenth and the fi rst part of the sixteenth century, Myron Gilmore cautions us against the notion that the “balance

THE STATES SYSTEM 99

of power” in any explicit sense was the image by which the Italian states-men governed their policy:

The history of the balance of power in Italy has…been represented as a prefi guration of the course of modern international relations. The system of alliances in Italy in the fi fteenth century can be compared to the system of alliances in Europe in the nineteenth. Just as Florence, Venice, and Milan were overwhelmed by the northern monarchies, so France, Germany, and England are now in the twentieth century overshadowed by the great pow-ers of the United States and Russia.

Such a comparison may well help us to understand the tragedy of Italy in the sixteenth century and of Europe in the twentieth, but we must be careful not the press the parallel too far. The attempt to fi nd a conscious applica-tion of the principles of balance of power in the fi fteenth century may be as unhistorical as the claims made for modern nationalism in the same period. 5

Gilmore points out that the Treaty of Cambrai in March 1517 “seemed to Erasmus to promise a golden age of European peace.” 6 He concludes his discussion with these words:

If there was as yet no conscious appeal to a theoretical principle of balance of power on a European scale, there had nevertheless developed a clearer realization of the interdependence of the European states system and a con-viction that the independence of each and perhaps ultimately the security of all depended on common action against any one power which appeared to be acquiring too great a preponderance. 7

The views of Mattingly and Gilmore reinforce one another. For to the degree that the hope to establish a res publica Christiana , a Christian Commonwealth, and to breathe once again the breath of life into the uni-versalist heritage of Roman political institutions was dominant in political thinking, the doctrine of the balance of power could not hold sway. The two notions are incompatible, and one or the other had to prevail. For the acceptance of the balance of power system as legitimate was possible only if one had broken once and for all with the aspiration to restore imperial unity. The balance of power gave expression to the powerful pressures for diversity at work in the new political units; the universal monarchy gave expression to the powerful longing for unity on the Roman pattern. Renaissance Italy and early modern Western Europe were in a transition between these two images and neither can be said to have prevailed. We

100 W. JOHNSTON

err when we take Machiavelli as representing the dominant mood of the time. Erasmus and Sir Thomas More are probably in accord with its spirit. But Machiavelli had the more realistic feeling for the shape of things to come.

By indirection, we are now in a position to understand more clearly the balance of power system. I.L. Claude is correct when he argues:

The balance of power system is a system only in the loosest sense; its opera-tion is characterized by unilateral manipulation and by the free interplay of combinations of states. It is more a framework for arrangements—arrange-ments which are inherently competitive—than a setting for the systematic ordering or relationships among states. 8

He does not welcome the system, as did its proponents at the dawn of the modern states system.

Whatever one may think of their prescription for central authority, it is clear that the theories of collective security and world government are fundamentally correct in insisting that among its proponents the world requires a measure of central direction, an agency capable of presiding over the system and bearing responsibility for promoting orderly relation-ships among its component parts. One can hardly conceive of an adequate theory of world order which does not involve a considerable modifi cation of the decentralization which marks the balance of power system. 9

Yet Claude is hardly optimistic when he turns to the present scene, which he sees as essentially a balance of power situation:

Whatever the predilections of the system builders of San Francisco, they limited their aspirations and bequeathed to us a world which operates on the most essential respects as a balance of power system. If this means that the nations remain in a state of nature more Hobbesian [Hoffmann’s The State of War ] than Lockean in its basic characteristics, our task for the present and foreseeable future is to make the best of it. 10

The “essence” of the “balance of power system” is, then, a lack of sys-tem—at least with regard to what Claude refers to as the “management of power,” that is, the task of “keeping war-making potential under con-trol.” 11 The legal refl ection of the balance of power image is the sovereignty of the state, most particularly in its control over the use of force. The politi-cal, and often the cultural, dimension of the doctrine is a fi erce attachment to national or state independence. Thus the balance of power is linked


with some very important forms of freedom. Recognition of this linkage enables us to see the tensions between the balance of power and universal monarchy in the context of the “problem of community” discussed in the “Liberal Theories” course. The balance of power stresses the value of free-dom of action on the part of states; universal monarchy stresses the hazards of freedom of action and the advantages of patterns of order. In the shift in attitude toward the balance of power in the history of the states system, we therefore have a vital clue in the shift in attitude toward freedom and order on the part of states in their “image” of international relations.

The stages in the pattern may be simply put. At the dawn of the states system (fi fteenth century), there was the tension described above between allegiance to “universal monarchy” and the res publica Christiana and alle-giance to the freedom or action of one’s own political unit. It was clear, by the time the efforts of Charles V and Phillip II to restore Christian unity had been repulsed, that the principle of diversity had gained dominance over the principle of unity. The triumph was registered at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which gives legal sanction to the principle of sover-eignty and political diversity. By this time, the notion of “universal monar-chy” had come to be abhorrent. As one moves into the latter seventeenth century and then into the eighteenth centuries, the balance of power comes to be cherished, as a remarkable system by which states could reconcile their commitment to independence and freedom of action with their con-cerns over a tolerable measure of international order. Confi dence in the balance of power system is shaken by the ravages of the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. However it was plausible to see the Napoleonic excesses as a confi rmation of the illegitimacy and dangers in any attempt of one power to establish imperial sway over the other European states. That is to say, it was possible to look on Napoleon as having revived the dream of universal monarchy along the lines of Charles V or Phillip II. Indeed, Geoffrey Bruun ( Europe and the French Imperium ) interprets Napoleon’s policies as governed by the Roman imperial image, and this seems to me a highly plausible interpretation. 12 Hence the Napoleonic excesses may be said to have strengthened the commitment of those who had opposed him to the balance of power system. The Vienna settlement is therefore looked upon as a model of balance of power policy. However there was also a misgiving that the old freewheeling balance should be restored, and an effort was made toward the “managed balance,” as evidenced in the Quadruple Alliance, the Concert of Europe, and so on. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, however, the largely decentralized balance

102 W. JOHNSTON

seemed to work with a concern to legitimize the principles of the balance (see, e.g., Kaplan and Katzenbach). 13

It is with the beginning of the twentieth century that we enter a third stage: when the balance of power is now on the defensive and statesmen begin to think themselves back toward an image not unlike that of the Middle Ages, in revolt against which the states system had been born. The chief reason for this reassessment was the enormous costliness of war, as seen in World War I. As was implied before, war was looked upon as a normal means of adjustment—when other means failed—in the balance of power system. The price states had to pay for this means of adjust-ment was seen as worth the gain in the maintenance of state indepen-dence and freedom of action. World War I, World War II, and the nuclear age have brought about a profound reassessment of the hazard of the price and merit of the gain. The reassessment has not suffi ced to bring an end the balance of power system—to establish a different method for the accomplishment of “the management of power (force).” But it has at least brought the issue into the open, and the balance of power no longer fi nds itself the dominant image by default. It is hardly accidental that this third stage has links with the fi rst. In The Legal Community of Mankind , Walter Schiffer has shown the linkage between the legal principles which underlay the League of Nations and those which underlay the exercise of papal authority in the Middle Ages. 14 In terms of the diversity-unity theme of Dehio mentioned at the outset, the period of the Middle Ages and the period of international organization since 1919 are both periods in which the importance of unity is central. The period from, say, Westphalia to Versailles is one in which the problem of unity is treated as peripheral and the value of diversity taken as central. The attack by Woodrow Wilson on the balance of power registers the shift in emphasis.

By summary, we may depict three general stages: (1) the medieval period valued res publica Christiana and held immoral particularist egotism; (2) the period from Westphalia (1648) to Versailles (1919) valued balance of power and held immoral universal monarchy; and (3) the period from 1919 to present held in question (and often held as immoral) the balance of power and valued international organizations. The vogue of collective security and world government clearly indicates this shift in evaluation in the third period, as does, negatively, the skepticism about the virtues of national freedom of action and—at times—of national autonomy itself. As mentioned above, the primary factor (though not the sole one) in


bringing about this reassessment from period 2 to period 3 has been the changed nature and risks of warfare.

It is therefore possible, in the fashion sketched above, to relate an analy-sis of shifting attitudes toward the balance of power to shifting attitudes toward unity and diversity or (if one is careful in his use of these terms) to shifting attitudes toward freedom and order. The balance of power is identifi ed intimately with two forms of freedom: state independence and freedom of action. Critics of the balance of power are interested in order in that they feel the price in violence of the decentralized opera-tion of the balance of power is too great or, to put it in other terms, the order provided by this system is inadequate. Critics of the balance may, or may not, be led to criticize sovereignty and national independence them-selves. Proponents of collective security think a more effective order can be accomplished without substantial infringement of state sovereignty; proponents of world government are inclined to fi nd the villain of the piece in state sovereignty itself and to stress the incompatibility between effective order and traditional state freedom.

However, although there are links between period three and period one as discussed above, it is clear that there are also important differences. By the end of World War I, and symbolized in Wilson, there was a clear rec-ognition of the inadequacies of the traditional freewheeling system of state sovereignty and a recognition of the necessities for more effective order. However the efforts to move toward a wider unity had, now, to be rec-onciled with a tradition—over four centuries old—of independence and freedom of action on the part of states. What is more, this four-century tradition of independence and relative freedom of action had generated deep traditions of animosity among the several states, and the competitive interplay of the various states had itself served to give an enormous inten-sity to national identities. Thus the effort to reconcile state freedom with a more effective world order proved to have unexpected diffi culties, rooted in the intensity of the claims of states to the maintenance of their freedom.

The quest for a more effective international order was further compli-cated by the point of Dehio to which reference was made on page one:

If the consolidation of the European states into one unit nevertheless failed again and again to materialize, the main reason was that regularly, just before the moment of achievement, new powers were brought into the maneuvers to serve as counterweights. 15

104 W. JOHNSTON

If this point be kept in mind, we may say that we have four stages in the development of the balance of power: (1) the peninsular balance of the fi fteenth century in Italy; (2) the West European balance, which begins in about 1500 and is more or less self-controlled until the early part of the eighteenth century; (3) the European balance—which emerges with the merger of the East European system with the West European system—as seen in the great wars of the mid-eighteenth century; and (4) the global balance, which may be said, with some plausibility, to have begun with the dawn of the twentieth century, as refl ected in such developments as the USA’s defeat of Spain in 1898, the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902, and the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905. World War I is a confi rmation of the trans-European character of the balance, as refl ected in the decisive role of the USA in the defeat of Germany. 16 The global character of the balance is made unmistakable in World War II, where military operations range across the face of the globe itself—for example, as seen in the importance of Pacifi c theater operations in the American, Japanese, and, to a degree, British war efforts and the Mediterranean operations in German, British, and Italian efforts.

There is a sense in which, if one had been operating in a closed sys-tem, the balance of power might have been put to an end long ago and some form or other of “universal monarchy” established. Thus, within the European theater, Napoleon came close to ending the balance of power, and it was only because of the combined pressure of the two peripheral powers—Britain and Russia (already in different senses, trans- European)—that his efforts were blocked. The same is true, a century later, with Germany—even more effectively situated to accomplish continental uni-fi cation than had been France and coming closer to it—once again to be blocked by peripheral powers that are trans-European. But at each stage when it seems that consolidation is probable, the “open-ended” character of world politics manifests itself, new diversities are brought into play, and the struggle is lifted to a vaster scale. Indeed, there is a sense in which we are now witnessing a further expansion, as the “loose-bipolar balance” threatens to give way to a global balance of vast continental and cultural agglomerations.

If the expansion of the balance is viewed in perspective, it may be seen to have these characteristics, among others:


(1) An expansion in extent (from the Italian peninsula to Western Europe, to Europe, and to the world). Various stages in the “extent” and “density” of the world balance may yet unfold.

(2) An expansion in the scale of the units involved (from Milan, Florence, Venice, etc.), in the peninsular system (to England, France, Spain, etc.), in the “age of absolutism” (to the German Empire, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire (the second empire, built in response to the expansion in scale of states such as Germany)), and in the European system (to the continental scale of the United States and the Soviet Union in the global era).

(3) An expansion “in depth,” that is, in the numbers and percentage of men and material involved in these encounters—from the commer-cial soldiers of the Italian city-states to the more effi cient political, economic, and military organizations of the “age of absolutism” and to the mobilization of mass sentiment and the full panoply of modern industrial technology in World War I, culminating in the emergence of the modern “garrison state” under totalitarianism. 17

(4) An expansion in intensity , in that war becomes “more total,” not only militarily (as refl ected in the growth of military technology) but also psychologically (as refl ected in the growth of “hard-shell” ideologies).

However there is not a steady progression with respect to each of these factors. In fact one sees periods of pervasive anarchy followed by periods of tolerable stability. However periods of tolerable stability have, in their turn, given way to an anarchy vaster and more destructive in its conse-quences. As Hoffmann has pointed out, from the inception of the states system to Westphalia, one had wide-ranging anarchy. 18 From Westphalia to the French Revolution, one has tolerable stability. From the French Revolution to Vienna, turmoil. From Vienna to World War I, a restoration of stability. From World War I until the present, a period of virtually inces-sant and extensive instability. One may argue that a form of stability has returned of late years to the international scene, and we shall be concerned to explore its extent, its bases, and its probable duration.

In the above interpretation, we have suggested that the emphasis on unity was dominant on the eve of the emergence of the states system in Western Europe. We have followed Mattingly in this interpretation. There are those who would take a different view and who would stress, even then, the strength of the forces of particularism. (In his The Rise of

106 W. JOHNSTON

the West , McNeill is more sympathetic to this view than is Mattingly.) 19 Indeed, it is possible to argue that there were, from the dawn of historic consciousness, forces of diversity at work on the European scene over which the Roman structure had merely put an overlay and which existed, partially slumbering, throughout the entire medieval period. In this view, European history is seen not as falling away from unity since 1400, but as a reawakening to full power of forces of diversity which had been in a “sleeping-waking” state for many centuries.

Whatever may be the most meaningful interpretation of the history of Western Europe, it seems impossible to challenge an interpretation, for world history, which starts with the primacy of particularist forces. At the dawn of historic consciousness, man as a whole starts with a divided world. This divisiveness is refl ected in the mythology of early peoples (e.g., the myth of Noah’s three sons as the founders of three races, the myth of the tower of Babel, and the primordial Greek distinction of Greek from barbarian). What are the reasons behind this diversity? The “reasons” are, in fact, arbitrary: these diversities are “facts of nature” whose explanation must be found, originally, in prehistory itself. Thus, if one takes diversity to be coeval with the dawn of historic consciousness itself, one may ask: What is the relation between these diversities and the forces making for unity in mankind? The previous discussion of the balance of power and universal monarchy may be seen as but an aspect of this larger question—but one form of the tension, as it has been refl ected in the social political conditions of modern, primarily European, international politics.

If we take the diverse “identities” of human groups as “facts of nature” whose “explanation” (if one exists) is to be found in “prehistory,” we may see them in tension with forces which “transcend nature” and move man toward communities which transcend those inherited from tradition. These “transcendent forces” may be put in two primary categories: the products of reason and the products of conscience. The former include science and technology; the latter, religious ethical and legal principles. One may then see history in terms of the tension between the particularity of the “forces of nature” and the generality (and potential universality) of the forces of reason and conscience.

The view that the forces making for unity would prevail, in time, over the forces of diversity has been recurrent in history. We may distinguish two variants of the view (among many others). The fi rst is a dialectic inter-pretation; the second is a harmonic interpretation. Communist theory is the most widespread of contemporary dialectic interpretations. It sees


the forces of modern technology pulling the world, irresistibly, together. However it argues that the movement toward unity is “dialectic”—that is, it will encounter powerful resistant forces, and it is only through stages of confl ict between the unifying and the resistant forces that ultimate unity will be achieved. The resistant forces are those of capitalism and imperial-ism—but the very process of clash among the resistant (“reactionary”) forces, as well as between the “reactionary” and the “progressive” forces, will inevitably further world unity.

There is an element of realism in the dialectic analysis lacking in har-monic analyses. However it is not realistic enough—that is, it does not see the intensity of the tension between the general and the particular forces, and it does not see that the “triumph” of the general forces may require an enormous span of time. Furthermore, it has only come vaguely to perceive (in the post-Stalinist leadership in the Soviet Union) that the existence of this enormous span of time cannot be taken for granted. Communism recognizes the need for a fundamental change in political identity to cor-respond to the changes in life pattern occasioned by technological inter-dependence. It understands the interdependence between the internal transformation of Western European society (“class warfare”) and the world revolution (“imperialist rivalries”). It sees that the many particular-ist and “quaint” patterns of loyalty which color the globe like a vast patch-work quilt are “irrational” (from a technological standpoint) and through a shallow universalism it attempts to close incongruity. Communism fails fundamentally, however (and its most grievous tactical errors are related to this fundamental ideological error), to gauge the depth and intensity of particularist loyalties, as well as their inevitability (among Communists themselves, not least of all). Communists were aware that one’s “image” was conditioned by his class position. The First International assumed that class was a more important conditioning factor than nation, whereas World War I (it has been argued) gave a defi nitive demonstration that nation was more important than class. The Chinese-Russian split may be taken as additional confi rmation of this. Further evidence of the power of national-ism as an element in “the image” has been given by A. Meyer where he has pointed out that, very early after 1945, the content of Communism comes to be shaped by its Polish, Czech, and so on setting—that is, that the particularities of national circumstance are often determinative of the form the doctrine takes. 20 However this much-discussed clash between Communism and nationalism is but one illustration of the Communist failure to gauge the strength and inevitability of particular loyalties on

108 W. JOHNSTON

the world scene (and indeed, albeit in somewhat different form, on the domestic as well).

The Communist vision of universalism—although it makes some provision for the dialectical encounter between general and particular forces—has a vastly inadequate understanding of the latter and is, there-fore, confronted with recurrent and unpredicted and frustrating shocks. The present diffi culties between Peking and Moscow are but the most prominent present indications of this pattern—and these disputes cannot be “resolved” (they cannot, indeed, be saved from further and extensive deterioration) unless there is a fundamental modifi cation in the rigidities of the Communist view of the world and the simplifi cation of its universal-ist dogmatism. Beyond any external dispute with Peking, the Russians fi nd themselves caught in all the complexities and diversities of a new techno-logical age, which cannot possibly be coerced to fi t the rigid pattern which “scientifi c” planners see as “rational.” In short, the naïve hard utopianism of Soviet Communism is now in the throes of a major dilemma (or rather a series of dilemmas) which it can cover up so long as it defi nes its identity in negative terms—in terms of what it is against —but which it cannot resolve unless it breaks apart the dogmatic rigidities of the doctrine.

In the meantime, the consequences for mankind—the Communist peoples themselves included—are enormous and fateful. For the awful clashes of the interwar period and of World War II may be understood, very largely, in terms of the brutal interplay of false absolutes, each gen-erating the other, each feeding off the other, each devouring the “chil-dren of light” in the process. It is in terms of this analysis that some light may be cast on the emergence of Nazism. Nazism derived much of its strength from those who felt their identity threatened by all the pressures of alienation in modern society, the fl ames of which are fed and whipped up by the Communists. One therefore witnesses, from 1917 to 1945, the fateful dialectic between Communism and Nazism, each riding out one horn of the dilemma of a world technologically unifi ed and politically disparate: Communism pushing in ruthless fashion to “integrate” human beings in the “rational” manner “necessitated” by the development of modern technology; Nazism as the whiplash reaction of people who feel the technological pressures of the modern age are a threat to their most basic identity and who mobilize a measureless fury to protect their posi-tion against such a coercive “universalism.” Thus, with Communism, one sees the notion that technology will transcend particularism and establish a universal political order corresponding to the “inherent rationality” of


technology itself. In Nazism, one sees a reaction against such pressures and a harnessing of the full potential of technology to the full fury of nationalist particularism. An ironic twist is added to this brutal encounter by the fact that Nazism went on to challenge and threaten the identity of other states and stimulate nationalist reactions against itself, some of which the Communists were able to harness to their own quite unnational preoccupations.

In this fateful dialectic between the two political religions of Nazism and Communism, we see the dangers in the attempt to transform the diversities of the world situation in some dogmatic and coercive fashion. The diffi culties, of a different order, can also be seen to trouble other universalist movements—such as the ecumenical movement, which would hope to fi nd a basis for global spiritual unity through the expansion and adjustment of one or the other of the traditional religions. This is not the place at which discussion can be given to these diffi culties.

The dialectic analyses of the tension between particularism and univer-salism are sound to the degree that they assess with accuracy the strength of the relative tendencies. Communism is one variant of dialectic analysis, but it is rooted in Marxism, which is in turn rooted in Hegel’s philoso-phy. Hegel too errs in the simplicity of his dialectics and in his faith in the “cunning of reason.” Hegel’s position has a predecessor in Kant’s—where one has a rudimentary analysis of the “hidden plan” of nature, by which the diversities of nature, and the clashes consequent upon these, are seen as inevitably moving mankind toward unity. The “realism” of these various positions errs in not seeing the dialectic dimension of the encounter in suffi cient depth, and this error is rooted in the failure to assess with accuracy the intensity of particularist loyalties and the ferocity of whiplash reactions to coercive or rapid efforts to transform those loyal-ties. (K. Boulding has suggested that different parts of the “image” show different degrees of resistance to change. This provides the basis on which the effort to understand the tension between particularity and universality might be understood, but an adequate application of it to the interpreta-tion of international relations has not been made.) 21

The chief illustrations of “harmonic” analyses of the movement toward world unity are to be found in the liberal tradition, and the limitations in these views have been discussed at length in the “Liberal Theories” course. Harmonic analyses understand with even less perceptiveness than dialectic analyses the tension between the forces of particularity and the forces of generality and universality. They rest on the assumption that

110 W. JOHNSTON

there is some pattern of easily accomplished harmonization of particular-ity with universality that can be achieved, and, when such harmonization is not accomplished, they take comfort in the faith that historic progress is automatically moving the world toward this goal.

We are now in a better position to understand the particular diffi culties which characterize an attempt to achieve an effective “management of force” on the world scene today. For reasons mentioned previously, both appeals to the balance of power and appeals to one or another form of universalism are seriously inadequate. As a consequence, “realist” forces which understood the strength of particular forces and were willing to accept the consequences of clashes among them and “idealistic” forces which sought to move the world toward a legitimate universal order are unclear with regard to relevant strategies.

The contrast between the uncertainties of the present era and the com-parative certainties of the balance of power era may now be summarized. The central value of the balance of power system was the maintenance of state freedom in two respects: state independence and freedom of action. The chief cost of the system was that adjustments among states were accomplished, ultimately, through war. However the cost was seen as worth the gain. War was taken to be an inevitable and natural part of the system. International law refl ected the system, not only in the legitimacy it gave to sovereignty but in the legitimacy it gave to war itself. International law was not concerned with the elimination of the use of force, but rather with its mitigation and the formalization of the conditions under which it could be used. Grotius’ analysis of the laws of war illustrates this limited concern. International law also gave evidence (as Hoffmann has argued) of refl ecting the hierarchy between the powerful states and the lesser states. 22 The position of the two was different in the system.

When one moves from the period in which the balance of power is legit-imized to the period in which it is on the defensive, the attitude toward the use of force in world politics changes sharply. Once again one sees a link between the mood which emerges at Versailles in 1919 and the mood which had been characteristic of the medieval system and of the states system at its emergence. That is to say, there is now a renewed concern to restrict the use of force on the world scene to “legitimate” authorities, and the emergence of collective security theory marked a return to the “just war” doctrine which, in its turn, marked a divergence from the radical decentralization characteristic of the balance of power-sovereign states sys-tem. Indeed, there now emerged theories which hoped for the elimination


of the use of force internationally, rather than merely its confi nement to legitimate purposes. Such aspirations were an even more extensive depar-ture from balance of power-sovereign state thinking. They were often linked with one variety or other of world government theory.

A principal factor in bringing about this change in attitude toward the use of force on the world scene was the heightened destructiveness of war. This, in itself, was related to increased interdependence, manifest in the shortening of distance though the growth of ever-more effective deliv-ery systems. The growth is startling and dramatic, when one contrasts the range of weapons in the peninsular campaigns in Renaissance Italy and the reach of present-day weapons. What is more, there was an even more remarkable growth in destructive capacity of the explosive carried by one’s means of delivery. Thus, in the revolutionary growth in the reach of “delivery systems” and the explosive power of “warheads,” one had dramatic evidence of the growth of global interdependence—seen both as threat and promise—which was a primary factor behind the reassessment of the traditional meaning of freedom on the international scene.

A second factor in the shift was the growth of a money economy. Robert Heilbroner (in The Making of Economic Society ) has given a brief but clear account of the development of modern economic interdependence. The emergence of a money economy is, of course, part and parcel—refl ection and precondition—of the development of an ever-more complex division of labor. 23 The sense of such global economic interdependence was ush-ered in most unmistakably by the worldwide consequences of the eco-nomic collapse of the 1930s, and an interesting evidence of its existence today is given in the intimate interdependence between American domes-tic economic developments and economic developments the world over. Once again, those of “idealistic” orientation see the enormous promise of this interdependence and fashion visions of global peace and plenty through global economic development. Those of more “realist” inclina-tions see in this interdependence the possibilities of more and more exten-sive chain-reaction dilemmas.

Another development which brought about the reassessment of the place of force in the world was the changing pattern of domestic life. At the dawn of the states system, I fi nd it hard to believe that one would fi nd much support for the notion that war was a horrible evil—indeed, perhaps, the chief evil from which man suffered. For at that time, there were other, more immediate, threats to security, other intrusions of violence, which crowded in on the life of the “man in the fi eld.” I suspect that he would

112 W. JOHNSTON

have seen in our present-day preoccupation with the hazards of interna-tional violence a utopian preoccupation with concerns far removed from the more immediate pressures of daily existence and resting on a failure to sense that life is always fraught with toil and trouble. However, as force begins to be brought under more or less effective and legitimate control in larger and larger areas, the incongruity between man’s domestic and his international situation comes to seem all the sharper. The sharpness was particularly manifest to inhabitants of liberal states, which had long since resolved the basic problem of “management of force” within their own borders and looked with rather uncomprehending eyes on the brutal play of force internationally. It is, of course, not accidental that the harmonic pattern of analysis should be rooted most deeply and pervasively in the Anglo-American tradition, as Wolfers has pointed out. 24 In short, the more effectively force has been brought under control domestically, the more incongruous is felt to be the divergence between domestic and interna-tional politics, and the sharper is likely to be the condemnation of war.

By contrast to developments within liberal states, no comparable con-trol of force was achieved in most other areas of the world. Thus the incongruity between domestic and international politics was not felt with a comparable sharpness, and war itself was viewed in a very different light. The divergence between perspectives is seen most sharply in the compari-son of liberal with Nazi and Communist outlooks. In the Communist and Nazi domestic systems, force is looked upon as an essential and primary element in domestic governance; in liberal systems, the entire thrust is to put it on the periphery. It was the failure to grasp the magnitude of this divergence which accounted, in good measure, for the misestimate by the Western world of Nazi foreign policy. The Nazis saw the international use of force as in conformity with domestic practice. This does not mean that the Nazis would, inevitably, resort to war. It does mean that if the external situation is inviting, the Nazi will feel no (or very little) sense of “inner contradiction” in the use of force internationally. Indeed, if the natural impulse of the liberal is to achieve a unity of domestic and international experience through the extension of the role of law and the reduction of the role of force, the natural impulse of the totalitarians will be to achieve such unity through the skillful application of force internationally, as it has been employed domestically.

Similar diffi culties have confronted the liberal-Communist confron-tation. There can be no question that Communism has looked on the use of force as a legitimate and essential tool on the world scene. The


whole body of their doctrine sustains this interpretation although there has been, primarily in Soviet Communism, a reassessment of this notion as it applies to nuclear weapons. The fact remains that, even with regard to Soviet Communism, a central stumbling block to a genuine American- Soviet entente has been the Russian insistence on the legitimacy of wars of national “liberation” and the American refusal to accept these as legitimate.

These refl ections cast some light on the arguments developed by Kenneth Waltz in Man, the State, and War . Waltz is right, I think, in arguing that the “fi rst-image” analysis, that is, that the causes of war are to be found in human nature, is in error. For if the causes of war are to be found in human nature, how then are we to account for the establishment of peaceful collective entities among men? If, however, peaceful collec-tive entities can be established among men, the causes of war must lie in something in addition to human nature. The notion that the cause of war is in the international system itself is plausible, both for the reasons Waltz develops and also because the “system” (such as it is) may be described as an “organic” cause of war, in the sense that its very decentralization is a refl ection of the organic diversity of mankind itself. In this sense, it is hardly proper to speak of it as a “system” at all—it is rather a complex and unplanned network of interdependence in which the divergent traditions and wills of the many “tribes” of mankind crisscross in unpredictable fash-ion. If, however, the points made above about interdependence between the view of force in domestic and international politics be correct, there can be no consensus about the legitimate control of force internationally until there is a consensus about the legitimate control of force domesti-cally. This leads us to a recognition of the interdependence between the “second-image” analyses and the “third-image” analyses: the character of the domestic structure of a state is, without question, infl uenced by its international setting. (Many clear examples of this can be given, for example, the security of Britain and America heightening the emphasis in these countries on the rule of law and the insecurity of Germany height-ening its reliance on military strength.) On the other hand, the character of the domestic tradition (Morgenthau to the contrary notwithstanding) has an intimate effect on the manner in which the state interacts with its external environment. Thus the second image infl uences the view of the third image, but it is, in its turn, infl uenced by the third image. This refl ec-tion, in itself, brings us back to a recognition of the enormous diversities at work in world politics and the diffi culties in the way of accomplishing any consensus among divergent “images” of world order. Indeed, there is

114 W. JOHNSTON

a sense in which these images have grown more diverse as technology has had a differential impact on different traditional societies.

Nevertheless, the points remains that, within the liberal world, the change in attitude toward the use of force internationally was a refl ection of changes in the internal development of these states, as well as in changes in the risks of the use of war internationally. However, even for states with a nonliberal tradition, the changed nature of war has been the occasion for second thoughts about the types of state freedom which are still plausible. As we have seen, in the balance of power system, the primary emphasis was on state independence and freedom of action, and the price of adjustments through war for the preservation of these forms of freedom was consid-ered to be worth paying. In short, the balance of power was an acceptable means of reconciling the tension between unity and diversity described by Dehio at the outset. However the price for the preservation of a state’s independence and freedom of action has risen sharply since 1914, and it is this heightened risk which is at the root of what is perhaps the most profound diffi culty in world politics today. One cannot advocate a return to that “freedom” of the traditional system without the risk of anarchy triumphant; one cannot move toward a more effective international order without a threat to traditional independence and identity.

The USA, for reasons deeply rooted in its own national experience, as well as for foreign policy considerations, argues that it is only through the surrender, on the part of its allies, of much freedom of action that their existence in itself can be preserved. In short, the implicit justifi cation of our alliance policies has been that only through this restriction of indepen-dence can diversities more deeply valued be preserved. In other words, in the traditional balance of power system, a nation could maintain its security largely through freedom of action. Now (in international organizations of a universalist cast, as well as in alliances) it is argued that only through the abandonment of freedom of action can national independence and identity be preserved. The lesser freedom must be sacrifi ced for the larger.

In criticism of this position, de Gaulle, for example, wants to restore to France a far larger measure of freedom of action. To do so, he must act on the assumption that French survival is not dependent on the American deterrent—that is, he must try to show that there is not a fundamental confl ict between French security and French freedom of action or a free-dom of action far greater than the USA feels acceptable. (At times, de Gaulle goes one step further and argues that French security is threatened by the intimacy of the alliance connections with the USA. This turns the


tables on the USA’s assumptions and makes the alliance seem a threat to France’s most basic freedoms, rather than their precondition.)

The “problem of community,” that is, the problem of reconciliation of the necessities of order with the pressures of freedom, through a distinc-tion between the legitimate and illegitimate exercise of freedom is drawn with great sharpness in world politics today. The beginning of wisdom in the study of world politics lies in a recognition of the scale of the dilemma, not in an attempt, through exegetical manipulation, to wave it out of exis-tence. The dilemma is rooted in the incongruity between technological interdependence and political parochialism, between those parts of man which rapidly and readily “transcend” particularist limitations and those parts deeply bound to those limitations. The central error in both the dialectic and the harmonic analyses of world politics lies in the confusion between interdependence and community.

All meeting of self with other—individual or collective—has to it an “imperialist” dimension. Individuals and nations cannot simply “live and let live,” in part because people are never simply content just “to live,” and they are never content just to live because, as Niebuhr has argued, the will to live is inseparable from the will to power. The source of their insepara-bility is the radical insecurity of the human situation. Security is mitigated through “togetherness”—doctrines and causes enjoy “legitimacy” in good part in proportion to the number who adhere to them. Thus all encounter of self with other involves the effort, at times subtle, at times blatant, to bring the perspective of the other into closer conformity with one’s own.

The more intimate the interdependence, the more intense does this “imperialistic” aspect become. One can move toward a tolerable world order in the nuclear age through the achievement of a uniform pattern of values—an elemental convergence of images. Most universalists have this as their goal, and they are in a hurry to reach Zion. The very speed of their agitation becomes a pervasive source of insecurity which generates whiplash reactions, at times of ferocious proportions. The alternative path toward world order is to keep to a minimum the areas in which a “convergence of images,” a “union of hearts,” is needed. This has been the “way out” in man’s simpler past. The route has been very largely washed out through the rapidity with which technological interdependence has occurred.

Thus neither the universalists, who welcome the multiplication of bonds, which they think they can easily manipulate in accordance with their own purposes, nor the traditionalists, who fear them, and sense the threats they contain, and would slow them down, have much plausibility

116 W. JOHNSTON

in the contemporary scene. One is in a situation where there is occurring a rapid multiplication of the intimacy of human interdependence, which generates the need for a greater convergence of images, but does not, of itself, generate that convergence. The necessities of common action seem to multiply at a rate more rapid than the convergence in values which make such common action, on a legitimate basis, possible. If the factors of interdependence grow without a comparable growth in a community of values, one has simply multiplied the areas of friction and brought about a net reduction in meaningful human freedom. Something very much like this has happened in the evolution of world politics in the past three- quarters of a century.

If the dimensions of the problem are to be understood, one must repu-diate the traditional theory of progress. In that theory, there was ordinarily a confusion between “growth” and “progress.” But growth is multiple—always multiple. Progress, by contrast, is dependent on a certain ratio, a certain balance, among the different factors that are growing. Growth in itself does not assure the maintenance of such balance. On the contrary, it may lead to a disproportion, an imbalance, which in terms of meaningful standards represents retrogression rather than progress. There is a clear sense in which international politics in the last three-quarters of a century has been retrogressive. There is no defi nitive evidence that this retrogres-sive trend has been reversed. A precondition for its reversal is a recogni-tion of the plausibility in the assumption of the existence of retrogressive trends.

The traditional theory of progress very largely incapacitates us for the assumption of a genuine moral responsibility toward the achievement of a more acceptable world order. The traditional theory of progress ordinarily takes its principle of change—a progressive one—and projects this into the future, as if it were the only one operative and as if the rest of the world would be frozen, into the future in approximately the same form in which it stood when the projection was made. However, if we are to engage in projection, the projections themselves must be multiple: we shall have to project—without convincing counterevidence— all the trends at work. If all grow equally, things will remain about the same. If the confl ictive trends grow at a rate more rapid than the harmonic, the future will be worse than the present. If the harmonic grow at a more rapid rate than the confl ictive, mankind will have progressed. We have no guarantee which pattern will prevail. The evidence of history is, in itself, a maze of confl ict—there can be no doubt that there have been periods of massive retrogression, as well


as periods of substantial progress. From the fact that the victors write the textbooks, we should not be blind to the tragic dimensions of history. On the other hand, faith in the future is a psychological, a moral, precondition for effective efforts in the present. The psychological preconditions should not, however, dull the critical intelligence, which must still justify the bases on which an analysis which projects the more rapid growth of progressive than confl ictive forces rests.

The analysis of the states system is but one illustration of the ambigui-ties of the present state in history. A comparable analysis could be under-taken at the metaphysical, the economic, or the psychological level. It is our concern in the seminar to understand the general principles which have underlain the historic development of that system, the realist analysis of its limitations, and the present policy efforts to work with and, where plausible, transform the system.

NOTES 1. L. Dehio (1962) The Precarious Balance (New York: Knopf), 19–23. 2. Ibid. 42. 3. Mattingly, 16. Emphasis mine. 4. Ibid. 16–17. 5. M. Gilmore (1962) The World of Humanism (New York: Harper), 140. 6. Ibid. 159. 7. Ibid. 160. Emphasis mine. 8. I.L. Claude (1962) Power and International Relations (New York: Random

House), 274. 9. Ibid. 274, 275.

10. Ibid. 280. 11. Ibid. 6. 12. G. Brunn (1938) Europe and the French Imperium (London: Harper and

Brothers). 13. M. Kaplan and N. Katzenbach (1961) The Political Foundations of

International Law (New York: Wiley). 14. W. Schiffer (1954) The Legal Community of Mankind (New York: Columbia

University Press), 163–164, passim. 15. Dehio, The Precarious Balance , 42 16. See, e.g., Hajo Holborn (1951) The Political Collapse of Europe (New

York: Knopf). 17. See M. Beloff (1954) The Age of Absolutism (London: Hutchinson),

28–45.

118 W. JOHNSTON

18. S. Hoffmann (1965) The State of War (New York: Praeger). 19. W. McNeill (1963) The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press). 20. A.G. Meyer (1962) Communism (New York: Random House), 179–181. 21. K. Boulding (1956) The Image (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press),

12. 22. S. Hoffmann (1961) “International Systems and International Law” World

Politics Vol. 14, No. 1, 205–237. 23. R. Heilbroner (1968) The Making of Economic Society (Englewood Cliffs:

Prentice Hall), 39, 48, 98. 24. A. Wolfers and L. Martin (1956) The Anglo-American Tradition in Foreign

Affairs (New Haven: Yale University Press), xx–xxvii. Also A. Wolfers (1965) Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 182–185.


CHAPTER 6

Behind the idea of the balance of power lies a protest against the achievement of unity through uniformity, and the balance of power is thus properly put in antithesis to the idea of universal monarchy. As such, the balance of power is akin to a belief in the virtues of diversity and freedom. The very idea of balance also implies a form of equality. Thus, because the idea of balance of power is seen to be rather closely related to both the idea of freedom and the idea of equality, one might expect the notion to be one congenial to the liberal tradition. How are we then to account for the somewhat surprising fact that the notion of the balance of power has been subjected to the most severe criticism in that tradition?

In the fi rst place, I think we should realize that the mechanism of adjustment in the balance of power system has been, ultimately, war, and the acceptance, indeed the sanction, of the inevitability of war has been distasteful to the liberal conscience and its hope for universal peace. The liberal distaste for the balance of power may thus be seen to be intimately related to its utopian vision of a harmonious world community, which leads it to look on the competitive balancing of forces and the peren-nial threat of violence as a form of degeneration. And yet even when we concede this, our problem simply grows a bit more complex, for has not the liberal tradition prided itself on the achievement of a larger harmony through the competitive struggle of the several parts? That is to say, is there not a close connection between the liberal emphasis on the achieve-ment of harmony through the competitive system of laissez-faire and the

The Balance of Power

120 W. JOHNSTON

realist emphasis in the achievement of a tolerable international harmony through the competitive system of the balance of power?

As we have just mentioned, the two systems obviously differ in that the one fi nds in violence its ultimate mechanism of adjustment and the other attempts to avoid such violence. It is not, however, always successful. For in classic laissez-faire theory, it was taken for granted that periodic depres-sions were “normal” mechanisms of adjustment and one could never be sure that they would not be attended by violence, perhaps of revolutionary proportions. Be that as it may, there is a close linkage between the role of war in the balance of power system and the role of depression , or eco-nomic crisis , in the laissez-faire system. The notion that war was a normal and inevitable means of adjustment was accepted as a matter of course by traditional realists; idealists (particularly after the horrors of World War I) came to question the system because of this consequence, but they also, it might be added, came after the Great Depression to question laissez-faire because they felt the normal mechanisms in its adjustment to be too costly. There is thus a sense in which, as I.L. Claude has pointed out, World War I played for the balance of power system a role analogous to that played by the Great Depression for the laissez-faire system. 1

One of the clearest illustrations of a traditional realist who looked upon war as a normal means of adjustment in the system was Admiral Mahan. We have discussed his views elsewhere and it is only necessary at this point to remind the reader of his contrast between the power struggle (with violence always just beneath the surface) as a “normal” means of resolv-ing crisis with arbitration, which he considers an “artifi cial” means. 2 As I have said elsewhere, Mahan has here hidden a value judgment as an empirical proposition; a standard device for presenting a preference as a condition of fact is to describe that preference as “natural” and to dismiss the alternative as “artifi cial.” It is impossible from an empirical inquiry to establish war as “natural” and arbitration as “artifi cial.” We see in truth that Mahan was infl uenced by the social Darwinist perspective and meant, when he described war as a “natural” means of adjustment, that it was, in important respects, a better means of adjustment—one to be preferred on moral grounds. 3

Nevertheless we return to the point that, though realists and ideal-ists may diverge on the inevitability or the desirability of war and this may color their respective attitudes toward the balance of power, impor-tant similarities in their outlook remain. For what the idealists often do is take the same form of thinking that is embodied in the balance of power

THE BALANCE OF POWER 121

analysis and give it different content. That is, they carry on the notion that there is a sort of natural harmony that is supposed to characterize the system, but they try to alter fundamentally the role of war as a mechanism of adjustment in the system. I think that it is important to keep this point in mind lest we draw distinctions that are too sharp between traditional idealists and traditional realists. What links them together may seem, in historic perspective, to be more important than what divides them. Both accept a largely decentralized system in which a form of natural harmony is to be accomplished by the competitive interplay of the several parts. The idealists are more squeamish about how rough they will allow this compe-tition to become, and they hope to substitute for war more humanitarian devices of economic competition or a free interplay of nationalities, but these may be looked upon as “tactical” differences. I think this is, in part, what Stanley Hoffmann has in mind when he refers to contemporary real-ists (in his discussion of Rousseau) as neo-liberals. 4 They have elevated the national interest to a central place in their thought, in place of the often vague universalism of their predecessors, but they share with them the hope for a relatively easy harmonization of these interests.

