Reason Magazine - Contributors

War and Peace

info@reason.com (Paul A. Rahe) — Sun, 01 Oct 1995 00:00:00 EDT

On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, by Donald Kagan, New York: Doubleday, 606 pages, $30.00

Twenty-five years ago, shortly after shifting from Cornell to Yale University, Donald Kagan launched a new lecture course, "Historical Studies in the Origins of War." Each fall, he would introduce hundreds of freshmen and sophomores to Greek history; and when neither on leave nor saddled with administrative duties as department chair or Yale College dean, he would invite a host of undergraduates to devote the spring to reconsidering the course of events that led to the Peloponnesian War, World War I, the Second Punic War, World War II, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. By now, the teaching assistants who have run sections for Kagan before wandering off to take up assistant professorships at campuses all over the country are many (I was one two decades ago), and they are greatly outnumbered by the Yale alumni who once chose to wrestle with the complex set of issues that Kagan raised.

In On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace , Kagan, now Bass Professor of Western Civilization at Yale, makes it possible for readers throughout the world to share what was for many years an essential part of the Yale experience. He addresses the same four wars and the missile crisis, and he has apparently found a large audience. The book has been featured by the History Book Club and offered by the Book of the Month Club; its author has been interviewed on C -SPAN's Booknotes; and he has been invited to address the CEOs of the Fortune 500. Sales have been brisk.

It is easy to see why. Kagan's writing is clear; his book is well adorned with maps; his topic is one of permanent importance; and his presumptions are quite sensible. Nowhere does he suggest that we can hope for a world without war, but neither does he succumb to fatalism. While acknowledging that we operate within constraints, he insists that statesmen frequently have real choices to make and that these choices can be made wisely or foolishly. Kagan stoutly resists both the social scientist's instinct to force dissimilar situations into a similar mold and the historian's proclivity for presuming that no two situations are genuinely comparable. While demonstrating that the devil is in the details, he makes analogies where appropriate, keeping his eyes open for that which is permanent in the human condition.

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from these carefully linked studies, it is that statesman ship matters. Kagan insists that, in the absence of careful management, the international system tends towards anarchy. The maintenance of peace requires the presence of a great power willing to devote its efforts to avoiding a general conflagration. This superintending entity must be a satisfied power: No country possessed of territorial ambitions or revolutionary intentions likely to bring it into conflict with other states can be trusted to serve as an honest broker. This state must be powerful: In the best of circumstances, it should hold the balance between contending rivals. At the very least, it should be clear to all concerned that its intervention on one side or another in a given conflict will make a real difference to the outcome. Finally, this country must be aware of the role that it is called on to play; its citizens must be willing to shoulder the burden; and it must be shrewdly led.

Kagan concludes that, when these conditions are absent, a general war will almost certainly be the result; and in the course of five discrete narratives, he indicates why this is so. Kagan's conten tion ought to be a sobering thought for Americans. The United States is the only satisfied power in today's world with the political, economic, and moral capital to play what he takes to be the requisite role, and we may now be inclined to presume that "a return to normalcy" means for us a withdrawal from the world and a massive reduction in armaments. This Kagan thinks exceedingly dangerous. As a consequence, his book ought to be read by every citizen willing seriously to ponder whither we are tending. It should be force-fed to Bill Clinton, to his Republican rivals, and to the leaders of both parties in the two houses of Congressfor if its author is right, we as a nation cannot afford to be wrong.

At the beginning and throughout the book, Kagan emphasizes the first item on Thucydides' list of the three great concerns that influence political communities. While contemporary readers will not be surprised by the notion "that fear and interest move states to war," Kagan writes, it may seem strange to them that a "concern for honor should do so." Of course, he notes, "if we take honor to mean fame, glory, renown, or splendor, it may appear applicable only to an earlier time." If, on the other hand, "we understand its significance as deference, esteem, just due, regard, respect, or pres tige we will find it an important motive of nations in the modern world as well."

Honor, Kagan insists, is "desirable in itself," but "it also has practical importance in the compe tition for power. When it is on the wane, so, too, is the power of the state losing it, and the reverse is also true. Power and honor have a reciprocal relationship." Above all else, an otherwise formidable state tends to lose prestige, and with it the capacity to accomplish its goals, when it is "seen to lack the will to use its material power." Kagan warns his readers that they "may be surprised by how small a roleconsiderations of practical utility and material gain, and even ambition for power itself, play in bringing on wars and how often some aspect of honor is decisive."

