Statesmanship and Political Philosophy

REVIEW ESSAY
Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill
edited by John A. Burtka
Regnery Gateway, 2024, 344 pages

Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy
by Costin Alamariu
self-published, 2023, 368 pages

Europe’s Leadership Famine: Portraits of Defiance and Decay 1950–2022
by Tom Gallagher
Scotview, 2023, 403 pages

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
by Rob Copeland
St. Martin’s, 2023, 352 pages

For as long as I can remember, the American Right has celebrated “statesmanship” while striving to drown the state in a bathtub. Under appeals to the wisdom of the ages, it has pursued utopian projects at home and abroad that have done immense harm to the American nation and its people. The Left, on the other hand, built the modern American state, but has little use for statesmen, preferring activists, journalists, “experts,” and bureaucrats, or maybe harmless radicals like Bernie Sanders. While eager to theorize about global governance, this class is uncomfortable with the argot of statesmanship, of advancing the concrete interests of a discrete polity.

In this context, a book like John A. Burtka’s Gateway to Statesmanship, an edited collection of excerpts from the mirror of princes genre in political theory, can seem hopelessly quaint if not intentionally absurd. As president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Burtka surely knows that, if there is one problem the American Right has not suffered from in recent decades, it is a lack of political theory. And where have all the Adam Smith seminars and Edmund Burke reading groups and Straussian interpretations of the founding led? By Burtka’s own account, to failures too numerous to list. Meanwhile, the leading politician on the right is Donald Trump, who seems to take pride in his ignorance of academic canons, his “love” of the “poorly educated,” and whose general indifference—and occasional hostility—toward the conservative intellectual establishment has been key to his electoral success.

Nevertheless, although republishing a few excerpts from Xenophon seems unlikely to give rise to the next great American statesman, these classical approaches are often more revealing of our present moment than the deluge of contemporary punditry. Historically, many of the greatest works of political philosophy were written during periods of political turmoil and decline, moments not unlike our own. Thus it may not be entirely surprising that, in addition to Burtka’s book, a number of other recent works take up similar themes and even classical literary styles. Together, they offer an incisive portrait of civilizational decline, though perhaps little of use in reversing it.

Philosophers and Princes

“Americans no longer have faith in their leaders.” Thus begins Burtka’s introduction to Gateway to Statesmanship. “Examples of elite failures are so ubiquitous that there is no need to chronicle them all here.” These include “China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, the September 11 terrorist attacks, the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the deindustrialization of the American heartland, the opioid epidemic, pandemic lockdowns, social unrest, economic stagnation, and the war in Ukraine.” Burtka singles out, in particular, “the ‘end of history’ prophets of the early post–Cold War period that promised economic globalization, democratic expansion, and liberal individualism under the banner of American hegemony. . . .” He offers the works collected in Gateway to Statesmanship as a corrective.

Yet many of these turn-of-the-millennium prophets, who participated in many of these failures, were devoted readers of the very same books that Burtka recommends as antidotes to poor leadership—a fact that Burtka unfortunately does not examine. It is a testament to what might be called the charm of political philosophy that its practical value continues to be taken for granted, despite the concrete failures undertaken in its name in the recent past, and a much longer history (or at least perception) of Western decline. Indeed, it is far from obvious that these works offer sound guidance to statesmen or would-be statesmen—or that this was even the principal intention of their authors.

Perhaps as a result, Burtka’s most illuminating selections are those that depart from the canon that has prevailed on the right for the last several decades, departures which reflect the developments and challenges of recent years. To be sure, Gateway includes usual suspects such as Xenophon, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Machiavelli. But it also features excerpts from Eusebius’ Life of Constantine, Agapetus the Deacon’s Advice to the Emperor Justinian, Erasmus, Thomas More, and the Chinese legalist philosopher Han Fei. Curiously, although the subtitle reads Selections from Xenophon to Churchill, Burtka actually ends the book with an excerpt from Charles de Gaulle’s Edge of the Sword. While de Gaulle has never been a particularly bright star in the American conservative firmament, giving him the last word seems both a proper acknowledgement of changing internal and external political circumstances as well as a fitting call for a different kind of statesmanship to address them.

For the most part, Burtka presents the works collected in Gateway with only summary commentary rather than interpretive analysis. He does, however, highlight a trend in the modern era from the rule of the Christian prince—whom he calls “the institutional individual” or monarch—to the primacy of institutional structures (in particular, the Constitution) to an increasingly unstable combination of mass politics and expressive individuality. “The statesman of modern times,” he writes, “was defined less by formal obligations to law or religion and more by charisma, personality, and will. Politics became a popularity contest, and public opinion triumphed over republicanism.”

At the center of Burtka’s account is the political significance of Christianity. For Burtka, this represents a straightforward trajectory of decline:

Today, while there are leaders who are Christians, the formal—and now informal—separation of church and state has reduced the significance of traditional religion on public life throughout the Western world. . . . What remains of Christianity in the public square has largely been transformed into a civil religion, which engenders a sense of patriotism and providence around social occasions like presidential inaugurations and Fourth of July parades, but is easily coopted by the ideological currents of the day.

One could read these lines as a subtle indictment of the reduction of “evangelical Christianity” into a vote bank for a particularly duplicitous and self-destructive “conservatism.” Many on the left also imagine that Christianity remains a powerful, oppressive force that must continually be resisted.

At the same time, many (and arguably the most prominent) intellectual strands on the right see the rise of Christianity as a civilizational problem and trace current left-wing movements to its ongoing influence. Even as the power of the Christian church itself has declined, according to this narrative, Western politics has increasingly adopted Christian-inspired moral orientations. In many historical cases, the power of the institutional church was constrained precisely in order to achieve a more thoroughgoing and consistent application of Christian-inflected values. Remnants of Christianity can be seen not only—and perhaps not even primarily—in the formalities of presidential inaugurations. They continue to define fundamental political values in the West, particularly those espoused by the Left: universalism and globalism, egalitarianism and self-abnegation, guilt and compassion. These are said to be embodied today in policy priorities like the global climate change agenda, which often relies upon ascetism and austerity, “anti-racism” or “wokeness,” and a general sympathy for the weak over the strong. Those who continue to adhere to traditional Christian observance tend to reject this post-Christian morality as a form of heresy. Taken together, the result is not the simple fading away of Christianity, but a situation in which nominally anti-Christian political currents reveal themselves, in terms of moral outlook, to be “more Christian than the Christians,” as Sheluyang Peng has put it.