The linkage between the realist and idealist perspective may also be seen, as is often pointed out, in the linkage between the balance of power system (presumably a realist device) and collective security (the offspring of idealism). One need not belabor the point of their interconnection, since it has often been demonstrated and may be taken as fully under-stood. As Hoffmann has pointed out in his discussion of the relation of international law and international politics, the balance of power actually assumed a preponderance on the side of those in favor of the status quo as against those who wished to change it. 5 Collective security assumes the same, and both systems are designed, through such preponderance, to preserve the independence of the several members of the system against the threatened predominance of one, or some, of them. Of course, the collective security system differed from the balance of power system in that, fi rst, its arrangements were far more explicit and were supposed to be automatic in their operation. In case of aggression, there was supposed to be automatic aid on the part of other states for the threatened state. An essential prerequisite for the working of effective collective security was a “foolproof” defi nition of aggression and an agency that could make, in each specifi c instance, an unequivocal determination of aggression. Much of the rather torturous negotiation during the League period was occu-pied with this attempt to attain this clarity of formulation and to work

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out institutional arrangement by which such a determination could be made with swiftness and precision. The negotiations centering about the Geneva Protocol may be taken as one illustration. We know the results were unsuccessful in both respects, that is, it proved impossible (as it has under the UN system) either to arrive at a precise and agreed defi nition of aggression or to assign clear-cut institutional responsibilities for the making of such a decision. John Herz has discussed, for our own era, the diffi culties in the achievement of precision of defi nition. I myself fi nd these insuperable and therefore feel the only area on which one can concen-trate fruitfully is that of institutional construction—for it is only through assigning the task of clarifi cation (which must always, in a measure, con-tain an arbitrary element) to an institution taken as legitimate that one can cut through the inherent vagueness of such an issue. I think our own experience with the great phrases of the Constitution testifi es to this. It is not through semantic clarifi cation, but through institutional creation, that these problems of precision are resolved. And even here we see how frequent are the complaints about the arbitrary nature of our high courts’ judicial determinations. On the world scene, we can take little comfort from the institutional prescription. The whole long record of League and UN negotiations on this issue shows the diffi culty of reaching any con-sensus on the assignment of this crucial function to a particular agency. The problem of establishment of an organ of determination that would be held to possess legitimate authority has proved insoluble. I.L. Claude has pointed this out in his discussion of the attempt to implement the UN clauses which would have endowed the UN with effective armed forces of its own with which to protect the law of the charter. 6 And the special issue of International Organization (particularly the Hoffmann article) shows the enormous political obstacle in the way of the establishment of a meaningful UN armed force, as distinct from the border patrols in the Middle East. 7

By contrast to this pattern of dilemmas, the balance of power was rather tardy and haphazard. There was no formal defi nition of aggression and no attempt to establish an agency which could make such a determination. What the balance of power lost in aspiration it may, however, have gained in honesty. There seems at least to have been a closer connection between its modest and clumsy operations and the realities of its times than there is between the rather grandiose aspiration of proponents of international organization and the sorry realities of our own era. Because we hope for more, our frustrations are more acute; once again, one sees the sense in


which in an “age between the ages” the very effort to bend a recalcitrant system into conformity with a higher norm produces particularly bitter forms of frustration, as we have seen among the more hopeful supporters of the United Nations within this land. It is perhaps better in terms of a mature continuation of our tasks to hope for less and thereby cushion the shock of the inevitable disappointments. This, indeed, is one of the most powerful of the psychological arguments in favor of realism: that it avoids the cycle of utopian aspiration—bitter disillusionment which may handi-cap the very effectiveness of the idealists’ pursuit of their goals. It is in this sense that a realist orientation is a better servant of ideal purposes than an explicitly idealist one.

We return to the relationship between the balance of power and collec-tive security by the indication that one of the reasons the collective security system collapsed in the League era was that it tried to make the opposition to the aggressor universal , whereas the balance of power had normally operated on a far more restricted basis. Thus, under the legal idealism of the League, the Chaco War, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, was supposed to be of as much concern to, say, Britain, as was German aggres-sion versus France or Russian aggression versus Finland. The diffi culties in agreement on a defi nition of aggression were intensifi ed by this sweeping universalism of the League commitment, as one can see, once again, in the negotiations over the Geneva Protocol.

Both of these efforts—the quest for a foolproof defi nition of aggres-sion and the universalization of the collective security commitment—were attempts to assure that collective security would do what the balance of power had often done, but do it more swiftly and more comprehensively. Yet both of these efforts ran the risk of weakening the measure of order which the more informal and limited workings of the balance of power had in fact achieved. Proponents of collective security often hid from themselves the possibilities of failure (and consequently of falling between two stools into the worst of both worlds) by sugar-coating the additional demands placed on states by an assumption in good part both pacifi st and utopian: the assumption that if states would simply agree to act automatically and universally against any aggressor this very agreement would, of itself, render the action in all probability unnecessary. This line of argument was used by Woodrow Wilson in his effort to win Senate acceptance of the League, and we may take it that Wilson held to the conviction with sincerity. Walter Schiffer has analyzed the pervasiveness of this notion. 8

124 W. JOHNSTON

Even if armed action should prove unnecessary, its scale was minimized by painting an image of the world scene analogous to that which pre-vails within well-governed states. As Kenneth Waltz has pointed out, this was one of the illusions which lay behind President’s Taft’s confi dence in judicial arbitration of disputes. On the assumption that general and effec-tive disarmament would take place, it seemed both pleasing and plausible to argue that the overwhelming power which would meet an offender against the peace would be suffi cient (except in marginal cases) to deter the offender from aggressive action. This collective security was to be analogous not to war but rather to police action . In this, the idealist could strengthen his conviction that he had broken with the evil system of the balance of power and brought about a subordination of force to law on the world scene. The fi ction that violence under a collective security action is somehow different in kind from war was preserved by the Korean police action, which the man in the street perversely persists in referring to as the Korean War.

No one has pointed out with greater clarity the error in this ten-dency to equate collective security actions with police actions than Hans Morgenthau, and his discussion of collective security in Politics among Nations is penetrating. 9 It is useful, also, to remember that in the history of the development of internal order within states, the disarmament of centers of power within the state which threatened it was rarely achieved by agreement (What historic examples can one cite to sustain this point and lend encouragement to proponents of disarmament on the world scene?) but rather through a great deal of violence. The sustained violence which accompanied the transition from the feudal era to that of modern monarchy was part of the price which had to be paid to achieve “disarma-ment” within the modern state. It is useful, albeit painful, to bear in mind the long trauma of the Wars of the Roses in England, for example, or the recurrent civil wars of the last four decades of the sixteenth century in France (R.R. Palmer fi nds that not less than nine were fought) and that these were part of the “birth pangs” of the reasonably orderly monarchies of the seventeenth centuries in those lands. Of course, there is no guaran-tee, even then, that the effort will be successful. The effort to subdue feu-dal particularism in Germany (despite the agony of the Thirty Years’ War) proved abortive, and it was not until the nineteenth century that Germany achieved the level of unity of England and France in the seventeenth. And when it was fi nally achieved, under Bismarck, extensive violence was its counterpart. As I have argued in my analysis of Tannenbaum, those who


feel it is a relatively easy step toward effective international order have simply neglected the prolonged violence which accompanied the estab-lishment of even a minimal order within the state. Although it may be more pleasant to suffer from historical amnesia, those ignorant of the past may fi nd themselves, as the saying goes, condemned to repeat its mistakes. In short, one of the foundations of this foolish analogy between the police action and collective security is an ignorance of history—a sheer failure to sense that our era is the cutting edge of an enormous historic transforma-tion, more diffi cult, more vast, more turbulent, more dangerous than that which accompanied the transition from feudalism to the centralized mon-archy. How trifl ing are those comments which would lead us to believe the transition is to be far easier! The anguish of “the age between the ages” is made the more bitter by the foolish cries of those who have sighted the shores of the new world when we have barely left the shores of the old.

The analogy is made all the more inappropriate when we realize that support of collective security confronts us with a sharp dilemma between order and change which mature constitutional systems have gone very far to resolve. I have discussed the general tension between order and change elsewhere. It is suffi cient here to say that the tension reaches its sharpest forms—forms very largely unmanageable, on the whole—on the world scene. Both the balance of power and collective security presuppose, for their effective working, a widespread agreement on the status quo. By the periodic free elections and other devices of a free society, a constitutional system makes provision for specifi c changes within the general system of constitutional order. Neither it nor any other system can make provision—short of violence—for challenges to the fundamental order itself. Where a challenge to the fundamental order of the system itself exists, the threat takes the form of a civil war rather than a police action. Where such chal-lenges exist internationally, neither the balance of power nor collective security can preserve the system without the risk of bloody and extensive warfare. Thus, surely in the deeply split international arena in which we have lived in this century, the proper analogy with collective security is not a domestic police action but a domestic civil war.

I think the idealist expectation about the ease with which the enor-mous and stubborn power confl icts in the international arena could be brought under the rule of law would have been less ardent if a more pro-found understanding of the development of the market economy had been achieved. As I have pointed out, there were similarities between the laissez-faire system and the balance of power system. One might move one

126 W. JOHNSTON

step farther and ask: Could one learn from the pattern of development which took place in the laissez-faire system anything about the diffi culties which might face the balance of power system—for example, about the crises which were involved in the attempt to transform a balance of power system into one of collective security?

I should think that an initial linkage we could make is that, in both sys-tems, the struggle for power proved more intense than had been foreseen and the crises proved more intense than had been anticipated. It is useful to keep in mind that neither the Great War nor the Great Depression was foreseen by most adherents of the two systems.

Because the self-balancing system seemed to have collapsed in the Great Depression and the danger of monopoly to have grown, the simultaneous preservation of the individual and common interest—which had been one of the great justifi cations of the system—no longer seemed to be achieved. E.H. Carr has pointed out the consequences of this for a system that sup-posedly rested on the notion of harmony of interest. It was foreshadowed, before 1929, in the shift from the world of Smith to the world of Sumner. Cochran and Miller have shown how depression tended to favor monop-oly and thereby undermine the balanced diversity which was to preserve freedom in the system. 10 One consequence of this recognition of the collapse of the inner balance was the movement toward a more complex pattern of balance. Keynes had pointed out that the classic system did not, perhaps, possess an automatic recuperative power but that it might, on the contrary, achieve stabilization at the bottom, so to speak—that is, stabilization with a high level of unemployment and a large percentage of productive capacity idle. Put in its simplest terms, the Keynesian proposal was to restore the balance by making government an active element in it—in short, by abandoning the notion of a self-balancing economic system and elaborating the notion of a complex balance within and between the elements in a political economy. One may see as a further elaboration of this general line of analysis a study like that of J.K. Galbraith’s American Capitalism . 11 It is clear that the idea of balance has not been abandoned (Can we ever think without reliance on some notion of “balance”?) but broadened and made more complex. There is a sense in which one has seen the substitution of a more complex idea of balance for a relatively simple one. The new forms of balance, as discussed by Galbraith, were not acceptable to classic theory. Nevertheless experience sustained the conclu-sion that the pretended balance of classic theory had resulted, in fact, in an imbalance (with the increase of monopolistic and oligopolistic trends) in


the relation of entrepreneurs with one another and also, on a larger scale, in the relation of entrepreneurs to the society as a whole (as seen in the powerful indications of business domination in the twenties—elaborated by Cochran and Miller). 12

There is a sense, of course, in which the old balance had never been purely “economic”—despite the theory. As Walter Lippmann has argued in The Good Society , the notion that one somehow had a “natural” area of economic activity independent of any political relationship was wholly false. 13 The role of government, for example, was always presupposed in the very guarantee of the right of private property, which has meaning only if there are legal agencies which can sustain that right. Green had pointed out earlier that the notion of rights presupposes a pattern of social interrelationship and an agency which supports certain forms of freedom by giving them a legal sanction. Thus, even in the classic era of laissez- faire, it is clear that there was a sense in which the political order has primacy over the economic, and the supposedly “natural” workings of the latter were dependent on the “artifi cial” framework of man-made law. Once again, as in Mahan, we see that specifi c interests and prefer-ences tend to make themselves invulnerable to assault by wrapping them-selves in the mantle of “nature”—which is the adaption to a naturalistic era of the earlier philosophy of divine right of kings. The real difference between the old balance and the new balance lay in the more open and obvious role of the political element in the new balance. We now admit-ted its role more openly and were less intimidated by allowing it to enter into the pattern.

When we shift perspectives from the market economy to the interna-tional system, we see that, there too, the confl ict grew more intense than had been anticipated. The great cataclysms of the French Revolutionary Wars had not been anticipated by most idealists, nor, in the early part of this century, was the Great War foreseen. If we take Oppenheim as repre-sentative of thought on international law, one may say that he thought—in his combination of progressive and positivist thought—that the interna-tional “political market” worked with a tolerable harmony. 14 The depth and derangement of the crisis which began in 1914—and its continuing nature—were quite unanticipated. And, as Schiffer has pointed out, even the shock of that war was not enough to bring about a radical rethink-ing of the demands for international order. 15 Much of the old notion of a self-balancing system, now dressed up in the more respectable garb of international organization, was maintained.

128 W. JOHNSTON

This, however, proved impossible and those who think the system can work in some self-balancing fashion—be they “realists” or “idealists”—are analogous to unreconstructed proponents of laissez-faire writing after the Great Depression. One cannot turn back the clock and play the part of a Rip Van Winkle who has dozed his way through the enormous crises of our era. We shall have occasion to return to this form of reactionary thought in the relative calm of the 1960s—as seen in the thought of de Gaulle, in particular, and of the international pluralists, in general.

The trend toward larger-scale international entities and larger-scale international crises is intimately related to similar drives within the econ-omy. Hans Morgenthau has discussed both with skill, but he has not attempted to relate the trends. 16 Laissez-faire theory assumed that each competitive unit wanted to achieve monopoly position in the market (as Kenneth Waltz has pointed out). This tendency was supposed to be checked by the countervailing power of the competitive system. Yet the persistent pressure of technological change had undermined this nice system of checks and balances. Technological change has enlarged the scale of feasible enterprise. It has also vastly expanded the areas of interdepen-dence, which has had, among other results, the consequence of guaran-teeing that instabilities are more widely ramifi ed than they ever could be in a more nearly self-suffi cient economy. 17 The threat of these instabilities gave what might be called a “systemic impetus” to the formation of the larger agglomerations—that is their formation was in part motivated by concern to achieve a larger measure of control of a more complex and more threatening environment. Cochran and Miller’s study of the history of American business sustains this argument, that is, the formation of large business agglomerations was a consequence in part of the expanded scale and possibilities of technology; it was a consequence, also, of “systemic pressures,” that is, the hazards of weakness in a more interdependent and complex market. 18

I think one can see the linkage between this pattern of analysis and that developed, for example, by Raymond Aron in The Century of Total War or John Herz in International Politics in the Atomic Age . 19 The pressure toward an expansion of scale may be said to have been felt most sharply in the military sphere, and, as Herz has shown, the scale of what was consid-ered a viable unit has risen with accelerating rapidity.

In truth, what one seems to face is a situation where the scales of inter-dependence and of potential (and actual) confl ict—and hence the “sys-temic pressure” toward larger agglomeration—seem to increase as virtually


inevitable corollaries of the impact of technology on a decentralized competitive setting. To put this in other terms, the market, which might be described as “in balance” at a given time or place and at a given stage of technological development, is seen to have within it very powerful ten-dencies to move in a more and more anarchic direction. This was the actual course of American business in the latter nineteenth century. The attempt to arrest those instabilities through voluntary arrangements (e.g., pools) proved unavailing, because of the recurrent tendency of one mem-ber to break the understanding when the time seems propitious for him. One thus moved to a situation where the alternatives were either some form of domination of the economy by enormous agglomerations of eco-nomic power (perhaps a transitional oligopoly before the realization of full monopoly) or the intervention of another form of power, through the state, to infl uence the balance. On the world scene, where the second option is closed, the fi rst would seem to be impelling. Thus the solution available domestically, where there exists a state to reduce the anarchy, is unavailable internationally. The Marxist theory—which was rendered in error domestically because of the healing power which was exercised by the domestic state—takes on a new relevance internationally. As I have pointed out elsewhere, it was part of the genius of Lenin that he rescued the Marxist dogma from an area where it had been belied by experience and fi tted it to a scene where experience seemed in large measure its con-fi rmation. We are, in short, by no means free from a situation in which the tendency toward greater and greater accumulation of power in certain centers—and the prospect of more awful collisions among those centers—may occur. There are, in fact, powerful trends which seem to push modern history toward these very concentrations and these collisions. In summary, we can by no means be sure that we are not caught in an environment in which the Hobbesian logic, the logic of the “zero-sum game”—and with a vengeance—will be operative.

Is there any way that one can work free from this dilemma? As I have argued elsewhere, it requires a quite drastic rethinking of the foundations of the liberal approach to accomplish such an “escape”—if one be possible at all. In general, the approach must involve a rethinking of the entire role of imperial constructions in international relations: just as liberalism had to rethink the role of the state in its relation to freedom on the domestic scene if the instabilities of the market economy were to be contained, it may fi nd that it will have to rethink the role of imperial structures on the world scene if the instabilities of the balance of power are to be contained.

130 W. JOHNSTON

It is in this sense that Niebuhr’s The Structure of Nations and Empires may be looked on as a prophetic book. 20

Before we push too far forward in our projections, however, it is neces-sary to cast a look over our shoulder and see if the pattern of development of the state system under the balance of power does in any way conform to the line of our general analysis.

When one compares the Congress of Vienna with the Conference at Versailles a century later, I think he must be impressed by the existence of a much larger area of agreement among the victorious powers at the former, in contrast to the latter, conference. A clear indication of this is seen in the rather close correspondence between the British and the Continental (espe-cially the Austrian) view. (This stands in clear contrast to the divergence of the British and French views at Versailles and in the interwar period, as Arnold Wolfers has carefully pointed out.) 21 It is true that Castlereagh could not commit the British to extensive undertakings Metternich wanted. But this was because of the traditional British unwillingness to accept blind commitments for future contingencies, not because of any feeling on Castlereagh’s parts that what Metternich was trying to do was illegitimate or “illiberal.” Indeed, Castlereagh represented the “old order” in Britain and he sympathized with what Metternich was trying to do. It is only with the coming to power of Canning in the later twenties that a truly “ideological” split may be said to manifest itself between Britain and the Continent. It is clear that the coming to power of Canning signifi es an important change in the interests which have come to dominate British politics from within. His accession refl ects the heightened power of the commercial and industrial classes who come to demand, in British foreign policy, something quite different from that which Castlereagh would have supported. The shift is made even clearer under Canning’s successors. Thus the “ideological” chasm between Britain and the Continent widens as the dominant interests within British life shift from the landed classes to the new classes identifi ed with the liberal cause. To a lesser degree and at a later date, those changes make themselves felt in France and they provide part of the basis for subsequent accords between Britain and France, as Richard Rosecrance has pointed out. 22 This instance shows, I think, that any “realist” notion that there is a continuing and objective national inter-est independent of internal balance of forces is, to say the least, a grave oversimplifi cation. In no area, perhaps, has Hans Morgenthau erred more seriously than in his failure to integrate into his conception of “balance of power” the complex interplay between internal political balances and


external international balances. Any failure to attempt such an integration can lead to estimates of political reality which will prove quite wide of the mark.

We see, therefore, that the coincidence of interest between England and Austria—which had been a crucial underpinning of the Vienna settle-ment—proved short lived. It had rested in part on the personal compatibil-ity of Metternich and Castlereagh, but these men refl ected the dominant interests of their societies. The coincidence of interest was not, on any prolonged basis, to be renewed.

The situation remains, nevertheless, somewhat paradoxical for, in spite of domestic changes, Britain and Austria may be said to have shared important “objective” interests in common. Britain wanted stability on the Continent. Castlereagh speaking for the Pitt Plan (as analyzed on Henry Kissinger’s study) had shown this, and his successors, in spite of liberal ori-entations, were also to speak for it. 23 The British interest in a continental balance of power was a deep-seated element in their policy; Austria also wanted and needed such a balance. Both, in short, were largely status quo states when it came to continental affairs. The expansionism Austria had come to show in the Balkans by the early twentieth century was essentially defensive (even when one admits the diffi culty of distinguishing, with pre-cision, between “defensive” and “offensive” motivation in a decentralized setting)—designed to head off growth of nationalist movements which threatened the survival of its own domestic political structure.

The policy of Prussia, at least by the era of Bismarck, was, by contrast, clearly expansive. One would, therefore, logically expect the recreation of an Austrian-British alignment as a nucleus to block the expansionist drives of Prussia in the 1860s. If Britain had been true to her traditional policies, would she not have supported Austria against the Prussian challenge to the balance of power? Of course, in the event, she does not, and Prussia is permitted to change the distribution of power on the continent in a most fundamental way without any important British counteraction, on the Continent, in the name of the preservation of the equilibrium.

William L. Langer has argued that the change that has come into effect by the 1870s was more fundamental than the French Revolution and he may very well be correct in his estimate. 24 For the initial change leads to a crucial series of subsequent changes, which alter the structure of the international environment. Once Prussia has consolidated her position in Germany, Austria then comes to terms with this new center of power. This also represents a fundamental change in the pattern of continental politics.

132 W. JOHNSTON

Austria, hitherto a rival with Prussia in Central Europe over the question of who shall organize Germany, now comes to terms with Prussia and in effect links (and at times subordinates) her policy to that of Prussian Germany. (In the light of the coming of World War I, in part on the basis of the “blank check” which Germany gave to Austria, one may rightly ask who was the “senior partner” in this relationship? Under the Kaiser, it seems the political center may have shifted to Vienna. Prof. Langer, on the basis of an interview with the Kaiser, has spoken of the sense of defer-ence the Hohenzollern ruler felt for the Hapsburgs—a revealing indica-tion of the power of a sense of legitimacy outweighing the “objective” power of sheer military might.) In any case, the pattern of two rival states competing for the right to organize Central Europe gives way to a unifi ed bloc—the Dual Alliance. Thus this element of fl exibility, which had been so important to the workings of the historic balance, gives way to a uni-fi ed bloc. It is remarkable that the British fail to see the signifi cance of this shift—at least in time to have any effective part in infl uencing it. The rea-sons for this major error of political analysis have been attributed by Lord Strang (and with considerable bitterness) to the decay of British political realism under the infl uence of liberal utopianism:

The minimum of commitment in Europe, the minimum of preparation even for imperial defence, the neglect of agriculture and growing reliance on overseas food supplies may have served well enough so long as Great Britain was secure at home; but they were ill-suited to the dangerous world which was soon to grow up around her. In the longer term, by her inability or failure to play her due part in the ordering of Europe in the third quarter of the century; she must also bear a share of responsibility for the increasing international tension, and consequently for the ultimate catastrophe which descended upon the Continent and upon herself in 1914. It may well be that nationalism, anti-nationalism and national ambitions had, in the crucial formative period, created a situation too complex and too explosive for us to handle alone: but at least we might have tried, as Disraeli did with some success after 1874. Cobdenite doctrine and Gladstonian fi nance may have much to answer for. In a few pregnant years, the face of Europe had been changed to our detriment. 25

Thus I think that one sees here, in concrete illustration, the hazards of acting on the optimistic assumption that the struggle for power has given way to an international harmony. The fruit of utopian illusion here, as elsewhere, was subsequent and bitter disillusionment. In part, the error in


British judgment can be traced, as Lord Strang has argued, to the failure of the liberals (Liberals) to see the connection between the Continental balance and British security—from their tendency to look on the balance as, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, iniquitous. I have discussed the bases and limitations of this perspective in the analysis of Cobden and that analy-sis need not be repeated here. A second consideration which infl uences British policy, particularly under the Conservative leadership of Disraeli, is the attempt to counterbalance the new German position on the Continent by British imperial expansion overseas. This, however, comes after the event and in itself sets up new shock waves of hostility in the imperial theater. But it is true that the British do by the latter seventies attempt once again to bring in the new world to counterbalance the old. However there is a third factor which enters into British thinking and is of particular interest to us here: this is the notion that there is something “natural” in the working of the balance of power and that a contrived response would not be necessary. 26

The error in analysis here lay in the notion that there was, somehow, an automatic coincidence of interest on the side of the status quo by states who fi nd themselves threatened by the rise to power of a new challenger. Many examples from the experience of the modern state system could be cited: the coalitions against Napoleon, the earlier coalitions against Louis XIV, and the even earlier resistance offered to Philip II. If once looks back from our own era, the analogy is made of the similarity of these responses to the Grand Alliance versus the Axis and the present NATO structure versus Communist power. One thinks of the fact that Churchill completed his study of his ancestor Marlborough’s leadership in forging the last great coalition against Louis XIV not long before Churchill was called on to help forge the great alliance against Hitler.

This pattern of response is justifi ed, theoretically, in terms of the inter-est of each state in the preservation of its own freedom, in the blocking of the achievement of a “universal monarchy,” in the willingness of each state to use force to see that such a threat is stopped, and in the feeling that all other like-minded states (and it is assumed that most will be like-minded) will see things the same way, will join with it, and will make the task of putting the aggressor in his place a relatively easy one. There is, as I suggested on page one, an element of liberal idealism in this view. States are looked upon as stout defenders of their liberties—almost as indepen-dent yeomen with the musket above the fi replace, willing to take it down and turn it against the tyrant whenever he threatens their liberties. The

134 W. JOHNSTON

sentiment is supposed to be universal and the response largely automatic. The foundation is taken to be a powerful and universal interest in the pres-ervation of state freedom. The possibility that there may be sentiments which support a desire to “escape from freedom” is seldom taken into the calculations. That these sentiments not only exist but also play a powerful role—often a decisive one—we shall suggest later.

As we have suggested, this expected pattern of response bears analogy with the theory of the independent yeomen, sturdy in his defense of liberty against the tyrant. The earlier liberals, indeed, looked upon this as giving an ultimate and automatic defense against tyranny and the right to bear arms of course entered into the historic list of fundamental freedoms that con-stituted the American Bill of Rights. Professors Friedrich and Brzezinski have discussed this as an aspect of the “natural” limits on the power of the state in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy . 27 Nevertheless the notion has been challenged, for example, by Paul Kecskemeti, in his the-ory of the relation between totalitarianism and revolution in the twen-tieth century, and by Hans Morgenthau, who argued (in his lectures at the American University) that technology has shifted, decisively, power in favor of the state as against the would-be revolutionaries. 28 In more theo-retical terms, one may say that a shift has taken place in which the forces of order have come, domestically, to outweigh the forces of freedom. Both the power on the side of those committed to the preservation of the status quo and the risks to be incurred in a challenge to the status quo have vastly increased in the technological age. We shall return to this point shortly, but a tentative conclusion is suggested—that the balance of power was a refl ection of a certain historic relationship between freedom and order, in which the scales were weighed in the side of freedom; it cannot operate in its traditional fashion in a setting where the scales may often be heavily weighted in favor of a very rapid shift in the status quo and a technological consolidation of it.

In addition to bearing a certain analogy with the traditional notion of the independent yeomen, the balance of power bore, as we have argued earlier, a rather close analogy to the theory of the self-balancing market. The aggressor here is analogous to the unfair competitor who attempts to corner the market and who is reduced in his power by the unseen hand of the spontaneous reactions on the part of other competitors. But, as we have also seen, the fact of the matter is that the unseen hand did not always—indeed, often did not—work as had been predicted. And as we have seen, the likelihood that such a self-balancing system would work on


the world scene was appreciably diminished by the absence of a regulative framework, comparable to the state, which could reduce the inequities and the instabilities. We know from the American experience that the free market probably would have destroyed itself had such a framework been missing. The whole impetus behind the “New Freedom” of Woodrow Wilson was to use the power of the state to block these inherent ten-dencies toward self-destruction. The implication for the world scene, where such a framework is absent, is that these tendencies toward self- destruction will be much more pronounced and will work out their logic toward its fuller completion. This implication was suggested earlier, and I think one of the indications that we are now in a rather advanced stage of this “logic” is the reemergence since 1945 of what are in truth enormous imperial aggregates.

In contrast to the perspective of the sturdy yeomen, the self-balancing market, and the balance of power system, I think it is useful to put forward an alternative image. The process on which I would like to focus is that of the consolidation of power, which has its psychological basis in man’s desire for order. The strength of this desire differs in different technologi-cal and political settings. When the scale of violence likely to follow from the challenge to order sharply increases, the inclination to the acceptance of that order is strengthened. When the scale of prospective violence is relatively slight, the inclination toward acceptance of that order is reduced, and the willingness to challenge it is heightened. In short, the strength of the urge to freedom and the urge to order vary with the risks which will follow from the challenge to a given status quo, and these risks change in different political and technological settings. In our own age, the risks are very great, and there is a sense in which (though the pattern is not a simple one) there is a secular historic trend toward the heightening of risks. The estimate of the limits of what freedoms can be enjoyed varies greatly with different circumstances.

If the psychological foundation of the sentiment is to be found in man’s quest for order, its recurrence in practical experience is caught in a num-ber of colloquial formulas, for example, “nothing succeeds like success”; “if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em”; and in the widely accepted reality of the “bandwagon effect” in the domestic politics. The tendency is, indeed, something of a corollary to the tendency toward the emergence of “the organization man” in large corporate structures. There are plausible justi-fi cations (rationalizations, if you wish) which may be marshaled in support of this course of action; these have been, in general, emphasized in the

136 W. JOHNSTON

European conservative tradition. They have played little articulate role in American political thought. (Where is our de Maistre?)

If this pattern of behavior is projected on the world scene, we will see that it leads us to expect from states a pattern of behavior the very reverse of that predicted in traditional balance of power thinking. It would lead them to come to terms with the dominant power, thus accelerating its growth, rather than oppose it with the effect of retarding its growth. The “spontaneous” tendency, under this point of view, is not to form a coali-tion against the preponderant power, but to come to terms with it and to reorient one’s policy so as to bring it (insofar as possible) into conformity with the dominant center of power of the time. Professor Elliott cap-tures the essence of this outlook when he quotes Dr. Johnson’s remark of Gibbon: it was no more true to say that Rome spread upon the world than to say that the world spread upon Rome. 29 We may therefore draw another tentative conclusion: we cannot assume that the balance of power will operate, with or without automaticity, on the world scene. Other ten-dencies, moving in the very opposite direction, may in fact prevail. The tendency to accelerate the concentration of power in a given locus may prevail over the tendency to counteract such a concentration. Organski has touched upon this point but he has not elaborated it. 30

If we turn back to the historic example of the transformation of the dis-tribution of Continental power consequent on the “Prussian Revolution,” I think we shall fi nd a confi rmation for our argument. We have noted earlier the failure of the British to respond in the fashion which would have been “rational” under the balance of power model. The French met the challenge of the “Prussian Revolution” in a rather more predictable way. They saw the challenge as direct, as revolutionary, as extraordinarily formidable. For the unifi cation of Germany by Prussia had brought to an end a condition which, for some three centuries, had been a principal pre-condition for French continental policy. The transformation was made all the more drastic by the fact that France had suffered a humiliating defeat on the fi eld of battle by Prussia—a defeat in which she had, in effect, been thrown on the mercies of Prussia. One of the great powers in the whole history of the state system seemed—at least for the moment—to count for little more than Poland, if indeed for that much. In the phrase of John Herz, France’s “protective shell” had been smashed. The fact that her very existence itself now seemed dependent on the will of an outside power was a radical shock to the state that had for centuries been the greatest power on the Continent and had, little more than half a century earlier, held the Continent underneath her sway.


In short, the terms of the “revolution” had brought into being a politi-cal condition which it had been a principal objective of traditional French continental policy to prevent: the consolidation of a united German state. This state had then proceeded to make the revolution even more profound by establishing a close working relation with the other great German state, Austria. By all the canons of the traditional balance of power thinking, the consolidation of Germany under Prussia in 1871—a consolidation achieved only under the humiliation of both Austria and France—should have brought into being a Franco-Austrian grouping to which Britain (as I have argued earlier) and probably Russia might reasonably be expected to adhere. There were far better grounds for a “diplomatic revolution” after 1871 than there were when Kaunitz’s “revolution” was brought about after 1748. The fact that such a revolution did not occur sustains our ear-lier argument about trends within the state system which work in a way which is the direct opposite from the way they should work according to the balance of power schema.

The usual interpretation offered as explanation for the forging of the Dual Alliance is that of Bismarck’s exceptional diplomatic skill. There can be no doubt of the brilliance of his diplomacy. Yet I must wonder if it is proper to place the chief emphasis here. A far stronger case could be made in favor of the proposition that the basis of the Bismarckian system (and of the predominance of Germany in that system) lay less in the skill of Bismarck’s diplomacy than in the reality of German power. The dominant characteristic of the Continental politics of this era can be seen not to lie in the attempt to form a countercoalition, for this was undertaken with the greatest reluctance on the part of powers other than France. Russia came into the French system tardily and with much reluctance and only after Bismarck’s successors had made the continuance of the tie with Germany impossible. Much the same could be said about British diplomacy in the fi rst years of the twentieth century. For the remarkable thing is not so much that Britain fi nally concluded the Entente Cordiale with France: traditional balance of power thinking would have led one to assume this understand-ing would have been concluded at a much earlier date. The surprising thing is that Britain was so reluctant to conclude this understanding, in the light of the provocation with which German power had confronted her and the disturbing effect the rise of German power had had on the traditional sys-tem. We speak, if we use the “realist” categories, in terms of “interests” being at the basis of an effective diplomacy. But what were the “inter-ests” whose coincidence made possible the German- Austrian alliance from

138 W. JOHNSTON

1881 right to the closing days of World War I and blocked the tie which, historically, one might have taken to be more likely—that is, that between France and Austria to contain Germany? The “interest” was in good part created by the very increase in German power itself. It is in this sense that power creates its own interests, and we must always be wary of giving too static and material a content to the notion of “interests.” This is an error into which the realists often fall, as I have argued in another context.

We shall not here search the record to ferret out other examples where the trend within the state system may be said to support the concentration of power rather than its restraint. There are numerous examples which might be explored, but this is not the place for such an exploration. It is suffi cient, however, to point out that there are similarities between the pattern of Bismarckian Europe and Hitlerian Europe, that is, there are powerful evidences of trends toward a crystallization of power about the Hitler system. One illustration is, of course, Munich and its consequences. Here the “kingpin” in the opposition to the advance of German power under Bismarck (i.e., France) is willing to travel quite far down the road to an accommodation with Germany. The road, of course, is to lead all the way under Marshal Petain and the Vichy regime. One might cite the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 or the shift in Italian policy in a pro-German direction after the Ethiopian invasion and the Rhineland remilitarization or the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact of August 1939—but we need not elaborate these points here. It is suffi cient, at this stage, to point out that they indicate a trend of behavior that had no more to do with classic balance of power analyses than does the creation of United States Steel (by the consolidation of lesser giants) has to do with classic laissez-faire theory. We must be led to wonder where the realism lies when the “realists” advocate that we pursue a policy of the balance of power.

I have pointed out earlier that the workability of the balance of power may be dependent on the relative emphasis which different eras place on freedom in relation to order and that the different fashion in which this interrelation is conceived may be dependent on the stage of technology and the distribution of political power. This may be taken one step further if we return to the earlier point that the belief in the central value of the preser-vation of the state’s independence is a psychological precondition for the balance of power. When this belief is weakened or destroyed, then the bal-ance itself may collapse. Two forces may weaken the belief: fi rst, the threat to a state’s destruction may come to seem so overwhelming that there seems nothing to be gained from an attempted resistance, since the effort is


foredoomed to failure in any case. One thinks of the Danish response to the German invasion in April, 1940, as an illustration. In the second instance, the cost of preserving the independence of the state, while not impossible of payment, seems to outweigh the advantages of such an action. Thus the spread of the Quisling outlook through much of Europe and the defeatism of pre-World War II France (which continues after the war itself is under-way) indicated that many felt the loss of French independence to be a lesser evil than the bloody sacrifi ces that would be involved in the effort to main-tain it. Thus one sees that at the root of the balance of power must lie this fi erce devotion to the preservation of the independence of one’s own state, but that this devotion may not always be forthcoming. In our own era, both Communism and the dangers of nuclear war threaten, in crisscrossing pat-terns, to undermine this devotion. From quite another direction, there is an attempt to undermine it by those who wish to move on to the construction of a larger order of law which will transcend the state system. As was pointed out earlier, however, there is always the risk that in this transitional stage, where old loyalties are shaken and new ones yet unformed, one puts himself at the mercy of very grievous dangers. Unless one can go all the way with the transformation, there is much to be said, in a dangerous arena, for hold-ing fast to a rather simple patriotism. It was, after all, to the fi erce national-ism of Churchill rather than to the pastel internationalism of the Labour Party that Britain owed her survival in the face of the Nazi tyranny. The “age between ages” is hardly at the stage when it can view with indifference the elements that give a people a sense of pride in land and nation—although it also fi nds it diffi cult to live with them.

The relationship between the “subjective” and the “objective” precon-ditions for the successful operation of the balance of power has grown more complex with the awakening of a sense of mass participation in poli-tics. This, of course, is one reason the realist proponents of the balance of power feel more at home in the eighteenth century than the twentieth and why they are led, as with Morgenthau, to take a critical view of the role of democracy in foreign policy—since this threatens one of the primary preconditions on which a realist strategy must rest. If one turns to our opening notion: that the balance of power implies the creation of a rough equality among the several principal units of the system, it can be seem that at both Utrecht and Vienna territories were shifted to create a more effective balance as the will of the leading statesmen might dictate. The peoples thus shifted were not, to my knowledge, in any (and certainly not in most) instances consulted.

140 W. JOHNSTON

However, with the rise of popular participation in politics, such redistribution of territory and population in the name of the balance of power came to seem arbitrary and unjust. What really took place was that the achievement of the balance had now to be judged by two criteria rather than merely one: hitherto the criterion “justice” had been the exter-nal quality of balance. But now “justice” could not be achieved unless attention was also given—and perhaps primarily given—to the internal quality of popular aspiration. In short, it was now necessary to take into account the “subjective” wishes of populations as well as the “objective” necessities of the balance. As a consequence, the tasks of statesmanship grew more complex, for, when the needs of an approximate equilibrium clashed with the political aspirations of the peoples affected, how was the clash to be resolved? We shall see the customary pattern of liberal utopia-nism at work in this issue as well as in others, for the liberals assumed that there was some formula that could be found in which these two clashing demands could be reconciled—a formula which would obviate the need for drastic international reorganization. The formula for the resolution was national self-determination, but it proved to create as many problems as it resolved and to issue in the expected bitter disillusionment.

Although the clash is most clearly felt at the Versailles Conference, it had not been absent from the Congress of Vienna. Here it had taken the form of the clash between a settlement to rest on the principle of legiti-macy and a settlement to rest on the principle of the balance of power. On the whole (although this is an oversimplifi cation), the Vienna statesmen sacrifi ced what was considered the lesser principle for what was considered the greater—that is, legitimacy was sacrifi ced when the objective condi-tions of the balance seemed to justify it. At Versailles, the clash took the form of that between the principle of national self-determination and the balance of power. Here (although this is again something of an oversim-plifi cation) it may be said that a fi rst hearing was given to the principle of national self-determination and the principle of balance was sacrifi ced for it. It is in this sense that it is not unfair to say that, whereas at Vienna the clash between the interests of the whole and the interests of the parts was sharply seen and a statesmanlike effort was made to see that the inter-ests of the whole prevailed over those of the parts, at Versailles—under the illusion that harmonization between the whole and the part could be achieved—the particular interests were in fact given primacy over the more general. In my analysis of E.H. Carr, I suggest that this is one of his principal lines of argument in his critique of the Versailles settlement.


Perhaps the most important illustration of the fact that the interest of the whole was subordinated to the interests of the parts (a sacrifi ce made acceptable by the rationalization that there was a natural harmony between whole and part) is the acquiescence, and then support, the lib-eral victors gave to the destruction of the Austrian Empire in the name of the self-determination of its various nationalities. One of the fateful weak-nesses of the Versailles settlement was its acquiescence in this destruction which removed an essential cog within the European system, without which it was to prove impossible to restore an equilibrium. Metternich had predicted that, if a free play were given to the several nationalities of Eastern Europe, the result would be to open up a “war of all against all” in that area. The historic record seems to bear out this pessimistic forecast as a more profound one than the optimistic forecast of Wilson. In the larger pattern of history, it is not easy to see the statesmanship of Wilson as superior to that of Metternich. But it was impossible for the liberal historians of the nineteenth century to credit Metternich with insight, for the liberal insight itself was to come only after its own uto-pia was implemented and then fell to pieces. This confi rms again my notion that the deepest insights in the collective experience of man are, very often, won only as the consequence of a tragic consequence of a tragic encounter. There is often no other way to know the strengths or limitations of a given position until it is in fact implemented, and its implementation may produce quite unexpected and quite tragic conse-quences. I think the tragic complications of the problem of community in Eastern Europe can be seen if we set the politics of that area within a historic framework.

Historically Eastern Europe was for long a center of contention among three states: Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. With the rise of Prussian power, and then with the unifi cation of Germany by Prussia, a fourth major contender entered the stage. As the Ottoman Empire was steadily pushed back in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth cen-turies, a central question was posed: Who is to be the heir of the Turkish holdings? By the Dual Alliance of 1879, Austria got German backing for her aspirations in the Balkans. As Bernadotte Schmitt has pointed out, if Austria pushed through to the Mediterranean, Russian aspirations would be blocked; if, on the other hand, Russia pushed through, Austria would be blocked. 31 World War I very largely was the consequence of this confl ict in the Balkans. Austria (with German backing) was determined to try to give a defi nitive setback to Slavic aspirations (which had Russian backing).

142 W. JOHNSTON

The rise of a number of small, independent, national states in Eastern Europe in the period after World War I may be seen as a brief interlude which resulted from an atypical political situation in the area. For World War I had created a fourfold vacuum there: Russia was in revolution and her boundaries had been pushed far to the east, Austria-Hungary had disintegrated, the Ottoman Empire had also disintegrated and all that was left was the “core”—a rather small national state with a restricted territo-rial base—and, in the fourth place, Germany had been defeated and was without signifi cant military or economic power in being.