Such was the case with the Peloponnesian War. As Kagan tells the story, Thucydides was right in general and wrong in particular: This great conflict was by no means inevitable. Neither the Spartans nor the Athenians were intent on war. They had come to blows in the recent past, and neither side had proved able to eliminate or secure a decisive advantage over the other. There were circumstances that could encourage confrontation: Athens ruled a maritime empire, and Sparta was a land power, which led and dominated the so-called Peloponnesian League. Instability within either alliance might tempt the other to intervene. But the Spartans, outnumbered as they were by a restive and troublesome servile population, were exceedingly reluctant to take risks; and Athens, which was the less vulnerable of the two, was led by Pericles, a sober and capable statesman graced with first hand experience of the dangers that one subjected one's country to when one embarked on such a war.

In the event, Corinth, a maritime power that happened to be the most independent of Sparta's allies, became embroiled in a conflict in the Adriatic. The Athenians were drawn in when faced with the prospect that the Corinthians might conquer hitherto neutral Corcyra and, by bringing together under their control the second and third largest fleets in Greece, emerge as a threat to Athens on the sea. When the Athenians intervened to prevent the Corinthians from achieving this goal, the latter successfully pressed the Spartans for a declaration of war.

The Corinthians were driven chiefly by honor; the Spartans, by the fear that their alliance would come apart, by the conviction that war would in any case eventually come, and by the desire not to dishonor themselves by abandoning a longtime ally. Initially, the Athenians were concerned with their own safety. Under Pericles' leadership, they came to the defense of Corcyra but did so in an unprovocative manner. They blundered only when, in anger, out of a sense of honor, they retali ated against Megara for her participation in Corinth's Corcyraean adventure by imposing a trade embargo on that Spartan ally. By putting pressure on the very community that Athens had taken from Sparta at the beginning of the earlier war, Pericles touched a nerve, bringing Sparta into the conflict.

Pericles, though he failed in the end, is the hero of the piece, as he was in Kagan's Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (1991). But here he serves primarily as a foil for a figure who appears to have been an even greater man: Otto von Bismarck, the statesman most responsible for the formation of Germany.

As Kagan recounts the tale, Bismarck was a man who knew what could be done and what could not. After forging German unity, he recognized that further German expansion would unite the rest of Europe against the upstart power. He therefore presented his country to its neighbors as a saturated power intent on the preservation of peace, willing and able to serve as an honest broker. Having injured France by the seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, he sought at the same time to isolate that potentially revanchist power and to soothe its fears. Recognizing the danger that Russian ambitions might pose, he tried both the carrot and the stick, neither encouraging adventurism on Russia's part nor drawing so close to Austria-Hungary that Russia would be estranged. It was, as Kagan empha sizes, a bravura performance.

It ended when, after the death of Bismarck's patron Kaiser Wilhelm I, that fortunate monarch's grandson Wilhelm II asked for the great statesman's resignation. Under Wilhelm II, Germany em barked on a quest for power and glory. In the process, it needlessly alienated Russia; found itself forced to fall back on its alliance with Austria-Hungary; encouraged fear and revanchism in France; and built a fleet, for which it had no real need, that so threatened the British that they abandoned their traditional isolationism, drew near to their ancient enemy France, and eventually signed an alliance with Russia.

Having encircled themselves, the Kaiser and his advisers seized upon the crisis stirred up by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo as an opportunity to drive a wedge between England, Russia, and France, taking "a calculated risk" that ended in a general war. If Bismarck's story is a tale of a difficult situation magnificently handled, the history of Wilhelmine Germany is a case study in what not to do.

Kagan juxtaposes the Peloponnesian War with World War I because, in each case, there were two opposed alliance systems, and one of the hegemonic powers found itself drawn into a conflict of intrinsic interest only to its chief ally. He juxtaposes the Second Punic War with World War II for comparable reasons. In each case, the war involved powers which had fought before, and one side had been victorious and had imposed a peace. In studying these last two examples, one can ponder what it is that makes a good postwar settlement and what is required to enforce or maintain the peace.