In other words, the process of secularization operates in both directions. The church is weakened, but what was formerly outside the church takes on elements of its teachings. Burtka argues earlier in his essay that the Roman Catholic Church’s tightening of doctrinal discipline, its centralization of authority, and the expansion of its worldly powers after the Great Schism inadvertently sowed the seeds of “secularism, political equality, and representative government” in the West. “In an attempt to dominate the political sphere, the church intentionally desacralized it,” he writes. Conversely, the gradual desacralization of metaphysics across the modern era and down to the present seems to have only strengthened the hold of a post-Christian morality.

Burtka’s heightened attention to these matters gives Gateway a distinctive significance. Even though he chooses not to directly engage with other commentators from the past or present, or to offer a resolution of these contradictions, Burtka’s editorial selections open a fresh perspective on today’s politics.

Philosophy and Tyranny

In many ways representing the opposite of Burtka’s approach to political thought is Costin Alamariu’s Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, a republication of his 2015 Yale dissertation, originally titled “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche,” with some added introductory material. To the chagrin of his academic advisers and many media commentators, Selective Breeding is probably the most widely read work to emerge from the Straussian tradition of political theory since Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Alamariu’s dissertation, and even more so his provocative online persona, repudiates fundamental tenets of contemporary Western morality, in general, and the standard perception of Leo Strauss’s thought, in particular. On avowedly Nietzschean grounds, Alamariu celebrates strength over justice, beauty over goodness, aristocracy or even tyranny over modern constitutionalism and “liberal democracy.” In short, in his polemical rhetoric and political positioning, Alamariu seems to represent everything that Straussian professors, along with the entire Western educational system, seek to prevent.

Yet, in critical respects, Alamariu offers little more than a restatement of Strauss. His work, and the fevered reaction to it, serves mainly to illustrate the narrowing effects of Strauss’s influence on American political thought. This episode also demonstrates the limitations of “Straussianism” as a right-wing political project. Regardless of whether its outer valences trend Bushian or Trumpian, Straussian attempts at political manipulation tend to terminate in the self-delusion of academics rather than the self-knowledge of philosophers. As James Burnham observed almost a century ago, those who begin consciously promoting a “noble lie” end up becoming the last people to sincerely believe it.¹

The Straussian view of Platonic political philosophy, as taught for decades in American universities, holds that there is an inevitable tension between philosophy and the conventions of any political community. The philosopher who openly seeks the truth will eventually come to question, challenge, and undermine the prevailing beliefs, mores, and laws of his “city.” This leads either to political chaos and ruin—which is generally harmful to the pursuit of philosophy—and/or to the persecution or even execution of philosophers (à la Socrates) by political authorities. The philosopher, being wise, recognizes this problem, and conceals the subversive elements of his thought, so that they are accessible only to those wise enough to navigate them with similar discretion. Hence the philosopher is in the city but not of it. He is a “friend” of the regime insofar as he moderates his speech to guard against social disorder and, being wise, may occasionally offer useful advice—perhaps even write a mirror of princes. He might also, according to the Straussians, attract ambitious young men to pursue philosophy, rather than become tyrants. But the philosopher’s attachment to the city is ultimately ironic: his true loyalty is to philosophy, supposedly the highest human activity. His true motivation is to continue the erotic-hedonistic pursuit of wisdom, and his outward (“exoteric”) acknowledgement of religious or patriotic duties is only instrumental.

This presentation has an obvious appeal for professors and students of philosophy. Instead of being confined to the margins of university campuses, they can imagine themselves to be actors in a grand, transhistorical conspiracy. Their work is not only the highest form of human endeavor, but at the center of power politics and the animating force of civilizations. Still, Straussianism would likely never have been more than a campus curiosity were it not for its partisan political resonance at a particular moment. Hence Strauss’s peculiar interpretation of the history of political thought has always been closely associated with—and received only limited interest beyond—twentieth-century (American) conservatism.

Since World War I (at least), the West seemed to be in the grips of a metaphysical and political crisis. God was dead; the pursuit of absolute truth had given way to historical contingencies and scientific probabilities. Such moral relativism and intellectual nihilism were bound up with destructive and totalitarian political radicalism, as embodied by figures like Martin Heidegger. Although the Allies won World War II, this intellectual crisis only seemed to deepen in its aftermath. By the Cold War, the U.S. government had been transformed and, to many, scarcely resembled the republic described in its eighteenth-century founding documents. At the same time, fundamental values and loyalties were being abandoned. Scientists insisted upon a strict fact-value distinction, though science itself now threatened destruction. Social science, in particular, could not define good and bad government, could not even attempt to speak in those terms. More concretely, the American intellectual elite no longer seemed to believe in the American political system, nor could they offer a compelling defense of it. As Strauss wrote in Natural Right and History (1953), “Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold these ‘truths to be self-evident’?”

In response, Strauss argued that the apparent crisis of American liberalism was not a crisis of philosophy per se but rather a crisis specific to modern political philosophy. In this narrative, Platonic political philosophy had been subordinated and instrumentalized—made the handmaid of theology—by the early Christians. Then, in the transition from medievalism to modernity, the objective of this instrumentalization shifted: theology gave way to science, and philosophy became a tool of practical improvement for the “relief of man’s estate,” in the words of Francis Bacon. This new, modern relationship between philosophy and political authority represented, in Strauss’s formulation, an untenable combination of the Epicurean understanding of nature with Platonic political idealism. Such a delicate synthesis—i.e., modern liberalism—could not ultimately contain the relativism and antinomianism embedded in its materialist metaphysics, which would culminate in intellectual and civilizational crisis. Yet the result would not be the withering of the state or a withdrawal from politics, as the ancient Epicureans counseled, but a monstrous combination of intellectual nihilism and political activism, an especially grotesque tyranny.

Strauss argued, however, that the recovery of ancient Platonic political philosophy, as summarized above, offered a pathway out of the “crisis of the West.” Among simpleminded conservative audiences, this was received as a straightforward defense of ancient truths. Finally, here was an intellectually serious critique of progressivism and postmodernism, one that was at once more solid than twee Burkeanism² but which also (of special importance to Americans) seemed to avoid the baggage of both monarchical and fascist forms of reaction. Among more sophisticated audiences, Strauss’s followers endlessly elaborated upon, or at least pretended to understand, the complexities and complications lurking in his defense of ancient wisdom. Although at bottom it was arguably just another variant of ironic postmodernism, Strauss’s recovery of autonomous, ancient philosophy still seemed to offer a way to navigate the absence of metaphysical and political certainties without falling into nihilism and radicalism. One could recognize and critique the shortcomings of American liberalism, yet remain a wise “friend of the regime”—ironically, of course—indirectly guiding it for the benefit of philosophers and philosophy.