This fourfold vacuum was the fi rst condition which made possible the rise of small independent states in Eastern Europe. The second condition was the support given to these states by France, who looked upon such support as part of a general French policy of containing Germany and also as bulwarks against the spread of Communist power westward. By 1935, however, both these conditions had been changed, not to say under-mined. The vacuum had ended with the revival of German and Russian power. There had also been a relative weakening of the French commit-ment to its Eastern European clients as a consequence, in part, of the rise of German and Russian power. The effectiveness of the French commit-ment was drastically reduced with the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 (as Churchill saw at once) and the reduction became defi ni-tive at the Munich Conference in 1938 when France, unable to win British support for a fi rm policy in Eastern Europe, radically reduced her commit-ment in that area.

These two developments—the revival of Russian and German power and the reduction of the French commitment—meant the radical decline in the security of the independent states of this area, and it meant that the independence of these states was now largely dependent on the will of Germany and the will of Russia. There still, however, remained a possibil-ity of independence if the two dominant powers could be kept in some form of balance. This prospect, however, came to an end when the Stalin Pact was concluded in August 1939, when the two powers agreed, in effect, to partition the area between them. Events in Eastern Europe had by this late stage clearly moved largely beyond Western control. George Kennan is correct when he reminds us that, if we want to understand the circumstances under which the “loss” of Eastern Europe took place, we should begin, not with Yalta, but with Munich and the subsequent course of events. 32


To preserve the independence of the smaller states of Eastern Europe under these circumstances, two broad paths were open. In the fi rst place, it would have been possible that a Germany, although defeated, be kept in being and kept relatively powerful as a counterweight to Russia. This possible Western policy was ruled out by the policy of unconditional sur-render. The alternative policy was for the USA and Britain themselves to undertake the commitment of their power (including a clear willingness, if need be, to use force) to contain Russian power to something approxi-mating its pre-1939—or at least pre-1941—boundaries. This, of course, was the commitment for which Churchill had hoped, and the story of the tension between Churchill and the leaders of the American government over this issue is too well known to require repetition here. In the issue, the commitment was not made; a paper commitment was made at Yalta, but countervailing power was not employed and the paper commitment proved inadequate.

Hence the consequence followed, as does the day the night, that the area fell under Soviet domination and was reduced to a colonial holding in a vastly expanded Russian Empire. The Western world bitterly resented the result, but it had followed logically from the failure of the West to employ either of the two suggested alternative policies. One may add that the Western acquiescence in the destruction of the independence of the states of Eastern Europe was sealed with the response we made to the uprisings of the fall of 1956. We said, in effect, that we would rejoice in a rollback if the people of the area could, by themselves, bring it about. We would not, however, use our power to support it. Russian power thus found an added confi rmation for its domination of the area. One had, in effect, witnessed the end of the multiple balance of power in Europe.

I think this long and baleful story points up in sharpest outline the clash between the objective need for balance and the subjective aspira-tions of peoples for “justice.” When this clash occurs, it becomes impos-sible to satisfy—in any satisfactory way—both the need for order through the balance and the aspirations for freedom though the principle of self- determination. One is reminded of the joke in The New Yorker where a salesman is shown advocating a toy to a parent on the grounds that it “is a wonderful aid in helping the child adjust to the real world. No matter how you put it together it won’t work.” And there is a sad truth in the nature of much of the real world in international politics: no matter how you put the pieces together, they simply will not work—if one defi nes

144 W. JOHNSTON

“to work” as the satisfaction of the many complex needs and aspirations of the peoples concerned. We may thus reiterate our earlier point: that there has always been something of a gap between the “subjective” and the “objective” needs for an effective balance, but the gap has become wider with the “awakening of the masses” in nationalism and democracy. Vienna may be taken as the last great international settlement in which it was possible to undertake a widespread redistribution of territory with a disregard for the subjective aspirations of the people concerned. One can-not imagine a Treaty of Utrecht in 1919 or a Congress of Vienna in 1964. But the remembrance of things past must not make us think we can fl ee to them. It is surely an unrealistic realism which makes a central political strategy depend on undoing perhaps the most basic political movement of modern history: the “awakening of the masses” as seen in movements of democracy and self-determination. Somehow all these political sentiments must be taken into account in our conception of balance. There is no real-ism—only escapism—in the Morgenthau desire to go back to a style of diplomacy which existed before these changes had taken place.

It is nevertheless impossible to welcome, as did Wilson, the change. He welcomed it, in good measure, because he did not understand how impos-sible it would be to manage some of these new political forces. He felt that the only basis for a secure international order was to be found in the jus-tice of its foundations, and he felt it a relatively easy matter to implement a just settlement. He is inspired in the formulation of his war aims and his wartime foreign policy by the notion that there are clear principles of jus-tice which can be discovered and implemented. He seems to have felt that these principles had not been discovered and implemented earlier because the practitioners of the old ways had been so corrupted by the system in which they operated that their moral sense had grown degenerate and their intellectual apprehension blurred. Like a man long addicted to drink, they could no longer appreciate the quality of fresh springwater even if served it. There was, one must add (as Arthur Link has pointed out), a hard vein of arrogance in Wilson which accentuated his confi dence in the superiority of his own judgment. The conviction of his own intellectual and ethical superiority was shown in his attitude toward his own subordi-nates (such as Lansing). But the Wilsonian convictions were strengthened by his entire image of the role of America in world politics—his sense that America was a nation capable of taking a disinterested view of the world scene and enjoying an inner moral superiority. I have discussed this in my critique of Wilson and will not expand it here. It does, however, remind


one of Reinhold Niebuhr’s remark that the individual (or the nation) that sees itself as innocent in its own eyes becomes intolerable in the eyes of others. It is this which also lends strength to the statement that the world has suffered more from the consciously righteous than ever it has from the consciously wicked. Of course, Wilson’s certainties also stemmed in very large measure from sheer ignorance: he had not had the knowledge of experience in the complexities of international politics that was in the marrow of the bones of the best of European statesmen. As I have argued elsewhere, the dogmatic liberal indictment of the “corruptions” of the old world bears many parallels to the dogmatic Marxist indictment of the liberal world. The element of tragedy enters history in the inability of the proponents to transcend their perspectives save through the awful encounter with their inadequacies in the harsh trials of experience itself. Yet we are here less concerned with the sources of Wilson’s outlook than its manifestations and its effects. A principal manifestation was the belief that an order could be achieved in international affairs which would rest on “objective justice” and in which, as a consequence, the role of coercion and even of a dynamic political strategy could be very largely eliminated. There are, as Walter Schiffer has pointed, two confl icting notions behind the League of Nations: one that coercion will be needed since states are imperfect and the other that the very perfection of the settlement will rule out the need for coercion. 33 It is hard to tell who the “real Wilson” is, for he talks at times as the proponent of both views. But there is much evi-dence to indicate that the real Wilson was a believer in an anarchic utopia.

In any case, I think it can now be seen that the belief in national self- determination was fundamentally inadequate as a basis on which a stable international order could be built. Alfred Cobban has explored this issue in his study of national self-determination. 34 If one assumes that the subjec-tive aspirations of people themselves constitute a suffi cient basis for order, because they somehow coincide with the objective needs of the situation, the clash between order and justice is resolved. From the supposed resolu-tion, it follows as natural consequence that insuffi cient attention will be paid to the need for the achievement of an approximate equilibrium. In this respect, as well as in others, we see the sense in which the best may become the enemy of the good.

We may return to our opening notion that there is, at least on the sur-face, a linkage between the liberal belief in equality and the emphasis on a balance of power which is, after all, an emphasis on a form of balance. This has led me in the analysis of Tannenbaum to point out that there

146 W. JOHNSTON

is a linkage between balance of power thinking and his emphasis on the coordinate state. Nevertheless there is a difference as well—in addition to the one I have suggested in the Tannenbaum analysis. If we take as central goals of the liberal tradition the achievement (to borrow Hans Morgenthau’s phrase) of “equality in freedom,” the realist critique adds a valuable insight to idealistic liberalism in its insistence that “equality in freedom” is not to be achieved so much by moral preachment as it is through the establishment of a roughly equal distribution of power. To put it in other terms, however much formal allegiance to equality there may be in a given society, one cannot achieve the consensual relationship which liberalism insists is the foundation of a just order (as distinguished from mere “order”) without the establishment of a rough equilibrium of power. The notion is related to that developed by Dean Griffi th of government by consensus achieved through the balance among the great agencies of the national government—although it is broader in its applica-tions. 35 It is also related, of course, to the notion of the Founding Fathers that a mere opposition in principle to tyranny is no suffi cient check against it. The moral opposition to tyranny had to be sustained through a sys-tem of checks and balances within the government structure (and, indeed, within the society itself) which, through its very capacity for deadlock, necessitates a consensual relation if action is to be taken.

The notion is also closely linked to that developed by Calhoun in his A Disquisition on Government , where he argued that equality of power was the only means of guaranteeing true equality. 36 And Calhoun went on to say argue that the only way to guarantee a truly consensual relationship was to give each member of it the possibility of disrupting it—and rely on the fear of anarchy to prevent the potential disruption from becoming actual. However the question which is joined explicitly in Calhoun and implicitly in much of the realist tradition is central to the problem of community: How are we to prevent the very balance of power necessary to the achieve-ment of a just order from degenerating from potential to actual anarchy? This problem, as we shall see subsequently, is never really resolved in real-ist thought—and is perhaps incapable of resolution. To take account of it, a realist like Niebuhr elaborates the notion of centralization of power, and the central framework in his structure of balance becomes the tension between centralization of power and balance of power. 37 This, it will be noted, is a quite different notion from traditional balance of power theory, which did not have the notion of centralization of power as a component of its “balance.” Whether it is a satisfactory resolution of the problem is


a question I have dealt with in the analysis of Niebuhr. It is clear that the notion is a more complex one than the notion of balance in Morgenthau’s system, which is saved from anarchy only by the (logically inadmissible) admission of the principle of auto-limitation.

I think we in America have been misled in our estimate of the ease with which this problem can be solved by our own misunderstanding of our own history. We probably are inclined to make too much of the consensual foundation of our system as established in Philadelphia and to overlook both the organic foundations which underlay that convention and the fact that the ultimate question of the form of the state was not settled until the Civil War. The Civil War was the closest thing in our experience to the subjection of feudal anarchy in the history of other states, and it teaches similar lessons. For up until the Civil War, it was not clear whether or not it was legitimate to secede, and it is well known that several threats to the Union came before 1861 and were connected with shifts in the balance of power among the various sections. In short, the problem of balance was complicated by change, particularly the Westward Movement, which ulti-mately tore the nation apart. We have many specifi c instances of the strains within the system: the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, the arguments of Spencer Roane of the Virginia Court, the efforts of the Essex Junto and the Hartford Convention, the nullifi cation attempt in South Carolina, and so on. However the chief point is a simple one: America was not truly a sovereign state until 1865 for until then there was no universal awareness that the balance of power among states did not include the justifi ed right of disrupting the Union. This threat hung, for long periods, like a great cloud over the nation’s destiny. To use a phrase developed by Binkley in Realism and Nationalism , we were until 1865 a “federative polity”; after that, we were a sovereign state. 38 The reason the “federative polity” met with such little success is that it represents but a halfway house in the attempt to resolve the problem of order; the ultimate question of sover-eignty must recur under it. It was not, therefore (as Binkley would have us think), a plausible alternative to the creation of sovereign national entities.

We are brought, therefore, to this conclusion: the balance of power is always a threat to order unless it operates within a framework where prepon-derate power rests somewhere and is capable of making itself felt . We must hasten to add, however, that “preponderate power” must itself be seen primarily in psychological rather than “material” terms. Although eco-nomically and militarily preponderance of power may be looked upon as the ability, in coercive terms, to have one’s own way, its ultimate bases

148 W. JOHNSTON

are legal and political. Legally, its basis is the common acceptance of a common sovereign. The ultimate “preponderance” is political: loyalty felt by the citizenry toward a common locus of authority. One must of course realize that the issue is in part a “chicken and egg” question, in that the common loyalty rests on common experience with an authority as accept-able, that is, there is a sense in which “institutions do deposit their own foundations” and the “general will” is the product of the state. In America, the national government asserted its supremacy in 1865, and this in turn came to shape the attitudes of loyalty which citizens felt toward it. (I have made this point earlier in the discussion of the Bismarckian system—the sense in which preponderant power creates its own “interests”—which in turn “legitimize” it. Niebuhr is very perceptive on this point.)

In America, the preponderate power may, therefore, be said to rest with the “general will” of the citizenry, and it makes itself effective politically by winning control of the state in the competitive process of free elections. The power of the state may then be used to serve the cause of reconciling order with justice by, for example, checking the threat that some interest in the society may become hegemonial or, on the other hand, checking the danger of some interest being subjected to a continuing disproportion of power with a consequent injustice (e.g., the Negro). I have discussed elsewhere the signifi cance of the use of the broadly based domestic power to reduce the threat to justice posed by concentrated corporate power. It is important to see that the government was successful in this instance (and unsuccessful in the Civil War) in part because, by the latter nine-teenth century, its unrivaled right to be the ultimate spokesman for legiti-macy had been resolved by the Civil War. Thus historians who argue that if the Civil War had somehow been avoided in 1861 a comparable challenge would not have again presented itself lose sight of the fact that subsequent challenges did not emerge in good part because before that war the locus of sovereignty could be questioned and after the war could not. The con-fl ict of the Progressive Era might have come closer to Civil War (Theodore Roosevelt saw the threat of war as a real one in the nineties) had the ques-tion of the locus of sovereignty not been resolved a generation earlier.

We may draw these considerations to a close with a few words about the balance of power as it has operated in world politics since 1945. The post- 1945 situation differs from its predecessors in that today there may be said to be one enormous interdependent power system operative. In the past, there were usually several more or less independent systems in operation. Perhaps the most important of these are what I would call the Continental


(Europe excluding Britain) and the Oceanian. The fact that the drama of world politics was acted out on two different (though not unrelated) stages had important implications for the issue of balance as against pre-ponderance. To put the matter in its simplest terms, it proved possible for one power to establish preponderance on one or the other stage; it was never possible for a power to establish preponderance on both. Napoleon and Hitler, for example, in effect established their preponderance on the Continental stage; Britain, for much of the modern era, established her preponderance on the Oceanic stage. The fact that Britain was an actor on both stages, and could bring the resources of her Oceanic position to bear against the dominant Continental power, was a central factor in breaking both Napoleonic and Hitlerian dominance. The “balance of power” on the Continent has been overthrown more than once. It has been restored because this particular regional balance is related to a larger global balance which has come to play a decisive role in the restoration of equilibrium to the Continent.

The uniqueness of the post-1945 balance is nowhere more evident than in the quite untraditional position occupied by the USA. In the words of Max Lerner:

There have been great land empires before and great maritime empires, but it would be hard to cite an earlier land empire with its own available sea lanes, or an earlier maritime empire with so vast an expanse as its land core. 39

The USA, in other words, enjoys quite unique potential for playing a dominant role in both theaters—something neither Britain nor the great Continental powers was ever able to do. This unique position renders a considerable body of thought (such as that of Mahan and Mackinder) somewhat irrelevant to her present position, where she is compelled to act, not merely as a sea power on the fringes, or a Continental power at the center, but in an important sense as both. We shall explore the implica-tions of this for the longer-run conception of the American role in world politics at a later stage. Here it is merely necessary to remark that it con-tains both promise as well as risk. Some of the present-day international pluralists focus on the hazards. Yet their anxieties are in order only if they have in mind an alternative arrangement which well make the risks less grievous. Often the alternative arrangement is, implicitly or explicitly, a return to some form of self-balancing pluralist system. The burden of the present account has been that such a system tends to be self-destroying

150 W. JOHNSTON

and that we have arrived where we are today in very good measure because of the inherent destructive tendencies of a supposedly self-balancing sys-tem. If this be the case, perhaps we should focus on the promise of the present American position rather than its risk. As John Stuart Mill said, pagan self- assertion is a virtue, as well as Christian self-denial. It is to the promise of the American preponderance that we may now return.

NOTES 1. Claude, 90. 2. A. Mahan (1912) Armaments and Arbitration (New York: Harper and

Brothers), 5–8. 3. Ibid. 4. S. Hoffmann (1963) “Rousseau on War and Peace” The American Political

Science Review , Vol. 57, No. 2, 323–324. 5. Hoffmann, “International Law and International Systems,” 215. 6. I.L. Claude (1964) Swords into Plowshares (New York: Random House),

264–277. 7. S. Hoffmann (1957) “Sisyphus and the Avalanche: The United Nations,

Egypt and Hungary,” International Organization , Vol. 11, No. 3, 446–469.

8. Schiffer, 202–223. 9. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations , 331–340.

10. T.C. Cochran and W. Miller (1942) The Age of Enterprise (New York: Macmillan).

11. J.K. Galbraith (1952) American Capitalism (Boston: Houghton-Miffl in). 12. Cochran and Miller, 59–76, 305. 13. W. Lippmann (1937) The Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown and

Company), 246, 273–275. 14. L.F.L. Oppenheim, quoted in Schiffer. 169–169. 15. Schiffer, 272, 287. 16. See, e.g., his analysis of “The New Feudalism” on the domestic scene.

H.J. Morgenthau (June 1960) “Our Thwarted Republic: State Power vs. the New Feudalism,” Commentary .

17. One might here explore the analysis of Jacques Ellul on the impact of technology.

18. Cochran and Miller, 63, 326 ff. 19. R. Aron (1954) The Century of Total War (London: Derek Verschoyle);

J. Herz (1959) International Politics in the Atomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press).


20. R. Niebuhr (1959) The Structure of Nations and Empires (New York: Scribner).

21. Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration , 254. 22. R. Rosecrance (1963) Action and Reaction in World Politics (Boston:

Little, Brown), 92. 23. Kissinger, A World Restored . 24. W.L. Langer (1939) European Alliances and Alignments (New York:

A.A. Knopf), 3. 25. W. Strang (1961) Britain in World Affairs (London: Faber & Faber), 197,

198. 26. For an elaboration of the different types of balance, see Claude, Power and

International Relations , 13–35. 27. C. Friedrich and Z. Brzezinski (1956) Totalitarian Dictatorship and

Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 166–173. 28. P. Kecskemeti (1961) The Unexpected Revolution: Social Forces in the

Hungarian Uprising (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 149–159; Morgenthau, Politics among Nations , 298–305.

29. W.Y. Elliott (1961) Western Political Heritage (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall), 250.

30. A.F.K. Organski (1959) World Politics (New York: Knopf), 299–338. 31. B. Schmitt (1934) The Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente (New York:

H. Holt and Company). 32. G. Kennan (1967) Memoirs 1925–1950 (Little, Brown, and Company:

Boston), 214–215. 33. Schiffer. 256, passim. 34. A. Cobban (1945) National Self-Determination (London: University of

Oxford Press). 35. E. S. Griffi th (1951) Congress: Its Contemporary Role (New York: New York

University Press). 36. J. C. Calhoun (1851) A Disquisition on Government (Charleston, S.C.:

Steam Power Press of Walker & James), 12, 40–50. 37. R. Niebuhr (1944) The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

(New York: S. Scribner & Sons). 38. R. C. Binkley (1935) Realism and Nationalism (New York: Harper &

Brothers), 299–300. 39. M. Lerner (1957) America as a Civilization (New York: Simon and

Schuster), 881.

PART III

Liberalism and History


CHAPTER 7

In his criticism of the traditional fashion in which economics has been taught, Robert Heilbroner has suggested the weakness of stressing either abstract principles of the market or the general fl ow of events, set apart from any analytic framework. In his study, The Making of Economic Society , he attempts to pursue a more fruitful approach:

If this diagnosis is correct, the remedy suggests itself. The isolated problems of economics must fi rst be joined into a connected fl ow, which is to say, they must be viewed in the light of history . But that is not enough. In turn, the movement of history must be further lit by the generalizing insights of economic theory . In other words, economics should be approached from a point of view in which theory explains and enlightens the facts of history and in which history illustrates and substantiates the abstractions of theory. 1

In our discussion of the development of the liberal tradition, we attempt to follow a similar approach, that is, we attempt to analyze a complex historical transition—or series of transitions—in terms of an explicit analytic framework. Two notions are central to this framework. The fi rst I term “the problem of community” and the second “the world revolution.” I have discussed both—and particularly “the problem of community”—at much greater length elsewhere, but a preliminary explanation of the meaning I shall attach to them is a prerequisite for the presentation of the historical account. For this essay is an attempt to survey a complex historical development in terms of an explicit analytic

The Development of the Liberal Tradition, Part 1

156 W. JOHNSTON

framework. Thus, to begin with, a word about the “the problem of community” and “the world revolution.”

The problem of community is rooted in the inescapable ambivalence of human nature itself. All individuals are, at one and the same time, discrete centers of reality and also parts of larger patterns of reality. In one part of our being, we see ourselves as distinct and autonomous beings, with a vivid sense of “self” and with a clear “meaning” to our life; in another part of our being, we sense that we are mere fragments without meaning except in terms of our interconnection with larger wholes. In his discussion of democracy in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness , Reinhold Niebuhr argues that:

Ideally democracy is a permanently valid form of social and political organi-zation which does justice to two dimensions of human existence: to man’s spiritual stature and his social character; to the uniqueness and varieties of life, as well as to the common necessities of all men…. The commu-nity requires liberty as much as the individual; and the individual requires community more than bourgeois thought comprehended. Democracy can therefore not be equated with freedom . An ideal democratic order seeks to unify within the conditions of freedom; it maintains freedom within the framework of order. 2

The problem of the relation of freedom to order, used in the above pas-sage to describe the nature of democratic cohesion, may also be used to describe the fundamental ambivalence of human nature itself. The problem of freedom and order is seen in one of its “external” manifestations on the political level; it is also “internalized” in the complex that makes up the personality itself. In a rough way, the Freudian triad of libido, superego, and ego may be said to refl ect this internalization. We may take the libido to represent the organic drives within the individual pushing for assertion, the superego the restraints put upon these drives by society to preserve a minimal cohesion, and the ego as the element in the personality which seeks to relate these two pressures to each other in as harmonious a fashion as possible. If one turns to the psychological triad put forth by Dewey in Human Nature and Conduct (impulse, habit, and intelligence), these may also be seen, in a general manner, to refl ect the same ambivalence and attempted resolution as that mentioned in the freedom-order dichotomy. 3

It is therefore misleading to take the realization of “freedom” as the sole concern of the liberal tradition or as the primary value in terms of which the development of that tradition is to be understood. In part, of course,

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LIBERAL TRADITION, PART 1 157

the issue is a semantic one and turns on the meaning we give to the term “freedom.” We shall return later to a more precise examination of the variety of meanings which attach to that term. At this stage, however, it is important to see that human existence has an irrevocably social dimension—as well as an individual dimension—to it, and any approach which attempts to understand that existence in terms of an individualistic conception of freedom will suffer from grave inadequacies.

We cannot achieve fulfi llment except through our ties with others; our fulfi llment is, therefore, intimately related with the needs of others as well as with the impulses within the self. In fact, the impulses within the self are themselves conditioned by the needs of others from the early days of our life onward, as Freud, among others, has demonstrated. Much of what we think of as an inner individual drive is in fact the internalization of a pattern of behavior which society has demanded of us. To be sure, there are innate endowments of the self which exist prior to the environmental setting, but no precise line can be drawn between the innate and the socially conditioned, and our concern at this point is to stress the intimacy and complexity of the interdependence between the innate and the environmental. If the concept of freedom is taken to mean (as is the case of some of the more extreme versions of liberal individualism) that somehow man achieves fulfi llment independent of, indeed in opposition to, social need and demand, it is an inadequate notion, for it gives us no clear appreciation of the social dimension of our fulfi llment. This notion of freedom, carried to its logical fulfi llment, would lead ultimately to a complete withdrawal from the human situation into a private world of one’s own. Although the monastic experience might be taken to represent this form of withdrawal, it in truth does not. It represents a withdrawal from secular ties in order that one may fulfi ll his role in the body of the church with more single-hearted devotion. The emphasis on “art for art’s sake” may also mean not that one wants to withdraw in a private world, but that one is in opposition to the esthetic standards that prevail in a particular era. By stressing “art for art’s sake,” the artist may give expression to his desire to create new demands, arouse new interests, evoke new possibilities of shared experience, and this is a deeply worthwhile undertaking. Insofar as it means, literally, that art should be pursued for the sake of the artist’s own isolated inner world, then it represents a massive egocentricity which is in truth a form of madness and can have no legitimate complaint that society, to whose legitimacy it gives no heed, refuses to sustain it. Solipsism is the most logical philosophical elucidation

158 W. JOHNSTON

of a consistent individualism, and it too reduces human experience to a form of madness, in which the reality of anything but the self is drained out and the individual’s consciousness becomes coextensive with reality.

What have been relatively minor eccentricities in the fi elds of philosophy and esthetics have had more signifi cant and less innocent effects in modern economic and political thought. Liberal individualism often fell into a form of practical madness by pressing its narrow notion of freedom too close to its logical fulfi llment and hence to absurdity. The root error lay in the notion that there were certain economic rights which are “natural,” which exist in a sphere of their own, and with which no one has legitimate justifi cation to interfere. Walter Lippmann has given skillful analysis and critique of this notion in The Good Society . 4 T.H. Green carried the liberal tradition beyond the simplicities of Benthamism by his analysis of the social dimension of freedom. The analysis has not, however, become suffi ciently integrated into the liberal tradition to save it from skirting the shores of anarchy in its domestic life in the era of the Great Depression and actually plunging over the brink of anarchy in its attempts to apply dogmatic simplifi cations to the complexities of international politics. We shall return to the domestic and international effects of these applications later; I wish here to stress that they are deeply rooted in the narrowness given by many liberals to the notion of freedom. (For an application of this argument to a specifi c case, see my discussion of Senator Goldwater’s philosophy in the paper on “The Use and Abuse of Political Abstractions.”) 5

If we start with an emphasis in the basic need of the individual for a mean-ingful path to fulfi llment (we may defi ne “freedom” in its “positive” sense as the achievement of this fulfi llment), we see that our prospects of fulfi llment are always limited, both by internal factors and by the options open to us in the society of our time. If we are to achieve fulfi llment, we must, by and large, conform to the demands of that society. Mankind has its heroes and saints who break the restrictions of their social environment and it rightly cherishes them. They remain as lasting symbols of that element of freedom in the human spirit which transcends any environmental restrictions. But saints and heroes win “eternal honor and glory” because of their exceptional qualities of spirit; the exception proves the rule: the mass of men in their daily lives are not governed by a consciousness of their transcendent free-dom. They are governed, rather, by the concept of success. William James described this criterion in unfl attering terms which were in part a refl ection of the extent to which he had transcended, due to his unusual gifts and his privileged social position, the norms of the “mass.” There is an element of


aristocratic disdain and of personal arrogance in James’ contempt for the “bitch-goddess success.” The fact remains that success is the criterion by which men (and even James) must fi nd their efforts judged (although there are different criteria of success). It is understandable, of course, that success as defi ned in monetary terms should be attacked, for it is clear that there are needs other than monetary needs for which man seeks fulfi llment. Even here, however, one must guard against the critique which comes from those whose livelihood comes from inherited wealth. It is easy to show disdain for that which we take for granted. It is also understandable that any narrow criterion of success should be subjected to criticism; the standards of success need to be broad and they need to reach beyond the confi nes of a particular era. But success in the sense of fulfi lling some deeply felt need of mankind must remain a fundamental criterion by which the legitimacy of human efforts is judged. And that success in this sense is the criterion is attested by human history. Success in this sense remains an essential criterion for, as I have said earlier, it represents the irrevocably social dimension of human existence. Carr has touched upon this point in What is History ?. 6 The repu-diation of success as a criterion may mask the same irresponsible attitude seen in a consistent solipsism or esthetic “purism.” There are obvious dan-gers in the reliance on some commonplace notion of success as the criterion of human achievement. There are less obvious, but very real, dangers in the contemptuous dismissal of success as a criterion.

If we attempt now to pull together our thoughts in this issue, we may say that most forms of fulfi llment have their social dimension. They are dependent, that is, on relation with others. As a consequence, we must give up certain expressions of our individuality (certain forms of “freedom,” if this term be used literally) to achieve other forms of freedom we value more highly. Even before we become conscious “selves,” many of those fundamental “choices” are made for us, by the necessity of preserving the helpless infant and reconciling his “rights” with the needs of a larger “society” (if only that of the family). No society (however simple) is possible unless it is governed by a set of common principles, and these can be achieved only if the participant members “compromise” a measure of their individual freedom. It is in this sense that the individual may be said to need order very deeply, since he can only fi nd fulfi llment through relation with others, and this relation presupposes the establishment of uniform ways of doing things. It is in this sense that freedom, in the meaningful use of that term, is derivative and not primary; the meaning it has in the concrete is set by the bounds of the social order.

160 W. JOHNSTON

The problem of community may be said to stem from the fact that the very “society” which is a necessary means to the realization of human freedom is at the same time a threat to that realization. The same interdependence with others which is the precondition to our realization may also frustrate that realization. Freudian psychology comes to some rather pessimistic conclusions about the human condition on the basis of its recognition of this ambivalence. Erich Fromm has summarized the Freudian view in these words:

Man, to him [Freud] is fundamentally antisocial. Society must domesticate him, must allow some direct satisfaction of biological—and hence ineradicable—drives; but for the most part society must refi ne and adroitly check man’s basic impulses. In consequence of this suppression of the natural impulses by society something miraculous happens: the suppressed drives turn into striv-ings that are culturally valuable and thus become the basis for culture. Freud chose the word sublimation for this strange transformation from suppression into civilized behavior. If the amount of suppression is greater than the capac-ity for sublimation, individuals become neurotic and it is necessary to allow the lessening of suppression. Generally, however, there is a reverse relation between satisfaction of man’s drives and culture: the more suppression, the more culture (and the more danger of neurotic disturbances). 7

Thus one sees that in the Freudian schema the tension between the two forms of “freedom” is inevitable: the gain in socialization and hence in civilization is purchased at a considerable loss in primordial “freedom.” If freedom is defi ned in a narrowly individualistic sense, one may be unaware of the toll this takes on the development of society. If freedom is defi ned in the “positive” sense of “social fulfi llment,” one may be unaware of the cost, in internal tension, this may exact on the “primordial” individual. The value of the Freudian schema for our purposes is that it contains (although it does not label them as such) two different notions of freedom, and it is aware that there is no easy way in which these two can be harmonized. Or, to put the matter in other terms, it sees clearly the tension between primordial freedom and freedom which can be enjoyed only after the individual has been “socialized” to accept society’s standards of order. Thus the Freudian analysis does grapple with the problems of “freedom and order” which, in abbreviated fashion, we call the “problem of com-munity.” In Civilization and Its Discontents , one of Freud’s later works, written after the shock of World War I, he presents this problem in darkly pessimistic terms and sees it as virtually incapable of harmonious


resolution. 8 Our own analysis does not lead us to conclusions which are this pessimistic, although it has little linkage with views based on notions of a simple harmony.

Another thinker who came to terms with this issue in profound fashion was Rousseau. Indeed, all the social contract thinkers, in one sense or another, may be said to have joined this issue. But Rousseau’s approach seems to me the most profound, for he links the political problems with the psychological problem in the most thoroughgoing way. One of the persistent themes in eighteenth-century French political thought centers on the cost in individual freedom man must give up when he “joins” society. Rousseau himself comes to the conclusion that, under most circumstances (and most particularly under those obtaining in eighteenth- century France), the cost exceeds the gain. There is a clear current in Rousseau’s thought which stresses the losses the individual suffers from participation in society and which gives expression to romantic yearning for the supposedly idyllic condition that existed prior to organized social life, and this has led some to take as Rousseau’s ideal a situation where “noble savages” lived in virtual isolation in some form of primitive har-mony in a purely natural setting. If this be the meaning of Rousseau’s social philosophy, I think it is apparent that it has little relevance to those concerned, in serious fashion, the study of politics. A romance on idyllic anarchy does not constitute a philosophy of politics.

The actual concern of Rousseau is more profound and more signifi cant. Rousseau sees quite clearly the two sides of the equation we have been discussing. That is to say, he sees quite clearly that it is only through participation in society that man can fi nd his deeper fulfi llment (his “moral freedom,” as he calls it in the Social Contract ), but he also sees that a given society, poorly constituted, may frustrate and block man’s deepest aspirations. Rousseau is thus led (as was Freud implicitly) to distinguish between two conceptions of “freedom.” A poorly constituted society may deprive man of his “natural” freedom but not his “moral” freedom. Under these circumstances, the individual fi nds himself in the worst of all states: he will have made a sacrifi ce of one form of freedom and will have gotten in return only enslavement. The central issue in Rousseau’s political philosophy becomes, therefore, the question: is there a form of community in which we can enjoy the benefi ts of association with others and yet not, at the same time, fi nd our own deeper aspirations as individuals blocked? In short, as Frederick Watkins has pointed out, Rousseau posed the problem of community in its most fundamental terms. 9

162 W. JOHNSTON

In order that we may understand clearly “the problem of community,” which is central to all our subsequent arguments, we may put it in other terms and explore it briefl y from this perspective. As I have said above, the problem of community may also be phrased as the problem of achieving a tolerable harmony between “necessary areas of uniformity” and “permissible areas of diversity.” However, if the term “order” is taken to mean “unity in diversity,” then the freedom-order dichotomy collapses, for freedom is embraced in the concept of order itself. The word “unity” is sometimes used in this broader sense also, and it is sharply distinguished from “mere uniformity,” presumably on the grounds that “unity” represents a form of cohesion which embraces diversity, whereas uniformity represents a form of cohesion that is purchased at the price of diversity.

The distinction is seen in Greek thought, in the following words used by Aristotle to criticize Plato’s Republic :

We must suppose, then, that Socrates’ mistake arose from the principle he set out with being false; we admit, indeed, that both a family and a city ought to be one in some particulars, but not entirely; for there is a point beyond which if a city proceeds in reducing itself to one, it will no longer be a city.

There is another point at which it will still continue to be a city, but it will approach so near to not being one, that it will be worse than none; as if anyone should reduce the voices of those who sing in concert to one, or a verse to a foot. 10

A contemporary example of the distinction can be seen in this comment by Max Freedman on the relationship between the movement toward Arab unity and American foreign policy:

On the face of it, we should welcome unity in the Middle East no less than in other parts of the world. This in fact is the age of regional organization. Why should the Arab nations be denied the virtues and advantages of cooperation that are so eagerly fostered in the NATO community or Latin America? It can hardly be a Western interest to have the Arab world divided and weak, feeding on its own grievances and spreading disorders that may reach other lands. The presumption therefore is in favor of unity and strength—provided always that the unity is genuine rather than being an imposed uniformity, and provided that the strength is used to benefi t the Arab people instead of bringing harm or danger to anyone else. 11


In the above passage, Mr. Freedman seems to distinguish a “genuine” unity from an “imposed uniformity” by implying that “genuine unity” will embrace diversity, not suppress it. He also seems to imply, in Burkean fashion, that a genuine unity cannot be imposed, but must be the consequence of a pattern of organic growth. Of course the central question remains: is unity on this basis capable of being achieved in the Middle East? Is the problem of community in this area capable of a solution along the harmonic lines, and with the provisos, Mr. Freedman suggests? The record of achievement of national unity gives little encouragement to his hopes, although the lower level unity of regional organizations does sustain parts of his argument.

For our purposes, however, the important thing to grasp is the need to make a distinction between the term “unity” (which may fairly be taken to mean a form of cohesion which embraces diversity) and the term “uniformity” (which may be taken to mean a form of cohesion in which diversity is ruled out). When I use the word order in the subsequent analysis, I attach to it a meaning far more restrictive than the meaning most people attach to the term unity ; by the word order , I mean uniformity . Thus may we rephrase the freedom-order dichotomy as a diversity-uniformity dichotomy. The problem of community, the problem of the relation of freedom to order, and the problem of the relation of diversity to uniformity may thus be seen as different ways of stating the same issue. The main point I am concerned to make at this stage is that order, or uniformity, is a value as fundamental in human relations as is freedom, or diversity. As I pointed out earlier, the failure of the liberal tradition to sense this brought it to the brink of anarchy in its domestic life and led it over that brink in its international policies. The brunt of our argument, if we would correct the biases in that tradition, needs, therefore, to be directed not to the defense of freedom—which has had many defenders over the years. It needs to be directed toward the necessity of order and the dependence of an enjoyment of many freedoms most highly cherished in the liberal tradition on the establishment of elemental patterns of order. Unless this dependence is seen, it is impossible to save that tradition from multiple varieties of libertarian sentimentalism.

We may illustrate the elemental importance of order, the sense in which it is a fundamental value without which no social life is possible, by two examples, the fi rst drawn from the area of language and the second from the area of economics.

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Throughout the history of the USA a concerted effort has been made to see that the English (American?) language was used in a uniform way. An important step in this direction came with the work of Noah Webster who was, as Professor Ralph Gabriel has pointed out, a strong nationalist. He realized that it was often hard for people of one area to understand those of another, and he therefore attempted to establish a uniform spelling for words and to give a uniform meaning to them. His “blue back spellers” were more or less standard up to the Civil War. It is useful to pause for a moment and consider what values Webster and the nation accepted when this work was being undertaken. 12

In a spelling book, one attempts to give a uniform spelling to words. In a dictionary, one attempts to give them a uniform meaning. In a grammar book, one attempts to establish uniform principles by which they are to be related to one another. What the dictionaries do in a somewhat indirect way the grammar books and the school system do in a most positive way. The direct connection between the instructor in grammar and the advancement of individual freedom is not transparent at least to the struggling freshman. Any spelling book or dictionary or grammar book is, at least in part, normative , that is, although it stands with one foot in the camp of common usage, with the other, it stands in the realm of the “should be.” In short, it attempts to set standards which will restrict acceptable usage within certain clearly defi ned—and often quite narrow—limits. Its entire thrust is in the direction of uniformity , not freedom.

Indeed, when such linguistic standards are set, much diversity, much freedom, is thereby lost. Many quaint modes of speech, of spelling, and of style are placed beyond the pale. Imaginative men of prose and poetry periodically rebel against this linguistic uniformity which many fi nd oppres-sive and some no doubt see—interesting phrase—as tyrannical. In such rebellions, the writer resorts to special modes in style, or spelling, or even typography, in the attempt to transmit the uniqueness of his experience or to transmit with a new freshness a common experience. There are many interesting examples of this in twentieth-century American poetry, ably summarized by Willard Thorp in his American Writing in the Twentieth Century . 13 One thinks, for example, of the imagists, such as Amy Lowell or Ezra Pound, or of the particular efforts made by e e cummings to com-municate the intensity and novelty of his experiences.

It is also signifi cant to note that this rebellion against “the tyranny of language” can go all the way—until the artist develops a wholly private language, designed to transmit the otherwise inexpressible uniqueness of


his own experience. In short, it can swing to a form of literary anarchy in which the artist gives expression to a wholly private realm of experience and makes very little (if any) attempt to communicate with others. We have discussed the implications of this earlier in the comments on “art for art’s sake.” Perhaps the most extreme literary manifestation of this anarchic tendency is seen in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , which surely represents the wasting of very rich talent. Here one sees Joyce, caught up in a form of egomania, babbling, as one critic put it, in a darkened corner to himself. The petty tyranny consequent to this repudiation of the social dimension of experience is seen in Joyce’s argument that others should devote their lives to the mastery of his private language. In short, they are advised to learn to “communicate” with Joyce by subordinating their being to his, by becoming the supple tools of his artistic and psychological imperialism. Equally extreme manifestations of this tendency can be seen in painting (e.g., Da Da, or Inji Inji, as discussed by John Baur in his excellent study of twentieth-century American painting). Whatever the apologia the critics may develop, I think we are right here when we follow our intuition that such aberrations represent a partial moral degeneration of a civilization rather than its esthetic fulfi llment.

These comments, however, take us from our main point which is that the concern for language is a clear illustration of the concern with uniformity in human relations, and it signifi es a support for order as a value. In these linguistic undertakings, the concern is with order, not with freedom. And why? Because it is understood (almost at the level of the group subconscious, so to speak) that much that is most valuable in human life comes from the easy interdependence of self with other and that language, as a mode of uniformity, can facilitate that interdependence. Much diversity, much freedom, is lost, but the gain made through having a uniform pattern of speech is considered to outweigh the loss. In short, one has given direct support to order as a value.

The second illustration of the support given to order as a value may be drawn from economics. Here the concern with order is persistent. On the most rudimentary level, this concern is shown in the effort to establish a uniform system of weights and measures and a uniform currency. From our own national experience, we know that the American economy was threatened with breakdown under the Articles of Confederation; under the Constitution, which established uniformity in the areas (particularly in the establishment of a uniform currency), the economy moved forward successfully. The contrast between trade within a nation and trade among

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nations is signifi cant. In international trade, there is no uniform currency and no uniform system of weights and measures. It is, of course, possible to carry on trade among nations, but it is clearly more diffi cult than it is domestically, and it involves time-consuming processes of monetary conversion and so on. Yet what is possible between economic units with different patterns of uniformity would be altogether impossible were there no patterns of uniformity. If monetary standards and standards of weights and measures shifted from every locale to every other locale, the modern economy would soon be reduced to innumerable local markets, with such exchange as existed among those tiny units being based primarily on barter. Hence money is a value (in more senses than one!) because, through it, society establishes a common standard in terms of which many different forms of activity may be measured, and this in turn make possible a far more complex division of labor than would otherwise be possible. 14

When we refl ect on this, we see that, once again, order is the precondition for freedom in that the uniformity resultant from the monetization of life makes possible the diversity of the division of labor. Order has again been shown to be the foundation which makes possible the enjoyment of subsequent forms of freedom.