It should have been easy for Rome to forge a lasting settlement in the wake
of the First Punic War. Once Rome achieved full control of the sea, Carthage was helpless. Rome could have destroyed its rival. But the Romans were reluctant to govern an empire, and so they sought to turn Carthage into a client state. In the Peace of Lutatius, they defined for the powers two separate spheres, taking Sicily and the nearby islands for themselves and leaving Carthage with Sardinia and the Maghreb. In principle, this might have workedbut Carthage had been a great power long before Rome was worthy of notice, and it is by no means clear that it would have been satisfied with second-class status. In any case, when the Carthaginians became embroiled in a con flict in North Africa with their own mercenaries and rebellious mercenaries in Sardinia offered that island to Rome, the Romans hesitated; and when the offer was made a second time after the Carthaginians had put down the rebellion near home, the Romans pounced. After that, what little chance there was that the Carthaginians would ever trust the Romans and accept the hand that fate had recently dealt them disappeared.

Even then, Kagan insists, the peace might have been kept. The Romans might have attempted appeasement and they might have prevented the Carthaginians from establishing an empire in Spain. They did neither. Kagan's tale of what they did instead is a story of gross ineptitude.

Something of the sort can be said concerning the origins of World War II. Given what the victorious allies had suffered in the course of a war fought for the most part on French and Belgian soil, and given what they had learned concerning Germany's intentions from the terms imposed on the Soviet Union in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, one can hardly blame them for being wary of the prospect that Germany might emerge from the war as a power dominant on the continent of Europe. If the peace imposed on Germany was a Carthaginian Peace, as is sometimes said, it was not because the Versailles settlement was needlessly harsh but rather because it was not harsh enough. At the end of World War I, German industry was intact; the German economy had far better prospects for a quick recovery than the economies of her rivals. The peace imposed on Germany was bound to inspire resentment. It applied the principle of national self-determination to all but Germans, and it held the Central Powers responsible for the war. But the real problem was that, having added insult to injury, it left the aggrieved with the wherewithal to press hard for a general revision of the settle ment in their favor. The Versailles settlement was not a peace that would enforce itself.

That would not have been fatal had the Allies been willing to enforce the peace themselves. The French were willing, but they could notor at least would notdo so alone. At Versailles, the French had pressed for the dismemberment of Germany. They had been persuaded to give way on the expectation that they would be awarded a defensive alliance with the United States and Britain. But when Woodrow Wilson failed to make good on his promises, Britain exercised its right to forgo the alliance, and France was left to her own devices.

In fact, after the peace was signed, neither the Americans nor the British were comfortable with the results. Wilson's pious hopes for collective security and his contempt for balance-of-power politics caught on, especially in the United Kingdom. Under the influence of those notions, the British set out to appease the Germans and bring them within the League of Nationsand the French, after a brief attempt to go it alone, followed their lead. In the 1930s, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain merely pursued to its logical conclusion the appeasement policy adopted the decade before.

Twenty years ago, Kagan's course tended to end on a note of triumph. Where Pericles and other statesmen had failed, John F. Kennedy had succeeded. The events of October 1962 were a diplomatic crisis well handled: It did not end in war. That was, of course, the impression left by the memoirs published by those inside the Kennedy administration. The release of hitherto classified data has altered the picture, and Kagan is no longer inclined to congratulate the Americans on their statesmanship. Kennedy emerges in this account as a man much more like Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill. He had, to be sure, a proclivity for extreme rhetoric, but that rhetoric was rarely, if ever, backed up by action.

In the 1960 election campaign, Kennedy publicly called for an invasion of Cuba by the Cuban exiles. Then he allowed it to fail. On Laos, where Eisenhower had been tough, he accepted a settle ment unfavorable to the United States. At the Vienna Summit, he allowed Nikita Khrushchev to browbeat him. He did nothing to prevent the building of the Berlin Wall and may have encouraged Sen. J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to float the idea that the Soviets would be perfectly justified in closing the border and cutting off East German emigration to the West. When, in panic, Kennedy announced that America would not hesitate to launch a first strike if the Soviets invaded Western Europe, Khrushchev figured that it was worth the risk to try to put an end to America's nuclear superiority by shipping to Cuba middle-range and intermediate -range ballistic missiles bearing nuclear weapons. Even if the Americans discovered the missiles before they were operational, the Soviet leader appears to have reasoned, Kennedy lacked the cour age to do anything to prevent them from being readied.