By the time Alamariu encountered this Straussian school, it was chiefly defined by a highly intellectualized cultural conservatism, an astonishingly ignorant liberal imperialism, and its own stifling intellectual complacency. On the one hand, it promised to reveal the secrets of the ancients and resolve the “crisis of the West.” On the other hand, everything important had already been discovered by Strauss himself; there was little left to do but write derivative essays on Xenophon and Tocqueville, debate the extent to which American constitutionalism preserved ancient virtues, and vote Republican. As another reviewer put it, “Alamariu’s dissertation advisor at Yale, Steven Smith, exemplifies the soporific dullness of this tradition.”³

Alamariu rejects this Straussian political “project.” To his credit, he recognizes that Stauss’s departure from left-liberal consensus also functioned as a Trojan horse, introducing elements of “postmodern” solipsism and antinomianism among audiences who imagined themselves to be fighting these tendencies. Rather than masquerade as a moral exemplar and friend of liberal democracy, Alamariu draws out the connection between philosophy and tyranny, showing that the philosopher and the tyrant are not only kindred spirits but, in effect, political allies. Both, he argues, emerge out of declining aristocracies and represent radical attempts to reassert aristocratic values against the leveling, herd mentality of the masses; the philosopher’s conception of “nature” is inseparable from the warrior-aristocracy’s appreciation for, and embodiment of, “selective breeding.”

The implication is that the task of philosophy today is not to advise “the prince” on good government, much less to suggest subtle improvements to liberal democracy, but to rekindle tyrannical appetites among great men and to inspire a revival of aristocratic virtues in a time of insipid egalitarianism. Central to this task, according to Alamariu, is an honest confrontation with the political importance of “breeding,” both its ancient history and the scientific insights of modern genetics (which is the focus of much of the new material added to the dissertation).

These themes are almost perfectly tailored to shock contemporary moral sensibilities, and together with Alamariu’s larger online persona, have elicited predictable, and presumably desired, outrage over the last few years. Yet not only is the core of the argument in Selective Breeding explicitly Nietzschean, but much of it is also substantively Straussian, albeit with slightly different accents.

In his new preface, Alamariu states emphatically that he is “not a Straussian,” and refers to those who accept the label as an “ineffectual ladies’ reading group.” He mentions that, “out of professional loyalty,” he felt compelled to include in the dissertation “some Straussian language and stuffy Straussian affectations, as well as maybe references to that author and his intellectual progeny that at times may feel forced or contrived.” Yet major areas of thematic overlap go well beyond language and affectations. And while it is possible that Alamariu simply arrived at conclusions similar to Strauss’s from his own reading of Nietzsche, as he suggests at times, this does not change the fact that Alamariu’s seemingly scandalous interpretations, even if reached independently, are not in any significant respect novel.

To begin with, Alamariu’s focus on philosophy and tyranny is a staple of Straussian scholarship. While Strauss and his followers tended to present philosophy as an alternative path for ambitious young men who might otherwise become tyrants—rather than highlight the kinship between the two—this conceit only makes sense if both aspirations share fundamental similarities.

Indeed, Alamariu mainly bases his argument on a close reading of Plato’s Gorgias, particularly the crucial exchange between Socrates and Callicles on these questions. Although Socrates ostensibly bests Callicles in arguing for justice and the philosophic life over the rule of the strong and the tyrannical satisfaction of ever-expanding desires, Alamariu contends that Plato actually gives Callicles the superior argument and reveals that the Socratic philosopher is, if anything, more tyrannical in his desires. But this interpretation was already put forward by Strauss’s student Seth Benardete in his book The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy, first published in 1991. (This should not be read as another weaponized accusation of “plagiarism”; Alamariu scrupulously cites his sources, including this one.) The point is also made rather directly by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, though it is not expounded in a “scholarly” fashion or related specifically to Gorgias. Alamariu does add to Benardete, bringing to bear an interesting selection of “interdisciplinary sources,” and disputes Benardete’s characterization of Callicles at one point. But these deviations are comparatively minor; Alamariu’s core argument was articulated decades ago by Strauss’s best student.

Perhaps surprisingly, Alamariu also shares Strauss’s view that philosophy is the highest form of human life. One might have expected a straightforward defense of Callicles’ rejection of philosophy and embrace of direct political power. Instead, Alamariu describes Callicles as a representative of pre-Socratic philosophy and engages in a lengthy discussion, drawn from Nietzsche, on the necessity of decadence and aristocratic decline to produce philosophy and “high culture,” which he considers the true crowns of human existence. This casts Alamariu’s enthusiastic celebration of warrior-aristocracy and its manly virtues earlier in the dissertation in a new light. It seems his goal is not simply to defend a strong aristocratic regime, but that regime must also decline so philosophers and artists—perhaps podcasters—can emerge. Even for a Straussian, this is a circuitous route and a trajectory that cannot really be described with any certainty. Many aristocracies, including ones cited by Alamariu, have risen and decayed without producing anything like high culture. For that matter, many peoples have engaged in breeding and husbandry without developing the Greek concept of φύσις at the heart of Western philosophy.

If anything, Alamariu’s stylized anthropology in the dissertation tends to contradict his (and Strauss’s) narrative, developed later in the work, regarding the political significance of Christianity. In Alamariu’s account, democratic, conformist, and leveling tendencies were the norm across societies before the arrival of aristocracy and concepts of “nature.” These tendencies did not originate with Plato or Christianity; the “longhouse,” after all, is not a Christian institution. Moreover, the introduction of an external standard such as “nature”—even if one wants to argue that it initially arose to justify aristocracy—inherently implies a universal “order” or “justice” outside of dictates enforced by physical strength or political power.⁴

Yet even if, like Rousseau, we begin by “putting aside all the facts,” the larger questions concerning the assumed value of philosophy are never explored in Alamariu’s commentary. Why is philosophy the ultimate fulfillment, or highest form, of human life, instead of merely a “sickness”? Why not simply accept Callicles’ stated rejection of it? Perhaps the work of great philosophers is immortalized, but among whom? Delusional academics and their bored undergraduates? Why aren’t the great Athenian or Roman—even American—statesmen not the highest men? Why, in a word, is politics in the service of “philosophy”? To the contrary, one could argue that philosophy is not worth paying attention to except insofar as it is seen to influence the prince. Absent such interest, it is, and always was, an “ineffectual ladies’ reading group.” But Alamariu never really considers this possibility.