However it is possible to discuss the role of money as a standard of uniformity on a second level. Since money is the measure of all other economic values, it should not itself change value any more than the yard or the ton—measures of physical quantities—should change value. One can imagine the diffi culties to which the natural sciences or the construction industries would be reduced if a ton meant one thing in 1945, another in 1953, and yet a third in 1964; one thing on Seattle, another in New York City, and a third in Austin. It is important to see that the fl uctuations to which I here refer are different from price changes, which are the lifeblood of the market economy. What we are here discussing is not a change in prices, but a change in the value of the unit by which prices are measured, that is, a general rise or a general fall in almost all prices, independent of fl uctuations of specifi c prices on top of the general rise or decline. And yet this general diffi culty does handicap economic life. The unit in terms of which all other economic values are measured, that is, money, itself fl uctu-ates, sometimes quite radically, in value. Hence everything measured in its terms fl uctuates. One of the most serious weaknesses of the classic liberal market economy was its inability to achieve effective stability in its monetary standard; the changing value of the standard of value itself was shown in vast infl ationary and defl ationary sweeps. We need not here detail


the political consequences of these instabilities. It is only necessary to point out that some of the most harmful of all the political consequences to befall the liberal tradition have been the result of its inability to establish a modicum of order in the economy in general and in the monetary stan-dard in particular. One thinks, in particular, of the twofold collapse of German monetary stability in the twenties, with all the dreadful political consequences that brought in its wake. Uncritical proponents of freedom are often liberalism’s worst enemies. When, indeed, one inspects the history of the liberal tradition, he is almost led to say that liberalism can protect itself from its enemies, if only God will protect it from its friends!

It is not necessary here to give further illustrations of the general argument. At a later stage, a discussion of the connection between the problem of community and the problems of law and the state will be given. At this point, it is useful to pull together the general threads of the argument and state the preliminary conclusions. In each of the examples discussed above, the establishment of basic uniformities was not an end in itself; their establishment made it possible to go ahead to the enjoyment of subsequent diversities. It is thus accurate to say that it is the achievement of certain form of freedom that supplies the rationale by which one acquiesces, in the name of order, in the loss of certain other forms of freedom . The common language makes possible the fl owering of a national literature. A uniformity of monetary standard is an indispensable prerequisite to a high specialization of labor, which is in turn a prerequisite to a higher standard of living, which is, in its turn, the means for freeing us from a preoccupation with the tasks of mere survival. In short, we are willing to sacrifi ce certain forms of diversity for an order which will make possible the assertions of diversities we value more highly. However this is a very far cry from the statement that diversity is the only value, freedom the only need. To argue in this manner is, in effect, to saw off the limb on which we are sitting: to imperil, in the name of freedom, the basic order without whose existence we would be unable to enjoy the very freedom we prize so highly. As I said at an earlier stage, it is possible, of course, to compress the meaning of the liberal tradi-tion into the concept “freedom” if this is used with suffi cient semantic refi nement. If one makes a clear and consistent distinction between the forms of “primordial” freedom man enjoys and the forms of “positive” freedom he enjoys after he has learned to integrate his wishes with the demands of his social environment, it is still possible to say that the central concern of liberalism is with “freedom.” But it is hard to keep the essential distinctions in mind, especially when the same word is used to depict two

168 W. JOHNSTON

radically different situations. It is for this reason that I have been concerned to sharpen the distinction and highlight the tension between the two forms of freedom, by putting the problem in dialectic terms. In all that follows, it is necessary to keep in mind the centrality of the problem of community in its several formulations: the relation of freedom to order, the relation of diversity to uniformity, of “primordial” freedom to “positive” freedom.

Our primary concern is with the problem of community at the political level, particularly in international politics. Of all the problems mankind has faced, I think the most diffi cult has been that of resolving the problem of community among large-scale human groupings. In science, by contrast, man has great achievements to his credit, as this atomic age or as the near-miraculous achievements of modern medicine testify. In the sphere of the arts, man has soared to the height of the human spirit and plumbed its depths, as the achievements of Shakespeare, or a Rembrandt, illustrate. In the sphere of satisfying man’s material needs, modern technology has opened up, in parts of the world, a horn of plenty undreamed of in earlier ages. When it comes to the problem of man’s relation with man in large-scale human groupings, the picture is far darker. The areas in which mankind has achieved a successful resolution to the problem of large-scale community stand like oases in an arid desert or islands in a stormy sea. The turbulent course of world history bears witness, by and large, to the failure of mankind to resolve this problem. That is why, today, in spite of the potentialities for human betterment which science and technology open up before us, we walk this razor’s edge near the abyss of destruction. For these reasons, I think it is a matter of the fi rst importance to study those areas of the world in which human beings have achieved a tolerable success in resolving, on the large scale, the problem of community.

From the preceding discussion, it is clear that the failure to resolve the problem may come either out of an inability to subordinate the drive for freedom and diversity to the need for a cohesive relation with others or out of a suppression, in the name of order, of the drive for freedom to a uniformity imposed by some dominant element in the society. In short, the rather delicate balance between freedom and order may be upset by a ten-dency to push the legitimate concern with freedom to an extreme of anar-chy or by a tendency to push the legitimate concern with order to the extreme of tyranny. A derivative problem of major importance centers on the question of the criteria and the institutions by which the line is drawn between freedom and order, between permissible diversity and necessary


uniformity, between legitimate and illegitimate exercises of freedom. This problem is discussed under the heading “the problem of legitimacy.” A key aspect of any political philosophy will be found in its analysis of legitimacy.

As philosophers from Plato on have seen, the two extremes of anarchy and tyranny tend to generate one another. If man’s urge for freedom is suppressed by a tyrannical regime, it usually generates opposition which issues in the violent overthrow of that regime. Likewise, unless man’s urge for freedom and assertion is restrained and related in some orderly fashion to the aspirations of others, endless strife will follow until some form of dictatorial regime emerges to quell that strife. Much of the history of large-scale human collectivities shows what may be called a dreadful oscillation between rather prolonged periods of tyranny and their relief by sharp outbreaks of revolutionary violence, which serve as mere interludes before the imposition of a new tyranny. There is a sense in which the political tradition of most peoples may be summarized in the phrase “despotism relieved by revolution.”

It is a central proposition that the primary achievement of the liberal tradition is to be found in the skill with which it has related these two ambivalent pressures to one another and hence the success with which it has broken the “dreadful cycle of oscillation” and moved into a process of peaceful change. Indeed, the clearest evidence that a nation has resolved the problem of community may be seen in its capacity to achieve change peaceably, for the problem of community, seen in its dynamic aspect, is the problem of the relation between stability and change. All expressions of freedom represent forces of actual or potential change that imperil a given equilibrium. The dynamic aspect of the problem of community has been discussed elsewhere in terms of the tension between stability and change, and it is only necessary here to make a brief reference to it. Our next task at this stage is to set this abstract formulation into historic terms. We have thus far been concerned with analysis ; it is now necessary to turn to history . But one more analytic note is necessary. We must show what is meant when we speak of the “world revolution.” This provides an effective bridge to an exploration of more concrete historical materials.

In our discussion of the “world revolution,” we may begin with a few remarks on the characteristics of the traditional society as described by Millikan and Blackmer in their study of The Emerging Nations . 15 The principal characteristics of traditional societies may be described as fi ve: fi rst, they are primarily agrarian, with over 75 % of the workforce engaged in the production of food. Seen from another point of view, what is missing

170 W. JOHNSTON

in the traditional society is the monetization of all economic activity and hence any extensive market economy or specialization of labor. Second, they are static or so very slowly changing as to seem virtually static. Evidence of this is seen in the stress put on the continuation of tradition—particularly family and religious traditions. The individual is fi rmly guided by a pattern of values passed down from father to son and from the leaders of the community to each new generation of the community. Third, some form of religious interpretation is usually given to the individual’s place in the cosmos, an interpretation which relates man’s quest for meaning and purpose to a cosmic design. Fourth, in social, economic, and political structures, these societies tend to be hierarchical, as seen in the traditional society of the West in feudalism. Finally, the basic unit is the locality; the great majority of individuals spend most of their life in the small, largely closed, “face-to-face” community.

In general terms, the Europe of the Middle Ages may be seen to fi t the pattern of a traditional society. During the Middle Ages, an integrated order was achieved that was later to be idealized by Henry Adams in Mt. St. Michel and Chartres and that some Catholic historians still look back upon with nostalgia (see, for example, the study Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries ). 16 The traditional society of the Middle Ages was integrated on both the meta-physical plane and the political and economic plane. It gave an answer to the questions about the ultimate meaning of human existence and the place of man in the universe through Christian theology, as interpreted by the priest-hood headed by the Pope. On the political and economic level, stabilization was achieved on the basis of feudalism, a decentralized and hierarchic political-economic structure in which the individual’s primary loyalties were to the local unit and to the universal church.

The stability of this traditional society is fi rst challenged on the meta-physical level, that is, the unifi ed view of man’s relation to the universe is broken apart and a diversity produced which has never since been ended. We shall return at a later stage to a discussion of the metaphysical and reli-gious dimensions of the problem of world unity. At this stage, it is useful to keep in mind that the main forces which broke apart the unifi ed world view of the Middle Ages were two really quite different spiritual forces. The fi rst force—science and the new learning—might be spoken of as a modern or progressive force, to use these terms imprecisely. The develop-ment of the scientifi c and naturalistic approach to the metaphysical question may be said to go through three stages: there is fi rst a period of doubt about the traditional religion and a period of searching for a new


formulation. The second period, which is seen in clearest form in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, rests on the assumption that science provides an optimistic and harmonious answer to the ultimate questions. In this new faith, it was felt that, in the spread of a scientifi c and rational outlook toward the universe, a new and universal metaphysic could be built. I have discussed the impact of this view on the theories of politics held by leading eighteenth-century thinkers elsewhere. It is useful here to bear in mind that this era was important for the development of American no less than European attitudes. The optimistic rationalism of the Newtonian world view (of which Deism was an offshoot) found prominent exponents in such fi gures as Locke, Franklin, and Jefferson. Many of the liberals, in the earlier stage of liberalism in particular, associated themselves with this outlook. One may see in James Mill, for example, a quite confi dent and dogmatic identifi cation of the liberal cause with the opposition to religion. In the twentieth century, this strand of thought remains strong; in the writings of John Dewey, one sees an effort to make a scientifi c and naturalistic humanism the foundations of the liberal orientation. However, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, this confi dent naturalism had begun to fi nd itself in a more troubled estate. For the world science reveals now came, more and more, to diverge from Newtonian harmony and to be colored by a Darwinian image of struggle, a Freudian revelation of irratio-nality, an Einsteinian indication of relativity and mystery. The important thing to keep in mind at this point is the fundamental difference between naturalistic metaphysics and a transcendent metaphysics. The former fi nds the ultimate reality to be embodied in some concept of nature—and usually in the concept delineated by scientifi c analysis. The latter insists on the reality of a world beyond nature and insists that no naturalistic philosophy can ever give a satisfactory answer to the ultimate questions. The naturalistic camp itself began to be rather deeply divided as new images of reality began to be revealed by science in the latter nineteenth century. On the one hand, a very powerful current of naturalistic pessimism emerged, one mirrored in many of the major novelists of twentieth-century America. On the other hand, efforts were made to restate, in spite of some rather discouraging evidence, the naturalistic outlook in optimistic fashion. John Dewey is probably the most signifi cant representative of this effort. In any case, the unity of naturalistic perspective, so very largely characteristic of the eighteenth century, has not been recaptured in our own.

It proved impossible to integrate fully the new learning and the scientifi c world view into the religious consensus inherited from the Middle Ages.

172 W. JOHNSTON

On the other hand, the many who felt it would be possible to fi nd in science and the new learning a basis for a universal metaphysic that would give man an acceptable answer to questions of his ultimate destiny were also destined to be frustrated. Behind all the political uncertainties of the modern era has therefore lain a massive metaphysical uncertainty. The unity of the traditional society, once broken, has not been achieved anew.

The second spiritual factor which contributed to the breakup of the medieval world view was to be found in the church itself and in the fact that the spiritual energies of the church were at a low ebb. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, refugee Greek scholars fl ed to the West and brought with them much of the classical learning. This, however, was not the fi rst time classical learning had made an impact on Western Christendom. When in the thirteenth century it was feared that the writings of Aristotle would undermine the religious unity of the West, by the presentation of an alternative secular metaphysics, Thomas Aquinas had proved the vigor of Christendom by integrating, with consummate skill, this new learning into a Christian framework. 17 What had proved possible in the thirteenth century was, however, to prove impossible in the sixteenth.

In reaction to the corruption within the church and to the extent that the church itself had fallen sway to the new secular forces of the Renaissance, various reform movements arose within Christianity. Luther looked on his own protests as similar to the reform movements of the earlier mendicant orders that had led to the inner revitalization of the church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this era, the church, however, did not exercise the vigor to reform in time, and the Counter Reformation came too late. The end result was the rupture in the unity of the Christian metaphysic.

It is important to see that the breaking of the medieval metaphysical unity was the result of two quite different spiritual forces moving in two quite different directions. Ernst Troeltsch has developed this argument in his celebrated essay in the Renaissance and Reformation. If, to use the terms loosely, science was a progressive force, Protestantism may be described as a reactionary force, not in a derogatory sense, but in the literal sense that it wished to restore the church to its pristine purity. It was in part a matter of chance that these two forces, moving in different directions, coincided in time, although it was the secular impact of the new learning that played some part in producing the religious reaction of the Reformation. Although different in origin and intent, the two forces were similar in effect. They broke apart the metaphysical unity of the


medieval world; they threw into question the problem of man’s relation to the universe and the ultimate meaning of his existence.

The forces were similar in another respect as well. For both involved a new emphasis on the individual and a belief that the answer to the ultimate questions could be found by the individual. Protestantism emphasized the conscience of the individual man, science his reason. Thus both felt that in an appeal to the elements of human nature, as distinct from tradition and authority, a new unity could be achieved. Both hopes ended in disillusion-ment. Protestantism seemed, throughout most of its history, to splinter in almost endless fashion. And reason proved to be very largely a formal notion, given quite different content by different individuals and different cultures. The possible contributions of the ecumenical movement and of a rational humanism to world unity will be dealt with later. We may leave this topic for the moment with the remark that, once the medieval unity was disrupted, several contenders for man’s religious allegiance came to compete. The three chief ones from the Western tradition were Roman Catholicism, Protestantism in its multiple forms, and scientifi c rationalism. The relation of the liberal tradition to these, and other “spiritual” contenders, is a problem that will give us concern at a later stage.

The traditional society of the medieval world rested on economic and political foundations as well as metaphysical ones. The decentralized feu-dal structure had rather clearly given way by the latter half of the fi fteenth century to consolidated territorial states. Developments in this direction occur in England, Spain, France, and Russia at about the same time. These changes reinforced the spiritual changes in bringing down the unity of the medieval world. Many princes welcomed Protestantism as a means of freeing them from the restraints of the church both internally and externally. The notion of sovereignty involved the assertion of the right of the territorial monarch against local authorities within and universal authorities without. It also involved a basic change in the unit that was to be the fundamental “actor” on the political stage. Hitherto the unit had been either the feudality locality or the loosely knit imperial structures. Both were now to take secondary roles to the territorial state.

The details of this transformation have been carefully charted by the historians and it is out of place to retrace that ground here. It is important, however, to say a word about the effect which the undermining of the traditional society of Western Europe had on world politics. Although the record of the transformation of Western Europe is itself of the greatest importance, it is of even greater importance to see that the transformation

174 W. JOHNSTON

of Western Europe was more than a local affair. It spilled over and set in motion what I call the world revolution. That is to say, the forces released by the transformation of the traditional society of Western Europe were so great that they spread far beyond Europe’s borders, caved in traditional societies around the world, and caught them up, by chain reaction, in the revolutionary momentum.

When the turbulent fl oods of the revolution in politics and technology beat against the shores of traditional cultures beyond Western Europe, there was a characteristic split within the traditional society. One group wanted to reinforce the traditional ways and drive out the unsettling infl uences; another group wished to push on with modernization and overcome the lag of its society. This split is seen, for example, in Japan, in Russia, and in China (and earlier, of course, in Western Europe itself). However, if the historic society is to survive at all, it is necessary that the modernists, at least eventually, win. If the traditionalists win, their victory will be a short-lived one. For to maintain the standards of the traditional society in the era of the world revolution means weakness, defeat, and subordination to outside powers—as was the fate of much of the world in the era of European predominance. The modernists themselves, however, may be seen to be divided between the conservative modernists (who triumphed in Japan under the Meiji Restoration) and the radical modernists (who triumphed in Russia and China under the auspices of Communism). Liberalism was a powerful agency in the process of the modernization of the traditional society of Western Europe.

This brings us to a word about Communism. A primary aspect of the transformation within Western Europe was the phenomenon of the class struggle and domestic upheaval; a primary aspect of the revolution on the world scene was the phenomenon of imperialism and international war. Marx caught much of the tension between the old and the new in Europe and focused on the class struggle as its essence. He had not been unaware that the class struggle in Europe has important implication for traditional societies beyond Europe, but his main emphasis was on the transformation of the traditional European order. Lenin, with a dogmatic brilliance, grasped the hidden unity to the entire course of modern history. For he sensed that the revolutionary tension in Western Europe, manifested in the class struggle, had become intertwined with the revolutionary transformation of traditional societies around the world, manifested in imperialism. He sensed that although Marx may have been in error in his underestimation


of the ability of Western European states to absorb the shock of change without revolutionary upheaval, he was right about the revolutionary impact of change on the world scene, particularly on the traditional cultures beyond Western Europe. Here the disintegration was far more widespread than it had been in Europe. This is one reason Communism continues to have great vitality as a political movement on the world scene, even though its predictions for the pattern of development of the Western world itself have proved false. Its predictions, as formulated by Lenin, for the course of world history as a whole have yet to be proved false.

If we try to put together the two analytic concepts we have explored up to this point, that is, “the problem of community” and “the world revolution,” we may describe the traditional society as one in which cohesion was achieved, but very largely as the price of the suppression of individual assertion. Order and stability were the primary traits of these traditional communities; freedom and change played far less signifi cant roles. Speaking of the economic dimension of life in traditional Europe, Heilbroner has said:

…the whole temper of guild life was still far removed from the goals and ideals of modern business enterprise. There was no free play of price, no free competition, no restless probing of advantage. Existing on the margin of a relatively moneyless society, the guilds perforce sought to take the risks out of their slender enterprises. Their aim was not increase, but preservation, stability, orderliness. As such, they were as drenched in the medieval atmosphere as the manors. 18

The problem of community was “solved” in part because it had hardly been joined, for there had been no vigorous evocation of individual or collective self-assertion.

The primary characteristic of the new era which emerged in Western Europe was the powerful assertion of individual and collective freedom. For a while, indeed, the assertion proved to be so powerful that it may be said to have upset, in the other direction, the equilibrium established in the traditional society. For there a rudimentary community had been achieved at the cost of leaving dormant man’s capacity for individual and collective self-assertion; now these forces were to be given such play that order and security were, for long, to prove impossible of achievement. The disintegration of the new era was to be seen, initially, in what Frederick Watkins has called “the crisis of secularization.” 19 Subsequently it was to

176 W. JOHNSTON

be seen in the persistence of revolution and war. The Renaissance itself revealed, in prophetic fashion, the troubled ambivalence that was to characterize the entire modern experience. For if the Renaissance awoke man from his “medieval sloth” and gave him a new sense of the potentialities of human freedom, the new vision was a very mixed one. On the one hand, it was a vision of great creativity, which found its fulfi llment in, say, a Michelangelo. On the other hand, it was a vision of great destructive power, which found its embodiment in a Cesare Borgia or in the “realism” of a Machiavelli, to whom freedom had come to mean the abandonment of the higher law.

It was on the world scene, however, that this ambivalence was to reveal itself most clearly—and most clearly there to our own age. The chief instrument of the ambivalence here has been technology: at once an instrumentality of great integrative potential and an instrumentality of unlimited destructive power. If one focuses on its integrative potential, it is seen as carrying mankind, irreversibly, toward world community. If one focuses on its destructive power, it seems destined to pull the human experiment, through the fi res of hell, to oblivion. To our own age, it is clear, however, that the sense in which technology has made mankind one is in terms of mutual interdependence—so that events in one part of the world have effects, often decisive effects, on every other part of the world. But interdependence is not community; the common bond of the handcuff makes the prisoner and the guard interdependent. Ours is an age shot through with the most profound incongruities. Since 1914, the “dreadful oscillation” seems to have characterized much of our history: from disintegration to the technologically reinforced tyranny of totalitarianism. We see major evidence of this in the reaction to World War I (which furthered Communism in Russia and Fascism in Italy): the Great Depression (which furthered Nazism in Germany and military dictatorship in Japan), World War II (which brought Communism to Eastern Europe and advanced it by long strides in China), and the revolution of developing nations (which leave in the balance the political future of the entire “southern” half of the globe). And we now have in our hands the fi nal instrumentality of disintegration in nuclear weapons.

It is from this perspective that we turn now, in the second part of this essay, to an exploration of the historic development of the liberal tradition, which has enjoyed unique success in its resolution of the problem of community.


NOTES 1. Heilbroner, x. 2. Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness , 3.

Emphasis mine. 3. J. Dewey (1922) Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry

Holt and Company). 4. Lippmann, The Good Society , 243 – 245. 5. We have been unable to fi nd this paper. 6. Carr, What Is History?, 28–29. 7. E. Fromm (1941) Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar &

Rinehart, Inc.), 10, 11. 8. S. Freud (1961) Civilization and Its Discontents , trans. James

Strachey (New York: Norton). 9. Watkins, 90–91. 10. Aristotle (1941) Politics , ed. Richard McKeon (New York:

Random House), 1263b29-35. 11. M. Freedman, The Washington Post ; March 18, 1963. Emphasis

mine. 12. R.H. Gabriel (1940) The Course of American Democratic Thought

(New York: The Ronald Press Company), 133. 13. W. Thorp (1960) American Writing in the Twentieth Century

(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press). 14. In Robert Heilbroner’s The Making of Economic Society , this point

has been elaborated with clarity. 15. M.F. Millikan and D.L.F. Blackmer (1961) The Emerging Nations

(Boston: Little Brown). 16. J.J. Walsh (1929) The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries (New

York: Catholic Summer School Press). 17. As Frederick Watkins has pointed out. Watkins, 63. 18. Heilbroner, 35–36. 19. Watkins, 62.


CHAPTER 8

In the previous section, we attempted to show in what sense the transition from the traditional order of the Middle Ages to the modern world was a revolutionary one, both within Western Europe and on the world stage itself. Within Western Europe, the initial disintegrative effect of the tran-sitional process was seen most clearly in what Frederick Watkins has called the “crisis of secularization.” 1 This prolonged period of religious strife, which reached its height in the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, was in good part the consequence of the decay of the religious unity of the Middle Ages. It was largely in reaction to the widespread disintegration which accompanied the revolutionary collapse of the traditional society that modern absolutism was born.

The chief integrative force at work in this revolutionary period was the political movement represented by the “new monarchs.” At this stage, the modernists were those who wished to see the integrative forces pushed. In Spain, the period is marked by the union of Aragon and Castile in the mar-riage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469. As I mentioned in the previous section, there were comparable developments in France (with the begin-ning of the Valois-Bourbon era) and in England (with the beginning of the Tudor-Stuart era). Beyond the confi nes of Western Europe, in the Russia of Ivan III, one can see similar integrative pressures at work, although it is a mistake to relate them in any direct fashion to the developments in Western Europe. At the level of theory, Machiavelli and Hobbes may be taken as the primary examples of theorists who support the integrative


180 W. JOHNSTON

efforts of the new monarchs. The Prince and The Leviathan remain as enduring testaments to this view of politics. Hobbes and Machiavelli looked upon order as the primary value. They saw liberty as a vestigial remnant of feudalism. This outlook is seen most clearly in Hobbes who takes a derogatory attitude toward the common law and natural law as well as toward freedom of opinion or of religion. In the essay on the his-torical approach to the theory of international relations, I have discussed the relation between truth and political necessity at greater length. It is important at this stage to note that, in the philosophy of Hobbes, one sees put forth with startling clarity the view that the standard of truth is to be determined by the conviction of what is politically necessary. Hobbes takes the need for order to be overwhelming; this need is the determinant of what he will accept as “true.”

I do not want to elaborate this point here, since I have discussed it else-where, but its importance must be stressed. For the notion that is taken as axiomatic in the liberal tradition—that there is a realm of truth separate and removed from what the ruler says is “true”—is a revolutionary notion. It could be sustained only in societies possessed of suffi cient cohesion to allow the leaven of doubt to operate. Hitherto the prevailing notion had been that truth is what the soldier-priests say is true. The fi rst “classic” for-mulation of this view is found in Plato’s Republic , with its rationalization of the “golden lie,” and wherever the view is accepted, it has as its corol-lary the advocacy of some form of antidemocratic elitism. 2 We see another illustration of this outlook in the philosophy of enlightened despotism, where despotism is the corollary of the conviction that there exists a sci-ence of society. The governance of the present-day priest-kings of Russia and China, in which truth is the creature of political necessity as revealed in the party line, is thus closer to the “norm” of historic experience than the radical notion of a truth independent of the political order which is seen in liberalism. The liberal notion, in fact, owes more to the prophetic insights of the Biblical tradition than it does to the classic heritage—more to Israel than Plato. The treatment of human relations as a branch of “sci-ence” (part of Hobbes’ inheritance from the Greeks) is inevitably accom-panied by a tendency to violate the ethical imperative and, if carried out in consistent fashion, has as its corollary a monstrous injustice. The begin-ning of wisdom in political analysis is the recognition of the limitations, rather than the possibilities, of the techniques which have been found useful in the analysis of natural phenomena. But I have spelled this out at much greater length in the abovementioned essay and need not go further


at this point; the most important thing to see is that the leading political thinkers of this era took order to be the central value and order was not felt to be compatible with any real measure of diversity. The most extreme formulation of this outlook is seen in Hobbes’ notion that truth is what the sovereign says is true. There is a sense in which Jean Bodin may be related to this school of thought, though there are constitutional empha-ses in his philosophy which set him apart from the absolutists.

Thus, with the collapse of the traditional medieval order, there fol-lowed a disintegration so pervasive that there took place a reaction (in accordance with classic cyclic theory) toward integration on a despotic basis. Absolutism was the political aspect of this reaction. However the integrative forces found more than a political expression. Political absolut-ism had its corollary in economic absolutism, that is, in mercantilism. It also had its religious, or spiritual, dimension, and this found expression in the notion of the need to unify church and state: the head of the state was at the same time to be the head of the church. Thus, in the fi rst phase of the political history of the modern West, absolutism was the characteristic structure and order the central goal. Absolute monarchy represented the nation organized in its political dimension, mercantilism the nation orga-nized in its economic dimension, and the state church the nation orga-nized in its spiritual dimension.

However the very concentration of power and authority necessary to subdue “feudal particularism” (and to counteract the disintegration which accompanied the collapse of the traditional system) in the name of order became oppressive to the diversities which sought expression against this concentration of power in the name of freedom. Thus we witness an ironic sequence of developments: no sooner was the modern state built (in the name of order) than efforts were made to restrain it (in the name of freedom). There is thus a link, as Louis Hartz has pointed out, between liberalism and feudalism, in that both stand for diversity, or freedom, against the concentrated power of the state. 3 But a fundamental differ-ence remains: the freedom which liberalism advocated was not a threat to order in its most fundamental sense, as had been the liberty of feudal particularism. On the contrary, the freedom liberalism advocated presup-posed and was built upon order established in the age of absolutism. In a historic sense, as well as an analytic one, we see the intimate dependence of freedom upon order. Because it is in England that the contours of the new system are fi rst delineated, we may now turn to a brief consideration of the English experience.

182 W. JOHNSTON

It was long assumed that England, in its political evolution, would follow the characteristic “modern” pattern, and under the Tudor-Stuarts (particularly James I), English political evolution did seem to parallel that of the continent. But, in truth, it had become clear by the latter half of the seventeenth century (and one can go back farther than this if he chooses) that the English political tradition had begun to diverge in a most sig-nifi cant way from that of the continent . It was in this divergence that the emergence of liberalism is to be found . And it was this divergence that, in my view, was to make Britain the most revolutionary political force in modern history. Put in its simplest terms, the revolutionary nature of the British achievement lay in the demonstration that the cohesion of large- scale human collectivities was compatible with the existence of widespread diversity. In short, the British showed that it was possible to moderate the oppressive uniformity characteristic of absolutism and still preserve cohesion.

It is important to see that, in the abstract, the assumption of most prior theorists would have been that the British experiment was destined to fail. As we have just seen, the most prominent theorists of the early modern period saw order as the primary value and felt that an emphasis on free-dom was an invitation to anarchy. And if one goes back before Machiavelli to the classic period, I think the story is much the same. We, in our desire to establish a venerable ancestry for constitutionalism, are inclined (in my view) to grossly exaggerate the continuities that exist between modern constitutionalism and that of Greece. We must always bear in mind the time scale of the Greek experiment with constitutionalism. And Aristotle, in his inability to conceive of a large state governed in a constitutional manner, would, in his own way, have been dubious of the British prospects as would Hobbes. Both, I feel, would have looked upon despotism as the “natural” form of government for a territory as vast as that of Britain. And to move forward to the eighteenth century, Rousseau, with his longing for the ancient classic sense of community, nevertheless argued that it could be realized only in the city-state.

The uniqueness of the British experience is even more clearly revealed when we consider the stress that came to be placed on toleration, on freedom of thought, and—in America—on separation of church and state. The separation of dogma from state, and the passionate defense of freedom in the realm of ideas given by a Milton or a Mill, was incon-ceivable to virtually any theorist before this time. Hobbes, Machiavelli, Plato, Rousseau all assumed that a fundamental agreement on doctrine


(indeed fundamental uniformity) was essential to the preservation of order. They felt freedom of religion would destroy the capacity of a society to achieve cohesion. There are important respects in which the American carry the British experiment farther than the British them-selves. One illustration of this is Jefferson’s battle for religious liberty in Virginia, a quite unparalleled undertaking. In my paper on “the American Character,” I have developed the above theme. 4

If then it be admitted that the relation of the British experience to prior theory is to be found more in the breach than in the promise, we are led to ask where the basis of the new system is to be found and how its operation is to be accounted for.

Liberalism may be said to emerge as a protest against the centralization of political, economic, and spiritual power characteristic of absolutism. In the political sphere, liberalism derived much of its meaning from an assault on the monistic concept of sovereignty. It reduces to obscurity a deeply signifi cant historic process if we attempt to embrace under the same term “sovereignty” institutional arrangements as diverse as the checks and bal-ances which came to characterize the British system and the absolute mon-archy of the continental. In the effort to fi nd an institutional basis for its attack on monistic sovereignty, the liberal movement was led to reach back to institutions which had been operative before the kings had consoli-dated power in their hands. De Ruggiero opens his History of European Liberalism with these words:

“In France, liberty is ancient; despotism is modern.” These words of Madame de Stael are not without historic truth. Liberty is an older thing than the absolutism of modern monarchy, because it has its roots in feudal society. 5

The crucial question for the development of liberalism was: Could these traditional institutions be revived and made effective as restraints on the crown? In England, such a revival and adaption proved possible.

Through the diversifi cation of the institutions of government power, it was possible to move to a community in which no one institution pos-sessed sole sovereign power, with the consequent threat of tyranny. The Hobbesian conception of sovereignty was repudiated. Locke was the most celebrated fi gure who gave expression to this assault, and it is of deep sig-nifi cance that he relates himself (in the Second Treatise ) to the “judicious Hooker,” who was characteristically medieval in his outlook. Thus Locke

184 W. JOHNSTON

reaches across the early modern experience, across the Tudor-Stuart era, back to join hands with the medieval roots of English constitutionalism.

Coke is another great fi gure in this liberal protest against absolutism, and his challenge (in the name of the common law) was to James I’s notion of divine right. Edward S. Corwin (in his study of The “Higher Law” Background of the American Constitution ) describes this memorable encounter between Coke and James I:

On Sunday morning, November 10, 1608, Coke and “all the judges of England, and the Barons of the Exchequer” faced James I at Hampton Court to confute the notion which had been instilled in him by Archbishop Bancroft that, inasmuch as the judges were but his delegate, he was entitled to decide cases in his own person. “The judges informed the king, “Coke records, “that no King after the Conquest assumed to himself to give any judgment in any case whatsoever, which concerned the administration of justice within this realm, but these were solely determined in the courts of justice…” To this the king answered that “he thought the law was founded on reason, and that he and others had reason, as well as the Judges”; but Coke pointed out the fallacy of this view on the following words:

True it was, that God had endowed his Majesty with excellent science, and great endowments of nature; but his Majesty was not learned in the laws of his realm of England, and causes which concern the life, or inheritance, or goods, or fortunes of his subjects, are not to be decided by natural reason, but by the artifi cial reason and judgments of the law, which law is an act which requires long study and experience, before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it; and that the law was the golden met-wand and measure to try the causes of the subjects; and which protected his Majesty in safety and peace.

“The King,” the report continues, “was greatly offended,” saying that “then he should be under the law, which was treason to affi rm,” to which Coke responded in Bracton’s words; “ Quod Rex non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege .” 6

It is important that the implications of the above discussion be seen, for they show that constitutional government, as it emerged in England, had to it a heavily medieval component. It was, so to speak, the concept of sovereignty of the absolute monarch integrated with, and restrained by, the medieval tradition which antedated it. Or, to put this in more abstract words, it rested on the recognition that the state is both neces-sary and dangerous. It is therefore a profound error to speak of con-


stitutionalism—the political dimension of liberalism—as a wholly or a primarily modern phenomenon and set it in contrast to a preconstitu-tional medieval outlook. In an important sense, absolutism was a more characteristically “modern” phenomenon than was constitutional-ism. This shows, I think, the soundness of the Burkean insight that a sound political tradition builds upon traditional foundations rather than attempting wholesale repudiation.

When one glances at the French experience, I think one can say that Montesquieu tries to do for France in the eighteenth century what Locke had done for England in the seventeenth. That is, he attempted to revive premodern institutions as restraints on the despotism of the Bourbons. And in this attempt he was subjected to criticism by the “enlightened” proponents of despotism, who looked upon him as medieval and them-selves as modern. However, France proved incapable, at least at this stage of development, of achieving the sort of balance of freedom and order toward which England had taken important strides.

Just as absolutism had more than a political dimension, the liberal pro-test was more than a political one. If mercantilism may be viewed as the economic counterpart of absolutism, the free market may be viewed as the economic counterpart of constitutionalism. For the free market was supposed to do for the economy what constitutionalism had done for the political community, that is, to make it possible to moderate the oppres-sive uniformity of mercantilism in the name of diversity and yet still pre-serve an effective cohesion. In short, the effort was to bring freedom and order, diversity and uniformity, into a relationship in which they would sustain one another in a mutually enriching harmony, rather than lock in confl ict. The great theoretical formulation of the economic pattern was, of course, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations . However it is well to bear in mind that Adam Smith looked upon this endeavor as but a specifi c aspect of a far more basic and general problem. This problem (which Smith took to be the essence of the moral problem and with which he had grappled in his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments ) was that of relating indi-vidual interest to the common interest, that is, the problem of community. What excited him in his economic analysis was the conviction that, in the harmony of the market system, he had found the answer to a problem far more basic than the economic problem.

Finally, we have argued that the spiritual dimension of absolutism was seen in the insistence on the union of church and state. The liberal coun-terpart to the absolutist notion of a state-controlled doctrine was the exten-

186 W. JOHNSTON

sion of the notion of the free market from the economy to the realm of ideas as well. Frederick Watkins has put the analogy in the following words:

During the religious controversies of the seventeenth century, exceptional men like John Milton and Roger Williams had already come forward with the proposition that the religious interests of mankind would prosper best by allowing every variety of religious opinion to circulate freely, submit-ting rival doctrines to the conscientious judgments of men. This concept of religious toleration was adopted by the Enlightenment, and used as the basis for a more comprehensive theory of intellectual freedom. According to this theory, the goal of intellectual life is to maximize the discovery and diffusion of rationally verifi able truth. If all forms of opinion are allowed to compete freely, the rational judgment of individuals will ultimately suffi ce to distinguish truth from error. The imposition of legal restraints, by exclud-ing potentially useful ideas from the scope of rational discussion, forces the public to accept an inferior intellectual product, and deprives the producers of an invaluable chance to improve the quality of their work. 7

The great triad in the emerging liberal tradition was constitutionalism, the market economy, and freedom of expression. All may be seen as aspects of an effort to move beyond the absolutist conception of community, with its stress on the primacy of order; diversity and uniformity may be related to each other in a self-sustaining harmony. In the skill with which it was able to build community on this basis is found the great achievement of liberalism.

As we study this unique British experience, it is also necessary to bear in mind the “organic” as distinct from the “spiritual” bases which may be said to have underlain it. What we are interested in is the means by which the vicious circle [triggered by the breakup] of the traditional society is broken and the cyclic variation from tyranny to anarchy is contained. If we take a leaf from the writings of those who have analyzed the prob-lems of economic growth (such as W.W. Rostow or Robert Heilbroner), we may ask: What initial “political capital” did the British possess which made it possible for them to begin this upward-moving process of politi-cal growth? Two broad factors, suggested by Frederick Watkins, may be singled out. England, in contrast to continental countries, was rela-tively well centralized in the Middle Ages. As a result, its representative institutions tended to be general, rather than merely provincial. What is more, in England, parliament was divided into two estates, rather than the three characteristic of France, which may have added plausibility to


the parliamentary claim that it was a national agency, able to speak for the community as well as (and perhaps better than) the monarchy. A second element, also stressed by Watkins, was the result of England’s unique geo-graphic position. In his words:

In countries lacking the natural defense of England’s insular position, the fact that a strong royal army was needed for protection against the evils of foreign invasion also served as a powerful argument in favor of absolute monarchy. 8

Here one is led back, in the attempt to explain the uniqueness of the British experience, to the recognition of two conditions, both of which have in them an “organic” element: fi rst, that England had been more centralized in the Middle Ages than most other countries of Europe (a condition in itself not unrelated to Britain’s island position) and, second, that England enjoyed a wider margin of security than the continental countries, a condition related in intimate fashion to her island position. The consequences were of great signifi cance for British political evolu-tion. For they made it possible in England for a wide diversity of inter-ests to operate without the fear that the nation’s basic security would be imperiled. In short, in England, it was not necessary to press the claims of “order” as relentlessly as on the continent, and it proved easier to rec-oncile the need for cohesion with a rather broad play of diverse interests.

At this point, we may attempt a summary generalization. Where the consolidating process of modern monarchy was never really effective (as in the Germanys) or where it was so effective that the “feudal remnants” of diversity within the society were not merely “civilized” but were rooted out and destroyed (as was largely the case in France or in Russia), then the type of balanced society (with its corollary of the Lockean limited state, which in the liberal tradition we are accustomed to take as the norm) proved to be impossible of establishment. What we are led to suggest, then, is that the balance between freedom and order, which we have just discussed on the theoretical level, is in truth a complex balance between great historic phases in a nation’s history. The balance of institutions itself is at least in part a balance of interests as, for example, with the parliament and the common law taken as representative of the more traditional inter-ests, whereas the monarchy was captured, in some degree, by the “mod-ernizing” interests. This will perhaps be seen with greater clarity if we look briefl y at alternative national experiences.

188 W. JOHNSTON

One might argue that in France the process of consolidation began later but was carried further than in England. As we have mentioned before, the Estates-General in France had little of the vitality of the English par-liament, in part because of its rigid division into three estates that could hardly pretend to speak for any genuine national interests. What is more, when the French attempted to moderate the strictures of absolutism through revolutionary action, they found themselves under severe pres-sures from without, and this external pressure altered the entire tenor of the revolutionary experience in France. Thus the attempt to moderate the order of absolutism in the name of the freedom of liberalism was a far more troubled undertaking in France than in England, and its conse-quences were far less certain.

The American experience also differed from the British, but in a way that was, so to speak, the opposite of the way in which the French experi-ence differed. That is to say, if the French liberal experiment seems more troubled and uncertain than the British, the American seems smoother and more certain. In part, this was because the British were the pioneers in the liberal experiment; the Americans were the second wave of settlers who came after the “primeval political forest” had already been partly cleared. The American experience, important as it was, was nevertheless in its fi rst diffi cult stages largely derivative from the British. Indeed, it was the fi ve-generation experience under British imperialism that constituted the richest source of initial “political capital” the American possessed when they attempted to move into the stage of self-sustaining political growth.

Three illustrations of the way in which we drew upon this capital reserve may be briefl y mentioned. First, under the long period of “salu-tary neglect” by London, the empire was in fact (if not in theory) a feder-ation, with a division of powers between the central authority in London and the regional authorities in the various colonies. Andrew McLaughlin has stressed this point in his constitutional history of the USA. 9 The Americans, in short, enjoyed a working experience with a system of divi-sion of powers which later carried over into the structure of their own federal system. In the second place, by their long experience with the colonial governments (where the tension between royal governor and popular legislature was a reproduction, on a smaller scale, of the great constitutional contests in England), the colonists had learned to work with a system of separation of powers. Their experience in this regard was enriched, through indirection, by the study of Locke’s classic formula-tion of the meaning of the Glorious Revolution, as well as by their careful


training in the common law. Thus, in the system of separation of powers, which was another key device of American liberalism, they drew heavily on the British experience. Finally, in the notion that certain basic rights, such as habeas corpus, were to be guaranteed to the citizen by law against the state, they were once again drawing on deep resources of the British experience.

Of course, the American environment itself was another powerful source of “political capital,” and here too three elements may be stressed: the economic, as seen in the favorable land-man ratio, or in the broader effects of the frontiers, as stressed by Turner; social, particularly the absence of a deeply rooted traditional order, as stressed by de Tocqueville and later by Louis Hartz; and international, the “free security” emphasized by Vann Woodward. 10

The consequence of the interaction of these two great factors, the British constitutional tradition and the abundant American environment, was to present an environment even more favorable than the British to the liberal experiment. It was to provide an environment in which the problem of community would present itself mainly in terms of a preoccupation with freedom, because the bases of order could so largely be taken for granted. It is in this sense that the general limitations of the liberal perspective are intensifi ed in the American variant of liberalism.