Kagan's account suggests that Khrushchev was right in his estimation of Kennedy. The delib erations of Ex Comm, the body that Kennedy set up to weigh America's options, were taped on Kennedy's orders. The transcripts are now available, and they demonstrate that neither Robert McNamara nor John F. Kennedy had any appreciation of the strategic consequences of allowing the missiles to stay in place. Both could think only of the elections that would take place in a few weeks. They evidently regretted Kennedy's public commitment, announced in early September, that the United States would not tolerate the introduction to Cuba of missiles with a nuclear payload. Neither appears to have been willing seriously to contemplate an American attack on the missiles' site or an American invasion of the island.

Kagan's judgment can, of course, be questioned. Twenty years ago, I was inclined to think that Pericles was less like Bismarck than like the last preWorld War I German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and I still suspect that the embargo against Megara was aimed at dividing Corinth from Sparta and splitting the Peloponnesian League so that Athens could fight an inevitable war on favorable terms. Others may wish to challenge Kagan's assessment of Bismarck or Kaiser Wilhelm II; of Roman statesmanship between the First and Second Punic Wars; of the Versailles Treaty; of Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and Winston Churchill; of John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. But none of this detracts from the value of this book, for its purpose is less to tell one what to think than to make one do so. Even if Kagan is wrong on a given question, he has much to teach us concerning the questions that we must repeatedly askand, as anyone in the business of strategic management can testify, posing the right questions is where political prudence begins.

Civility Wars

info@reason.com (Paul A. Rahe) — Sat, 01 Apr 1995 00:00:00 EST

Democracy on Trial, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, New York: Basic Books, 153 pages, $20.00

Some years ago, when a friend reached his 40th birthday, I sent him a T-shirt emblazoned with the legend "Aging McGovern Voters for Reagan." Were I closely acquainted with the author of this slender volume, I would be inclined to draw her attention to the fact that a woman who once prided herself on her hatred for Nixon is now sounding some themes reminiscent of Newt Gingrich. I wonder, however, whether she would be amused.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Ethics at the University of Chicago, is an academic left-liberal with impeccable feminist credentials. The five lectures that make up her latest publication were delivered at Massey College in 1993, broadcast on CBC Radio in Canada, and revised for publication during an extended sojourn at Harvard University. Although her book is written in a conversational tone and is accessible to anyone willing to plunk down $20, it is in fact directed at a particular audience--at academic left-liberals and their fellow travelers, especially at those inclined to think righteous thoughts when they hear the chant, "Race, Class, and Gender."

Elshtain is not a convert preaching to the converted. Nor does she make strenuous efforts to establish her bona fides with those to whom her remarks are addressed. Her lectures are, in fact, noteworthy for the near absence of cheap shots at those on the right. For the most part, she reserves her criticism for members of her own tribe. But Elshtain isn't a turncoat--a liberal turned neoconservative--at least not yet. She associates herself with Amitai Etzioni, Michael Walzer, William Galston, and others on the "communitarian" left, and there is every reason to suppose that she cheered William Jefferson Clinton's latest State of the Union address.

But like neoconservatives of a slightly older generation, she is a liberal who has clearly been mugged by reality. In her preface, she tells us that she has "joined the ranks of the nervous," and her book, graced with a title that, as one senior colleague observed, has "a very 1940s ring to it," is an attempt to explain why.

To begin with, Elshtain is a firm friend to the family. Her study is dedicated to the memory of her father; in its preface, she draws attention to the fact that she is herself now a grandmother. She worries that "the America" which her granddaughter "will discover a mere fifteen or twenty years from now" will not possess a political "culture worthy of endorsement and engagement." Above all else, she fears what I will call the postmodern mentality, which is marked by what she calls "the pernicious corrosion of resentment."

As she puts it, "The language of opposition now appears as a cascading series of manifestos that tell us we cannot live together; we cannot work together; we are not in this together; we are not Americans who have something in common, but racial, ethnic, gender, or sexually identified clans who demand to be 'recognized' only or exclusively as 'different.' Think about how odd this is on the face of it: I require that you recognize that we have nothing in common with one another. This demand is rapidly becoming a shared civic zaniness that threatens to implode our culture. We are in danger of losing democratic civil society. It is that simple and that dangerous, springing, as it does, not from a generous openness to sharp disagreement--democratic feistiness--but from a cynical and resentful closing off of others."

Pluralism she embraces: The "aim" of her book is, as she puts it, "to reach disagreement," and she is perfectly prepared to honor and even celebrate "our distinctions, as peoples of a particular heritage and individuals of particular gifts." What worries her is multiculturalism, which she defines as "the current construction of 'difference' as a form of group homogeneity that brooks no disagreement or distinction within and can maintain itself only as a redoubt against threatening 'enemies' from without."