Alamariu’s only significant departure from Strauss concerns the rhetorical tactics of the philosopher. He argues that the Platonic approach of making philosophy appear morally nonthreatening and a “friend of the regime” foundered in the face of an “international missionary religion,” namely Christianity. Quoting Nietzsche, Alamariu contends that the loss of Platonism’s “esoteric” teachings on hierarchy and nature under Christianity led to a “misbreeding of modern European man.” In the new introduction, Alamariu gives this a literal meaning, arguing that the Christian prohibition of cousin marriage enabled the spread of universalist and egalitarian ideologies.⁵ In the dissertation itself, he simply asserts that Christianity “took the Platonic exoteric teaching more seriously and enforced it more comprehensively than Plato himself could ever dream of.” By suppressing Plato’s appreciation for the prerational—of breeding, of the connection between philosophy and tyranny—Christianity eventually undermined the possibility of philosophy and aristocracy. (Alamariu, like Strauss, spends little time on, and shows only the thinnest grasp of, actual Christian thought, history, and theology, despite its importance to this historical narrative.⁶)

Here again, Alamariu accepts in all important respects Strauss’s diagnosis of the “crisis of the West.” He departs from Strauss solely in his preferred response, concluding that the Straussian revival of Platonic philosophy is doomed to failure, and that a Nietzschean “aristocratic radicalism” is needed to rescue philosophy. This change of tactics, however, adds up to little more than an attempt to adapt Straussianism to a new time and a new “crisis.” The fact is that Strauss’s chief concerns seem completely irrelevant to today’s politics.⁷ The twenty-first-century West, far from facing a crisis of moral relativism, seems to be in the grip of moralistic excess (e.g., wokeness), and far from statist totalitarianism, seems to be experiencing a broad collapse of political legitimacy. Alamariu’s shift in style responds to these issues, but his underlying fantasy of reviving “philosophy” is all the same.

Even Alamariu’s fixation on breeding and genetics, while not a feature of previous Straussian scholarship, is less radical than one might imagine. In keeping with his internet provocations, which hardly display political caution or a commitment to the art of “esoteric writing,”⁸ the reader might have expected an aggressive embrace of eugenics, or maybe the third-world population control measures popular among America’s declining WASP aristocracy in the mid-twentieth century. Instead, Alamariu offers an interesting but nonprescriptive gloss of breeding practices among the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Christians, and other cultures. He mentions some contradictions between the findings of modern genetics research and political egalitarianism—hardly a new controversy—and notes that even today’s progressives practice a form of eugenics in aborting children with Down syndrome—a quip recognizable to anyone familiar with pro-life campaigns. More substantively, the absence of any prescriptive program calls into question the dissertation’s larger argument: if Alamariu can elaborate his philosophy without defining a specific “selective breeding” regimen, then perhaps the latter is neither especially important nor primary to the former.

In sum, whether one finds his work morally repulsive or exhilarating, Alamariu does little more than invert the Straussian rhetorical style. Rather than wear the mask of a “friend of the regime,” Alamariu advertises his disdain for contemporary pieties. In terms of content, however, what’s original is not especially subversive, and what’s subversive is not especially original. The “Bronze Age Pervert” remains more than professionally loyal to his Straussian professors.

Europe’s Leadership Famine

In Europe’s Leadership Famine, Tom Gallagher, a Scottish political science professor, charts the trajectory of Europe through portraits of the continent’s most significant postwar politicians, from Andreotti and Mitterrand to Merkel and Macron. Gallagher’s title leaves little doubt about his conclusions, which have provoked somewhat desperate defenses of the “European project.” Reviewer Andrew Moravcsik criticized Gallagher’s book as “not just unpersuasive but troubling for those who believe politicians should support impartial democratic institutions and sustainable gains in public welfare.” Of course, the EU’s “democratic deficit” is a widely discussed phenomenon, and the continent’s economic performance has been anemic for decades, never mind the decline of its geopolitical influence and inability to provide for its own defense. Yet the real value of Gallagher’s Tacitean style of history lies not in its contribution to long-running partisan debates but in its character studies—what it reveals about the personalities of those who presided over the key events of recent European history.

As in ancient histories, the fortunes of states and the souls of individuals are bound together in Gallagher’s work. “A premise of the book,” he writes, “is that as time passed, politicians, especially in the old democracies, were increasingly disinclined to show tenacity, display courage, or take risks in order to secure an important outcome. The book is less a set of profiles in courage, and closer to being one that could be called profiles in procrastination.” Gallagher’s critique cuts across partisan categories. Liberals, conservatives, socialists, and identitarians all appear as corrupt, petty, and pathetic. Twenty politicians are profiled in Europe’s Leadership Famine, but in important respects, they are all the same.

“Achievement-oriented” politicians, Gallagher argues, have been replaced by ciphers for “forces which have not sought electoral validation.” As a result, “the political stage emptied of talent”:

Politicians who scheme or campaign to get to the top often turn out to have no programme. . . . [They] are far more interested in advancing their careers than in offering public service by demonstrating governing skills. A graduate class educated in esoteric or technocratic subjects, and with only a fraction of the experiences of life and work of pre-1980 decision-makers, now increasingly determine[s] the direction of policy and the allocation of resources, both at the nation-state level and within the emerging trans-national seats of authority. . . . Most had not been required to take risks in their lives or careers, nor had they had to struggle to acquire a decent income. Few, if any . . . have served in the military or fought in conflicts, as was the case with Helmut Schmidt, an anti-aircraft gunner on the Eastern front after 1941. Nor would the new political breed likely have closely engaged with social groups outside their ranks. . . . Political leaders took their cue from the doyen of European philosophers, Jürgen Habermas, who postulated that Europe was now firmly in a “post-heroic age” bound up with consumerism and leisure activities.

The case of François Mitterrand is illustrative. Beginning his career on the right in the 1930s, a devotee of Charles Maurras, he served in the Vichy government and “received a decoration from the Pétain regime, as late as 1943,” Gallagher recounts. Later in that same year, he joined the Resistance, though de Gaulle is said to have distrusted him. After the war, Mitterrand distinguished himself in his zeal for colonial repression: “Not since 1831, had there been a justice minister who had presided over as many executions as Mitterrand.” Following the collapse of the Fourth Republic, however, “as part of a discredited and defunct regime, he was on the rocks politically,” and decided to “position himself firmly on the French Left. . . . where he felt his best hopes of a career now lay.” He went so far as to stage an assassination attempt on himself in 1959, “as a way of boosting his image,” and he called for de Gaulle’s resignation during the 1968 protests to shore up leftist support.