Nevertheless, even in this favorable setting and with this favorable inheri-tance, the American experience, at least initially, goes through stages, which suggest that it may have been caught up in the sterile cycle. This may be seen in the contrast between the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the spirit of the Constitution. In the fi rst, the problem of politics was seen primarily in terms of the importance of freedom and it had as its insti-tutional corollary the Articles of Confederation. Its spiritual embodiment was Jefferson. In the second, the problem of politics was seen primarily in terms of the need to restrain a society near disintegration through the estab-lishment of a more effective basis of order, and its spiritual embodiment is Hamilton, with his emphasis on the need for a powerful and centralized national state. The balance struck was embodied in the Constitution itself, and it is Madison who perhaps stated the central problem of politics better than anyone else when he argued, in The Federalist Papers , that:

In setting up a government of men over men the diffi culty lies in this, that you must fi rst enable the government to control the governed and then compel it to control itself. 11

190 W. JOHNSTON

Thus the American revolutionary experience was a “condensed synthesis” of the British revolutionary experience, with this interesting difference: in the British case, the synthesis moves from Hobbes to Locke, while in the American case, it moves from Locke to Hobbes. This ironic contrast in itself brings out the ambivalent foundations of liberalism and makes it clear that the liberal tradition may be undermined if its quest for balance is upset in either direction.

We thus see that liberalism may falter if the balance on which it depends is upset in either direction—in a Lockean direction if (in a too pure pursuit of freedom) it undermines the power of the state; in a Hobbesian direc-tion if (in a too pure pursuit of order) it exalts the power of the state. Because of the factors suggested earlier, the tendency of American liberal-ism has been to veer toward the Lockean extreme. It is therefore necessary at this stage to elaborate on the important contributions made by the state to the success of the American experiment.

We argued earlier, by analogy, that the possession of a certain basic “political capital” made it possible for the American liberal tradition to avoid the dreadful oscillation between tyranny and anarchy. The role of the state may be put in terms of this analogy. Without an effective state, this initial political capital would have been squandered (as indeed it was in process of being under the Articles of Confederation); with an effective government, this capital was wisely “invested” and it multiplied.

The fi rst means through which the state makes its contribution is in the establishment of a basic framework of order and security. The analysis of Hobbes is in an important sense true here. Morality is the “creation” of the law in the sense that it is impossible for a moral climate to grow in any general way without the existence of a basic security, and in most circumstances, the state is essential in the provision of this security. Once a foundation of security is established and once the neutral agency of the state exists to protect each man against the other, the “war of all against all” is contained. From the very pervasiveness of this basic security, an atmosphere of mutual trust, of give and take, can grow. However such attitudes cannot, in most insistences, effectively precede the establishment of a state. The circularity of the dilemma stems from the fact that unless a modicum of mutual trust exists to begin there is not a suffi cient initial cohesion to make it possible to establish, by consent, a state. Since this initial mutual confi dence is largely dependent on the existence of organic uniformities, we are led to the conclusion that, where these uniformi-ties are absent, it may prove impossible to generate “political takeoff”


under liberal auspices. It is for this reason that the diffi culties in the way of getting the initial political momentum with which to launch the lib-eral experiment are so formidable in many of the nations of the world today. The only alternative under these circumstances may be some form of authoritarianism. Such authoritarianism has, however, in most historic instances been merely a phase in the vicious cycle, rather than a prelude to political development. Of course, no foolproof generalization is possible here, and when we turn to contemporary issues, we shall have to take a look at the particular conditions of each case.

Our summary point at this stage is that the mutual trust which is an essential element of morality can grow only in a framework where basic order and minimal security are largely taken for granted. It is in this sense that Hobbes is correct and that the state does precede morality.

The second respect in which the state makes a vital contribution to the growth of a liberal community is through the establishment of precondi-tions which make possible the operation of the exchange economy. Put in general terms, the most basic of these is the condition of mutual trust itself. For the commercial spirit cannot function (or it can function only in halting, broken, uncertain fashion) in conditions where this basic trust is not widely operative. The very notion of “credit” is impossible without such trust, as Carl Friedrich has pointed out in his discussion of what he calls the “timet” economy under totalitarianism. 12 It may be suggested that one of the reasons the exchange economy has functioned with such unparalleled vigor in America is that the preconditions of security are here operative in so pervasive a fashion. The commercial spirit cannot create this elemental security. Once it is existent, it can, however, sustain and defend it. Its creation is dependent on the interaction of the state with the organic setting in a way suggested above.

This general proposition may be seen more clearly if we look at the role of the new government established at Philadelphia. One of the great achievements of the new government was the sweeping away of barri-ers to the development of a more effi cient division of labor. The govern-ment of the Articles of Confederation had been unable to do this, and the economy was in desperate condition by 1786. Under the grand vision of Hamilton and through the great decisions of Marshall, the political bar-riers to a more effi cient division of labor were largely removed. Through the guarantee of private property and sanctity of contract, though the provision of a national banking system and a national currency, a powerful

192 W. JOHNSTON

stimulus was given to the market economy, and the network of economic interests multiplied mightily.

We may attempt to summarize the above argument in the following generalizations (which I have touched on at the conclusion of my paper on “Relevant Utopias: The Pattern of Transformation”). 13 The process of development of a political community may be said to be that of an upward-moving spiral. A certain “organic” level of cohesion is necessary at the outset if the process of growth is to begin under liberal auspices at all. This initial cohesion must then, however, be diversifi ed by actions which the state takes. Within the framework of new circumstances made possible by the action of the state, more tissue of common interest may be formed. This new tissue, in its turn, is able to support fi rmer and more comprehensive institutions which, in their turn, create conditions under which the bonds of common interests multiply. It is when, in this manner, success sustains success that the community may be said to have moved into political maturity.

It follows from the above account that there is an important sense in which community is the creation of the state and in which government does (in I.L. Claude’s phrase) “deposit its own foundations.” To be sure, the state cannot (at least in any short period of time and without a reli-ance on despotic practices) create the “initial political capital” on which it, itself, must rest. As Reinhold Niebuhr has said:

The police power of a government cannot be a pure political artifact. It is an arm of the community’s body. If the body is in pieces the arm cannot integrate it. 14

However, as Niebuhr himself would admit, this is only partially true. For the healthy arm can aid in the restoration of the sickened body to well-being. The state, in relation to the broken community, can at times do the same. In short, the relation of the state and the community is one of complex interdependence.

This may be seen, fi nally, if we look at the use Lincoln made of the state in the Civil War. If one had taken the view (with which, apparently, Buchanan sympathized) that the state is simply the arm of the community and that if the community is broken that state cannot preserve it, the only course would have been to “let the erring sisters go.” The response of Lincoln was radically different. It was to use the power and author-ity of the state to save the community or, if you will, to create a new


community. The task of that state may, therefore, be said to be (in the words of A.D. Lindsay) “to make the community more of a community.” 15

The early liberal view of the state fell into serious error, however, when it became associated with the dogmas of laissez-faire and with the assump-tion that, from a particular set of circumstances, a timeless generalization about the proper role of the state could be made. Laissez-faire liberalism rested on the assumption that the state could intervene at one stage in the historic process, to clear the way for the effective operation of the market economy with the guarantee of private property, of sanctity of contract, and so on, and once this had been done, all that was necessary had been done. In short, the state had guaranteed the conditions under which the market could operate, and the market would take care of the rest. This view rested on a utopian faith in self-balancing that grossly exaggerated the extent to which the market had brought about a harmonious resolu-tion between the individual and common interest, between freedom and order. The belief that, after the foundations had been laid, the market would operate in happy harmony proved in error, and the conclusion drawn from it with regard to the role of the state was also in error. The liberal tradition came later to realize that the role of the state in the social process had to be continuous if progress was to be made toward the liberal ideal of community.

To put this issue in other words, laissez-faire theory assumed that a set of rules of competition could be established which would, once and for all, be just, and it tried to freeze within a fi xed framework these laws of com-petition. There came to be expressed in an antithesis between society, the repository of man’s virtues, and the state, an agency necessary to restrain man’s vices. This narrow version of liberalism was to handicap severely that tradition’s ability to deal with the problem of community in an advanced technological society. In particular, liberalism was handicapped by the false laissez-faire notion that the role of the state could be treated as a constant.

Before we explore the ways in which laissez-faire liberalism handi-capped the “ecumenical” liberal tradition, it is only fair to say something about the important contributions made by laissez-faire to liberalism. In the fi rst place, this narrow version of liberalism rightly sensed the danger which would come from the unrestricted exercise of state power. As we saw earlier in our discussion, liberalism rests on the ambivalent insight that the state is both necessary and dangerous. Laissez-faire gave powerful expression to this latter dimension of the liberal ambivalence. Secondly, the competitive market in important ways advanced effi ciency. There

194 W. JOHNSTON

were admirable traits associated with the early advocates of unrestrained enterprise, the bourgeoisie who formed the core of liberalism in its initial phase. The commercial and industrial classes possessed traits of energy, ini-tiative, intelligence, and decisiveness, which made them a more dynamic force in the society of the old regime than the now softened traditional nobility or the hide-bound landowners. They brought the economy to a level of effi ciency never before achieved under the more restrictive regime of the old order. Marx pays powerful tribute, in The Communist Manifesto , to the dynamic character of the bourgeoisie. We all, as consumers, have an interest in being able to buy goods for the highest quality at the lowest prices, and the competitive market was more successful in meeting this demand for effi ciency than had been a restrictive mercantilism. In this regard, “society” may be said to have an interest in effi ciency, and the market economy may be said to have satisfi ed that interest in effi ciency more fully than did the mercantilist economy. Finally, the bourgeoisie had a rugged reliance on their own powers and a willingness to measure a man by his achievements, rather than his hereditary rank, and this, I feel, represented a more defensible standard of justice in terms of which to allocate reward than did the standards of the ancien régime . Thus, in some respects, the market economy satisfi ed society’s interest in justice as well as society’s interest in effi ciency. It thus had some solid ground on which to base its claim that it had brought about a harmony between the individual interest and the common good, and it made contributions of a most sig-nifi cant sort to the liberal tradition.

However, when all is said and done, there remained severe limitations to the laissez-faire stage of liberalism, particularly in the notion that the terms of competition in the market, once fairly set, would continue to operate in a just manner throughout future time. For it is probably impossible to establish rules of competition which do not, to some degree, benefi t one group of contenders more than they do others. In this respect, it is true to say that the laissez-faire liberals generalized principles, which served their own interest, to the society as a whole under the guise of the harmony of interest doctrines. (This, of course, is the charge made in sweeping fashion by Marx and in a milder form by E.H. Carr.) However, even if one admits that it is possible to establish tolerably just rules of competition at any one stage in the historic process, it is clear that, as the economy itself under-goes major changes, the rules of competition must likewise be subject to recurrent revision. Since the primary agency through which such adjust-ment is to be accomplished is the state, the role of the state in the social


process was falsely treated as a constant by laissez-faire liberalism. This was the great defi ciency of the fi rst phase in the development of liberalism.

To look at this problem in greater detail, we may say that the factors which brought about fundamental changes in the society, and that neces-sitated a changed role for government in the social process, were three. First, there were certain inherent diffi culties in the market system itself. It came to seem that the results of free competition were the destruction of free competition; that, with the growth of great concentrations of eco-nomic power, the “big fi sh would swallow up the little fi sh” and the mar-ket system would be brought to an end by its own inner workings. This fear troubled Wilson and Brandeis and led to the notion (which found expression in Wilson’s “New Freedom”) that the state must intervene in more active fashion in the market economy in order to preserve the market against itself. What is more, the notion in the laissez-faire tradition—that labor was a commodity whose price was to be set by supply and demand—created a distress among the working class which could be remedied only through the achievement, on its part, of some measure of equality with management. It was led to turn to the state as the agency though whose action (as in the protection of collective bargaining and the provision of minimum wages) a measure of equality could be achieved. Agriculture was in a position broadly similar to that of labor in that it found itself at a considerable disadvantage in the market economy. The response of the agricultural interests was similar (in many instances) to the response of labor, that is, they turned to the state as an agency to assist them in mitigating their disadvantages in the free market. More general than this, however, was the concern over certain instabilities in the entire market mechanism—refl ected in infl ation and defl ation and the widespread suf-fering consequent upon these instabilities. Certain instabilities had been taken as inseparable from, and normal to, the operation of the market. But the extent of the suffering and dislocation of the Great Depression had not been foreseen, and in such measures as the Employment Act of 1946 and the establishment of the Council of Economic Advisers, the effort was made to use the state to prevent the recurrence of such widespread instabilities.

A second factor which brought about a change of outlook toward the role of the state in the society was a “glacial” shift in public attitude toward a more critical estimate of the free market. In part, this shift was manifested in a concern (in the name of order) to control the instabili-ties of the market. In part, it was manifested in a concern (in the name

196 W. JOHNSTON

of justice) to mitigate its inequalities. The great reform movements of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America gave expression to this shift in public attitude. The third factor which brought about the change in attitude was the massive pressure from without. This is seen in the strain which war and cold war have put on the peacetime functioning of the market economy. This strain begins with the breakdown of the rail-road system in World War I and continues to our own time in the impact of an immense military budget (which is in effect a semi-socialized part of the economy) on the private sector.

It is important to see, as clearly as possible, the basic nature of the shift in the liberal attitude toward the role of the state in society. The spirit of the earlier liberalism was caught in Tom Paine’s notions that:

Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; soci-ety is a blessing but government is a necessary evil. 16

The spirit of the newer liberal attitude is clearly foreshadowed in the words used by Wilson in his “New Freedom” speeches in the 1912 campaign:

The danger in every country is that the special interests will be the only things organized, and that the common interest will be unorganized against them. The business of government is to organize the common interest against the special interests. 17

The breadth of divergence in the points of view of Paine and Wilson is a measure of the changed circumstances under which the liberalism of the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries operated. One sees a reveal-ing and ironic 180° reversal in the liberal attitude toward state and society: in the laissez-faire stage, society is seen as good and the state as a barely necessary evil; in the later stage, society is looked upon primarily as evil, and the state is seen as the embodiment of virtue.

Under the latter-day liberal interpretation, one has moved from the position of Adam Smith to a position closer to Hegel. The state is seen as the expression of a higher moral principle than society, because it comes nearer to speaking for the community as a whole, while society is looked upon as a jumble of particular interests, evil because partial. It is thus but a short step from the reassessment of the role of the state to a Hegelian assertion of the moral superiority of the state or to a view that the state is the realization of the ethical ideal. The modern reconstruction of


liberalism always has within it, therefore, an implicitly Hegelian element, an implication which some of the more dogmatic branches of the socialist movement would push to its completion.

Thus the political odyssey of liberalism has been a strange and diffi cult one. Its master insight has been its recognition that the state is both dan-gerous and necessary; necessary as an agency of order, dangerous as a threat to freedom. If one goes back to the opening sections of the fi rst part of the essay on the development of the liberal tradition, he can see quite clearly that the problem of the role of the state is but a specifi c aspect of the more general problem of community. The master insight of liberalism has been blurred when it has been formulated as a simple antithesis between state and society, with praise for the latter and condemnation for the for-mer. For society too can be a threat to justice unless basic stability and tolerable equilibria of power are preserved within it. When it does become such a threat, there is nothing that can be condemned as illegitimate or “illiberal” in the larger part of the community (often its disinherited part) speaking through the state and using the state to restrain the power of the more privileged part of the nation.

Indeed, it is essential to the success of the liberal tradition that the state be available in this capacity, that it be an agency though which the disin-herited part of the community can speak and an instrument which this part can use to alter the distribution of power in society to accord more closely with the demands of justice. So long as the state fulfi lls this role, it gives democracies a self-healing capacity which is perhaps their greatest strength. Furthermore, it is important to see that this conception of the democratic state refutes the Marxist indictment. The Marxist dogma pictures this self-healing channel as blocked. It maintains that the capitalist class that controls the economy in its own interests also controls the state and thus blocks its usage by the larger community as an instrument for the reform of society and the amelioration of injustices within it. Were the Marxist diagnosis correct, the Marxist prescription would follow of necessity. For if there is no hope for reform within the present system, the movement toward justice can only fi nd expression through the violent destruction of the system. Thus the rejection of the state as an instrumentality of justice and the doctrine of violent revolution logically dovetail. The one is the corollary of the other, as seen, that is, in Lenin’s tract The State and the Revolution . 18

The central insight in the political tradition of liberalism may be said to have lain in its awareness of the ambivalent role of the state. The diffi culty

198 W. JOHNSTON

of holding this ambivalence in mind has been shown in the fact that, in the reaction to the narrow view of the state characteristic of laissez- faire (a reaction best represented, in my estimation, in the writings of T.H. Green), there is a tendency to push valid reappraisal of the role of the state in the achievement of justice through to a position in which the state seems to become representative of the total good and as such itself becomes a threat to justice. It is the neo-Hegelianism of Bosanquet that then pro-vokes Hobhouse to his critique of idealism in The Metaphysical Theory of the State . 19 What emerges from Hobhouse’s critique is a restatement of the ambivalence with which we started at the outset—the ambivalence which is the master insight of political liberalism.

As we draw our general account of the liberal tradition to a close, we may attempt to relate, in summary form, our analysis to the problem of community and then say something about the implications this analysis has for the role of liberalism on the world scene. These closing pages may therefore serve as a bridge to the main body of analysis with which the course is concerned, that is, liberal theories of world politics.

A tolerable resolution of the problem of community has been achieved when a tolerable harmony between individual interest and common inter-est, between freedom and order, between permissible diversity and neces-sary uniformity has been achieved. In short, a tolerable resolution of the problem of community is dependent upon a large coincidence between one’s desires to be true to himself and one’s need to be true to the larger society. A central theme in the preceding account has been that the extent to which such coincidence is possible is dependent upon the existence of organic uniformities (e.g., common language, common sense of eth-nic membership, conditions of economic well-being, and conditions of political security) as much as, if not more than, the existence of moral and rational faculties.

In his brilliant study of The Political Tradition of the West , Frederick Watkins seems to argue that somehow these coincidences will emerge automatically out of a system of checks and balances within a parliamentary framework. 20 The whole “contextual setting” is largely missing from his admirable analysis. Of course, he is correct in his argument that sometimes this result may take place; sometimes this interplay within a parliamentary framework may broaden the understanding of the participants and give to them a broadened moral perspective. The chief error of his analysis seems, in my judgment, to lie in his neglect of the consideration that sometimes parliamentary interplay may have precisely the reverse effect. But if one


thinks of the disintegrative effects of the interplay of diverse interests in the Austrian parliament before 1914, for example, or, on the international scene, the way in which the “great debate” in United Nations forums may exacerbate rather than moderate tensions (as I.L. Claude has pointed out), one has illustrations of the opposite tendency at work. Indeed, within our own Senate, the fi libuster is evidence that parliamentary process may harden and narrow, rather than soften and broaden, divergent perspectives.

What may not always be obvious in the political process we see more clearly at work in the social process. The capacity of society— any soci-ety—to tolerate diversity is in truth quite limited. To be sure, it is not as limited as the pessimists, with their emphasis on the evil of human nature and the need for a coercive state, would stress, but it is more limited than many idealistic liberals have understood. A clear illustration of the limita-tions of our own society to withstand diversity is found in the immigrant experience. Horace Kallen’s utopian notion that America would be a har-monious federation of nationalities proved very wide of the mark. 21 The adjustment of the immigrant to American life—in spite of all its promise—involved enormous psychic tension, particularly when ethnic divergence is marked by the color barrier. Oscar Handlin has highlighted the oftentimes tragic tensions within the immigrants’ spirit, in their efforts to be true to two worlds at the same time. 22 As Will Herberg has pointed out (in Protestant, Catholic, Jew ), while the USA has accepted religious diversity, it has rejected, by and large, ethnic diversity, particularly in language or in political values. 23 It is therefore crucial to see that the American politi-cal process—where so much emphasis has been placed on equality and freedom—has operated in good part as an adjunct to a very powerful social process, and the direction of that social process has been powerfully assimilative. As one illustration of this, Hans Kohn has pointed out the powerful assimilative pressures at work on Judaism in America in contrast to his native land in Central Europe.

It is therefore no easy matter to say what values really lie at the root of the American life pattern. We often pride ourselves on our love of free-dom. To be sure, this is important in the political, religious, legal, and economic fi elds. But observers who have sensed the enormous pressures toward uniformity which operate in America surely have a valid point. We have not yet, as a nation, come to any clear awareness of the complex interplay between our politico-legal freedoms and our social and cultural uniformities. We are not sure within our own inner consciences whether we are the greatest nation of freedom ever before seen or timid conformists

200 W. JOHNSTON

who take on the dominant coloration of our environment. The fact of the matter is that there is a sense in which both images are true and the rela-tion between them is of the most fundamental importance. In particular, it is important that through the instrumentalities of modern technology and the modern economy, we implicitly rely on these cohesive forces to allow us to sidestep many of the thorny problems which a thoroughgoing emphasis on freedom or diversity would present. The freedom we accept is always qualifi ed by deeply held notions of legitimacy, which keeps it within manageable bounds. David Potter has pointed out the sense in which an abundant economy has enable us to sidestep some of the nasty snarls that diverse class structure has produced in less productive societies. 24 And the politics—domestic as well as international—of President Roosevelt indi-cate that the nation had little awareness of the existence of fundamental and perhaps irreconcilable clashes of interest, in which the benign love of freedom assumes the malign countenance of the lust for power. It is of the greatest signifi cance that, as the nation has gotten a more profound sense of its own identity (consequent upon its involvement in all the snarls of world politics), it has come to see as its defi nitive characteristic its perva-sive middle-class uniformities, rather than its love of freedom. The clearest statement of this point of view is Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America , which is very much a book of the post-World War II era.

In world politics, one is faced with a setting in which organic uniformi-ties, if present at all, are present in a most limited fashion and over very partial areas. To put the problem another way, the forces of diversity are clearly dominant over the forces of uniformity, even on the most basic level, the use of violence. There is no monopoly over the use of force, no agency can claim (as does the state) that it alone has a legitimate right to use force. Again, to put the same issue from a different perspective, war is looked upon as normal and indeed as legal. We therefore face this central question: How can the liberal tradition relate itself to a setting in which even the minimal uniformities do not exist? This will be the central concern of the main body of this course, and it is the concern to which students should address themselves in the exploration of the problem of relevant utopias.

The liberal tradition has placed a primary reliance on the unifying effects of the technological revolution to mitigate the diffi culty of this dilemma. Its spokesmen have often talked as if liberalism could ride the wave of the industrial revolution to the far distant shore of a liberal world order. Although this hope has been very deeply rooted in the liberal tradi-


tion (as can be seen in the paper in which I analyze a number of specifi c thinkers), 25 it is destined, at best, to disappointment and, at worst, to com-plete frustration.

There can be no doubt, of course, that technology is under certain circumstances a powerful force in the establishment of basic uniformi-ties. I have stressed this point in my remarks on American society above. Technology has not eliminated diversity within the USA but it has tended to transform diversities of many different sorts into primarily functional diversities. There is a sense in which the USA may be said to be moving more and more toward the society of the enormous market, in which eth-nic and religious and color differences count for less and less and primary emphasis is placed on functional diversity.

But it is important to see that the initial impact of the technological world revolution is not to further uniformities of the sort I have men-tioned. Its initial impact is highly disintegrative. Marxism is a philosophy born of industrialism in this early stage, a philosophy that stresses primarily its disintegrative effects. As we saw in our discussion of world revolution, Lenin projects this onto the world scene. Communism itself is a form of pathology of the transition between the traditional and the modern soci-ety. In the most general terms, therefore, we may say that three bodies of philosophy contend for man’s allegiance on the world scene. The fi rst may be called the philosophies of the traditional society; the second, phi-losophies of the transition; and the third, philosophies of the new society. Communism is the most vigorous of the philosophies of the transition—for the national unit in Marxism, or the world itself in Leninism.

The American experience is unique in that the USA moved, in effect, into the new society without moving through the full transition; in short, it felt the trauma of the transition in highly attenuated form. This is the point Louis Hartz makes when he quotes de Tocqueville’s phrase that “America was born free” and asks if a nation born free can understand others struggling to become free. Thus America, which in its life pattern is the most impressive embodiment of the new society, is at a handicap in its attempt to relate itself to a world environment caught up in the trauma of revolutionary transformation. The handicap—faced by the entire lib-eral tradition—is faced by the American in magnifi ed form. What the traditional liberal tries to do when he faces the world arena is transfer the philosophy and institutions of the new society to a world caught in the transition. This attempt has accounted in part for the shock and scale of our failure in Germany after 1919, in Russia after 1917, and throughout

202 W. JOHNSTON

the whole awful story of our policy in China. The traditional liberal also attempts to preserve the moral purity of the whole society in the morally ambiguous world of the transition, which often results in an utter fail-ure to see, for example, that foreign aid must of necessity be a clear-cut instrument of political strategy. The traditional liberal attitude is further refl ected in faith in such mechanisms as world government, international law, the United Nations, free trade, and on down the line (even in the balance of power, on the part of the neo-liberals, as I have shown in my paper on this topic). However these devices can all be shown to pre-suppose (if they are to fulfi ll liberal hopes) conditions which are simply nonexistent.

They are in effect elaborate forms of political quackery in which largely irrelevant strategies are disguised under high-sounding phrases fl attering to our own self-image. They are like a physician who assures us that he is wholly dedicated to the improvement of our health but does not want at the moment to elaborate his specifi c policies for the achievement of that goal. The general phrases have a harmful effect when they conceal from us the meagerness of our own political experience (the meagerness, indeed, of most national experiences) when confronted with the immeasurable problem of achieving world order. It is most particularly misleading to look upon ourselves in any general sense as a revolutionary people; the core of the American political tradition is often closer to a polite and rather timid conservatism.

Thus the “whole” society faces unavoidable diffi culties as it tries to transcend its own perspectives and understand the disintegrative effects of the world revolution. The whole society is already on the far side of the revolution, and it may misjudge the ease with which other societies (to say nothing of the world “society” as a whole) can reach this distant shore. It may also fail to take with suffi cient seriousness the consequences of a failure in mid-process, when one seems left in limbo between an old world already dead and a new world powerless to be born. In such circum-stances, one sees the pathology of the transition in its most extreme form, where the customary bases of community have been destroyed and the new bases not yet laid. Totalitarianism is, in its simplest terms, the politi-cal manifestation of the pathology of the transition—the new despotism armed with all the weaponry and appurtenances of modern technology.

In the midst of this unfi nished revolution, the world has now been caught under the nuclear shadow and the margin for error drastically reduced. We return therefore to our central question which haunts the


entire subsequent account: How does the whole community of the liberal tra-dition relate itself to the broken society of the world arena under the nuclear shadow? Where will the uniformities come from without which freedom will destroy its own foundations? This is the central problem of the entire latter part of the course, where we discuss the topic of relevant utopias.

In terms of our central concept, the problem of community, we may say that, where the play of diverse forces is very broad, harmonization proves impossible on the basis of consent. One may then be faced with one of two alternatives, either of which represents a failure in terms of the liberal domestic experience. Either unity will be preserved, but at a rather primitive level and with rather heavy reliance on coercion, or the unity will collapse. If the liberal solution to the “problem of community” lies in the achievement of “unity with the conditions of freedom,” the failure is seen in the need to sacrifi ce the unity in the name of freedom or the freedom in the name of unity. Their harmonization will have been ruled out.

Liberalism is doomed to failure when it attempts to apply techniques to the world scene which presuppose for their success the existence of uniformities which are simply nonexistent. If these techniques are seen as marginal accompaniments to a major strategy, they may be relevant and useful. If they are seen as substitutes for a central political strategy, they are counsels of recklessness. There is a recurrent danger that those raised in the “whole society” of the liberal tradition will miss the hazards of the international scene and thereby imperil the national patrimony. We have vivid examples of this in our own era, Chamberlain and Roosevelt, both of whom may be taken primarily as symbols of the extent to which their peoples misunderstood the enormous chasm between national and inter-national politics and the necessary chasm between the attitudes appropri-ate to the one and the other.

It is not our purpose here to elaborate that master political strategy. This is undertaken in my analysis of the American system. However its central goal is the achievement of a preponderance of power on the side of those interests on the world scene one wishes to protect. The goal is the achievement of the crude approximation on the global scene to the role played by the state on the domestic. Within this framework of security, certain very useful things can be carried out; without it, there is no effective check on the triumph of disintegrative forces. This margin of security has in fact been given to the world since 1945 and primarily by the USA. I would maintain that the dominant characteristic of the international system for the last 19 years has been this preponderance of

204 W. JOHNSTON

American power. Such preponderance will continue to be necessary—although the risks in its maintenance are very great—until other unifor-mities (and other institutions built upon these uniformities) come to have suffi cient strength to replace it. This preponderance is the necessary—not the suffi cient—basis on which such an eventual world order might be built. It gives to us the possibility that some of the other things that need to be done can be done. Without its existence, the possibility itself is removed. Thus, in particular, we must be skeptical of the notion that a return to a more “pluralistic” world is desirable, a world in which several regional centers of power would be related to one another in some form of self-balancing relationship. This, in my view, would be the true divid-ing line between the postwar era and the beginnings of the prewar era.

NOTES 1. Watkins, 62. 2. Plato, Republic , quoted in Elliot, Western Political Heritage , 128–130. 3. Hartz, 145–159. 4. We do not have the paper. 5. G. de Ruggiero (1927) History of European Liberalism trans.

R.G. Collingwood (London: Oxford University Press), 1. 6. E. Corwin (1955) The “Higher Law” Background of the American

Constitution (Ithaca: Great Seal Books), 39. 7. Watkins, 142, 143. 8. Ibid. 87. 9. A.C. McLaughlin (1935) A Constitutional History of the United States

(New York: D. Appleton-Century Co.), 7–24. 10. C. Vann Woodward (1960) “The Age of Reinterpretation,” American

Historical Review, LXVI, 2–8. 11. J. Madison, “Federalist 10.” 12. Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy ,

206–207. 13. We do not have this paper. 14. R. Niebuhr (1958) The World Crisis and American Responsibility, ed.

E. Lefever (New York: Foreign Policy Association Press), 95. 15. Lindsay, 249. 16. Thomas Paine, Common Sense , “Of the Origin and Design of Government

in General.” 17. Quoted in R. Hofstadter (1948) The American Political Tradition , (New

York: Knopf), 330.


18. V. Lenin (1943) The State and the Revolution (New York: International Publishers).

19. L.T. Hobhouse (1918) The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London: Allen & Unwin Ltd.).

20. Watkins, ix–xii. 21. H.M. Kallen “Democracy versus the Melting-pot: A Study of American

Nationality” The Nation , Feb. 25, 1915. 22. O. Handlin (1951) The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown). 23. W. Herberg (1960) Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, NY: Anchor

Books). 24. D. Potter (1954) People of Plenty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press),

91–110. 25. This paper has not been included in the present volume.


CHAPTER 9

In the two previous sections in our account of the development of the liberal tradition, we have sketched that development in broad terms. It is necessary in this section to fi ll in certain details and amplify certain points which limitations of time did not permit in Parts I and II.

We have pointed out that, in response to the “crisis of secularization,” there is a movement toward consolidation of the modern territorial state by the “new monarchs”—a movement which may be said to reach its most complete embodiment in the France of Louis XIV. In this stage, there are three politically signifi cant elements: the king and his supporters, that is, the state bureaucracy and the armed forces, the nobility and the clergy, and the middle classes. In this stage, it is the king, with his supporters, and the mid-dle classes which are the modernizing the revolutionary forces. This stage reaches its height in the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Stage two may be said to begin with the middle classes’ loss of faith in the monarchy and to culminate in the revolutionary overthrow of the monarchy and the triumph of the middle classes. This triumph represents the fi rst stage of modern liberalism. It had its roots, as I have mentioned, in the middle-class feeling that absolute monarchy had ceased to be a progressive force and in the feeling that middle-class objectives can be achieved only through a revolutionary transformation of the monarchy. Again we fi nd the most signifi cant illustration of these trends in the France of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Initially the middle classes hoped their goals could be achieved via enlightened despotism, but this is


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abandoned for a revolutionary overthrow of the entire system. The great upheaval of 1789–1815 signifi es the defi nitive end of the fi rst stage in the political history of the modern state (in which the middle classes and the monarchy had been allies) and marks the defi nitive beginning of the second stage. During this stage, the nobility and the monarchy are driven together through a common opposition to the world of the bourgeoisie. As Watkins has pointed out, this is quite a novel alignment in European politics—this monarchical-noble alliance. This second stage in the history of the modern state is also, as we have mentioned above, the fi rst stage in the development of modern liberalism.

Stage three may be said to begin when the liberal order fi nds itself under attack from three sources—the forces of the old order (often aligned, as Watkins has pointed out, with the agrarian interests) which resent their overthrow, the new proletariat, weaknesses inherent in the system itself—and is usually manifested in a major economic crisis or series of crises. This stage ends in one of two alternatives, either the collapse of the lib-eral order—often into totalitarian dictatorship—or its broadening out, its democratization, and if this process is accomplished, the second stage of modern liberalism may be said to have begun. If this process is accom-plished, one also witnesses a transformation of liberalism from a narrow doctrine, representing primarily one class, to a broad doctrine capable of integrating through constitutional democracy the interests of the three major groups—agrarian, commercial, and proletarian—in the society. This is the analysis outlined by Watkins. As we have pointed out elsewhere, there is an interesting parallel between the arguments used in stage two by the middle classes against the old order and the arguments used in stage three by the proletarians against the middle classes.

The pattern of development in America is in some respects simpler than the pattern of development in Europe, for in Europe the development of modern liberalism involved fi ve major actors: the nobility and clergy, rep-resenting the survivals of the medieval order; the king, representing the modern territorial state; the middle classes, representing the new forces of commerce and industry; and the working classes of industrial labor. In America, the feudal order was never deeply rooted—after all the very discovery of America was an offshoot of the forces in Europe bursting beyond the medieval order. The fi rst English settlements in America were brought about by three of the characteristic forces which led to the dis-integration of that order: the territorial state, expanding commerce, and Protestantism. Hence America does not pass through the direct experience


of modern kingship during which the state is built in a prolonged struggle with feudal particularism. Hartz and de Tocqueville have made signifi cant elaborations of this thesis.

America’s independent political history may be said to begin with the attack on monarchy—with the revolution against George III. The Revolution was undertaken for reasons in part similar to those which led the European middle classes to turn against monarchy, that is, the feeling that oppressive political power was restricting the free opera-tion of the forces of commerce. Thus there are important links between our Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, with three important differences: our Revolution was far less turbulent, because the old order was much less deeply rooted and our international situation was less exposed and less complex; kingship was never honored in American tradition as a modernizing force and American liberalism tended to iden-tify kingship simply as representative of the old order; and our Revolution was a revolution for national independence against an imperial overlord.

However forces of at least a semi-feudal character did become rooted deeply enough in the USA to lead to a sharp and sustained clash between the middle-class way of life founded on commerce and industry and the settled agricultural way of life. This clash occurs, of course, in the Civil War, whose outcome registers the triumph of the middle-class interests. There is thus a sense in which American history reverses the sequence of European. Here the middle classes rebel against kingship fi rst and then use strong state power to destroy landed feudalism. In Europe, the middle classes ally with kingship to limit feudal landed power and then turn in revolutionary opposition to kingship.

In the USA the same diffi culty overtakes liberalism that had overtaken liberalism in Europe although—once again—the diffi culty is not presented in a form as extreme as America. But the key elements in the liberal philos-ophy seem too narrow to resolve, in a democratic way, the problems posed by the modern economy. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, one sees in the USA major discontent abroad in the land and widespread chal-lenge to the central doctrine of the early liberalism, the market economy. Thus there is a sense in which the European struggle between kingship and feudalism fi nds an echo in America in the debate between Lincoln and Calhoun and the debate between the two stages of liberalism in the debate between Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In any case, it is important to bear in mind that liberalism has passed through at least two stages and has at least two general meanings. In the fi rst, it is essentially a middle-class

210 W. JOHNSTON

doctrine which places its primary emphasis on freedom and the market economy (today given an extreme embodiment in the Goldwater philoso-phy); in the second, it has serious doubts about the market economy and has come to see the state as an agency of social justice—a point of view which fi nds expression in the writings of Eugene McCarthy.

Feudal diversity was incompatible with order in its most basic sense. The bourgeois liberals were aware of this, and thus they sided with the monarch in his effort to subdue feudal particularism. However, as we have seen in our account of the three stages, this was essentially a marriage of convenience. For once the bourgeoisie had backed the monarchy in its struggle against the diversity of feudalism, it came to demand against the monarchy, or from the monarchy, a diversity of its own. There is a sense in which the bourgeoisie may be said to have taken the major inheritance of the monarchy and then thrown the monarchy away. Since its most recent struggles were fought against the monarchical power of the state—since it came to a sense of its own “identity” through its opposition to the state—it often forgot its indebtedness to the state. As I have said earlier, we may take for granted that which we have inherited, and this was true in a sense of the liberals. They came to assign too little importance to order as a value in their hierarchy and came to look on it as somehow self- establishing, or automatic, when in truth they had inherited this from the monarchy. Hence there is a sense in which the liberal focus on freedom may be looked on as an interlude between the phases in the history of political thought in which the major focus was to be on order . Order was the principal concern in political thought in the age of absolutism; it has, in important respects, become the principal concern since the beginnings of the age of total war in 1914. It is for this very broad reason that much of liberal thought, much of the thought of the “liberal interlude,” is of limited relevance to our own era, and the realists are wholly justifi ed in subjecting its “harmonic illusions” to searching critique.

We may summarize our argument to this point as follows: Under the age of absolutism and through the efforts of consolidation of the mon-archs, a suffi cient measure of order was achieved to make it seem plausible to attempt to mitigate the powers of the centralized state, without at the same time imperiling social cohesion. On the top, so to speak, of the cohe-sion thus crystallized around the state, it then became possible to enjoy a measure of diversity which was not a threat to order but indeed seemed to be, through the sense of justice it inspired, a guarantee of a richer and more enduring order. The circumstances of its origins were to give to


liberalism a persistent bias against the state and to lead it to neglect the problem of order which was to prove an enormous handicap when it was confronted with problems on the world scene.

However we have focused on but one aspect of the topic, for the mod-ern state emerges as an aspect of the effort to break away from two pat-terns of restraint: the internal restraints, which were carried over from the multiple centers of authority associated with feudalism, and the external restraints, associated primarily with the universal ties of Christendom. The concept of external and internal sovereignty expressed on the legal level this twofold freeing of the state from the restraints of the Middle Ages.

The modern state represents an advance in order in that it gives security and controls violence over larger areas than any known since the decline of the Roman Empire. Indeed, in many areas, the effectiveness of the order of the new states was greater than anything known under Rome, if not in its territorial extent, then certainly in its “depth.” It is therefore proper that the creation of the state should be celebrated in modern political theory, for this achievement is a powerful testimony to the strength of the “community-building” capacity of man. Theorists who celebrate its creation are not misplaced in their enthusiasm, for, in terms of the social history of modern man, it may be said to represent the major achievement of modern history. The creation of the state confronted man, however, with two problems.

We have discussed the fi rst in the second part of this essay and need only briefl y refer to it here. The danger is that the state—necessary for the achievement of order—will press its claims too far and become dangerous to the prospects of freedom. In short, the fi rst danger is embodied in the tension between the need for the state (order) and the danger of the state (desire for freedom)—or the order-freedom dichotomy. The second major danger of the state is a consequence of the repudiation by the state of the restraints which have existed upon it on the external scene. The creation of the modern state signifi es an immense advance toward order in that it put down the bloody warfare of the feudal age. In this regard, the new monarchies were among the great progressive forces of modern history. In another sense, however, what can be seen in the modern period is a lifting of confl ict to a new level of intensity and scale—in which the new monarchs are little more than the chief feudal lords of their lands, locked in perennial confl ict with the chief feudal lords of other lands. From this perspective, the break between the modern and the feudal eras must not be pictured as a sharp one, for much of the anarchy characteristic of the

212 W. JOHNSTON

feudal era was now simply projected upon a larger stage and graced with the name of international “relations.”

It is very important to realize that these two dangers of the state con-front the liberal tradition with two very different tasks. On the domestic scene, liberalism faced the threat of tyranny, the threat of an order that was too oppressive and that was conceived in terms of uniformity. As we have stressed in Part II of this essay, the task of liberalism under these cir-cumstances was to moderate this narrow conception of order through an emphasis on freedom and equality and with the hope of achieving a higher justice. On the international scene, however, liberalism was faced with a radically different type of problem: the task of reducing wide-ranging anarchy to a minimal order before the preconditions of justice could exist. Thus the strategy needed by liberalism on the international scene was, in important respects, the reverse of the strategy needed on the domestic. On the whole, however, liberalism has not been clearly aware (and some-times it has not been aware at all) of the radical difference in the nature of the two problems, because it has not been aware of the radical difference between international and domestic politics. Our present analysis centers upon this radical difference and is sharply critical of all approaches (which are legion in the liberal tradition) which attempt to stress the similarities between the two. Indeed, the master error of the liberal analysis may be said to stem from this persistent tendency to see international political reality through the lenses of the domestic experience. This tendency is persistent and in some measure inevitable. But it leads, nonetheless, to errors of monumental proportions. The beginning of wisdom in the study of international politics comes from the perception of the radical differ-ence between the two spheres. To be sure, there are similarities which can be shown—after all there are some similarities between any two objects in the universe, else we could not speak about them through a common language. But it is not in the similarities that the points of chief impor-tance are to be found, and thinkers like Tannenbaum and Chadwick Alger who stress the similarities as if they were somehow the main thing really lead us into very serious confusions. The recognition of the differences is more important for the liberals than it is for representatives of other domestic political traditions for, although there is a radical difference between all domestic traditions and the international scene, the difference is greater between the liberal tradition and the world environment than it is between traditions less successful in the domestic resolution of the prob-lem of community and the international environment. As we have argued


in Part II, at the conclusion, the world environment is a “broken” society, whereas liberal societies are “whole” societies. Other domestic societies are in a spectrum between the two; they have far greater diffi culty resolv-ing the freedom-order tension than do the liberals; hence they fi nd the gap between the more-or-less limited crises of their own societies and the more-or-less unlimited crises of the international scene less diffi cult to understand than do the liberals.

Now the consequence of this liberal failure to see the radical difference between the two environments is a tendency to carry over the approach which has been successful in the one area to the other. This takes a num-ber of forms, but the recurrent ones are emphases on freedom (national self-determination), on equality (coordinate state), on pluralism (balance of power), on law (international law), and so on, with the expectation that their advocacy on the world scene will bring about an advance toward a fuller justice, since this has been their effect on the domestic scene. As I have said in my critique of Tannenbaum, the extension of these policies to a world scene, where the elemental conditions of order do not exist, may very well have an effect the reverse of that intended and mark an advance toward anarchy rather than toward justice. No amount of aca-demic casuistry can alter the elemental fact that on the world scene none of the preconditions shown to be essential to the maintenance of even a loosely cohesive social order are in existence. What is needed more in the study of international politics than intellectual subtlety is simple honesty.