One consequence of multiculturalism's hegemony is that the world of the university is now balkanized, and scholars "whose tacit Hippocratic oath commits them to thoroughness and fairness in inquiry" no longer "bother to hide" the fact that they think in quasi-inquisitorial terms of "apostasy" and heresy while searching "for guidance on the interdiction of a text."

If Elshtain had followed up on her eloquent introductory remarks by providing her readers with a sustained analysis of our postmodern predicament, this would have been an important book. Unfortunately, however, her lectures are disjointed and episodic, and her book is slender in more than one way. Where one looks for a coherent, focused argument, one finds instead an extended commentary on a pastiche of quotations drawn from the great and the good: from luminaries such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vaclav Havel, Milan Kundera, Pope John Paul II, Hannah Arendt, and many a lesser light. What no doubt worked on stage and even on the radio is far less effective when presented on the printed page.

The thrust of Elshtain's remarks is generally sensible. Early on, in the first lecture, she cites E.J. Dionne's Why Americans Hate Politics and draws attention to the incoherence marking both liberal and conservative thinking with regard to markets and morals. Liberals, she notes, try "to tame the logic of the market in economic life" and then "celebrate a nearly untrammeled laissez-faire in cultural and sexual life"; their conservative opponents think it possible to introduce "constraints and controls in the cultural and sexual sphere but embrace a nearly unconstrained market." She then draws attention to academic studies of the manner in which preferential hiring programs have stoked racial resentment, and she notes the tendency for federal programs to create "a 'client-compliance culture' that is much at odds with the possibilities for adult citizenship." Again and again, she emphasizes what is obvious to most Americans but incomprehensible to those within the academic counterculture: that there is a close correlation between poverty and juvenile delinquency on the one hand and being the offspring of unmarried parents who failed to complete high school and had a first child before reaching the age of 20 on the other.

In the same lecture, Elshtain quite rightly traces many of our difficulties to the substitution of a notion of rights as entitlements for the older, liberal understanding of rights as immunities. And in attacking "the logic of statism," she sensibly observes that "government cannot substitute for concrete moral obligations."

She sounds an elegiac note when she considers "the loneliness of the aged, the apathy of the young, the withering away of churches and communal organizations, the disentangling of family ties, and the loss of family rituals and rhythms." Although she stops short of simply blaming statism for these phenomena, she warns that "a bureaucratic, top-heavy state that numbers among its tasks defining populations by their 'needs' and targeting them for various policies based on assumptions about such needs, really cannot help moving in the direction of a 'social engineering' that exists in tension with democratic freedom, civic sociality, and individual liberty."

In similar fashion, Elshtain attacks the Violence Against Women Act, which incorporates "gender motivation" into the law and "presumes to see in rape--a crime of violence--the paradigmatic, indeed normative, expression of male dominance." It is, she observes, a "distressing spectacle" to find "an assault on civil liberties, coupled with a perfervid ideology of victimization." Four paragraphs thereafter, she launches an attack on court intervention in "wedge issues," such as the question of abortion, arguing that "the juridical model of politics" freezes out "citizen debate" and deepens "a politics of resentment." And she concludes her lecture with a call for "a new social covenant," the meaning of which, in subsequent lectures, she fails to spell out.

Elshtain's failure in this regard is a shame--for while it is difficult to find the thread that holds the individual pieces of her first lecture together, there is a logic evident in some of what she says. In the manner of the Anti-Federalists and Alexis de Tocqueville, she regards centralization as suspect, and she wants to reinvigorate families, churches, schools, and local governments. But she does not do a very good job of relating these concerns to her critique of the postmodern mentality. And when commenting on the recent debate concerning "the ability of the police to make unannounced sweeps of housing projects where danger is a pervasive presence," she displays a measure of the left-liberal myopia that elsewhere she quite effectively attacks.

This would have been an appropriate place for indicating the sort of reforms that a reinvigoration of local responsibility might entail. In this connection, Elshtain might have explored a proposal recently advanced by Robert Cottrol of the Rutgers School of Law at Camden that the heads of households within such projects be armed and drilled as a militia, that they be deputized as a posse comitatus, and that they be given considerable responsibility for cleaning up their own neighborhoods.