When he eventually became president in 1981, at the head of the Socialist Party, his government quickly passed a variety of left-wing economic reforms—in retrospect, clearly without sufficient thought or preparation—and just as quickly abandoned them. By the reelection campaign of 1988, “There was no proper programme, no socialist banners, no collective spirit, just a personal plebiscite.” Mitterrand also pushed through electoral reforms that aided Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, splitting the opposition and allowing him to remain in office until 1995. He spent the rest of his presidency focused on various opportunistic, though not especially effective, foreign policy gambits and the promotion of European integration.

Throughout his career, as Gallagher puts it, Mitterrand “failed to discourage the view that ‘the only cause in which he ever deeply believed was himself.’” At some level, his adroit shape-shifting and unscrupulous pursuit of power is impressive. And yet it all added up to very little, whether measured against the interests of France or the personal ambitions of great men. In Machiavellian terms, politicians like Mitterrand managed to win power (though not all that much) but not glory. Gallagher concludes by noting that “Mitterrand may have dabbled with extremist ideas in his youth, but the most lasting damage was caused when, as an ageing president, his cynical maneouvring brought the politics of entrenched selfishness back from the cold.” Today, all that remains of this life of Machiavellian scheming are fading memories of a mediocre presidency and a declining nation.

As Gallagher’s history nears the present, both the shallow opportunism of European leaders and the overall fecklessness of their governments only become more pronounced. On the right, figures like Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Boris Johnson in Britain are shown to lack “a coherent conservative strategy”—“a coherent program that [they were] prepared to dedicate [their] energies to realising”—offering instead “a bundle of platitudes and shibboleths cleverly converted into . . . slick and seductive political marketing.” When these leaders fall, it is not the result of political conflict over difficult reforms “but on account of melodramatic and self-indulgent gestures.” Europe’s recent conservative leaders have been little more than self-absorbed hucksters whose poor governing performance tends to undermine the very causes that initially made them popular.

On the whole, Gallagher observes, the European Right has proved incapable of, and largely uninterested in, developing a functional governing apparatus and reliable bases of power and patronage. With the possible exception of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, “Little energy on the centre-right was devoted to creating a strong capacity-driven state that, as well as doing things for people, equipped them with the means to do things for themselves.” Gallagher suggests, in part, that conservatism—relying on the “pragmatic and adaptable” strands of Burkeanism—is simply too flimsy a foundation on which to build an adequate program and support base.

Although his book is more focused on personal dynamics than structural causes, Gallagher also points to deeper shifts in the global economy that inhibited the formation of a serious European Right. Berlusconi, for instance, “exemplified the switch from a capitalist world absorbed with making things to one seeking vast profits from conjuring up images that diverted minds and dulled or debauched the senses.” Whether based on religious, aristocratic, or patriotic traditions, European conservatism stood little chance under these conditions. Its mainstream parties were gradually subsumed into larger projects of European integration and, later, green agendas. As Gallagher writes of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, “He was conservative and even aristocratic in his tastes and bearing. Yet he was content, as so many other outwardly conservative contemporaries were, to embrace what was essentially a technocratic and socialist project because of the opportunities that it offered to wield power and influence.”

Most of Gallagher’s history takes place before the mass migration of recent years, so his chapters on “impresarios of identity” focus on separatist movements in Catalonia and Scotland. Similar patterns of petty opportunism and corruption prevail in these quarters; if anything, the separatist leaders seem to “speed run” the dismal course set in the rest of Europe. What’s notable here is how easily such movements, ostensibly oriented toward the construction of states and peoples, discarded their nominal goals in favor of mediatized global progressivism.

Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party, for instance, essentially abandoned any serious efforts at securing or preparing for independence, instead reinventing itself as a progressive vanguard party focused on issues like transgender rights. After the SNP won almost all of Scotland’s fifty-nine seats in the UK parliament during Sturgeon’s first election as leader in 2015, she devoted her energies to turning the party into an “ancillary prop” for her own career, “rather than a key institution equipped to complete the freedom struggle.” The SNP showed little interest, for example, in developing an economic policy program—aside from hostility to North Sea oil production, perhaps the one plausible route to economic viability for an independent Scotland. On issues ranging from Covid to drug overdoses to education to government procurement, Sturgeon’s administration was marred by incompetence and scandal. Not only did the party struggle with basic matters of governance, but it became increasingly indifferent to them. “In contrast to regionalist and separatist parties in Spain,” writes Gallagher, “the SNP was by now numb about acquiring powers that made a material difference to society. It had shown a lack of expertise in using them effectively . . . due to Edinburgh’s unpreparedness.”

Over time, any pretense of material uplift was dropped entirely. “The changing character of the SNP meant that talking about personal identity became an increasingly noticeable feature.” Sturgeon herself “stopped talking about delivering improvements. . . . Many of her own public conversations concern milestones on her own personal journey and their significance for groups in society that she particularly relates to.” During a 2022 appearance with actor Brian Cox, Sturgeon suggested “that Scotland’s First Minister primarily regarded herself as a performer, just like him.”

By this point, Sturgeon seems to have concluded that promoting herself “as a voice of international middle-class niche politics” offered better opportunities for career advancement than leading a regional independence party. “Rather than being a vigorous protector of the party’s nationalist soul, Sturgeon seemed eager to turn it into a vanguard movement that is tireless in advocating social experimentation. . . . not to build a new state but to dismantle a social order.” Late in her tenure, she turned to aggressively promoting a controversial gender recognition bill and other progressive-identitarian measures. These moves alienated both Scottish voters and party colleagues, but won praise in international media and NGO circles—at least before her arrest on suspicion of misusing of party finances and her resignation from leadership in 2023.

Across these vignettes, Gallagher’s style is incisive but not didactic; he avoids programmatic theories and explanations, much less proposals to reverse European decline. Still, a few larger conclusions emerge.

One is the changing function of ideologies and left-right conflict. Mass ideologies inevitably obscure various complexities and always involve some element of “false consciousness,” but partisan orientations have undergone an important shift. The “Old Left,” the Marxist Left, presented itself as a vehicle for proletarian revolution and some form of communist utopia. In retrospect, it mainly functioned to legitimate catch-up industrial development (for largely nationalist purposes), and the hardships that entailed. Today’s progressive Left, however, primarily offers a moralistic justification of incumbent political authority in the absence of material improvement, which it appears incapable of, and largely uninterested in, delivering. The Right, on the other hand, imagines itself to be representative of the strong and the great, the defenders of excellence. But right-wing consciousness only arises after decline has begun. The Right is the party of losers, of elites in the process of being displaced—who, unable to build a new order of their own, seek accommodation within the ascendant one.⁹ And while, in the past, the Right’s self-justification involved the defense of moral rigor (inherited social traditions, aristocratic formalities, religious observance, and so on), today’s Right, with none of those foundations left intact, tends toward rebellion against the dominant progressive cultural mores and institutions as an end in itself. Across the ideological spectrum, then, there is little room for constructive statesmanship.