A corollary, internationally, of the notion of the unrestrained power of the sovereign domestically is the doctrine of reason of state: just as there can be no legitimate restraint on the power of the sovereign domesti-cally, there can be none on him internationally. However, domestically, this doctrine did not resolve the problem of politics, because the state is a danger as well as a need and men are interested in freedom as well as order. Likewise, on the international scene, the doctrine of reason of state was never a suffi cient answer to the problem of international poli-tics, because men were interested in a higher measure of order than this anarchic doctrine provided and because their sense of justice outran the narrow confi nes of state loyalty. It is clear that the liberal tradition has felt a sense of loyalty to values beyond the nation-state, as have the Catholic Church, other religious movements, the conservative tradition (see Metternich in the Holy Alliance and Bismarck in the Three Emperors’ league), and the socialists. However the central problem for all of these has been to give a politically operative meaning to these larger loyal-

214 W. JOHNSTON

ties. The problem of meeting the danger of the state and moving toward a higher justice on the international scene has been far more diffi cult than it has on the domestic. In the latter liberalism, on the whole, it may be said to have succeeded; in the former, it has failed.

Thus the content of liberalism is derivative mainly from its domestic successes, and liberal principles are, fi rst of all, principles for the domestic governance of a society. As Burke had said, general principles take on their meaning from specifi c circumstances—and so it is with the great values of the liberal tradition—particularly freedom and equality but also law. They really are most misleading—in fact they mean very little—when they are analyzed or proclaimed in the abstract. They must be seen in intimate operative interdependence with circumstance. On the international scene, where the circumstance is radically different, they will have a radically dif-ferent effect. The principles of liberalism originated in very specifi c domes-tic social settings and under very specifi c conditions. We have seen that the effort to transfer certain general liberal principles from the British experi-ence to the French in the eighteenth century had very different effects than those anticipated. If this be true in this instance, then it is true, a fortiori , as one attempts to transfer liberal principles from the domestic scene of the USA (unique in its own right) to world politics. Wilson and Roosevelt were therefore doomed inevitably to fail, by the very organic recalcitrance of the international environment itself. The liberal domestic experience is but a small corner on the vast landscape of human relations. These principles did not emerge from, nor do they seem to have much bearing upon, the thorny problems of establishing the rule of law in the vast external realm. It is essential to have the demonstration made by the realists. However our approach to the liberal tradition in world politics is not unlike that of Niebuhr toward democracy, “a vindication of democracy and a critique of its traditional defense.” For if we take the realist critique as the stopping point in our analysis, we are left in a room with no exit.

The liberal tradition might admit that the achievement of a liberal world order could not be accomplished at once, but, through faith in the theory of progress, it felt it could be achieved in a rather short time span. To put it in other terms, it failed to see the uniqueness of the domestic set-ting form which liberalism has emerged. It took a narrow slice of history and equated this with the whole and projected future trends on the basis of a too-brief time spectrum of the past. Thus our initial task is to explore the specifi c circumstances under which liberalism emerged. Then we must examine a series of encounters, mostly painful, between liberal principles


and the stubborn realities of world politics. This reaction is fi rst seen clearly in World War I, but this failure is “explained away,” as I have pointed out. However each subsequent crisis has confronted liberalism with a new series of dilemmas—and the assessments have tended, in secular fashion, to become more pessimistic and the pessimism to grow more widespread. This shift is refl ected in, theoretically, in a shift from views that criticize specifi c institutions, or nations, as supposedly responsible for the crisis (as seen in Wilson’s view toward World War I), toward theories which fi nd the roots of confl ict in human nature (Morgenthau, Niebuhr) or in the system itself (Waltz). Whatever the specifi c differences between Morgenthau and Niebuhr on the one hand and Waltz on the other, it is important to see their similarities, for both have found the roots of confl ict to be univer-sal and in a large measure inevitable. Both therefore are clear refl ections of the shift in a pessimistic direction, and both leave largely unanswered questions of proximate justice or relevant utopias. They are analogous to the theological absolutism of a Barth, and they leave us with the sense that we stand under an awful judgment, which renders the “nicely calculated more or less” largely irrelevant. Hence the parallels between trends in religious thought and trends in political thought (particularly in America) are quite close, and one can see how Niebuhr has moved fruitfully from the one to the other. The Christian liberals who felt the law of love could be made directly relevant to daily life and to politics are analogous to the liberals, who felt that principles of harmony could be brought to bear in some direct fashion in politics. The concept of the “children of light” is therefore no arbitrary construction. In both areas, the naiveté of the chil-dren of light has prompted profoundly pessimistic rejoinders, in terms of which the programs of the children of light are seen as superfi cial. But the pessimist may seem defeatist and cynical.

We may now shift our focus to a more concrete consideration of certain of the circumstances in the nineteenth century which were favorable to the advance of the liberal cause. If we examine the means by which the “old order” was overthrown in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I think we may say that the overthrow was the consequence of two main factors. The fi rst was the skillful use of the rivalries of interna-tional politics, that is, the revolutionary nationality could pit against the imperialist power some other power which was for one reason or other opposed to the imperial power. Thus Piedmont wins the support of France to drive the Austrians out of Italy, and the Belgians win French and British support to maintain their defi ance of the Dutch. On the converse side,

216 W. JOHNSTON

the Hungarians are able to sustain their independence against Austria, but Russian intervention crushes Hungary. In all three cases, the result of independence, “positive” or “negative,” is largely determined by the action of outside forces. The same is true in the case of Greece, who fi nally triumphs over the Turks through the aid of Russia, Britain, and France. In our own Revolution, it is French aid which ultimately makes our victory possible. The Latin American nations are able to sustain their break from Spain in part because of the tensions between Britain and the Continent. There are of course revolutions which take place without outside inter-ference, such as that in France in 1830 or 1848, but these are domestic matters and do not involve the emergence of a new state. Thus we see that the success of the movements toward national self-determination was intimately related to the international distribution of power. The achieve-ment of independence by a new state would seem, in many circumstances at least, to require the pitting of major powers against each other.

The second prerequisite for the success of these independence move-ments was the effi ciency of mass nationalist movements, which we see in Greece, in Belgium, and in Italy, that is, the mass is able through a genu-ine popular uprising to have an effect in weakening the governing power. Garibaldi’s role is probably the clearest illustration of this. The govern-ments against which they fi ght are not capable of resisting sustained mass pressure.

Today the prospects for independence movements are quite different, as Paul Kecskemeti has argued. 1 There are vastly more effective means of repression available to the status quo forces, the government agen-cies, which render the older pattern of democratic revolution very largely impossible. The tragedy of Hungary in 1956 is the clearest testimony to this. In this respect, the danger that government will exercise unrestrained tyranny has vastly increased in our own time, and I would doubt if one could fi nd in the annals of the past evidences of tyrannies as oppressive as that of, say, Communist China today. In this respect, therefore, the pos-sibilities of injustice are greater in our own modern era than they were in the past, and—as long as the ruling network itself remains united—greater sacrifi ces of justice to order or “progress” can be made today than would have been risked in an earlier era. These judgments of course are open to some challenge, but the very fact that a strong case can be made to sup-port them indicates that their divergence from the truth cannot be a very broad one. This is a force for a certain kind of stability in the world today, as we see in Russia and in China. But it also means that, if a basic split


should take place in the ruling hierarchy, the disintegrative consequences may be more sweeping than in previous centuries and the instabilities more widespread.

There is another factor which tends to promote the sacrifi ce of justice to order in an unparalleled degree, and that is the danger which attends the use of international politics as an agency in the liberation of suppressed peoples. The Hungarian Revolution again gives us an example. In the pre-atomic age, one might legitimately have asked: is it not “worth” running the risks of war, even major war, for the sake of dismantling the injustice of the Soviet satellite empire? In the atomic age, however, few asked this question very seriously, and the USA does not seem to have considered very seriously this alternative. From the fi rst stages of that crisis, there was a widespread assumption that the worst contingency was that this revolu-tion might lead to war; in a previous era, might not the suppression of Hungarian freedom have seemed the greater evil? It is in this sense that the nuclear era has brought some new rigidities into international politics, and there is no clear evidence that these rigidities do not operate in a direc-tion harmful to the achievement of a liberal world order. Henry Kissinger has, of course, been persistently concerned to see if there is some way that these rigidities can be lessened. The obstacles in the path of ending the injustices of the imperialism of the Communist bloc are greater than the obstacles faced in almost any other past imperial structure. On the other hand, the diffi culties in the way of dismantling the imperial structures of the Western nations have seemed, since 1945, less than in any previous era, for the Western nations themselves (or large segments of their opin-ion) have come to accept the need for the termination of their holdings. It is this sense that the present-day sentiment of anti-imperialism has been used as a weapon skewed in favor of the Communists and against the West. The sort of intervention now brought against Western imperialists (Britain in particular) has been in terms of moral pressure and the pressure of public opinion.

However we still tend to live in terms of past experience and to give more substance to the prospects of a real “people’s revolution” than is merited. This leads to the assumption (e.g., with regard to the overthrow of the Communist regime in China or even in Cuba) that there is more fl exibility in world politics than is the case. Once the serpentine coils of the modern police state lock about their victims, the chances of throw-ing them off well-nigh vanish. Thus (at least from the Western side) the status quo tends to stay stuck, which means that the greatest importance

218 W. JOHNSTON

must be attached, at the end of confl ict, to how the distribution of power is to be made. What is more, Brzezinski’s point about totalitarianism as an agency for reshaping society shows the extent to which the govern-ment has come to dominate the society rather than be shaped by it, as we assume. Liberalism began with a stress on the virtues of society and the vices of the state; yet today it seems that the state has very nearly, in the totalitarian world, devoured the society.

Thus, in confrontation with Communist imperialism, the liberal tra-dition confronts some unprecedented diffi culties. If we are to look for a transformation in the freeze that Communism now has over much of the world, we must look elsewhere than to the two devices which played so dominant a role in the transformation of the status quo of the nine-teenth century. One alternative device has been that of “liberation” (see Burnham’s arguments), but this was never really taken seriously at the offi -cial level, and the Dulles-Eisenhower arguments on this score proved to be campaign talk. 2 There is also the prospect for “mellowing” which Kennan projected. 3 However there are other versions, as seen in the writings of Fromm ( May Man Prevail? ) or Deutscher ( Russia after Stalin ), and these must be considered in their several variants. 4 However it is crucial that any theory of “mellowing” be made as explicit as possible, so we are to know the devices on which the author relies for the mellowing to take place and the time scale in which he thinks it will occur. As Henry Kissinger has pointed out, Carthage could take small comfort from the “mellowing” of Rome many years after Carthage’s own destruction. Both Kissinger and Huntington-Brzezinksi are examples of thinkers who challenge the convenient assumptions of the “mellowing” hypothesis. 5 I would feel the hypothesis had even less plausibility when applied to China than when applied to Russia; yet even Dulles seems to have acted, in part, in terms of its relevance to China.

Our general tendency here is skeptical of theories of “mellowing”—or at least of the notion that this mellowing can have any very direct politi-cal relevance for our own policy. I shall show in another context why I feel this skepticism is justifi ed. However it is important at this point to see that it involves a readaptation of the traditional theory of progress to meet the needs of the present era. For the early liberals assumed that the decay of feudalism would lead, in some automatic fashion, to the triumph of liberalism; their spirit lives on in those who have made a similar assump-tion about the decay of totalitarianism. But the fact of decay, in the one instance, did not always lead to a liberal advance, and there is no assurance


that it will do so in this instance either. To assume that, it will involve an assumption that one has read the true path along which world history is moving, and the path is a liberal one. This assumption about the course of historic development cannot be examined without an examination of the Communist assumptions about the path of historic development. And we cannot here dismiss lightly the evidence, particularly since 1945, that must seem to persuade the Communists of the validity of their own visions. Two elements serve to sustain the vision. The fi rst is the record of concrete successes, in terms of populations and territories gained. The second is in terms of future prospects and in turn is based on three elements: fi rst, the neutralization of our own superior power, which we do not use for fear of universal destruction; second the conditions in the backward coun-tries, which must seem particularly ripe for Communism, because of their economic plight, their anti-Westernism, and their absence of traditional bases on which to build a democratic order or (outside of their religious heritage) to resist the collectivist appeal of Communism; and third, the sense by both Russia and—particularly China—that they are states on the rising arc of their power. We shall consider at a later stage the effects of the Russian-Chinese split on these expectations.

Now part of this error of the liberal assessment of world politics stemmed not merely from errors in the projection of certain values (e.g., freedom, equality, rule of law, pluralism) from the domestic to the world scene but also from the error in the projection of the effects of certain trends from the one area to the other. The trends on which liberalism put perhaps its heaviest reliance were those of the spread of science and technology, and we still see today a rather complacent reliance put on the benefi cial effects of these trends, a complacency which often is given expression in uncritical advocacy of the foreign aid program and the work of certain United Nations agencies. However the spread of science and technology do not bring about the anticipated results for a number of rea-sons. First, their spread widened the gap (and continues to widen the gap) between the advanced and the backward nations. One sees here some-thing of a parallel to the effects of industrialism on American life—at least in its initial stages—where it moved in a clearly undemocratic direction. 6 It is not in the spread of science or technology themselves that the strength-ening of democracy is to be found, but in the use made by explicit political forces of the democratic potential in science and technology. In the second place, the rapid spread of science and technology led to a rapid disintegra-tion of traditional order around the world and produced a chaos which

220 W. JOHNSTON

generated powerful tendencies toward totalitarianism. One thinks, for example, of the impact of modern forces on traditional China, as analyzed by Fairbank. 7 The effect in this case was to harness technology to political particularism and to heighten, rather than lessen, the barriers in the path of political universalism. Whatever our hopes may be for the future impact of technology, I think the record of this century sustains the pessimistic assessment.

In the third place, through the development of an increasing specialization of labor, the shocks of a part of the world are transmitted far across the world itself. Thus not only the fruits but also the thorns of interdependence were shared. We see a clear example of this today in the unsettling political consequences on the developing nations of fl uctua-tions in the prices of primary commodities. We may also be reminded from our own experience that the interdependence of the new technol-ogy may be the source of enormous political disturbances, unknown in a simpler economy, and one more nearly self-suffi cient. Hofstadter has documented these instabilities in The Age of Reform . 8 Thus it is a funda-mental error to assume (as did the Cobden-Bright school) that the spread of the “silken ties of commerce” makes for unity, without seeing that their spread also generates new and oftentimes quite dangerous sources for confl ict.

In the fourth place, the increase in the division of labor increases (as we see from our domestic experience) the problems of coordination in the society. The experience of our domestic societies makes particularly inapt any view which looks on the bounding vitalities generated in the spread of science and technology as “self-balancing.” If our own national experience tells us anything in this respect, it is that it is only through con-scious political intervention that two pitfalls are avoided: the emergence of massive inequalities and the emergence of massive instabilities. We should altogether disenthrall ourselves of expectations about the emergence of automatic patterns of balance through the spread of technology through foreign aid. The consequences (and frustrations) of our aid programs in such an effort as the Alliance for Progress serve to confi rm the compla-cency of such an undertaking. And yet just as the old liberal theory of the benefi cent effects consequent upon the decay of absolutism survives today in theories of “mellowing,” the old illusions of Cobden and Bright, about trade as the instrument of peace, fi nd a new home in the uncritical advocacy of foreign aid. We are reminded once again that those who do not learn from experience are condemned to repeat it.


Finally we must keep in mind that the spread of technology threatened to produce recurrent reactions against the dangers of uniformity implicit in it, and the Communists have harnessed much of this anxiety by direct-ing it against the USA. By labeling all the evil aspects of “modernization” as “Americanization” and by pretending that all the threats to traditional identity implicit in the spread of technology are rooted in a calculated American design to dominate the world, the Communists have made use of a rather powerful weapon. America’s very technological preeminence exposes it to this type of criticism for there is a seeming plausibility in the identifi cation of the spread of technology, and all the problems this gener-ates, with the spread of American infl uence. The identifi cation remains, however, in error, for America is merely the most advanced embodiment of the technological era, rather than the source of it.

However everywhere traditional patterns of life are challenged by the spread of technology, and the resistance to the new will be intense in pro-portion to the attachment to the old. There is absolutely no way that the clash between these two modes of existence can be avoided, as we might learn from the tension within our own country between “the mind of the South” and “Yankee business enterprise.” The Communists are in some respects more honest than we in their recognition of the inevitability of this clash. But they are also more naïve and more brutal, for they have no respect for, or interest in, the old and profound doubts about the new have not colored their thought (at least their offi cial thought) in signifi -cant fashion. However, such doubts will come to enter their thoughts, and there will be a weakening of the revolutionary zeal when disillusionment with the new order makes itself felt in widespread fashion.

However the central fact we wish to stress here is that technology has brought interdependence; it has not brought community. And a world made interdependent before the rudimentary bases for community have been laid has proved to be a more troubled and dangerous world than that which existed prior to technological interdependence. Much the same point has been made, at least by indirection, time and again in American literature and American social thought. What is true for America as one nation is even more true for the world as a whole.

We have spoken earlier of one of the central tensions in liberalism as that between the need and danger of the state. This could also, of course, be given a broader formulation in terms of the ambivalence of human free-dom—that freedom is both a necessity and a danger. This is perhaps the broadest way in which the ambivalence could be formulated, and Niebuhr

222 W. JOHNSTON

has given it this formulation. The liberal tradition has seen the need for freedom. It has also seen that greater freedom is compatible with social unity. However what it has failed to see—at least at the level of general for-mulation—is the perils of freedom, particularly on the collective level. And yet the central problem of modern politics may be said to center precisely here—in the perils of collective freedom. Liberalism obscured from itself the reality of this problem through two interrelated concepts, that of har-mony and that of progress. These two concepts sidestep the problem; they do not join it. But there is no prospect for the “solution” of the problem unless it is joined in the most searching way.

Of course the problem is a perennial one, and it is never “solved” in the sense that the tension is laid eternally to rest. Kant is right in his conten-tion that tension contributes to the forward movement of mankind and that without it human relations would lapse into passivity. But he was in error when he felt that there was somehow an automatic guarantee that the outcome of this tension would be progressive. As I have pointed out earlier, however, we can never hope for a resolution of this tension. We can only hope that it will be held within manageable bounds and that we will be able to fulfi ll our own needs in a tolerable accord with the pressures of our fellow men to fulfi ll theirs.

Now we have found that the liberal “solution” to this tension was devel-oped on a pragmatic basis and consisted in an emphasis that the tension be held within bounds by some agreed-upon rules of the game. Today the emphasis on freedom is of course still central to the liberal tradition, and it serves the vital function of blocking the achievement of unity through uniformity. In this regard, the liberal emphasis on freedom is analogous to the realist emphasis on the balance of power and to the role of feudal structures in the Middle Ages. At the very origins of liberalism, we fi nd an ambivalence in its attitude toward freedom, for it aided the monarchy in the overthrow of the diversities of feudalism in order to achieve a larger political unit within which commerce and industry could fl ourish. And yet while it was actually aligning itself with the forces that undermined an important pattern of diversity, it identifi ed its cause with that of freedom in the abstract.

At the earlier stages in its history, the liberals felt the path of history was clear and that it led toward the triumph of the middle classes and constitutional government everywhere. However, since at least 1914, liberalism has come to realize the ambivalent effects of the continuance in the advance of technology. Not only does it bring some prospects


of advancing the liberal cause, it also brings the prospects of furthering totalitarianism and of making war more dangerous. It has erred when it has seen Communism as the creator of the revolutionary situation. In truth, Communism has been more its effect than its cause. The primary reality is that we have for some fi ve hundred years been involved in a roll-ing world revolution which took one turn in America, another in Russia and will no doubt take a third—with many subvarieties—in the develop-ing nations. Of course the same observation applies, a fortiori when we consider Communist ideology. For it is absurd to see the central problem as that of “capitalism,” rather than the world revolution itself. And yet it is more diffi cult to reach through to the Russians than to the Americans. For the closed nature of the American mind stems from the fact that it has been rooted for long in a particular set of conditions, with a particular set of values which are refl ections of those conditions, and the processes of rethinking are diffi cult. In the Russian case, their perspective is in part an outgrowth of the Russian experience. But it is also dogmatically cherished, and there will be institutional consequences of major proportions if their assessment of history is drastically modifi ed. We are already seeing some of the drastic consequences of this in the Russian-Chinese confl ict.

Of course no one can see how this enormous clash of traditions will be played out. If we were not in the nuclear age, it is quite possible that a major war between two states would already have occurred, a war in which the USA would probably have been victorious, at least in the sense that the Communist regime might very well have been overthrown. What has developed in the place of a major war is, however, a prolonged series of limited confl icts, and we can have no assurance that time is on our side in this area of confl ict.

We often repeat the statement that we are involved in a revolutionary situation, but it is not clear that we attach much operative meaning to that proposition. Yet one of the things it does mean is the tendency on the part of those who “have arrived” to slip into a lessening of their ener-gies, and this softening has played a part in the downfall of great civiliza-tions. Certainly this was a charge brought by the early liberals against the decadent aristocracy. Isaiah Berlin has argued that the Russians have shown a perceptive awareness of this danger and had taken ruthless mea-sures to keep this softening from taking place. 9 Nevertheless it is clear that, in Chinese eyes, the Russians have grown soft, and both Communist states often seem to make this assumption about the USA. However it will probably become increasingly diffi cult for the Russians to stave off

224 W. JOHNSTON

a “Thermidorian Reaction” as their material well-being increases, and in this sense, some form of mellowing probably is inevitable.

The attack against the “haves” by the liberals focused on the maldistribution of wealth and honor. The liberals stressed that because the managers put forth the capital and took the initiative, they should be the sole arbiters of the way in which the fruits of combined activities were to be distributed. This was too simple a notion, but it probably involved a closer approximation to justice than that of the old order. It nevertheless was a potent source of injustice as industrialism advanced, and it had to be subjected to substantial modifi cation in the second stage of liberalism.

NOTES 1. Kecskemeti, 153. 2. J. Burnham (1953) Containment or Liberation? An Inquiry into the Aims of

United States Foreign Policy (New York: John Day). 3. See “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” and “America and the Russian

Future” in G. Kennan (1951) American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

4. E. Fromm (1964) May Man Prevail? (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday); I. Deutscher (1968) Russia After Stalin , (New York: Bobs- Merrill), 132–140.

5. S. Huntington and Z. Brzezinksi (1964) Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking), 205.

6. See, e.g., the opening stages of F.L. Allen (1952) The Big Change (New York: Harper).

7. J.K. Fairbank (1958) The United States and China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard), 142–161.

8. R. Hofstadter (1955) The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books), 257–271.

9. I. Berlin, “The Silence in Russian Culture,” Foreign Affairs , October 1957.

PART IV

International Relations and Liberalism


CHAPTER 10

Both freedom and equality give expression to the demand that community rests on a voluntary basis—freedom being set in juxtaposition to a form of organization that relies heavily on coercion and equality being in set in juxtaposition to a form of order in which various arbitrary restrictions and exclusions are incorporated. The diffi culty in a reliance on freedom and equality is to be found in the failure to specify the anarchic effects of these values, unless the principles in terms of which they are to be limited are made equally clear. One cannot take them out of the social context in which man fi nds himself—always and eternally. For this social context will always impose limitations on the operation of freedom and equality. I have tried to show the grievous limitations of any reliance on these values in the abstract in my paper on Goldwater (who seems to think a meaningful political philosophy can be built around the concept of “freedom”) and Tannenbaum (who makes a similar mistake with regard to the concept of “equality”). The defi ciency of this abstract monism has become most clear—and tragically so—in the encounter of the liberal tradition with world politics.

What had been neglected in the liberal preoccupation with freedom and equality is the question of what it is that draws people together, that is, the problem of cohesion. Yet, without such basic agreement, it is impossible to restrain the most elemental expressions of violence, and no civilized life is possible. The liberal response to this question has been to emphasize that freedom and equality generated their own patterns

The Problem of Community

228 W. JOHNSTON

of order. There is of course some truth in this, but it is a very mixed truth, and it is always possible that the effect will be the opposite of that foreshadowed. If we take the notions seriously, in a general way, we shall see that they are so abstract that they will be disintegrative of the bases of social cohesion and produce the new barbarism of a genuinely rootless society. We have come to appreciate that certain of the valuable habits of life which taught a respect for others and for the wisdom of past experience may be eroded by a restless egalitarianism. Some of the least desirable aspects of “modernization,” whether in Tokyo, London, or New York, may be seen as related to the degenerative effects of a too-literal emphasis on freedom and equality. However the more common response to the emphasis on these values is not to take them in some literal fashion, but for each person to give to them such meaning as he sees fi t—to fi ll the vessel of generality with a content derivative from his own experience.

The determination of the “operative content” of freedom and equality can be made only by a careful study of the concrete consequences—over the generations—of emphasis on this or that form of equality or freedom. Our most cherished freedom and forms of equality have, in fact, been the conse-quences of this prolonged historical experience, that is, they are “Burkean” in their roots. We have not yet demonstrated that man has—on any world-wide level—the ability to keep his enormous social constructions running with a tolerable harmony over the long pull. Hence we should not rush in where angels fear to tread, but should give respectful audience to the tradi-tional patterns by which societies have integrated their common life.

Of course the attitude one takes toward traditional ways is largely dependent on the alternative possibilities one thinks are attainable. Here again I would think a modest aspiration is the more prudent one, for the best is usually the enemy of the good. The central problems in the relation of self to other are always with us, though we may have reason to hope the poor are not. The danger of this perception is that one will be thrown into the arms of the status quo conservatives, who use the plea for “order” to choke off any suggestions for the extension of freedom or equality. Thus I think Bonald and others erred in falling into this rather uncritical conservatism. This we should certainly strive to avoid, most particularly in domestic politics. But we must always bear in mind that whatever changes in a liberal direction are accomplished, we shall confront an “imperfect” situation, in which equality and freedom will still be needed as “leaven in the dough.”

THE PROBLEM OF COMMUNITY 229

We have discussed elsewhere, and at length, the problem of the relation of freedom and order. I think it is important to see that the problem has a corollary in the relation of freedom to equality. For equality, in the true sense, implies the establishment of areas of uniformity. This is what I would take equality, without qualifi cation, to mean. When we qualify the concept of equality so that it becomes, for example, equality of oppor-tunity, this already represents an attempt to modify these implications of uniformity with a concern for diversity, by adding to the notion of equal-ity certain qualifi cations which stress that only certain forms of uniformity are meant and that in all other respects diversity is to prevail. Thus the doctrine of equality of opportunity emphasizes that a uniform starting position should be granted, but that from there on diversities of endow-ment and application should come into play. By thus restricting the area in which equality is to operate to opportunity , one is saying in effect that in all other areas diversity should be the governing factor and that it is fair and proper that this be the case.

One of the diffi culties in a reliance on equality of opportunity stems from the fact that, in the nature of the case, there can be no wholly sat-isfactory agreement on what this should embrace and how far it should go. No “objective” determination that equality of opportunity exists can be made unless one can distinguish between what is innate and hereditary in man and what is due to environmental conditioning. One can usu-ally make something of a case for the argument that what appears to be an inequality stemming from endowment and application is in truth the result of an inequality of opportunity, at perhaps some very early stage in life and operating in a very indirect way. Thus the determination of how far the notion of equality of opportunity will be pushed in the direction of uniformity and how narrowly it will be confi ned (to allow for a free play of diversity) is subject to fl uctuation and modifi cation. In this way, we see that the problem of equality is but a special instance of the more general problem of community, as is the problem of the role of the state. Any pre-cise determination of where the line should be drawn between those areas in which equality is to prevail and areas in which it is not can be drawn only in the context of particular circumstances of a particular society at a particular point in time.

The democratic tradition had been devoted to the attack on inequalities in status and reward which had no demonstrable functional justifi cation, and it had attempted to show that a higher justice could be achieved if these inequalities were overturned. Of course, there is always a danger that

230 W. JOHNSTON

the democratic tradition will attempt to develop its “genius” too purely and slip into advocacy of uniformity rather than unity as the goal of its aspirations. In this sense, it is true that there is in the democratic move-ment itself a rather powerful impulse toward uniformity and, in its way, toward conformity, as Tocqueville argued persuasively in Democracy in America . Thus our conclusion is a simple one: we can fi nd in the principle of equality no satisfactory solution to the form of social cohesion valued in liberal democracy. Indeed, to attempt to embody one’s social philoso-phy in a monistic faith in “equality” would be destructive to public order, just as it would be to try to emphasize “order” or “freedom” as the sole principle. Any society which attempts to build its principle of order from a simple reliance on equality will, by seeking the whole loaf, risk all. In this sphere as well, the half loaf is better than none and it is important to recognize the limitations of the principle of equality as a principle of order. Failure to do so will result, once again, in a confusion of unity with uniformity and will involve a reduction of the chorus to the singing of one part. However it is often diffi cult for the democratic tradition to take these considerations into account and to reconcile the necessities of social life with the imperatives of its theoretical preconceptions. It is often easier in democratic practice to show what forms of inequality one is against than it is to be lucid on the forms of inequality one is for. It is clear that inequali-ties derivative from general racial, religious, class, or other group charac-teristics are not acceptable in democratic theory. (However the busing of students out of their regular school district in New York City seemed to me a misapplication of the democratic emphasis on equality. For here one imperiled one good, that is, the sense of neighborhood unity, desperately needed to give a sense of “rootedness” in our vast cities, without really affecting in any fundamental way the inequalities the Negro has suffered from inadequate schooling.)

Thus, with regard to both freedom and equality, there are only a few general propositions we can put forth. The determination of the specifi c areas in which one or the other is to operate must be determined by the concrete circumstances of a specifi c society. Perhaps we can shed more light on this problem if we look, for a moment, at another central value of the liberal tradition—freedom. We have argued earlier that any political order depends on its voluntary acceptance (through the appeal of some or another principle of legitimacy) by the large majority of the people, plus the ability to apply force against those who do not accept the order and attempt by violence to disrupt it. The less a given status quo is supported


voluntarily, the more force will be needed to sustain social cohesion. It is a fairly easy matter to contain violent challenges to the status quo if only one-tenth of the population engages in such violence, while the remain-ing portion of the population gives its voluntarily allegiance to the given order. The task of sustaining the given order is made more diffi cult as the proportion shifts. As the percentage of those alienated from the status quo increases 1 % and then 10 % and then 25 %, the order will either dis-solve altogether or it will be preserved only by the increasing increments of force. In a democratic order, the assumption is that the use of force can be kept to a minimum or, to put it another way, that the overwhelming majority of the people will accept the given order, voluntarily, as legiti-mate. It is possible to view the central question of politics, therefore, as that of how it is possible to bring about an order which will be accepted by the overwhelming majority of the people, voluntarily, as legitimate, so that the application of force can be kept to a minimum!

Part of the answer which democratic theory would give to this ques-tion is to be found in the notion that the concept of “order” must itself be seen as a dynamic one. The surest way to bring about an increase in those alienated from this order is to assume that all the detailed elements in that order can be fi xed through time. The order is dynamic, in the most gen-eral sense, because of the elemental freedom of man. Hence the answer in democratic theory to the problem of order differs from such answers as those given by, say, Plato or in medieval thought or in modern totalitar-ian thought. These views gave expression to the “quest for certainty” in politics and assumed that there was some substantive arrangement which could be established that would possess eternal stability and in which the continuing disruptive effects of human freedom would be removed. As I have said, one sees this in Plato’s Republic ; one also sees it in the Marxist notion of the “perfectly socialized individual,” who will have learned to conform without friction to the pattern into which he has been socially conditioned. One also sees an illustration of it, vividly drawn, in the reac-tionary thought of Bonald, who had been frightened by the spectacle of the destructive potential of man’s aspiration for freedom. Now although the proponent of democratic theory should strive to understand the logic behind these proposals, rather than dismiss them out of hand as somehow irrelevant, he cannot fail to see in them a fundamental error. In short, democratic theory insists that there is no answer to the problem of politi-cal order which does not incorporate into it an awareness of the primordial freedom of man and which does not make provision for the channeling of

232 W. JOHNSTON

this freedom, rather than its attempted suppression. This is of course part and parcel of the problem of making provision for peaceful change, and one of the most persuasive—albeit elemental—arguments in favor of free elections and the party is that it does make orderly provision for accom-plishing this transfer of power, which is an enormous achievement. One needs only the most cursory knowledge of history to be aware of the evils which have followed from a failure of societies to agree on this means of succession. For the power to direct the state is an enormous power (as I shall point out later) and it is altogether understandable that mighty con-tests should center about the question of who is to exercise this power. I cannot stress this too heavily, for its importance is often underestimated. So long as this fundamental question remains unresolved, the state itself—however imposing it may be in all other respects—rests on an unsure foundation. The problem of succession can be like the heel of the mighty Achilles of old. Mr. Churchill was therefore right when he maintained that free and secret elections, with a choice of candidates, was the heart of the matter. And it is possible to look upon much of the institutional structure of a free society (in particular the party system) as derivative from this elemental but absolutely decisive task.

From this, it would follow that it is rather misleading—and it may lead to some grievous errors in judgment—if we look upon “order” and “free-dom” as somehow rather clearly separable “stages” in political growth, on the assumption that somehow the one must fi rst be established and then the other may be developed. I think it is wiser to see that the two are inseparable (except for the purposes of analysis) in essence and in time of implementation, and it is from their inseparability that we reach the conclusion: there is no answer to the problem of order which does not incorporate into itself a recognition of the primordial freedom of man and make provision for its expression via channels of peaceful change. Professor Elliott has developed these arguments with skill in Chap. 14 of the Western Political Heritage . 1

Thus we shall have to view with some skepticism theories which assume that liberty is a consequence of “the erosion of despotism.” Henry Kissinger has given a perceptive critique of these notions in The Necessity for Choice . 2 Thus we shall have to refi ne the theory that “order” and “freedom” are somehow sequential developments in Western history. There may be some truth in this general formulation, but unless the matter is put with more precision, it may lead to serious errors in judgment. However there is a sense in which the consolidation of monarchical order did precede the


imposition of constitutional limitations on it, and we must reanalyze this whole question with great care. (It would also be useful to relate it, in as much detail as possible, to the present “politics of underdevelopment”—for example, the consequences of the Frei regime in Chile.) Thus, to the notion that freedom and order are sequential, we might oppose the notion that they are always, in an important sense, simultaneous. But then it does not make a difference what freedoms are emphasized at which stage, and perhaps this is all the sequential analysis is meant to convey. As such, it suggests a valid point.

We may draw this stage of our argument to a conclusion with the statement that freedom itself is a fundamental principle of public order. If one wants to preserve the loyalty on the part of the larger majority to the state and to keep within a small proportion those who seek to overthrow it, one must have as his goal unity, rather than uniformity . Nevertheless this very general formula does not tell us which specifi c forms of diversity are permissible and which are the areas in which uniformity is necessary. And this is the crucial question, to which no general answer can be given that will be applicable to all time and all places. From our own experience, we have had to work out this problem in a trial and error fashion, and it is certainly meaningless to try to pretend that the answer can be given in terms of some simple progression toward “freedom,” since the essence of the contest has centered about the tension and confl ict between con-tending versions of freedom. This is true, particularly, with regard to the economic sphere, for here quite rapid and subtle adjustments are often needed, to keep up with the unsettling pace of technological change itself. Thus the notion that one can give an answer, once and for all, to the “order- freedom” question in the economic sphere is wholly in error and is productive of grievous social errors. And yet this is just what the “conservative” tradition in America has attempted to do—to pretend that time has stood still and that certain relations among the various interests in economic development could be perpetuated forever and ever amen. They have been aided and abetted in this tendency by the professional economists, who have been led into the notion that economics is some-how a science above time and who have been in pursuit of the timeless abstractions of “the market.” There is perhaps no discipline—save that of politics itself—in which pursuit of timeless abstractions has less to tell us than economics, and as a corollary to this notion, there is none in which the historic approach is more desperately needed. (Heilbroner has attempted this.)

234 W. JOHNSTON

When we come to study the American scene, we should bear in mind that the colonists had come to America for certain quite specifi c forms of freedom—rather than for “freedom” in general. Does anyone ever really undertake anything in pursuit of “freedom” in general? There were cer-tain quite specifi c freedoms—particularly with regard to religion—which they sought. There were others which they brought with them, as heirs to the English constitutional tradition. And others still which were part inheritance from the old country and part response to the stimulus of the opportunity of the new—and I would put the stress on private prop-erty and individual enterprise in this category. But once we strip away the notion that history is somehow the forward march of “freedom,” in general we come to see that (as Morgenthau has ably argued) we in truth have a recurrent confl ict between many different forms of power, which claim—in idolatrous fashion—to be the spokesman for “freedom.” The pretension of these claims can be modifi ed only if a stress is placed on equality—which stresses the equal legitimacy of the several divergent claims. However the point which emerges is not an unimportant one: that the most venerable freedoms, the ones that are most essential as components of our conception of public order, are those of a political nature: habeas corpus, freedom of the press, freedom of association, pro-tection against arbitrary arrest and arbitrary search, a general freedom of expression, the right to vote in a secret election, and so on. Now of course none of these can be exercised without some limitation, but our assumption has been that the burden of proof is on those who want to limit them, rather than on those who want to uphold them. And I think we fi nd our experience has borne out the wisdom of this emphasis, as we might see from reference to a few instances. With regard to economic freedom, we would also feel that the bias should be in favor of free-dom, but we have been willing to go much further in the imposition of restraints on economic freedom than we have on political freedom. As I have said above, I think there is justice in this, because, in a dynamic technological society, economic forms change with great rapidity and adjustments must be made toward them, whereas the basic elements in the political sphere endure largely unchanged and serve perennial needs of man in his social life. But we should keep in mind that this whole question of what freedoms are to be considered acceptable, and which are to be restricted in the name of necessary uniformity, must be sifted out in a trial and error experience which often involves violence and always involves tension.


Now let us take a look at some of the forms of freedom which we have ruled out and which we have considered incompatible with public order. One of these is linguistic diversity. Here the American problem was a fairly simple one, in contrast to the multilingual states of Asia and Africa today. We have guarded rather jealously our linguistic unity, and we have not had to face the hazards that a closely knit linguistic group would use basic political freedoms to pursue an interest of its own which could easily diverge from that of the nation as a whole. And yet this is a danger which many of the Asian-African states face. 3 What is more, we have been particularly anxious to block the territorial consolidation of a given ethnic- linguistic group, and as early as Franklin, we hear expressions of anxiety over the consequences of any such development. And against any form of freedom which would sustain rewards and status which did not seem func-tionally defensible, we have brought the argument of equality. We now see this in the radical transformation of the basis on which our legislative bod-ies are selected. A whole series of examples could also be given from our “time of troubles” during the Articles of Confederation when many free-doms were found to be incompatible with the need for social cohesion. In general, I think it fair to say that we have had to restrict the freedom of movement of our several states as the nation has developed. But you can see from this that the problem of preserving freedom may be—and usually is—far more diffi cult in the nations of Asia-Africa, where the diversities are so much vaster and the prospect that legitimate freedoms will be abused to push for a particular interest is much greater, with the consequent risks of a tyrannical reaction, which sweeps away the whole lot of freedoms (a tragic and ultimately self-defeating response, however necessary it may seem at the moment).

In the study of the problem of community, we therefore badly need to move away from generalized analyses of the virtues of “freedom” and “equality” in the abstract and from generalized views of history which see it as moving inevitably toward the realization of freedom and equality. I cannot think of any general statement in this regard that is not subject to quite fundamental criticism from a divergent perspective; no statement about which the opposite conclusion cannot with plausibility be main-tained. Now this is really what I am trying to show when I stress that the preoccupation with freedom and equality must always be modifi ed by a realization of the importance of order —that is, the principles in terms of which these values are limited and made compatible with the necessities of social life. In its most basic sense, therefore, when I stress the centrality

236 W. JOHNSTON

of the “problem of community,” I am saying that little of relevance can be said about “freedom” and “equality” in the abstract and that our analysis becomes a meaningful one only when we relate these general values to the principles in terms of which they are to be restricted. (In the discussion of freedom above, two strands were intertwined. I argued that, in actual practice, unless widespread concessions were made to man’s primordial urge for freedom, no public order is durable. The other proposition, not stressed in the above, is that freedom is an intrinsic value in its own right. But I have been less concerned to stress the “normative” signifi cance of freedom than its “existential” signifi cance—the fact that, be it good or bad, it must be taken into account if one wants to build political structures with some possibility of durability.) I think the recognition of the basic importance of freedom as a principle of public order is seen as early as the shift in Plato’s thought from the mood of The Republic to the mood of The Laws , and of course (as Sabine has pointed out) an awareness of the dependence of an enduring order on an incorporation of the principle of freedom is central in the thought of Aristotle. 4

Thus we see that in democratic theory the goal is unity and not unifor-mity, and the overarching concept which is designed to give expression to the interdependence of freedom, equality, and order is justice . Thus the “problem of community” can fi nd its general theoretical resolution only through a recognition of “the primacy of justice.” As we move from the domestic to the world scene, we see that we have far fewer areas of shared uniformity present, and this is why there is a fundamental gulf between the political traditions of all peoples and the political conditions on the world scene. The inference from this difference is that to the extent that any order at all is preserved on the world scene, it must rest more heavily on coercion and the threat of coercion than is the case domestically. It is therefore surprising to see liberal thinkers carry over to the world scene emphases similar to those they have developed on the domestic scene. But as I have suggested, one cannot carry over to the world scene domestic notions and make them relevant without the most basic changes in those notions.