Instead, she criticizes the lawyers and editorial writers who worry about the civil liberties of those who live in the projects, and she launches an assault on the opponents of gun control. It never seems to cross her mind that, within the Whig political culture from which the American regime takes its origins, there is a connection between adult citizenship and the bearing of arms and that, in our larger cities, the housing projects are dangerous precisely because the people who live there are passive adherents to "a 'client-compliance culture,'" are disorganized, and have been denied the means of self-defense. Would it not be appropriate for "a new social covenant" to include within its provisions the presumption that individuals within a given locality should bear some considerable responsibility for their own security?

The second of Elshtain's five lectures is the most interesting and coherent of the lot. In it, she argues that the feminist insistence that "the personal is political" contributes mightily to the corruption of both public and private life, to the extension of "the therapeutic powers of the state," and to the emergence of a quasi-totalitarian ethos within the society at large. In this connection, she quotes to good effect Milan Kundera's contention that there is a "magic border" between "intimate life and public life...that can't be crossed with impunity," since anyone "who was the same in both public and intimate life would be a monster...without spontaneity in his private life and without responsibility in his public life. For example, privately to you I can say of a friend who's done something stupid, that he's an idiot, that his ears ought to be cut off, that he should be hung upside down and a mouse stuffed in his mouth. But if the same statement was broadcast over the radio spoken in a serious tone--and we all prefer to make such jokes in a serious tone--it would be indefensible."

America is not pre-1989 Czechoslovakia, Elshtain is quick to remark. In it, there is nothing precisely equivalent to the sort of "terror" that Kundera had in mind. Our officials do not tape remarks made over the kitchen table for subsequent broadcast on the radio. But the current hysteria concerning battered women points in a similar direction: "Mandated counseling, even behavioral conditioning of violent or 'potentially violent' men, coupled with compulsory punishment and no appeal, are common parts of the panoply of interim proposals that have been made."

In these proposals, Elshtain finds echoes of the social-hygiene movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which attempts were made to police and restrict feminine sexuality to "certain standards of class and ethnicity," and black men were accused of "reckless eyeballing" while Italians were suspect as "seducers" and Chinese were regarded as potential "white slavers."

In the same spirit, Elshtain points to the dangers inherent in the sort of "identity politics" practiced by the gay liberation movement in which "one's private identity becomes who and what one is in public, and public life is about confirming that identity." This is, she points out, a recipe for civil war, for "those who disagree with my 'politics,' then, are the enemies of my identity." That "the word of choice" in the polemics launched by those demanding public confirmation should be "enraged" is only logical--for what is at stake when politics is understood as "an eruption of radical feelings" is nothing less than everything.

It is consistent with "the politics of democratic civility and equity," Elshtain argues, for society to accord "all citizens, including gays,...a right, as individuals, to be protected from intrusion or harassment and to be free from discrimination in such areas as employment and housing." It is not consistent with that form of politics for a gay or for anyone else to demand "full public sanction of his or her activities, values, beliefs, or habits."

The quest for public validation causes such an individual to put "his life on display" and it gives rise to an "expressivist politics" in which he opens "himself up to publicity in ways that others are bound to find quite uncivil" since "the boundary of shame" is breached. There is, as she puts it, a real distinction between "flaunting one's most intimate self" and "arguing for a position, winning approval, or inviting dissent as a citizen." Public deliberation presupposes civility, and that in turn depends on the maintenance of an atmosphere of restraint defined by shame, privacy, and concealment.

In her subsequent lectures, Elshtain examines multiculturalism with an eye to radical egalitarianism and to the defects of our affirmative-action policies. She surveys earlier discussions of democracy in Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, and on the left and right in more recent times. She explores what she calls "democracy's enduring promise." But she does not rise again to the level that she attains in her second lecture, and it is not difficult to see why.

Missing from Elshtain's argument is clarity concerning the ends and purposes of politics and government. Her vague references to the need for "a new social covenant" cut off discussion right where it should begin. Elshtain rejects the illiberal politics of premodern times because it was predicated on a failure to distinguish what is properly public from what should remain private--it presupposed that it is the task of government to shape character and identity.

But she is also unsatisfied with the old liberal understanding that restricts politics to the protection of life, liberty, and property. Nowhere in her lectures does one find anything like the sentence in Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address praising as "the sum of good government...a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." Nowhere does one read anything even remotely comparable to the passage that Jefferson inserted in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, arguing that "confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism," that "free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence," and that "it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power." Indeed, nowhere--in a book chiefly concerned with the state of American democracy--is Jefferson even mentioned.