Vaguely echoing the elite circulation theory of the early twentieth century, Gallagher portrays a political class characterized by a sort of diminutive Machiavellianism. European leaders, he repeatedly argues, are capable of Machiavellian cunning, but they lack “the stamina and lucidity” required for any great achievement. They are adept at using deception to acquire or hold on to power, but they have no idea of what to do with it. They have no great ambitions, neither for public service nor for world-historical individual achievements. This is not a story of naïve or rigid ideologues, nor of good men coming to ruin among those who are not so good. It is a story of foxes and no lions.

As in Machiavelli, but unlike most histories written today, Gallagher still sees European politics as deeply intertwined with Christianity—or, perhaps more accurately for both authors, its degeneration. “For Christian Democrats,” Gallagher writes, “promoting European political integration was far more important than safeguarding the essential features of a Catholic society.” Like Machiavelli’s Papal State in Italy, Gallagher’s EU is strong enough to hold its member states down, but too weak to effectively unite them.

Meanwhile, Gallagher writes, “nominally Christian politicians were not Christian anymore, or at least not Christian enough to challenge the rest of the political class. . . . Christianity was no longer normative in morality and foundational in the culture, values and laws of Europe.” Instead, these energies had migrated to the environmental movement and other causes, as Gallagher illustrates through the career of Johann Vollenbroek, a Dutch environmental activist. Vollenbroek, citing his strict Catholic upbringing, “waged a war against farmers in the name of eco-purity,” saying, “I think that Christianity is causing this disastrous attitude toward the climate. Because . . .  if you read the Bible, then mankind is on a much higher level than nature.”

Yet despite all their funding and support among judges and technocrats, Europe’s NGO prophets remain “unarmed,” in Machiavellian terms, and unable to command real political authority. “The retreat of a previously familiar set of values, once substantially shaped around the Christian religion, meant that appeals from elected elites for . . . sacrifice in the face of economic adversity, increasingly fell on deaf ears. . . . The sense of deference towards traditional elites started to melt away.” Mainstream parties collapsed, while populist alternatives, so far, have mostly lacked the discipline required to carry out major reforms, reshape key institutions, or build a new social consensus. Europe’s leadership famine takes place in the void left by the decline and transmutation of Christianity.

Principles

Rob Copeland’s The Fund, an unauthorized biography of Ray Dalio and a history of his hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, is not ostensibly about politics.¹⁰ But it may be the single best portrayal of the tyrannical personality type set loose in “end of history” America.

Born in Queens, the son of jazz musician Marino Dallolio (Ray later shortened his surname), Dalio was fortuitously befriended by a wealthier family whom he caddied for at a nearby golf course. These connections aided his entry into finance. After a series of false starts—Dalio supposedly punched his boss and brought a stripper to a business conference—he launched his own firm, Bridgewater, offering commodity hedging advice and publishing a market commentary newsletter. He testified before Congress and even appeared on Oprah, captivating audiences with his gloomy, if often incorrect, prognostications. Following a failed collaboration with Paul Tudor Jones, Dalio managed to secure $5 million from the World Bank pension fund and turned Bridgewater into an institutional asset manager. The firm performed well in its early years and rapidly grew assets. Although bearish calls had backfired on Dalio before, he was well positioned for the 2008 financial crisis, and Bridgewater delivered positive returns while the markets crashed. Dalio had established himself as a “Wall Street legend,” and Bridgewater would soon become the largest hedge fund in the world.

Dalio had always marketed Bridgewater as a firm pursuing a systematic, rules-based investment strategy. Whereas some funds, particularly in the early days of the industry, promoted a “great man theory” of investing, Dalio emphasized automated trading, quantitative signals, and uncorrelated returns. Early on, he called his process the “Holy Grail of investing”:

A lot of people think the most important thing you could do is find the best investments. That’s important, but there is no great one best investment that can compete with something like this. The magic is, you only need to do this simple thing. The simple thing is to find fifteen or twenty good uncorrelated return streams, things that are probably going to make money—you don’t know, but they have a good probability of making money—that are uncorrelated.

Dalio would gradually drop the mythical language of “Holy Grail” and “magic” for more mechanical terminology. He increasingly spoke, instead, of the “economic machine,” which he thought could be reduced to cyclical patterns and scientific rules. Describing himself as an “economic doctor,” he began offering his advice on the operation of this “machine” to policymakers and even produced a series of videos for popular audiences. As his career progressed, Dalio’s axiomatic frameworks expanded from investing to macroeconomics to organizational management to general life advice, coalescing into a totalizing—for lack of a better word—philosophy. The refinement and implementation of what he called his “principles” became, at least in Copeland’s account, Dalio’s all-consuming ambition.

“Like technology titans who clothed themselves in a higher purpose than merely slinging online goods or apps, Dalio’s life work began to seem more important than the running of an investment firm,” Copeland writes. “[T]he money proved to Dalio that his philosophical approach worked. One could not exist without the other.” Thus, as his star rose, Dalio became “less interested in the puzzle of the markets than in the patterns of thinking they exposed. He was consumed by the idea of boiling down complex problems into singular answers.”

Although his source material tended toward popular science and psychology rather than the classics of political philosophy, Dalio was transfixed by the same crisis that Nietzsche called “the problem of Socrates”: a soul divided between reason and instinct. In Dalio’s language, “The prefrontal cortex was the ‘upper level you’ and the amygdala was the ‘lower level you.’ . . . these two parts of the brain were normally in conflict—and the amygdala fights dirty.” Yet Dalio had come to believe that, through transcendental meditation, “he was able to all but separate the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, thus freeing himself from being controlled by emotion. He credited this ability for his understanding of the psychological factors that lead to successful trading and company management.” In Nietzschean terms, “The instincts would play the tyrant; we must discover a counter-tyrant who is stronger than they.” Dalio claimed to have made reason the master of his soul, and “all yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards.”