Let us now return for a fuller exploration of the relation between eco-nomic and political forms of freedom, which we touched on in a general way a few pages back. Liberal theory had a heavy economic component in it at its time of origin, that is, it was closely related to the aspira-tion of the bourgeoisie for the protection of private property and their desire for freedom from government intervention. Beard and Lippmann


have discussed this. In America, liberal theory took these two forms of freedom to be in perfect harmony; both involved a belief in “individu-alism,” in freedom, in equality, and they seemed to be synthesized in the theory of the market. However their interrelation is not this simple. Economic determinists challenged the optimism of early democratic the-ory by arguing that in truth economic power was primary and directive. In its emphasis on the way in which political power was derivative from economic power, the implication was that the “reality” of democracy was thereby undermined. 5 Democracy stressed equality; property was clearly distributed in an unequal fashion—and this inequality was considered a legitimate diversity in democratic theory. Hence, if the economic deter-minists were right, then inequalities in power derivative from inequali-ties in property were the really important things in any community, not the “window dressing” equality of political power praised by democratic adherents. 6

However the economic determinists themselves were guilty of griev-ous oversimplifi cations and consequent distortions. The relationship between economic and political power is always reciprocal, and in demo-cratic theory, the higher of the two must ultimately be political power. For political power in a democracy comes with closer approximation to speak for the community as whole than does the more narrowly, and more unequally, distributed economic power. I think we can fi nd from the study of American history that it is not only in theory but in practice that the broadly based political power is seen to be superior to economic power. (I have not even touched on the relation between political power and mili-tary power, for in our tradition there has been no theoretical question, and few really signifi cant challenges, to the notion of the supremacy of political over military power. Samuel Huntington has analyzed this with care.) 7

Economic power represents partial interests—increasingly partial inter-ests as the division of labor grows more specialized. Political power rests on majority vote in the White House and on a more complex represen-tation of popular will in the Congress. When these two act in conjunc-tion, we surely have a more authentic approximation to “the general will” than when some hierarchically directed economic enterprise—whatever its scale—attempts to assert its will as the national will. Thus we see that it is a grave disservice to democracy—a crippling disservice—if its institutions are not clear expressions of the citizenry on the basis of “one man, one vote.” To allow representatives to be chosen on some basis other than “one man, one vote” is to strengthen the power of narrow interests (often

238 W. JOHNSTON

economic) to use the state as the vehicle for presenting their own will as if it were the general will.

Economic interests, of course, have their additional political parallels in the pressure groups, whose relation to democratic government is a matter of the greatest importance. However Schatschneider is correct when he places pressure groups on a lower level of legitimacy than political par-ties—because they do, after all, “short-circuit” the “general will” of the electoral process, whereas parties draw their legitimacy from the very con-frontation with one another in this process. 8 But the parties themselves speak with a level of legitimacy lower than that of presidency and Congress taken together. When we add to this the sanction of the state govern-ments (necessary in the amendment process), we have the most legitimate expression of the general will for which our system provides. In a general way, therefore, we may say that the legitimacy of the popular voice is mea-sured in terms of three considerations: the scope of the group of people consulted (president, senator, and representative represent a descending scale of “scope”), the number of samplings taken (i.e., the number of times the people in each group has spoken on a certain candidate or a cer-tain issue), and the percentage of people within each unity who have sup-ported a given issue or candidate. As scale, number of consultations, and percentage increase, legitimacy increases. Thus, for an issue like Medicare, where the president and Congress are for it, where the issue has been presented to the people over twenty years and many of them have given it their support on numerous occasions, and where the president and many members of the Congress were elected by overwhelming pluralities, the proposal may be said to enjoy a very high legitimacy.

Nevertheless we must remember that an action cannot be considered wholly legitimate unless every citizen gives it his willing support. (Indeed there are some theorists who would argue that even then the legitimacy is not complete, since there are obligations which a community must honor over time, and a fl agrant misuse, say, of the community’s resources—even though backed by 100 % of the population at the time—would be ille-gitimate, since it would deprive future generations of a usage legitimately theirs. However there is no way in which this notion can be given opera-tive political content—save through an agency similar to the Supreme Court, which at its best can only put a brake on action it considers pre-cipitate. It can always be overruled, through constitutional amendment, by the overwhelming majority. But the Supreme Court does represent a partial concession to the notion that no temporary majority—however


unanimous—can be considered the unchecked voice of legitimacy.) Of course, with a thinker like Rousseau, who argues that any representation is tyrannical, we see an advocacy of anarchy which (as I have pointed out in the thesis) can only have relevance for the small isolated community if even there.

Nevertheless the cautionary remarks of these critics point to an impor-tant reality: What one must work with in government is incomplete commu-nities, groups which have enough in common to sustain a government, but not so much in common as to make government unnecessary. In this perspective, therefore, it is true to see government as but a provisional representation of the community. Hence there must always be a sense that the government itself can never give complete expression to the legitimate demands of the com-munity—that the community is the entity with a legitimacy higher than that of the state and to which the state itself must be subordinate. Now how is this subordination to be effected? By the imposition of restraints on the government itself—via periodic secret elections, by the guarantee of certain fundamental freedoms against abuse by the government itself, by the free press and the general pluralism of the society itself. It is by no means meaningless, therefore, when democratic theorists make a sharp contrast between systems in which society is subordinated to the state and systems in which the state is subordinated to the higher legitimacy of soci-ety. Now this legitimacy itself can never be closed; it is always in growth and only if channels of freedom are kept open can the very concept of higher legitimacy of society be preserved. We thus reach this fundamental conclusion: Unless there are agencies through which interests other than those of the government can fi nd their expression, we have no “operative means” of protecting the “general will” of society against the “particu-lar will” which has found expression in the government. Government in a sense always represents a particular will, but if the society has instru-mentalities through which it can bring criticism and sanctions against the government, it tends to pull it into conformity with its own more general will. If the society has no such instrumentalities—or if it has only such as are granted to it by the government itself—then it is clear society has no means by which to check the subordination of the general will to the par-ticular will of those who exercise government power.

Even where the organs of government speak with high legitimacy (e.g., as is often the case in foreign affairs), it should still be borne in mind that the bonds of community, and hence of responsibility, do not stop at the boundaries of the nation. For man is part of a larger community and is

240 W. JOHNSTON

under a higher law than that of any national sovereignty. Thus national power must always be exercised with this sense of transnational limitation if it is to be considered truly legitimate. This larger sense of community (which fi nds many expressions) is rooted ultimately in man’s moral and religious sense.

Thus we may say, once again, that the liberal tradition is after a form of balance—in this case the balance between representing every interest in the community and thus threatening the government with chaos and the granting to a simple majority of the high legitimacy of representing the people’s will and thus threatening the society with tyranny. It will be seen, therefore, that in the preceding few pages what we have attempted to do is relate the very general conceptions of the relation between diversity and uniformity which we have said underlie the democratic conception of order, to the more specifi c problem of government structure. We have attempted to show how the more general principles are also operative at the lower level of generality of government structure itself. Thus we may fi nd errors in theory here, at the more specifi c level, as we found errors at the more general level. We have touched on one such error—or at least limitation—in our reference to Rousseau. I have dealt with others (e.g., Fromm in The Sane Society ) in the thesis. 9 I shall here mention but one more: Calhoun.

Calhoun was well aware that government was but a provisional repre-sentation of the community and that there was a sense in which it was a representation of one part of the community against the other. Thus he came to emphasize the need to accomplish the fullest representation in the government of the diverse interests of society, in order to check this inclination toward abuse. He relied on the fear of anarchy to hold together this loose-jointed government structure. 10 However I think it can be seen that if government is to derive its legitimacy mainly from the fear of anar-chy, then the activities of government must be limited to a very restrictive range indeed—and about all that is to be possible under these restric-tions is action concerned with the maintenance, in the most basic sense, of order. Thus Calhoun’s political philosophy is actually a philosophy of anarchy disguised as a philosophy of government. It is valuable as a pre-cautionary warning of the partial legitimacy which even the most represen-tative of government enjoys, but it is really of very little use as a guide to the creation of a sovereign government authority (John Fischer’s error). 11 Indeed, if government could operate on the basis envisaged by Calhoun, it is hard to see how it would be necessary in the fi rst place. In short,


Calhoun has followed an evasive line of argument in his domestic politi-cal philosophy analogous to the evasive line followed by many Victorian liberals in their international philosophy, as Schiffer has ably pointed out. There are thus signifi cant parallels between A Disquisition of Government and the philosophy which underlay the League of Nations—as well as the philosophy behind Tannenbaum’s proposals. In no instance is the cen-tral distinction made between a situation in which a will is binding on me without my consent and the situation in which it is binding on me only with my consent. And yet it is in this distinction that the distinction between government and anarchy is to be found. I have showed in my commentary on the Hogan book that the consequence of anarchic theory was anarchy in reality, as the implications of the rejection of the Geneva Protocol became clear. 12

Now I think in drawing this point to a close we should be absolutely clear that we are not saying the actual conditions existed on which a mean-ingful international government could have been created in 1919. We are merely saying that—empirical conditions aside, for the moment—a theory which disguises anarchy as government and presents a rationalization of the former as the equivalent of the latter must be altogether rejected. This is wholly different from the statement that, in practical political terms, it was unwise to try to establish a world government in 1919. It is merely a plea that we be logically consistent and not deceive ourselves. This is, after all, the burden of the Schiffer critique.

There are many aspects of the modern economy which sustain democ-racy; there are others which threaten it. I have discussed the ambivalent effects of technology on liberalism elsewhere. We may pull together a few additional refl ections and relate them to our earlier discussion of political and economic power. It is quite clear, I think, that there is a great need for hierarchical structures in the modern economy—and it is clear that no literal equality can operate here without a resultant chaos. Barrington Moore has shown how the Soviets had to abandon such egalitarian illu-sions, and Hitler justifi ed his political authoritarianism to the Ruhr indus-trialists on the grounds that he was simply organizing the state on the same principles by which they organized their industries. However the analogy was a fallacious one, for if we allow hierarchy to prevail here—in this ultimate source of political power itself—then we have no check against its self-perpetuation. 13 If, for example, we should allow political power to be distributed on the basis of some form of weighted voting, based on property, or race, or intelligence, then the forms of inequality

242 W. JOHNSTON

existent in society would tend to perpetuate themselves. By contrast, if we insist on the maintenance of equality in this ultimate form of power—political power itself—then all other hierarchies are, to that degree, provi-sional and subject to popular critique. To put the matter in other words, the radical egalitarianism which underlies political democracy is a means of threatening and keeping responsible all the other hierarchies of wealth and power which obtain in society. If political power should itself be made hierarchical and brought into correspondence with one or another of these alternative hierarchies, society would have lost its sole device (short of violent overthrow—now of lesser effi cacy in the technological era) by which to keep the state responsible to the society. This problem is of course closely related to that with which A.D. Lindsay closes his study of The Modern Democratic State —where is radical equality to prevail, and where is some form of hierarchy justifi ed? The general answer must be that radical equality is to prevail in the ultimate form of power and hierarchy in the provisional subordinate social and economic structures where it is functionally justifi ed. I think we can see from this the basic contribution made by radical equality to the maintenance of a democratic order. None of what I have said, however, can be carried over to equality of groups, in the way Tannenbaum attempts to do; the equality of political power I have discussed is equality for individuals, in the vote and before the law. It is not equality for Guatemala and the USA in the OAS. This is a wholly different problem, with which we shall deal in a different context. Nor does this mean (as Andrew Jackson seems to have thought) that radical equality can be the governing principle in public administration. It merely means that the hierarchies which do exist are provisional, are justifi ed on functional grounds, and are subject to modifi cation by this ultimate popular power.

In group theory, as I have suggested, the problems are different. At times, we seem to be faced with the choice between small enterprises (in the name of freedom) and large enterprises (in the name of progress). 14 Now the possibilities of equality here are more organically conditioned—for the difference in scale of the groups is often related to fundamental demands of the economic process—and these cannot automatically be equalized, without wrecking that process itself. Similar considerations pre-vail in international politics, where the inequality of states is a consequence of a whole cluster of deeply rooted and largely unalterable “organic” fac-tors. What relation does the purist emphasis on legal equality have to do with these circumstances? We have seen that the relevance it has within a democracy is in terms of “one man, one vote,” where it serves as a general


restraint on the abuse of hierarchical power. It obviously does not have this on the world scene, for there are no agencies which are represented on the one-man-one-vote principle. Where it does operate, therefore, it tends to be through formulas of group equality, which simply gives the lesser interests the power to hamstring the larger and cripple the possibili-ties of hierarchical leadership—that is, the possibilities of effective politi-cal action. Its effect here is close to the effect of equal representation of counties in the state legislatures or equal representation of the senators in the fi libuster process. In short, whereas equality domestically is a device to restrain the possible abuses of hierarchical authority, it is a device interna-tionally for crippling effective political action. It certainly cannot be said to be the guarantee of such action, as Tannenbaum pretends. “Realists” have tended to get around this by making a distinction between “law” (where a bouquet is to be thrown to equality) and “politics” (where the determi-native factor is to be power). But this of course opens one up to endless charges and harassments in terms of hypocrisy and also heightens the dan-ger that one will be stampeded (by having his own principles thrown in his face) into actions toward which a more realistic sense of interest would not lead. Morgenthau, of course, has been concerned with this abuse of equal-ity in his analysis of NATO. It is only necessary here to point out that the uses of equality, on the domestic and on the international scenes, are radi-cally different. The dangers in assuming that one can extend patterns of behavior developed in the one in some automatic function to the other are very real. It may be that while we need to push for greater equality (via the desegregation decisions, Baker vs. Carr etc.) domestically, our emphasis in the alliance structure should be the very reverse: toward a more clear-cut assertion of American leadership. We shall have an opportunity to explore this in more detail when we look at the proposal for Atlantic Partnership, which was a projection of our faith in equality to the world scene. We shall also note criticism of this projection.

We have said that liberalism takes the primordial freedom of man into account and attempts to channel it within manageable bounds rather than suppress it. This can be seen in adversary proceedings, within a court, where confl ict is regularized by carefully established rules of procedure, as interpreted by the judge. In a political campaign, there is, of course, no formal single judge. The rules which restrain the exercise of freedom are looser here, but there is a “judge” and he is the people themselves. As A.D. Lindsay has pointed out, the party which thought victory to be more important than the rules of the game, and was willing to use any tactics

244 W. JOHNSTON

to gain victory, would fi nd itself repudiated by the people themselves. On the world scene, however, one has a radically different situation, for one has no actual judge, of course, at work, and there is no public opinion operating in any very uniform fashion—although the attempt of utopians to have public opinion play this role is a recurrent one. Thus there is a persistent tendency for the confl ict to be reduced to the level of the most unscrupulous competitor.

NOTES 1. Elliott, 848–893. 2. H. Kissinger (1961) The Necessity for Choice (New York: Harper),

198–203. 3. E.g. Nigeria. 4. G. Sabine (1937) A History of Political Theory (Henry Holt: New York),

114. 5. C. Beard (1967) An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the

United States (MacMillan: New York). 6. Madison, “Federalist 10.” 7. S. Huntington (1957) The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press). 8. E.E. Schatschneider (1960) The Semisovereign People (Hinsdale: Dryden

Press). 9. E. Fromm (1955) The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart).

10. Calhoun, 26. 11. J. Fischer, “Unwritten Rules of American Politics,” Harper’s (November

1948), 27–36. 12. We have not been able to locate this commentary. 13. B. Moore (1950) Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press). 14. Galbraith, 8–9.


CHAPTER 11

Much has been written of the way in which Americans have “fl ed” politics and about the “historic unpreparedness” of the USA for world leader-ship. (A careful summary of the elements which are taken to compose this “unpreparedness” is given by Bradford Westerfi eld in his valuable study The Instruments of American Foreign Policy . ) 1 The nation seems to engage in a form of perennial breast-beating and lamentation at the wailing wall about its intrinsic inadequacies for the tasks it faces. I hope I may be for-given for suggesting that there is another side to the picture and that there are respects in which the USA is entitled to a greater degree of confi dence in its own abilities. As I said at the conclusion of the essay on “The Balance of Power,” Mill was correct in his contention that pagan self-assertion, as well as Christian self-denial, is a virtue.

We may begin with the recognition that there is an important sense in which no nation can be said to have a “historic preparedness” for the problems this age poses. In this respect, the era since 1945 has been a “great leveler.” Those concerned to remind us of the unpreparedness of the USA for world leadership are also, very often, concerned to remind us of the unique challenges of the nuclear age, of the age of bipolarity, of the age of the colonial revolt. Yet one cannot have it both ways. To the extent that one is concerned to stress the uniqueness of this era, he is disqualifi ed from stressing the particular inadequacies of the American experience as a training ground for world politics.

The American Alliance System

246 W. JOHNSTON

To move on to a second consideration, it is useful to bear in mind that the concentration of power which the USA represents makes it easier for her to bear her responsibilities than would be the case were her power less signifi cant. The very magnitude of American military and economic strength makes it possible for her to take a broader view of “the common interest” than would be possible for a weaker and less secure state. A state whose own margin of security is quite narrow is often inclined to react in a way prejudicial to the maintenance of a common bond at a comparatively slight shift in political sentiment in a hostile direction. The USA, largely free of dependence on her allies for the foundations of her own security, can (and indeed has) at times been quite long-suffering in the provoca-tions she has withstood, without being prompted to take action prejudicial to the common bond. In short, because of the magnitude of her power, she is often able simply to outlast the recurrent frictions which emerge in her alliance system and to move on with the next stage in alliance con-struction after she has ridden out this or that particular political storm. A state of lesser relative power might not fi nd it politically feasible to follow such a course.

What is more, the scale of American power has enabled her to have a broader conception of the manner in which her own interest is intertwined with the interests of her allies. That her policy is motivated, in some sense, by her own “national interest” and is to that sense “selfi sh” is a truism—and an irrelevant one. The important issue in politics and morals is: What conception has the individual or the group of its own self- interest? It is of course in a sense accurate to say that both St. Francis and Hitler were acting in pursuit of their own self-interest and, as the rather cynical pro-ponents of hedonism were once fond of saying, everyone is really moti-vated by the pursuit of pleasure. Be that as it may, the relevant questions in human relations turn on the radical divergence which exists between different conceptions of pleasure, and in international politics, the really important thing is whether the nation conceives its national interests in terms consistent with the interests of other states or conceives it in terms of a narrow self-glorifi cation. There may be truth in the proverb “There is no disputing about tastes,” but it is important that certain elementary facts be kept in mind. In a recent article, Barbara Ward brought out one of these: if the Marshall Plan had been undertaken in the form of interest-free loans, rather than through grants, there would be no balance of pay-ments problem for the USA today. 2 There would, in its stead, be a steady fl ow of funds in repayment of our support to Western Europe. It is not

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irrelevant in the light of these facts to direct the question, Who is unpre-pared for world leadership? to countries other than our own.

Consideration of this instance of American foreign economic policy brings us to another point. The basis of American world power is, of course, to be found in good part in her economic productivity. This eco-nomic productivity frees her from the desperate problems of subsistence, which haunt so much of mankind, and leaves her energies free for other tasks. What is more, it gives America an enormous surplus in her agricul-tural goods with which to assist, in a thousand-and-one ways, the needy of other lands. George Kennan and Alexander Hamilton are probably right when they argue that no nation should expect gratitude from another, but it is a corollary of their argument that they should not expect generosity either, and it is no more “improper” for the USA to expect that its eco-nomic generosity yield some political dividends than it is for it to show such generosity in the fi rst place. A narrow realism which rules out the expectation of gratitude would also be likely to rule out that generosity on which that expectation is based. In any case, the American economic machine is now able to accomplish almost anything toward which those who head it choose to direct it, as A.A. Berle has argued. 3 It should be noted that my argument differs (at least in implication) from that put forth by David Potter in People of Plenty . Potter is concerned to stress the error in perspective which is a consequence of the gap between our mate-rial plenty and the poverty of most lands. He makes a persuasive case for his own proposition. 4 My emphasis is a different one; it is on the realm of maneuver which our abundance makes possible. It is on the promise rather than the burden of our wealth. There are, of course, other factors which contribute to the magnitude of American power, for example, her geographic position and scale (still signifi cant, even in the nuclear age), as well as the military power which she keeps in being. What is more, a major source of her strength is to be found in the fact that she is so largely at peace with herself and in basic agreement, at least, on the means by which she is to reconcile her inner tensions. What is more, the fact that America is largely “at peace” with her world environment is an asset not to be weighed lightly. One cannot imagine what the character of the era since 1945 might have been had America been a military aggressor, rather than an essentially status quo state. This may not be a particular source of American strength in the world, but it is a factor to which other states might give thought.

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Another element in “America’s preparedness for world leadership” is to be found in the skill with which she has developed the art of accom-modation. I.L. Claude has argued that the essence of government is to be found, not in the imposition of one supreme will (as some classic theories of sovereignty would have us think) but in the “art of accommodation.” 5 I would be inclined to think Prof. Claude had written his general formula with too close an eye to his own national experience (could government be defi ned in similar terms if one were writing, not as an American, but as a Japanese or a Russian?), but his point is an important one. Americans have developed the conception of government as the art of accommo-dation with an unparalleled vigor, and their domestic experience in this regard is of considerable value in dealing with the multiple tasks of accom-modation with which international politics now confronts them.

A further justifi cation of America’s preparedness for world leadership (a justifi cation in some ways the strongest of all) is to be found in the fact that in any practical political analysis one must compare reality with real-ity and not with the ideal. That is to say, one must judge America, not by some abstract standard of perfection, but by the actual alternatives. In this respect, the most powerful justifi cation for America’s world leadership is to be found in the very default of effective alternatives. There are, perhaps, democracies with greater vitality (although this is open to question). Even if one concedes this point, these democracies (e.g., Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand) are of insuffi cient scale to bear the massive burdens which a world power must carry. The one state which might be taken as an excep-tion to this generalization (Great Britain) will be discussed in a moment. Of the states of larger scale, the political tradition does not, I would say, compare in any very favorable way with that of the USA. In our own time, we have seen France fall into serious inner turmoil from which she has been “rescued” by a heavily authoritarian regime which has been accomplished an “escape from freedom.” 6 In effect, one has seen political order based less on accommodation than on the imposition of a single “supreme will.” One cannot be sure that, with the passage of this will, the powerful dis-integrative forces will not reassert themselves. In this context, the notion that somehow France is somehow “old and wise” and the USA “young and inexperienced” hardly fi ts the facts. The shoe is very much on the other foot. Whatever the glories of French cooking, for political recipes, English is a richer language. And if one looks to other non-Communist states of signifi cant scale, it is not clear that the picture is fundamentally different. Ambassador Reischauer has written of the serious gap between


the generations in Japan. We cannot yet be sure that an enduring political foundation exists in Japan for constitutional government. 7 Neither the Japanese nor the Germans has yet passed through the important experi-ence of transferring government power from one party to another, and neither nation is certain that it can make such a transfer in such a way as to strengthen popular support for democracy. In general, neither nation yet has the backlog of political experience which gives it assurance that it can master its own political future in such a way as to achieve an ordered freedom. One might move on with other examples, for example, Italy, which is farther away from effective competition between two vigorous parties of the center than either Germany or Japan. But our purpose here is to suggest a simple point: if it comes down to the question of political maturity, the USA is in a “better” position to “question” the “youth” and “instability” of her allies’ political systems, than they are to question her own. The questions President de Gaulle has directed at America (about the integrity of our own commitment) might have been, with greater his-toric justice, directed at Paris. I am sure the Czechs must fi nd it ironic to hear the French question the integrity of another nation’s alliance com-mitment to France.

In the above discussion, no mention was made of Great Britain, a state of considerable power and one with a rich heritage of political experience. As I have argued elsewhere, one cannot understand the American political tradition itself unless he sees how deep are its roots in British political expe-rience. It is therefore signifi cant to note that these two states—America and Britain—have drawn toward a closer and closer working relationship in this century. It is of course possible to try to describe the basis of this convergence in “realist” terms, that is, in terms of convergence of inter-ests , which are usually thought of (in the “realist” perspective) in “hard” “substantive” terms, such as economic or military power. It is ironic that a realist like Morgenthau, who has laid so much stress on the importance of politics, has a very narrow, almost materialist, conception of “interest.” He therefore largely misgauges the signifi cance of the peculiarly political factors in the concept of interest, and it is these which have been at work, more than any others, in the Anglo-American convergence. One is led at times to the conclusion that this rejection of the play of sentiment and of political values in politics stems from a desire to portray one’s philosophy as thoroughly rugged and manly.

This orientation, nevertheless, obscures what I would take to be the most basic of the common interests between the two states, namely, the

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common acceptance of the constitutional tradition and of the entire ethos which goes with that tradition. I think we shall be more accurate, sim-ply as historians, if we play down the role of material interests in this relationship. In the years after the War of 1812, for example, our most astute diplomat of the period, John Quincy Adams, foresaw prolonged and recurrent confl ict as the likely course of future Anglo-American relations. And we sometimes forget that the most persistent theme in nineteenth- century American foreign policy centered on the complex snarls in our relations with Great Britain. Julius Pratt has pointed out the notion of the unguarded frontier between America and Canada is largely mythical, a reading back into history of a harmony which was achieved quite late in the nineteenth century. 8 In short, the areas of confl ict between America and Britain were multiple, if we think of “interests” in narrow substantive terms of economic and military factors. Thus I think we get ourselves into rather serious trouble if we approach this political constellation in terms of a too “realistic” conception of interests. We also fi nd ourselves in dif-fi culty if we attempt to explain Anglo-American convergence by the argu-ment that they drew together in opposition to a common foe (an argument which is used as early as 1823, to explain the support given by Canning to the Monroe Doctrine—out of a common Anglo-American opposition to the designs of the Holy Alliance). The type of argument merely begs the issue. For what is taken to be a common foe is, in itself, determined by a prior concept of “interest.” There is, after all, no “objective” crite-rion which tells us that this or that state was the “common” foe of both America and Britain. The concept “foe” presupposes a prior concept of interest to which that nation is seen to be hostile, and the concept “com-mon foe” presupposes a prior notion of common interest. Now I would not deny that an element in that “common interest” was to be found in certain similarities of strategic and commercial position between America and Britain. But we should also bear in mind that similarity often breeds contempt, and the Marxists, for example, predicted that the very similarity of economic power between America and Britain would be the source of deep commercial rivalries and political confl icts between them. We can-not understand the central element in the Anglo-American convergence unless we take into account the more basic “common constitutional inter-est” to which I have referred above.

These refl ections bring us to a second stage in our argument: a consid-eration of some elementary theoretical implications of the system of alli-ances which has emerged since World War II. If one looks at the genesis


of an alliance like NATO or the US-Japanese Security Agreement, I think it is clear that they were designed to meet the threat of the Communist challenge, and they may be seen as temporary devices to meet temporary needs. If one takes this view, these alliances may be analyzed in terms of past patterns of alliance, as Hans Morgenthau has done in his article on “Alliances.” 9 When one refl ects on Professor Morgenthau’s arguments, however, one is led to wonder if he may not have missed the deeper sig-nifi cance in the emergence of the American alliance system and in the subsequent pattern of development of that system.

If we may develop the point through an analogy with the history of the state, it is useful to bear in mind that earlier conceptions of the state were not unlike present conceptions of the alliance system, that is, in the “nightwatchman” conception of the state, it was seen simply as an agency for the maintenance of an elementary security. This notion was the com-panion, the complement, of a particular version of society which stressed the inherent capacity of a society to achieve a form of natural balance. Are we not now presented with a “nightwatchman” version of the alliance system, which has as its complementary notion the idea that there is some form of natural balance in the society of nations? To put the question in the simplest terms—if the validity of the nightwatchman conception of the state rested on the validity of the notion of natural harmony in interna-tional relations? We see, therefore, in what sense our analysis of alliances is related to our analysis, in another essay, of “The Balance of Power.” If, as I have attempted to argue in that paper, the balance of power is the companion piece of laissez-faire theory and if it has no more validity as the foundation of international order than laissez-faire has as a foundation of domestic order, the implications in both cases must be the same: we must reconsider in the most fundamental way the contribution made by politi-cal agencies to the achievement of a tolerable order. The political agency on the domestic scene is of the state; the political agency on the interna-tional scene, I would suggest, is the alliance system. T.H. Green helped the liberal tradition think through the new implications of the role of the state consequent upon liberal disillusionment with laissez-faire theory; the liberal tradition has not yet thought through the new role of alliances (and of imperial structures) consequent upon the disillusionment with balance of power theory.

In this respect, therefore, Professor Morgenthau’s “realist” analysis of alliances takes on a reactionary cast in the realm of theory, as does the Gaullist conception of foreign policy in the realm of practice. These are the

252 W. JOHNSTON

voices of Herbert Spencer arguing their cause after the Great Depression. In the liberal era, the state was largely conceived as an agency through which the minimal function of containing violence could be achieved. However the institution outlived, or moved beyond, this initial limited function and came to be seen as a crucial agency though which to deal with the common concerns of men. Our entire perspective shifts if we look on the American alliance system as an agency, or a system of agen-cies, through which to deal with the common necessities of men, to use I.L. Claude’s phrase. And if we look at the origins of the alliances from this point of view, we fi nd substantial evidence that they represented a rudi-mentary groping for agencies through which expression could be given to the common necessities of the nations concerned. Each of the great pillars of our alliance system has powerful historic foundations which well ante-date the Communist challenge. This is not the place to go into a detailed historical elaboration of this point. I have made mention of the gradual convergence of Anglo-American relations above. It is quite clear that the OAS is the institutionalization of a pattern of behavior which reaches back to the origins of the Pan-American system. And, if one reads the Yoshida Memoirs , it becomes clear that Premier Yoshida sees the American alliances as the continuance of a very deep strand in Japanese policy, fi rst expressed in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902. In a most revealing argument, Yoshida views Japan’s break with Britain and America, and her ties with the Axis, as a “great historic stumble.” 10 Thus we are dealing with an alliance which gives expression to deep and persistent Japanese interests and not a transitory device called up by the Communist challenge. As I mentioned, it would carry our argument out of proportion if I were to attempt here to elaborate this point with any historic fullness. But it is important that we set the American alliance system in the pattern of inter-national relations of the past three-quarters of a century, rather than the past twenty years, if we are to assess properly its origins and signifi cance.

It is quite possible, then, to see these alliances as efforts toward a more effective integration of a badly disintegrative world. Seen in this light, their importance is far greater than it has been taken to be. They are, in fact, the most relevant agencies through which a rudimentary global gen-eral will can make itself felt. And all the fashionable talk about The End of the Alliance (Ronald Steel) and The New Politics (Stillman and Pfaff) may be seen to be historically shallow and philosophically ungrounded. 11 The alliances are likely to have a permanence unanticipated by those who see the emergence of a “pluralistic” world just around the corner and who


welcome the new “freedom” this is expected to bring. The misreading of the signifi cance of our alliance system is rooted in quite profound mis-readings of the entire nature of politics and is derivative from a failure to think through with any depth the “problem of community” which is the central concept in our entire analysis. One can only hope that this desper-ate limitation of vision will not lead to the adoption of (or acquiescence in) policies which will unravel such stability as we have achieved on the world stage and advance us by seven league boots toward a nuclear anarchy. The president of the USA is not chosen as the people’s chief executive to pre-side over the dismantlement of the American alliance system. The purpose of the leader is to lead, but without a vision the people perish. We already have in the alliance system a great vision into which we should blow the breath of new life.

The task will not be an easy one. We shall discuss in more detail the specifi c problems we face in each of the alliances and shall put forth some notions about how we might go about the attempt to deal with them. I have put the general slogan which should govern this undertaking at the conclusion of my paper on “Relevant Utopias,” and I would repeat here: our task is to constitutionalize the American imperium, not dismantle it. The pressures for effective ordering of our international life will continue, not decrease; indeed, they will mount sharply. Our age has come to focus too sharply and too narrowly on one of these problems, that of military security. But the problems of the “general welfare” yawn even vaster than do those of “the common defense.” To be sure, man is such that he never quite separates in his community-building efforts the one problem from the other; in any case, our age cannot. Those who attempt such a separa-tion, who feel that if somehow these desperate life-and-death matters of the nuclear age can be controlled we can then go back to the simplicities of a decentralized world, are in profound error. The pressures of inter-dependence—atomic arms or no atomic arms—are there; they are irre-versible; they are mounting. They fi nd their most dramatic and awesome manifestation in the arms race, and those of religious persuasion might be tempted to see in this a “precious bane,” a “cunning of history” which compels men to recognize their interdependence and move along with the organization of their common life. There is some truth in this, but there is no simple truth in it. The more real problem is: can we use the negative effects of the need for common security to serve more positive trends without, in the very process, making the achievement of these com-mon ends more diffi cult? This poses the general question of the relation

254 W. JOHNSTON

between our alliance system and the achievement of a larger world order, and I have touched upon this in the paper “Relevant Utopias.” We see a concrete form of that debate today in the argument that the effort to establish the M.L.F. will endanger the détente with the Soviet Union and heighten the risks of nuclear diffusion. We shall return to the specifi c issues in this debate in another context.

NOTES 1. H. B. Westerfi eld (1963) The Instruments of American Foreign Policy (New

York: Crowell), 9–46. 2. B. Ward, “The Great Gesture of the Past for the Future,” The New York

Times Magazine, August 28, 1955 3. A. A. Berle (1954) The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (New York:

Harcourt, Brace). 4. Potter, 112–127. 5. Claude, Power and International Politics , 270. 6. S. Hoffmann et al. (1963) In Search of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press), 98–100. 7. E. O. Reischauer, “Our Broken Dialogue with Japan,” Foreign Affairs ,

October 1960. 8. J. Pratt (1936) Expansionists of 1812 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

Press). 9. H. J. Morgenthau (1959) “Alliances in Theory and Practice” in Arnold

Wolfers ed. Alliance Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins). 10. S. Yoshida (1961) The Yoshida Memoirs , trans. Kenichi Yoshida (Boston:

Houghton-Miffl in), 7. 11. R. Steel (1964) The End of the Alliance (New York: Viking Press); Stillman

and Pfaff (1961) The New Politics (New York: Coward-McCamm).


CHAPTER 12

It is possible to look at the liberal-democratic tradition in a number of different ways, and in general, an effort is made to link it with some form or other of freedom. For example, it was for long closely related and linked with laissez-faire capitalism, whereas others saw it intimately related to free-dom of religion. Several forms of freedom have been seen as components of the liberal tradition, but they are merely components; they do not represent the totality or the “essence” of the system. The aspect under which I would like to consider liberalism this evening is as a system for the accomplishment of peaceful change or, to put in other terms, a system for confl ict resolution. And the problem which will be central to our concerns this evening, and throughout the entire semester, turns on the relevance of liberalism as a sys-tem of confl ict resolution for the problems of world politics. To assess this relevance, it is necessary to have some image of the means by which the lib-eral tradition has dealt with the problem of change, some image of the basic character of international politics, and an estimate of the possible bearing the experiences of that tradition might have on the problems of that area.

There are many assumptions which underlie the liberal approach to politics, and a number of these will be touched on in the course of our proceedings. The fi rst is that change is real and that change can be good. It is easy to characterize the liberal in very broad terms by setting him apart from two more extreme viewpoints. This does not give us a very precise insight into liberalism, but it is of use in a general way. The liberal is not a consistent conservative, who would hold on to every element in the

Democratic Theory and International Relations

256 W. JOHNSTON

present order and not acquiesce one jot or tittle to change. This variant of uncompromising conservatism is alien to the liberal orientation and is felt to lead inevitably to a recessive condition for a number of reasons. One has to do with the conditions of liberalism’s birth, for the movement comes into being in good part in response to the changes consequent upon technological dynamism and the recurrent revolution in the scien-tifi c world view. Liberals have long (and at times uncritically—as with John Dewey) seen in the scientifi c and technological revolution as their natural allies; in truth the relation between science, technology, and liberalism is far more conjectural than the simple faith Dewey admitted. Beyond this, there is operative the pull of the “ideal end” of liberalism: the hope that one can achieve a society of equality, of freedom, and of plenty. The “ideal end” of liberalism embraces components from the Biblical tradition and is largely a notion of the “heavenly city” that can be brought to earth. It is for this reason no less compelling, on the contrary. Beyond these two factors of the scientifi c-technological revolutions and the pull of the “heavenly city,” liberalism sees in the general diversity of the human con-dition—most unmistakably revealed in the eternally renewed generation gap—a fundamental source of change. Hence it is easy to show that the liberal is different in orientation from the uncompromising conservative. It is perhaps more diffi cult to show how the liberal differs from the ever- compromising relativist, whose genial tolerance for change seems to fi nd expression in the phrase “anything goes.” But in truth anything does not go, or, if it does, much that is priceless goes with that which is worthless.

It is harder to differentiate the liberal view from that of ever- compromising relativism because, on the surface, the relativist shares many traits with the liberal—most particularly a faith in freedom and a concern for tolerance. However the relativist orientation neglects, among other things, the inevi-tably social dimension of human existence: the fact that no person lives in himself alone and no pattern of meaning can be generated simply from an individual source of existence. In short, the relativist aberration is the outgrowth of an exaggeration of a liberal virtue—its individualism. The life of the mind or the life of society is based on interdependence, but no pattern of interdependence can be sustained unless there is stability to the arrangements which govern the interdependence. In short, there can be no society without enduring relationships, but the establishment of enduring relationships is a joint product: of the self and other, of the present and the past. It can only be described adequately in Burkean terms. And it is in the inability of the self to function outside society, coupled with the fact that

DEMOCRATIC THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 257

there are fi xities which must govern any enduring social relationships, that the relativist meets his frustration. The self ultimately fi nds it cannot sustain even itself in a world where anything goes; when this awareness dawns, it has begun to stumble across the problem of the absolute.

Exploration of this problem in any depth would bring us face to face with one of the most diffi cult questions in political thought: the ground for a legitimate political ethic. This is not our concern here. Any talk, however, of an absolute presupposes the existence of such a ground. It is useful, however, to say that some of the most thoughtful contempo-rary theorists in international relations have devoted much concern to this problem. We should sharply distinguish between two situations which are on occasion confused—and it is on the confusion of these two that the confusion between the relativist and the liberal is found. The fi rst is the sit-uation (e.g., seen in Carr) in which there is a denial of an absolute ground for one’s ethical position. Divergences in ultimate norms, and their imper-manence, are assumed. Situation ethics often takes a similar position. Yet, from the fact that we act diversely in diverse situations, one may conclude that either there are no fi xed standards or that circumstances differ. The second approach (exemplifi ed in Niebuhr) makes the latter assumption. It works from the assumption that there is a fi xed ground for one’s ethic, though it admits that this single framework of value must be applied in dif-ferent ways in different circumstances. One might say that that difference in the two positions is but a difference in degree; even if this is admitted, the difference remains of great importance.

The liberal, then, assumes that change is real and that change can be good. Change is inevitable; progress is not. Liberalism is an effort to con-vert change into progress. But how is progress measured? In terms of approximation to the ideal ends of liberalism, the elements of the “heav-enly city”—which embraces the specifi c goals of freedom, equality, and abundance. As an aspect of the conversion of change into progress and the movement toward the ideal end, liberalism hopes to reduce the role of force in history, that is, to convert violent change into peaceful change. In its commitment to change, liberalism gives recognition to the incom-pleteness of the world as it is, its restless refusal to surrender to the notion that whatever is, is right. In its commitment that change be judged by its movement to or from the ideal end, liberalism divorces itself from the notion that whatever is new is, for that very fact, good and that change and progress are interchangeable. The insistence that change be kept within certain limits or parameters—which is the source of the liberal emphasis

258 W. JOHNSTON

on peaceful change—reveals the conservative and absolutist dimensions of liberalism. The master problem for the liberal tradition is the distinction between what is fi xed and what is permanent in its tradition, that is, it is the problem of the liberal identity.

Every day, every hour, every minute, changes occur: something old disappears, something new is born. And with every change, there enters an element of diversity into a given order. Thus, when we speak of an individual, or a society, or a tradition, as having a “continuing identity,” we obviously cannot mean that it persists, unchanged, throughout time. Suppose, for example, one were to say that the French identity were unchanged over many centuries because Paris had remained the chief city of France or because France had occupied roughly the same territory. The establishment of such broad continuities is not suffi cient to establish the persistence of the French identity. Or, to take the individual as an example, one might say that because the baby born in 1881 and the old man buried in 1945 occupied the same “mortal coil,” they possessed at beginning and end the same identity. But this is really not what we mean when we speak of the continuity of the self, nor is it what we as observers of the person as actor are in truth interested in. The problem of identity, in short, cannot be sidestepped by focusing on certain observed continuities and saying that their persistence demonstrates a continuing unity, that nothing has “really” changed. For something, as mentioned above, is always chang-ing and some continuities are always being broken. What I think we are interested in—as actors or as observers, at the individual or at the group level—is how we “weigh” the fi xed as against the changing, the continu-ities as against the discontinuities. It is part of the strength of liberalism that it has seen that an identity can continue through a process of inces-sant change, that to change is often the surest means to preserve. Yet it remains aware that, if certain parameters are exceeded, to change becomes equivalent to “to destroy.” The central question thus remains: What is fi xed? What is changing? What are the parameters within which change is permissible and those beyond which it become impermissible? Part of the liberal abhorrence of violent change is related to the instinctive feeling that such change exceeds the parameters of the permissible and is fraught with the danger of undermining the values of the liberal tradition. The dif-fi culty here comes, of course, from the fact that in social life some violence is always necessary and that in international politics violence is endemic. The liberal tradition, always troubled by the relation between violence and


its own identity, thus fi nds itself confronted with this problem in its most troublesome form in international politics.

When we speak, then, of the continuing identity of a tradition, we do not mean nothing in it changes; the claim to continuity in any such sense is an open absurdity. What we mean is that the changes which take place take place within certain parameters; if these parameters are broken, the identity is destroyed. It might be said, in passing, that there are nations in which such destruction has occurred, nations in which the possibilities of such destruction remain a constant preoccupation, and “nations” which possess an identity in name only, precisely because there are no effective parameters within which their seething diversities are contained. One may take as an illustration the German experience in the interwar period, which is an experience in the disintegration of national identity. When a com-munity is in very serious danger of going to pieces, one must then, if it is to be held together at all, resort to increasingly coercive devices which, in the German case, were as much of the mind as of the body: the control over the external life of the citizenry, the narrow racist identifi cation of the German identity imposed on the national mind. To talk today, therefore, of the German or the Japanese identity is, in part, to whistle in the dark and look to the future. How would one give a course in German politi-cal thought? Where is the “real Germany”? Where is the “real Japan”?—a question the Japanese, in most anxious fashion, are unable to answer for themselves and which is refl ected, most simply, in an inability to know what use to make of their fl ag as national symbol. One does not have to look far for the causes of this “identity crisis”: when a rapid series of confl icting historic experiences have broken all established parameters of permissibility, they can no longer be made coherent with one another, and the nation loses its “real self.” This is troublesome to it and to its global neighbors, for the nation that has lost its self will have an erratic pattern of behavior in world politics. Conversely, a stable pattern behavior in world politics is an index that the nation had “found its self” or is in the process of doing so.