Also like Socrates, Dalio turned to dialectics to discover the truth; “radical transparency” was his business-ese term for unconstrained debate in pursuit of truth. Bridgewater employees had to be willing to criticize everything, without regard for others’ pieties or pride. Harsh truths, in particular, must not be held back; as the training materials put it, “no one has the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking up.”

As a general matter, of course, encouraging employees to point out problems and engage in open debate seems eminently sensible. But it didn’t stop there. Although Dalio took pride in having overcome pride, he did not take criticism of his own ideas particularly well. “Believability-weighted decision-making” soon became another principle, meaning that opinions could not simply be evaluated on their own merits; the “track record” of the advocate had to be taken into account. Picking up on these cues, perhaps, employees were persistently less radical and transparent than Dalio wanted. Bridgewater then introduced an “issue log” for employees to register complaints, and Dalio required each person to log a minimum number of issues. The result, Copeland writes, is that “as Bridgewater got bigger, the firm began to focus on problems that were ever smaller.” Unable to substantively criticize Dalio, employees lodged a flurry of complaints about office coffee and the quality of the peas in cafeteria salads.

There were not enough issues to go around, however. Concerned that they would not get credit for duplicate complaints, employees began hunting for problems to impress Dalio, who regularly monitored the issue logs. A surveillance culture arose; employees spied on their coworkers to find reportable offenses. Soon, there was something real to complain about: several secretaries quit after one employee began listening in on their calls.

This incident seems to have provoked Dalio to undertake an additional round of self-reflection. “As he often told underlings . . . people just couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing.” On the one hand, he concluded that he had not been sufficiently clear about what he wanted, so he set about more rigorously articulating his “principles.” He began with a company-wide email, writing, “So, what’s success? It’s nothing more than getting what you want. . . .”¹¹ Thus Dalio turned from dialectics to politics.

Dalio’s principles themselves were, as Matthew Walther put it, a combination of “thirdhand Hobbes . . .  [grafted] onto Oprahisms about ‘Having the basics—a good bed to sleep in, good relationships, good food, and good sex.’” It says something about the man and the world he inhabited that he managed to get a collection of banalities like “pop the cork” and “beware of fiefdoms” taken seriously—never mind more bizarre expressions like “Meritocracy = Radical Truth + Radical Transparency + Believability – Weighted Decision Making” and nonsensical phrases such as “Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing—and decide what you want to be.” But for Dalio these so-called principles were of the utmost importance, and their drafting, expansion, and revision would occupy him for years. The book version would ultimately balloon to hundreds of pages.

Yet it was not enough to simply write the principles; Dalio had to ensure that they were implemented. He wanted to be thought of as a “shaper,” not just a “chirper;”¹² not only a philosopher but a philosopher-king. “Dalio began to present himself as a model for exemplary behavior. He compared himself to the Dalai Lama. . . . Dalio knew he wasn’t going to be around forever, and from what he witnessed at Bridgewater, merely handing out copies of The Principles did not ensure that they were followed. He needed a way to make the manifesto come alive, not just for those who had in-person exposure to him, but to all.”

First, Dalio began hiring psychologists and human resources consultants to formally integrate the principles into firm operations. They devised elaborate employee ratings criteria based on the principles, assigning scores for Dalian conceits like “living in truth” and “synthesizing through time.” An element of democracy was added: employees rated each other on how well they adhered to the principles. This burgeoning collection of “dots” (or ratings) across a constantly expanding set of principles-based metrics was to form what Dalio called the “Book of the Future.” Of course, in the 2010s, there had to be an app for that. So Bridgewater hired computer scientists, AI experts, and tech executives to build PriOS,¹³ the “principles operating system,” intended as a “GPS” for every management decision. Copeland estimates that Bridgewater spent $100 million trying to turn the principles into software. (Many of the people employed to do this—typically hired under pretenses of working in investment roles—recognized that the principles were ridiculous and the task was hopeless, yet continued with the project as long as Dalio paid well.)

But implementing the principles required more than human resources and IT. Dalio also hired prosecutors. James Comey, before he became famous for investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails and Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, was Bridgewater’s general counsel. Comey investigated employees accused of violating the principles and prosecuted them in firm-wide show trials over which Dalio presided. In keeping with the principle of radical transparency, all conversations at Bridgewater were recorded and available for inspection, so Comey—and pretty much anyone else at the firm—could comb through the library to find evidence of others’ transgressions. After a trip to China,¹⁴ Dalio also decided to stand up a “politburo”—he literally called it that—of the most enthusiastic staff to enforce the principles. True to form, the politburo placed “principles captains,” “overseers,” and “auditors” throughout the firm. “‘The worst thing,’ said one employee, ‘is for an overseer to find a problem before I find it.’”

A perverse dynamic arose: although most people could see that the principles were inane—if not totally insane—demonstrating loyalty to them was the surest way to win Dalio’s favor, and thus power within the firm. Rival factions of executives hauled each other before the politburo’s tribunals in order to score points with Dalio. Those who expressed dissent were quickly betrayed by their presumed allies, all jockeying to succeed the founder. At lower levels, the easiest way for employees to improve their own “believability scores” was to mimic the “dots” assigned by senior management, particularly Dalio. Thus Bridgewater’s democratic employee ratings system only encouraged herd behavior and reinforced the dictates of the leader. At one point, after a period of particularly bad performance, Dalio’s own scores did begin to slip, but he simply ordered staff to change the system so that his ratings were always the highest. Paradoxically, the more absurd the principles became, the more zealously everyone worked to enforce them; as the number of true believers dwindled, the more obsessively the principles were followed.

And whenever a victim of the politburo tried to use the principles against Dalio—radical transparency, after all, was supposed to ensure free speech—Dalio simply revised the principles. Once it became obvious that Dalio did not really follow his own principles, he declared “martial law”—again, his words—and instituted a new principle: “Expect those who receive the radical transparency to handle it responsibly and don’t give it to them if they can’t.” He estimated that only 10 percent of Bridgewater employees could be trusted. The glass walls of conference rooms were papered over to allow for secret meetings. “Renovations”—Dalio-speak for mass firings and purges—now happened on a whim.

As Dalio’s regime at Bridgewater sank deeper into dystopia, he finally published his book, Principles: Life and Work, and aggressively promoted his ideas to the world outside the firm. Thanks to heavy—and no doubt lavishly funded—publicity, the book became a bestseller. But no one really cared about the principles. Dalio dreamed that other companies and even governments would rush to implement them, but his collection of airport-nonfiction clichés and bizarre neologisms were ignored, received with the mixture of condescension and sycophancy often accorded to addled billionaires, demented relatives, and overexcited children. Additional books and various interactive tools to teach the principles fell flat. Rejected by the world, an aging Dalio finally stepped away from Bridgewater. The library of recordings, the “dot collector,” and the rest of the principles software gradually fell out of use.