We return, however, to the point about the liberal tradition and the role of violence. Part of the identity of the liberal tradition has been its conviction that the use of force can be kept within well-defi ned limits and that one can look toward a general reduction of the role of force in history. It remains, then, troubled by the necessities of acting in an environment in which there seem to be no clearly established parameters for the use of force and in which there can be no certain indicators that there is taking

260 W. JOHNSTON

place a general reduction of the role of force. In short, the involvement of the liberal tradition in world politics is a profound threat to its identity; either it must be able to bring the world arena into conformity with its own conceptions of the permissible use of force or fi nd its historic mean-ing imperiled by the recalcitrance of that environment. There is a deep ideological commitment—and a persistent one—on the part of liberals to the transformations of the world arena. The commitment is unavoid-able and will be ever renewed while there still exists a liberal tradition, for the frustration of such an effort is a frustration to the self-identity of the liberal.

When one speaks of “self-identity,” this refers to far more than indi-vidual identity; it refers also to collective identity, and in this respect, most particularly, I have in mind the collective identity of the USA, the most powerful of the liberal states. Louis Hartz in his study of The Liberal Tradition in America has given a vivid interpretation of the pervasive-ness and persistence of the liberal identity in America. It is necessary to say a few words here on this point. The strength of the America liberal identity is intimately related to the pattern of the American emergence into modernity (to adapt a phrase from Cyril Black). This is related to the manner in which the change from the traditional order of the ancien régime to the new order of commerce, industry, and the middle class was effected. This change was for long the dominant change in European life; Marxism is, after all, a philosophy which is preoccupied with the character and consequences of this change. In America, this tension between old and new was confronted in a highly attenuated form; Tocqueville is guilty of rhetorical exaggeration when he says that America was “born free,” but in relative terms his great insight is valid. In France, the “slugging match” between the old and the new, and its effects, dominated French life for generations to come and most obviously still intrude into the present. In America, one sees a relatively uncontested struggle, in which the fi eld is abandoned, by traditionalist forces, to the modernizers. The British expe-rience is in between that of France and America, but closer to the latter than the former. The Russian experience, by contrast, is more troubled than the French. We have one broad index with which to estimate the intensity of the liberal identity in a given nation when we study the manner in which this fi rst great transition was accomplished.

Put very briefl y, because in America this fi rst great “challenge of change” was accomplished in a relatively peaceful fashion, the tradition of peace-ful change struck early and deep roots. A consensus around the terms of


change was built. American traditionalism is peculiar in that it is a liberal traditionalism, a tradition which institutionalized change, expected it, and put those who would defend a given order on the defensive. France, by contrast, begins with the existence of a given order , and those who challenge it (fi rst the bourgeoisie) tend to think of themselves as a “new order” and are inclined to try to stabilize their hard-won position against further change. Not so in America. In America, one begins not with a given “order,” but with a given process, and what one legitimatizes is the principles which govern that process. The Constitution as a symbol and the Supreme Court as the “high priests” are the embodiments of this process; what America reveres in them is the embodiment of the rule of law, which sets the parameters within which the incessant dynamism of American life is to operate. Thus much of modern European history is a rather cataclysmic series of clashes between competing “orders”—each of which wins its temporary dominance in hard-won contests with a rival “order” and then tries to hold its ground tenaciously against any threat to its position. In America, the very concept of order is one in which pro-cess is central, specifi c arrangements are looked upon as temporary, and those who occupy them have not been forced through incessant confl ict to gain their position and do not feel under the compulsion to hold their ground, at whatever cost, against further challenges. There are, to be sure, exceptions. The Civil War was one. The current problem of integrating the Negro into American life may prove to be another. But even the Civil War—grave as it was to the preservation of the liberal identity—came to be seen as an advance toward the ideal ends of liberalism and had as one of its most remarkable aspects a rapid reintegration of the South into the larger national community. The speed of this reintegration is in its way as signifi cant a commentary on America as the coming of the war in the fi rst place. As for the current tensions, it would be my estimate that they will simply be overwhelmed by the assimilative force of American liberalism and the Negro integrated into the mainstream of national life far more swiftly than can be seen from the present moment.

In the Tocqueville-Hartz interpretation, we may see one source of the pervasiveness and persistence of the liberal tradition—thought of as the tradition of peaceful change—in America. A second source may also be suggested, and it is to be found in relation to the particular character of the American Revolution. A revolution, by its very defi nition, is a chal-lenge to the restraints of a given order; the challenge is made the more effective if it is total, dramatic, and seen as part of a universal struggle to

262 W. JOHNSTON

accomplish the good for mankind in general. This need to justify the use of force involved in a revolution by the appeal to a larger good is general; it is of particular intensity in a liberal revolution, since the use of force is a challenge to the liberal identity. Thus, in the American Revolution, one sees Jefferson argue that this use of force was justifi ed as a crucial phase in the liberation of all mankind from restraint, and Jefferson is constantly searching, with hopeful eye, for further signs that this general process of liberation had moved forward another stage. However, when the fi reworks and popping of corks are over, there always comes the morning after, and in the morning after, the necessities of interdependence and of principles of order to govern that interdependence begin once again to bear in upon the revolutionaries. This also poses a general problem for all revolution-aries: what is the basis on which the postrevolutionary order legitimizes itself? How is one to legitimize the imposition of new restraints when the revolution, in the process of attack on traditional restraints, has often lost sight of the inevitability of restraint in any social order? This question, seen in comparative terms, casts much light on the different course which post-revolutionary experiences take—whether, for example, one gets a George Washington or a Napoleon or a Stalin.

The interesting thing about the postrevolutionary era in America is the ease with which the imposition of new restraints was legitimized . Washington is the symbol of the new legitimacy. But one must ask: why were there so many men of Washington’s temper in postrevolutionary America—so many men who found in the conservative and legalistic Washington the symbol of the meaning of their revolution? I think we fi nd the beginning of an answer when we realize that the American Revolution was a partial revolution, directed against only some of the principles of oppression in the British system, and that in all other respects the Americans were satis-fi ed with their condition. This is related also to the recency of the serious disturbances; after all, until 1763, the Americans had been linked in a common cause with the British, and at the end of the Seven Years’ War, James Otis had drunk a toast to their enduring concord. In the statesmen of the time, the lingering sense of allegiance from the past probably played a considerable role in restraining the extent of their opposition, a memory which in many cases (most notably that of Washington) included that of common service. Beyond this, one had, of course, signifi cant linguistic, ethnic, and cultural links with the imperial power. This in itself is enough to set the American Revolution in sharp contrast to many of the revolu-tions of our own time, where one has many cumulative divergences piled


the one on top of the other (divergences of language, of color, of ethnic bond, of religion, of social structure, of historic experience, etc.), with the result that the political break signifi es an elemental cleavage rather than the brushing away of a single bridge while many others are left intact.

We are brought back then to our opening consideration of liberalism and change. As revolutions go, the American Revolution was clearly a lib-eral revolution. Seen in terms of the extensive use of violence, it broke the normal parameters of a stable domestic liberal tradition; seen in terms of the near-chaos of many revolutionary experiences, its relatively nonviolent nature is its most striking quality. How then are we to account for this? In terms of the quality for life in colonial America: from the fact that the principles of order under British imperialism were in very good part toler-able, the revolt, as a consequence, was partial. Beyond this, the reconcili-ation with the former imperial nation was the more easily effected. In this respect, we can see that Jefferson and many of his contemporaries badly misjudged the character of the American Revolution: they saw it in terms too dramatic and enduring and misunderstood the potential for reconcili-ation between the contending nations.

The American Revolution may then be spoken of as a liberal revolution, a contained revolution, and the speed of internal stabilization and external reconciliation sustains this interpretation. We may press the question a step further back. What accounts for the rather modest character of the oppressions against which the Americans were in rebellion? To answer this, we must look at the character of the imperial regime, a regime which had itself already gone far along the path of institutionalizing liberal val-ues. For at the very time that the fi rst English settlements were being made in North America, Coke was quoting to James I the reality of the rule of law. In short, Britain had her own great liberal revolutions in the seventeenth century, and the Americans were, in considerable degree, the benefi ciaries of this experience. For the fruits of the liberal revolution in Britain colored the entire tenor of its national life and its imperial colonies. Where, for example, does one have a richer criticism of the limitations of Britain’s America policy than that of Burke? Where, one might ask, is there a comparable critique by a Russian of its imperialist policy in Hungary?

Thus we see that what began as an exploration of a relatively limited question is seen to have wide implications. How to explain the character of the American Revolution? We fi nd this related to character of its colonial experience. How to explain this? In terms of the character of the imperial power. How to explain this ? We here are brought back to the exploration

264 W. JOHNSTON

of the sources of English liberalism, and any exploration of this would clearly take us beyond the bounds of our present concern. But at least one has pointed to a problem. The character of a revolutionary experience can no more be understood without a knowledge of the character of the regime against which the revolt is made than can the character of a child without the knowledge of the parents who reared him. In his discussion of the background of the Russian Revolution, Merle Fainsod has said that “Bolshevism as a movement was an indigenous, authoritarian response to the environment of Tsarist absolutism which nurtured it. Autocracy generates its own authoritarian antibodies and endows them with its own peculiar contours.” 1 The same formal proposition—but with very differ-ent content!—is accurate in explanation of the character of the American Revolution. Thus, to understand the American Revolution, one must understand more than America, and to understand Russian Communism, one must understand more than Communism. In closing on this point, one might keep in mind its relevance to international politics: the qual-ity of the discontents one faces there, and the form they take, is shaped in good part by the pattern of order fashioned by those in positions of dominance.

Our concern in the last few pages has been to suggest two reasons for the pervasiveness and persistence of the liberal identity in America. Others could be given. This is not our purpose here. Our concern is to point to the way in which these factors have strengthened the American confi dence that change is real, that change can be good, and thus it is pos-sible to establish parameters within which the processes of change can take place very largely in nonviolent fashion. This spirit, it may be suggested, is pervasive in the American approach to foreign policy. The ground for confl ict between that spirit and the realities of world politics may be easily seen, for, within most nations, the revolutions are not liberal revolutions and, in world politics as a whole, forces antithetical to the entire liberal orientation often seem predominant. What relevance, then, does the lib-eral faith in peaceful change—a consequence of parochial historic experi-ences—have for an environment where a sharply different reality prevails?

To begin to come to terms with this question, it is useful to draw more sharply the distinctions between the sort of environment within which the liberal tradition has operated in a country like the USA, and the environ-ment of international politics. As has been mentioned earlier, the liberal tradition puts a marginal emphasis on the use of coercion, and it measures progress toward the “heavenly city” in part by the decline in coercion and


the rise of consent as factors in social cohesion. If this is not the case, if a society is becoming more rather than less reliant on coercion as the basis of its order, then it is losing its liberal character. It is, in Machiavellian terms, shifting from the democratic order of The Discourses —based on civic vir-tue—to the coercive order of The Prince , necessitated when there has been a decay in civic virtue. The master question which a liberal order faces then turns on the direction of its movement: away from coercion and toward consent or away from consent and toward coercion?

David Easton has tried to spell out in rich detail the processes by which the forces of change are kept within parameters in order to preserve a stable political order. 2 This is the essential task for a liberal political sys-tem. Its entire panoply of representative institutions (formal and informal) are in good part supposed to bring to the attention of the governors the sources of alienation present in the society—sources which, if allowed to go untended, will culminate in a violent challenge to the system. The soundest instinct of a liberal system lies in this concern to convert alien-ation into legitimacy by removing the roots of the alienation. It must be stressed that the role of force in such a system is marginal. How is it to be described? As a means to protect the channels of transformation (from alienation to legitimacy) against violent disruption . Since some of the most troublesome sources of alienation are rooted in human nature itself (one mentions again the generation gap), the task of transformation is never done. But other sources of alienation are more external in their location and more temporary in their existence. In short, they do admit to removal or at least substantial modifi cation. It is not the place here to discuss which sources of alienation fall into which categories, though in practice it is important to make such a distinction. The awareness that some are per-manent and that means must be eternally available for the conversion of alienation into legitimacy is at the basis of the hard realism which enters as a strand into the liberal orientation.

For the liberal must be a realist in his assessment of the enduring sources of human confl ict. It is a mentality which must begin with the dawn of each day, so to speak, to condition itself and its environment to the management of these hardy perennials of confl ict—in terms of psychological predispositions and in terms of institutional creation. As a “theory of human nature,” it can in general terms be put, once again, in a position between the “children of light” and the “children of darkness,” in Niebuhr’s brilliant characterization. Were the sources of alienation as deep as the children of darkness maintain, there would be no hope for

266 W. JOHNSTON

the liberal strategy in politics. This is the error of such realists as Hans Morgenthau, and it makes his analysis of policy essentially beyond the liberal tradition and gives to his specifi c policy analyses the air of hopeless-ness from the outset. This is fairly easy to see, and liberals are not often tempted to confuse themselves with the unrealistic realism of the children of darkness. Their temptation here, as with the ever-compromising relativ-ists, is to succumb to the illusions of the children of light: to think too well of man and thus leave inadequately attended the ship of state.

The children of light err in their notion that the sources of alienation have a specifi c, and usually external, location and can be once and for all removed. It has (as I have tried to point out at length elsewhere) been gravely handicapped by the illusions of the tradition of scientifi c human-ism. The children of light begin their day, so to speak, with the high hope for harmony on the horizon and are not prepared, in terms either of psy-chological predispositions or institutional construction, for the perennial occurrence of confl ict. When it comes, against the best efforts of man to the contrary, they are caught off guard, and perfectionist ethics can then become swiftly transformed into paranoid politics. For when con-fl ict recurs against all one’s harmonic expectations, one has no means by which to fi t its recurrence into one’s framework of discourse and hence the sources of its must be defl ected externally and renewed zeal put behind the effort to root out the sources which “persecute” one. Of these dis-tinctions, many examples could be given—none more revealing than the difference between the sober realism of a Madison, on the one hand, as against the mad zigzags from harmonic illusions to brutal paranoia of a Khrushchev on the other. In passing, it might be said that the costs of perfectionist ethics transformed into paranoid politics are very high for international politics, whose waters are heavy with pollution from political systems unable to dispose of their own wastes.

Thus, were man as bad as the children of darkness feel, there would be no hope for a liberal solution to the problems of political order; were man as good as the children of light assume, there could be no need for such a solution. To paraphrase Niebuhr, man’s virtues make a liberal sys-tem possible; man’s vices make it necessary. But in this system, it must be stressed that the role of force is peripheral; the goal of the system is to “make the community more of a community,” by lessening the sources of alienation and giving more people (quantitative extension of legitimacy) a more intense (qualitative extension of legitimacy) stake in the system.


It is interesting and heartening to note that, once states have reached a “takeoff” point in a liberal political system, there are powerful forces at work which tend to strengthen the structure of that system. For the very existence of widespread areas of consensus in a society frees resources (emotional resources, not least of all) for the tasks of positive community building. Application of these resource in their turn alters the conditions of the society (through, e.g., greater security, greater economic “pay-offs,” and greater interchanges of information and experience), knits it more effectively together, and, in turn, frees more resources for a further effort to remove or modify the sources of alienation. This is why there are grounds on which one may be confi dent that the USA will be able to remove the principal sources of Negro alienation (some are irremovable) and build an effective sense of legitimacy among alienated Negroes. For all the anguish it occasions, the Negro problem is an ugly sore on an essen-tially healthy body. The resources of the healthy body should certainly prove vigorous enough to overcome the sickness of its member. In world politics, the situation is the reverse. Here one sees a few healthy patches on an essentially diseased whole, and the outcome for this patient is much more conjectural.

The outcome is more conjectural because if there are powerful fac-tors working to make a legitimate order more legitimate, there are fac-tors which tend to move a disintegrative order further down the cycle of decline, to turn an order lacking in legitimacy even more hopelessly against itself. It is possible to see international politics as caught in such a built-in cycle of decline. 3 For we have seen, since Westphalia, interludes of relatively contained violence followed by ever-more devastating upheav-als. It is clear that the next upheaval on a global scale could take man-kind beyond the point of no return. In studying the process of decay of a domestic order, one might see this as moving along a continuum, from a hypothetical situation of order based wholly on legitimacy, through vary-ing stages of reliance on coercion (as alienation mounts, goes unattended, and feeds on itself), to the stage where public order itself disintegrates. At this stage, where one formerly has a government, one would now have many governments, each possessing legitimacy to its own adherents and each having means of coercion at its own disposal, but the system as whole no longer possessing legitimacy and no longer having effective means of coercion at its disposal. This sorry estate, descriptive of the end point of decline of political order, is the beginning point for international order.

268 W. JOHNSTON

In world politics, nations must devote their primary energies to the task of the maintenance of order, in a coercive, repressive sense. From the absence of any centralized legitimate agency of coercion, one sees major centers of coercion organized in competition with one another. International politics becomes, very largely, a struggle in competitive coer-cion. States rely for their preservation on their ability to hurt those who would move against them. They thus feel under compulsion to counter the moves of potential antagonists in order to preserve this tenuous coercive order. And since no one can say, in an illegitimate system, who has cast the fi rst stone or when the cycle of aggression, precisely, began, each unit feels an inner justifi cation for putting more and more resources into this com-petitive coercive struggle. At the same time, through default, the “play of natural forces” continues, and the most bizarre and ominous imbalances are created. To cite but one: a growth rate in population which exceeds the growth rate in food supplies. And thus the downward spiral pushes itself farther downward: more resources go into coercive efforts to maintain a tenuous order; in the process the resources (and, once again, this most defi nitely includes the psychological resources) available for community- building efforts are badly attenuated; these community-building efforts left unattended further heighten the sources of alienation against the sys-tem which, in their turn, make necessary a further application of coercion to maintain a tenuous order at all—and so on down the cycle of degenera-tion goes. The general goal of liberal strategy is very clear: How to stop the cycle of degeneration and then, if possible, to start the cycle moving upward? All the minor diffi culties are those of implementation.

One may begin a consideration of how to make a utopia relevant by a dis-missal of means which are largely irrelevant but which, not seen in this harsh light, constitute a claim on limited resources beyond the return that can be expected from them. I have in mind, most particularly, the United Nations.

Perhaps the bitterest of all the ironies the liberal faces in world politics is that related to the United Nations: an agency which is supposed to be in the forefront of the effort to build a liberal world order and which is, by its very structure, handicapped at every turn from doing so. In the United Nations, one has frozen in explicit legal form the principle of particularism and then thrust upon this hamstrung agency the task of building a world order. Yet the very principles on which the United Nations is founded become the most effective means for frustrating the goals it is supposed to serve. It is as if one had a child, the son of a great musician and himself fi lled with a burning desire for accomplishment in the art of the piano,


who was born without hands. A disproportion between constitutional forms and the reality of political power undermines the effectiveness of any political system; this ineffectiveness becomes the more oppressive when the means for the system’s reform can be accomplished only through the acquiescence of those who are to suffer from such reforms. Such a provi-sion closes the circle of ineffectiveness about an organization.

In explicit and exalted form, the principle of equality has been frozen into the United Nations system. Not only has this built into the organiza-tion as its “working principle” the very reality of diversity which the orga-nization is supposed to be able to surmount, but it has brought into being a “legislature” which—of all those in the world—is most in need of redis-tricting. There is a subordinate irony in the liberals who work against the comparatively minor injustices of domestic legislative distortions and yet fi nd themselves, in international affairs, giving their support to the most distorted of all “representative” bodies! This frustrating inconsistency in itself speaks volumes about the dilemmas which face a liberal strategy in world, as against domestic, politics. Two consequences, among others, follow from the peculiar disproportion between form and function in the UN. First, nations often fi nd the most effective use of the UN, for their purposes, precisely in its non use. French policy—to say nothing of that of Soviet policy—is a case study in the nonuse of the UN to serve what the French see as useful political purposes. Second, effective positive use of the UN is in almost direct proportion to the skill with which one bypasses its formal procedures and makes use of its informal ones. One must evade form to fulfi ll function. This has a particular relevance to the position of the Secretary General, who is caught in the most humiliating of political dilemmas. For no higher responsibilities attend any political offi ce in the world, and yet there is none in which the gap between power and respon-sibility is so vast. The vastness of the gap must be a constant torment to the Secretary General; he compounds his own unenviable estate when he is—as seems to be the case with the present incumbent—of a legalistic orientation. 4 The Secretary General, above all, can narrow the gap in frus-tration only when he is able to act in the spirit and not the letter of the law which governs his own offi ce. There are, to be sure, useful purposes to which the United Nations can be put; in a world of scarcity, one must be thankful for small gifts. The point is, however, that the role of the UN will be marginal to the implementation of a liberal strategy—appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. One must turn elsewhere if a signifi cant momentum is to be given to that strategy.

270 W. JOHNSTON

To assess where one does turn, it is necessary to say something about the “identity” of the international system itself. In a very general way, we have talked about the “identity” of the liberal tradition and have made some tentative comments about the broad characteristics of world politics. It is now necessary to expand these briefl y and to confront more directly the question of the sense in which the identity of the international system has undergone change in the period since World War II. It is in the light of this discussion that we may draw to a close our concern with the relevance of the liberal tradition for world politics.

In my view, the best general description of the identity of the inter-national system is that given by Professor Morgenthau in Politics among Nations . As I have suggested elsewhere, the broad contours of the system will conform to the Morgenthau analysis until the system itself is changed. In short, the beginning of wisdom in international politics comes from an understanding of the insights of the realists, from an “internalization” of the realist image. Aron, Hoffmann, and others also describe the continu-ing identity of the international system in the broadest sense and capture its essence in their focus on the diplomatic-strategic struggle. However there are diffi culties in the “classic” realist position, most particularly in the position of Morgenthau, which I have also discussed at length else-where and do not want to repeat here. For by axiomatic proclamation, so to speak, Morgenthau stresses the continuities over the breaches of the international system. This, as we saw in our earlier discussion of the mean-ing of identity, very largely begs the question. For the central question is to weigh the continuities against the discontinuities, and only after such an estimate is made are we in a position to understand the identity of this specifi c age in world politics. The specifi c identity of this age is prejudged in realist thought, and it is this tendency toward prejudgment that gives to realism its static bias, its anachronistic character, and very largely deprives it of realism.

We may elaborate these points by analogies from economics. The clas-sical realist analysis bears many similarities with the classic market analy-sis. In the classic market, here one had many fi rms in competition; the actions of a given fi rm were irrelevant in the determination of market prices. One could discount the peculiarities of individual fi rms because of the determination of economic processes by the impersonal market. The classic market is analogous to Waltz’s third-image analysis of the nature of the international system: the behavior of fi rms is determined by the nature of the environment in which they fi nd themselves. A principal error


of Morgenthau is that his theory does not take suffi cient account of the manner in which the “international political market” has changed since World War II and the implications these changes have for the validity of his model.

To carry the economic analogy a step farther, as one moves from a plu-ralistic classic market to one of oligopoly or duopoly, the relative weight of “impersonal market forces” in the determination of economic processes declines, and the relative weight of the behavior of specifi c “dominant actors” increases. In Waltz’s terms, one moves from a pure third-image analysis to a mix of third- and second-image analyses. Take the auto indus-try as an example. What must we understand if we are to understand how car prices are set in America? It is obvious that, in this type of market, a knowledge of “impersonal market forces” is not enough; indeed, part of the inability of the Eisenhower administration to control infl ation came from a too-doctrinaire reliance on impersonal market forces and inatten-tion to the way in which in certain markets the behavior of the giants is determinative. In short, one will want to know a great deal about the pric-ing policies of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. Beyond this, one will want to know a great deal about the internal operations in each of these industries—most particularly its relations with the UAW. The point is sim-ple: factors which could be discounted in an impersonal classic market can no longer be discounted in a market dominated by two or three actors. The parallel for international politics is simple. In an age of bipolarity, one can no longer understand the international system in terms of the work-ings of an impersonal balance of power or an inherent logic of the third image. One can no longer discount the factors which the realists, thinking of a very different market in a very different era, continue to see as of no signifi cance—most particularly ideology and domestic political structure. In the world of bipolarity, an understanding of the domestic politics of the USA, for example, becomes essential to the understanding of the crucial determinants of world politics. In this respect, the study of shifting pat-terns in American public opinion is more important for an understanding of world politics than is a study of, say, a properly “international” subject like shifting voting patterns in the General Assembly. The point is simple: the second-image analysis takes on a new life, and the simplifi cation of classic realism becomes a grave distortion. The Morgenthau image is a badly inadequate guide—necessary, yes; suffi cient, by no means.

In passing, it should be noted that Morgenthau’s faith in the validity of the classic model exerts a powerful normative infl uence on the judgments

272 W. JOHNSTON

he makes of specifi c policies. For his descriptive account of the way the traditional system operated in the part is used as a norm to govern the way in which the system should operate in the future . Thus what passes as “pure analysis” is “pure” only if one assigns an exalted status to the clas-sic market, only if one sees this as an enduring “law” of the social order. Morgenthau is normative under the guise of his analysis in the same way as the classical economist; he is really a latter-day Sumner who has been over-taken by events. The classical economist uses as his criterion of judgment the preservation of factors which make possible the effective workings of the classical market; he criticizes those factors which hinder this proper working. The truth is that both the classic market and the classic interna-tional system were transitory historic phenomena , and relentless technologi-cal changes have radically altered both. The task for the economist is to understand the delineations of the new system, most particularly the new pattern of controls now operative and the way in which their operation can be made more effective. The same is true in the study of international relations. Adherence to the classic model obscures the origins, nature, and consequences of the new control devices which have come onto the world scene since 1945. And yet it is the appearance of these new control devices that marks the most signifi cant changes in international politics in our time. In the sphere of action, de Gaulle represents errors analogous to those of Morgenthau in the sphere of theory. They are both reactionary utopians and one must break with the specifi cs of their analyses to under-stand the character of the contemporary international system.

How then do we carry forward the analogy to delineate the character of the contemporary system? In the classic market, the parameters which set limits to market operations were marginal, frail, “way out there,” and there was no effective consensus on their maintenance and few formal agencies for their implementation. Free-ranging market activities covered the preponderant range of economic activities, and many examples of this can be given—most simply in terms of wages and hours policies. The mar-ket dominated all; on the fringes stood the government, uncertain guard-ian of fragile parameters. And so it was in international relations. The international political market controlled the preponderant range of inter-national activities. Its hallmark was the jealous insistence of states on their freedom of action, and their willingness to engage in war, when necessary, to protect this freedom of action. Sovereignty was the most exalted of legal principles; a profound and aggressive patriotism the most exalted of political virtues. This pattern of values is very rapidly waning, because the


world to which it had relevance is passing off the stage of history. To put it simply, small fi rms can no longer survive in the competitive environment. Take, as a single example, the Holland of the 1570s and the Holland of the 1940s; the former stands its ground against the greatest of empires for generations to establish an independence never before known; the lat-ter collapses in a moment in utter inability to preserve an independence many centuries old. States, in short, have come to fi nd the traditional sys-tem largely unworkable. The transformation in values is radical. Formerly freedom of action and the maintenance of security operated in harmony; now they are in confl ict, and to preserve their security, states more and more compromise their freedom of action. They do this in many ways; for example, they may, in effect, opt out of the system (Switzerland, Sweden); they may seek protection under the wings of a greater power (the alliance systems); they may try to change the roles of the system at its core (“mak-ing the UN work”). But they see their roles in a wholly different light from that of traditional statesmen.

A fi nal step in the analogy. When the inadequacies of the market became irrefutable, they took the form of a recognition that freedom of action was in confl ict with: (1) economic security and (2) justice. Freedom of action remained a good, but it had to be compromised signifi cantly to give opportunities for more security and greater justice. Some made the error of thinking that these latter ends were all that counted and that they could best be secured through a centralized transformation of the clas-sic system. They proved in error. Their theoretical formulations can be seen in doctrinaire socialism. The reasons for the failure were many, but included in them were the political unfeasibility of so wholesale a shift and the functional (as well as moral) advantages of preserving modifi ed freedom of action. It may also be useful for “theorists of international rela-tions” to keep in mind that no “theorist” saw the mix that was to emerge. The theorists—seeking consistency, troubled by the messy incompatibili-ties that must go together in any enduring functioning political order—misjudged the whole. It was only after the new mix had emerged, as the consequence of a vast number of unpredictable and pragmatic decisions, that the theorists could come to generalize how these messy incompat-ibilities somehow or other still seemed to be successful. Niebuhr writes his most perceptive chapter on the modern American political economy many years after pragmatic practitioners had created the system about which he could then generalize. 5 And the dogma over which their experience had triumphed was his, not at least of all.

274 W. JOHNSTON

Thus the classic international political system has fallen to pieces in the twentieth century, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not put the past together again. The collapse of the system is refl ected in the sharp tension among values hitherto easily harmonized in the state system, most particularly the tension between freedom of action and security, but also between freedom of action and economic well-being. This collapse has moved through every aspect of traditional values in international poli-tics, most particularly conceptions of the meaning of patriotism, for the world is too dangerous today for fl at-footed patriots and is hungry for the symbols of new models of international leadership. (It will seek for them anywhere, and this assigns a new dimension to the role of Popes in our time and becomes a most essential element in the effective leadership of any Secretary General—an element sensed by Hammarskjold and largely missed by U Thant.) The old pattern of values associated with the tradi-tionalist system is thus undergoing very rapid change. But the change is not as sweeping as the universalists assume, and one does not move from a freewheeling pluralism to a centrally regulated unity. One moves, as in the economy, to a complex, pragmatic, messy interweaving of incompat-ibilities—that is, one moves to the era of bipolarity. One of our concerns in subsequent sessions of the seminar will be with the implications of bipolar-ity for the achievement of a liberal world order. It, of course, poses many problems. But it solves a number also and creates parameters on the use of large-scale force in world politics which have already given the system a new character. As is now widely understood, the new ABM competition, wasteful in many ways, is highly functional in many others. As Kenneth Waltz has pointed out, the American and Soviet ABM systems are, in themselves, signifi cant nonproliferation devices. However we shall want to look at this, and many other related issues, in our subsequent sessions.

It remains here to say something about the American role in this type of system. What is the proper role for the USA if, given the nature of its own identity and given the nature of contemporary international politics, it wishes to see that system move in a more liberal direction or—more real-istically—keep from slipping in a more illiberal direction? The basic role may be described in very simple terms. The USA must help provide the parameters within which the inevitable processes of change can, hopefully, be kept from passing into uncontained violence. This, it should be seen, is a stopgap. It is not, per se , a community-building activity. But it does seek to contain community-destroying forces, and in this sense is essential to the very possibility of carrying on community-building processes. From the


fact that it is not an obviously “liberal” policy, it should not be inferred that it is an illiberal policy. It is, rather, the precondition for a liberal policy.

Force, as such, from the standpoint of liberal values, is evil. But from a general agreement that force is evil, the liberal cannot demonstrate that a given expression of force is bad. To think that this can be done is to equate liberalism with utopian anarchism, to dissolve its realism in the illusions of the children of light. In this simple calculation, the utopian anarchist leaves out a crucial alternative calculation. This the liberal cannot afford to do; he must instead ask: would the removal of the present exercise of force lead to a net reduction , or a net increase , in the overall role of force in the situation? Utopian anarchists see but one dimension of the historic process; they fl y from present evils to those they know not of and, in their sentimentalism, sacrifi ce the longer-range larger good for the alleviation of what is seen as an immediate and oppressive evil. This sentimentalism is rampant in the intellectual community in America today and is, unfor-tunately, often identifi ed as “liberal.” Such identifi cation is unacceptable as liberalism is described in this paper. Thus one cannot say in a given instance, and beforehand, that the removal of a given form of coercion will lead to a net reduction in coercion. It may only lead to a temporary interlude in which there seems to have been a net reduction of coercion followed by a period in which there is a sharp increase in coercion.

In each instance where force is employed in world politics, it is neces-sary to make the most careful estimate of what the removal of the given application of coercion will mean in terms of the net role of coercion. In such situations, precise predictions are, of course, impossible. But the question must, at least, be posed, and one can see, in broad outline, what condition must obtain if this is to represent more than the “calm before the storm.” In broad terms, there must be alternative forces of stability which will come into play to sustain the given order when the coercion is removed. Such an analysis applies to an evaluation of the present American policy in Viet nam. The question then becomes: How can one build alter-native bases of stability which will make a given reduction in coercion equivalent to a net reduction in coercion? This question of course, has endless ramifi cations, some of which we shall touch on in the course of the semester.

It may be useful to close with the statement of a general problem rather than the pretense of a general answer; in this spirit, we can at least say that our work is cut out for us. In the very broadest terms, politics may be described as the study of areas of interdependence in which common rules

276 W. JOHNSTON

must (for one reason or another) be established, but in which there is no natural harmony among the parties who are interdependent. A political situation is a condition of interdependence in tension. Tension need not take violent forms, but there is constant danger that it will. Now, then, can the international political situation be “managed” to reduce the likelihood of tension becoming open confl ict?

To a broad question, broad answers have been given. Two of them contain partial truths, but they are only partial and gravely inadequate because of their partiality. The “stock in trade” of traditional liberalism lay in the notion that there was natural harmony in interdependence which would, itself, prevail over confl ict. Though there is a potential for har-mony in interdependence, there is surely no guarantee of it, and because of this uncertainty, much of the traditional liberal orientation is inade-quate. There is a second, more isolationist variant of liberalism which also contains a partial truth. It has few illusions that interdependence generates its own harmony, on the contrary. Its approach is, therefore, to reduce the potential for confl ict by reducing the areas of interdependence. This sentiment is very widespread in America today and has found its foremost prophet in Senator Fulbright. The logic behind this approach is unas-sailable: no interdependence, no possibility of confl ict. Elements of mini-malism are crucial to an effective liberal strategy, and one of the reasons liberalism has been effective as a system of peaceful change is that very large areas of activity are withdrawn from the area of state action . For once an issue becomes a matter of public policy, it must be decided in accor-dance with a common rule, applicable to all, and arrived at in public. This very process is painful and uncertain and brings the enormous divergences of viewpoint among “the people” into the open. The great insight of the traditional liberal emphasis on the negative state was related to its under-standing that the public arena is a lion’s den. There is no virtue, per se, in the extension of the realm of public policy; in the process, one multiplies one’s headaches.

But there may be a necessity in doing so. And this was the great defi ciency of the traditional liberal emphasis on the negative state. The defi ciency was related to a faulty comprehension of the rapidity and irreversibility with which technology was making the world one world. One lives today in a world in which neither of the traditional strategies of liberalism—the maximalist not the minimalist—has any direct or simple relevance. How then are common decisions to be reached—in a world where they must


be reached—but in a world in which there are not “objective” criteria through which to reach them?

As a matter of principle and expediency, let us close on this note: there is little educational value in reading a book in which answers its own ques-tions and, even if there were, I should be at a loss since I do not know the answers myself.

NOTES 1. M. Fainsod (1963) How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press), 3. 2. D. Easton (1969) Change in the Political System (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press). 3. Hoffmann, “International Systems and International Law,” 222–223. 4. U Thant. 5. R. Niebuhr (1952) The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner),

89–108.


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INDEX

A Alliances , 245–254 Anglo-American tradition , 112, 113,

181–204, 249–250, 263 Aristotle , 40, 59, 87, 162, 172, 182,

236 Aron, Raymond , ix-x, 128, 270

B Balance of power , 111, 202, 213, 222

diversity and , 60, 119–151 history of , 98–110 inadequacy of , 18, 110, 114 natural , 60, 251

Bismarck, Otto von , 124, 131, 137, 138, 148, 213

Boulding, Kenneth , 34, 54, 56, 60, 109

Burke, Edmund , 71, 76, 84, 163, 185, 214, 228, 256, 263

C Calhoun, John C. , 146, 209,

240–241

Carr, Edward Hallett , viii, ix, 6–9, 60, 61, 63, 70–72, 74–75, 93, 126, 140, 159, 194, 257

Chamberlain, Neville , 64, 203 Christendom , ix, 4, 98, 99, 101,

102, 172, 211 Churchill, Winston , 64, 133, 142,

143, 232 Claude, Inis L. , 100, 120, 122, 192,

199, 248, 252 Cobden, Richard , 71, 220 Cold War , 1, 90 Collective security , 102, 103, 110,

121, 123–126 Communism , 69, 93, 176, 223, 264

and force , 112 as “false absolute,” 41, 108 as “pathology of transition,” 201 brutality of , 81 international implications of ,

174–175 liberal response to , 218–219 simplifi cation of history by , 86,

106–107 suppression of particularity by , 48,

107–109, 134

286 INDEX

D De Gaulle, Charles , 114, 128, 248,

251, 272 Dehio, Ludwig , 97, 102, 103, 114 Disraeli, Benjamin , 132, 133 Diversity in the states system ,

97–117, 119, 200

E Eisenhower, Dwight , 64, 65, 218, 271 Enlightenment

hostility to “closed images” of , 41 optimism of , 171 superfi ciality of , 40, 83–84

F Freedom, human , 45–46, 53, 57, 58,

61, 83 Freud, Sigmund , 160–161

H Hartz, Louis , 80, 181, 189, 200,

201, 209, 260, 261 Herz, John , 122, 128, 136 History

as guide to political wisdom , 17–19, 155, 169, 187, 228, 235

signifi cance in theorizing on international relations , 76–84, 90–93

Hitler, Adolf , 64, 138, 149, 241, 246 Hobbes, Thomas , 179–183, 190–191 Hoffmann, Stanley , ix, xii, 29–30,

32–33, 56, 105, 110, 121, 122, 270

I Idealism , 120–125, 128, 133, 146 Identity

class , 210 national , 42–44

“Images” of reality , 107, 109, 113, 115

ability to enter into images of others , 37–40

and “facts,” 55 and necessity of “absolutes,” 41 arbitrariness of , 39 dependent on range of experience ,

37–38 dependent on sense of history ,

35–37 “premature closing” of , 41 variation in , 38

J Jefferson, Thomas , 40–58, 85–86,

171, 183, 189, 262 Johnson, Lyndon , 31, 65 Johnston, Whittle

as adherent of liberalism , viii, ix, 3–5, 22

as adherent of realism , viii, 1–2, 5–6 as teacher , vii-viii as theoretician of international

relations , ix, x, 1–3, 16–17, 21–23

K Kant, Immanuel , 46, 84, 109, 222 Kennedy, John F. , 31, 65 Kissinger, Henry , 31, 93, 131, 217,

218, 232

L Langer, William , 131, 132 League of Nations , 102, 121–123 Liberalism , 156, 171, 173, 174, 176,

180, 181

INDEX 287

and balance of power , 119, 134

and force , 112 and international relations , 211–

224, 227–244, 251–252, 255–276

and role of state , 129, 190–191 and technological revolution ,

200–204 domestic success in management of

force by , 112, 114 evolution of , 171, 182–198,

207–211 limitations of , 109, 133, 140, 141,

145, 158, 163, 166–167, 189 Lippmann, Walter , 55, 127, 158, 236 Locke, John , 76, 171, 183, 185, 187,

188, 190

M Machiavelli, Niccolo , 179–180, 182,

265 Mahan, Alfred , 120, 127 Marx, Karl , 76, 77 Mattingly, Garrett , 98, 99, 105 Moral defi nition of the problem of

international relations , 85–89 Morgenthau, Hans , viii, 9–13, 15, 33,

49, 71, 72, 92, 124, 128, 130, 134, 139, 144, 146, 147, 215, 234, 243, 249, 251, 265, 270–272

N Niebuhr, Reinhold , ix, 14–16, 40, 55,

58, 60, 71, 115, 145–148, 156, 192, 214, 215, 221–222, 257, 265, 266, 273

Norms and “radical freedom” of human

beings , 44–46

and “values,” 46–48, 53–54 Nuclear weapons , 102, 113, 139, 176,

217, 223, 245, 247, 253

P Plato , 79, 180, 231, 236 Politics

as “architectonic” science , 33–34 as realm of confl ict , 62–65

Preponderance of power , 19–21, 121, 135–138, 147–149, 203–204, 246

“Problem of community,” 155–169, 227–244, 253

Progressivism , 70–74

R Realism , 120–123, 128, 130, 132,

137–139, 144, 146, 176, 214, 222, 243, 247, 249, 265–266, 270, 275

Roosevelt, Franklin , 65, 203, 209, 214

Rostow, Walt , 93, 186 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques , 76, 121, 161,

182, 239, 240

S Science , 256

and fact-value distinction , 56, 59 as deduction , 32 as laws of behavior and prediction ,

29–30, 67–69, 85 as systematic knowledge , 29 inapplicable to international

relations , 69–70, 88–89, 219–220

Sovereignty , 100, 103, 110, 240, 272

Soviet Union , 105, 107, 108

288 INDEX

Stalin, Josef , 64, 262 States system , 97–117

T Tocqueville, Alexis de , 50, 189, 201,

209, 230, 260, 261

U United Nations , 122, 123, 202,

219, 268–269, 273 United States , 104, 105, 114, 143, 147,

149–150, 164, 203–204, 217, 221, 223, 235, 242, 267, 271

alliance system of , 245–254 and liberalism in international

relations , 274–275 political culture of , 31, 144, 148,

188, 191, 199, 201, 208–214, 260–264

pragmatism of , 31 Unity in the states system , 97–117,

200

V Versailles , 102, 110, 141

and Vienna , 130, 140

W Waltz, Kenneth , 113, 124, 128, 215,

270–271, 274 War

as regulating principle , 101–102, 110, 119, 200

destructiveness of , 102, 105, 110, 111, 114, 210, 211, 217

Wilson, Woodrow , 102, 103, 123, 135, 141, 144–145, 195, 196, 214, 215

World government , 102, 103, 111, 202, 241

“World revolution,” 155, 169–178

World War I , 102–105, 107, 127, 132, 141, 142, 176, 196, 215

World War II , 102, 104, 105, 107, 176, 200

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