As for the actual performance of the fund during the principles era, it was unsurprisingly atrocious. Bridgewater’s flagship Pure Alpha Fund averaged compound annual returns of 1.5 percent from 2012 to 2022, or a total return of 17.8 percent over eleven years, barely beating inflation. During the same eleven-year period, the S&P 500 index averaged annual returns of 12.7 percent, or 273 percent in total. Dalio’s much-touted investment process turned out to be just as capricious and counterproductive as his management style. In reality, “there was essentially no grand system, no artificial intelligence of any substance, no Holy Grail. There was just Dalio . . . calling the shots,” and the shots got progressively worse. Dalio continued to adhere to the correlations and strategies he had identified in the 1980s and ’90s, but the world, and the hedge fund industry, had changed. Other firms also spent heavily on computer systems, but they built ever-more sophisticated trading software, rather than a “principles operating system.” In fact, most Bridgewater employees were not meaningfully engaged in investment analysis at all; their main role was to perform the cult of the principles every day. To boost morale, Bridgewater at one point introduced a “trading game” simulation, which allowed employees to take phantom positions in various markets. If the trades succeeded, Bridgewater would pay out the employee in cash. On the one hand, Copeland writes, for many employees, this was “the only time in their Bridgewater careers that they could actually express an investment idea.” On the other hand, the incident illustrates Dalio’s low opinion of his own staff, the analysts tasked with investing client assets: “he was willing to take, blind, the other side of whatever they came up with.”

Despite the massive misallocation of capital and human resources that Bridgewater had come to represent, “the market” never seems to have exerted any discipline or corrective pressure on Dalio until long after the damage was done. Although the firm increasingly had to look down-market for new limited partners, it managed to maintain its status as the “world’s largest hedge fund” by assets under management through years and years of terrible performance. The extravagant wastefulness of the entire principles experiment was never punished, and the “distributed knowledge” of Bridgewater clients reproduced the same herding patterns as Dalio’s employee ratings democracy.

In the end, “Socrates wished to die. Not Athens, but his own hand gave him the draught of hemlock; he drove Athens to the poisoned cup. ‘Socrates is not a doctor,’ he whispered to himself, ‘death alone can be a doctor here. . . . Socrates himself has only been ill a long while.’”

The Dialectic of Masters and Slaves

None of the four books discussed here mention Hegel, but it is worth recalling a key element of his master-slave dialectic. The master does not desire power alone but also recognition—recognition that the slave, as slave, cannot meaningfully provide. Becoming master and attaining recognition as master are in unresolvable tension: it is precisely the master’s power over the slave that thwarts the fulfillment of his desire for freely given recognition. One need not accept Hegel’s entire philosophy to appreciate the importance of this unsatisfied—and unsatisfiable—desire.

Politics, morality, and philosophy are driven not only by the cunning of the slaves but by the frustrated desire of the masters. Absent the master’s desire for recognition—for more than the merely coercive exercise of dominion—any “slave revolt in morality” would be of no consequence; the master would happily ignore it. In the Hegelian anthropology, the slave at some level accepts slavery—otherwise he would fight to the death—but the master is neither willing to be a slave nor content to be a master.

In general, today’s debates over politics, ideology, and morality tend to overlook this internal dilemma of rulers, of the “elite.” Yet this dynamic can at least begin to explain why the liberation of elite egoism (amid the decline of traditional religious, familial, and political ethics) has coincided with the rise of increasingly dogmatic public moralism—especially rigid, conformist, and leveling varieties. Left to its own devices and desires—the desire for recognition above all—the tyrannical personality type does not necessarily become a warrior-aristocrat or Socratic philosopher, but a flatterer of herd morality (while imagining himself to be a manipulator of it).¹⁵ Encouraging the further liberation of tyrannical desires among today’s elites, then, seems unlikely to produce anything but additional dysfunction and self-destruction.

Philosophy has never offered a cure for this sickness. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the Socratic quest terminates in the realization that the examined life really isn’t, either. In political terms, the gentlemen or aristocrats are always insipid¹⁶; their antiquated institutions and traditions only hasten their own decline. The tyrant is not so inhibited, but his subjugation to his own immediate impulses and desires prevents the accomplishment of anything substantial. The philosopher is permanently childish and ineffective; his survival (figuratively, qua philosopher, or perhaps even literally) depends upon his remaining irrelevant¹⁷—never rising beyond an “ineffectual ladies’ reading group.”¹⁸

From this perspective, Christianity ought not to be seen simply as a leveling, universalizing, pacifying, or life-denying force in Western intellectual and political history. (Of course, none of these tendencies are unique or original to Christianity.) On the contrary, by allowing for distance between the cities of God and man, Christianity¹⁹ provided a means to negotiate conflicting desires for domination and recognition, expanding the horizons of political ambition. Energies that would otherwise have been endlessly expended on the vagaries of tribal politics—oscillations between the most mindless clan moralism and the pettiest self-interest—could at least occasionally be directed toward grander ambitions.

The accompanying cost of liberal modernity’s compartmentalization of religion—secularization and the gradual decline of Christianity—was, paradoxically, the collapsing of the distance between the spiritual and the political. This flattening limited the range for navigating the opposition between domination and recognition, foreclosing possibilities for a spiritual morality of recognition separate from the ethics of political achievement or necessity. ²⁰ The result was not the rejuvenation of some mythic vitalism, but a diminishing capacity for the “reason of state” that undergirded Western self-assertion from colonial ventures to technological mastery.

It is doubtful whether a renewal of “statesmanship,” of what Gallagher calls achievement-oriented politics, or even a broader sense of political self-confidence, can occur in the West without the deepening of the dimensions between politics and morality that Christianity once provided. It is equally questionable whether such a deepening could occur today. But it almost certainly will not come from the existing, politicized institutions of organized religion,²¹ nor any repackaging of philosophic hedonism.

On the other hand, Habermas’s post-heroic age of consumerism and leisure seems to be coming to an end. After more than fifty years, the effort to reduce politics in the West to the maximization of personal consumption has now undermined itself. As a result, new approaches to politics and philosophy might finally emerge. It is far from certain that hard times create strong men, as the memes would have it—too many historical counterexamples argue otherwise—but there seems to be an essential connection between statesmanship, virtue, and necessity, a reality that even philosophers can understand.

This article is an American Affairs online exclusive, published August 26, 2024.

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