In the place customarily accorded the author of the Declaration of Independence stands Martin Heidegger's student Hannah Arendt. Elshtain makes much of the contrast that Arendt drew, in her book On Revolution (1963), between the French and the American Revolutions, and she follows Arendt in asserting that the former was concerned with "generic, unlimited 'rights of man'" while the latter was launched in pursuit of "the rights of freedom and citizenship" and was sustained by the conviction "that power comes into being when 'people...get together and bind themselves through promises, covenants, and mutual pledges'" and that "'only such power, which rests on reciprocity and mutuality,'" can be "'real power and legitimate.'"

Such a historical claim cannot be defended. To entertain it, one must act as Arendt did: One must resolutely ignore the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence, one must deny the crucial role played during and long after the American Revolution by the notion of the natural rights of man, and one must avert one's gaze from the influence exercised by Thomas Jefferson and the American example in shaping the French national assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Much can be learned from a comparison between the two revolutions. The differences are quite significant and go far toward explaining the subsequent history of the countries in which they took place. But they do not turn on the issue identified by Arendt, and Elshtain's error in this particular is indicative of the confusion underlying her inability to articulate what her "new social covenant" involves.

"Political power does not explode out of the barrel of a gun or flow from the dripping blade of a guillotine," Elshtain informs us. "Rather, it comes into being when men and women, acting in common as citizens, get together and find a way to express their collective hopes and possibilities." For Elshtain, the crucial example is the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Its politics cannot, she insists, be confined to the political issues it explicitly addressed. To understand what took place, one must focus on the achievement of "freedom as collective liberation from bondage" and on what one historian calls the "necessary transformation of the self experienced by those actively engaged in direct action." Elshtain is persuaded that it would be a blunder to "see such solidaristic freedom and self-transformation as merely peripheral to 'the explicit goals of liquidation of racial discrimination and black disenfranchisement,'" for to do so would be "to lose the ethical power and historic complexity of the civil rights struggle."

Here lies the source of Elshtain's confusion. Those who organized and joined the civil rights movement justified their resort to civil disobedience by appealing to the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Of "solidaristic freedom and self-transformation," in these appeals, they breathed not a word--and for good reason. The respect for one another's rights is what grounds civility and makes it possible for us "to reach disagreement" without slaughtering one another. The search through politics for "solidaristic freedom and self-transformation" is plainly incompatible with this: It directly leads to the "identity politics" that Elshtain abhors. The quest for "self-transformation" and for "freedom as collective liberation from bondage" is, in fact, perfectly consistent with "the current construction of 'difference' as a form of group homogeneity that brooks no disagreement or distinction within and can maintain itself only as a redoubt against threatening 'enemies' from without."

At the heart of the new tribalism so visible within today's academy and beyond is the same warmed-over existentialism that Elshtain's mentor Hannah Arendt purveyed in her books. Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard may be the proximate sources of the postmodern mentality, but the fountainhead for their thinking--and for Arendt's as well--is the Martin Heidegger who sought to practice the politics of "solidaristic freedom and self-transformation" by embracing the National Socialist cause.

In 1933, Heidegger's compatriots, "acting in common as citizens," had gotten together and found "a way to express their collective hopes and possibilities." In Arendt's demand that power rest on "reciprocity and mutuality," there is no ground for denying that what Heidegger and his fellow Germans did was "legitimate."

Jean Bethke Elshtain needs to rethink her argument from the bottom up. To discover the foundations for the civility that is, as she quite rightly asserts, crucial to the process of public deliberation within a liberal democratic society, one need only study the American Founding Fathers. Nowhere do they deny that politics can be ennobling. Their very activity presupposed as much. Nor need one doubt that the Revolution required of Americans a measure of solidarity and that the revolutionary experience was for many transformative. Yet nowhere did our Founders advocate revolution or even "direct action" as such.

Instead, they espoused limited government. For instance, in stipulating that taking a religious oath would not be a prerequisite for holding federal office, they signalled their commitment to the view that "self-transformation" and the pursuit of "freedom as collective liberation from bondage" are best conducted outside the political sphere--in churches, in families, and in private associations.

It was, as they saw it, not enough that Americans, "acting in common as citizens," should come together and "find a way to express their collective hopes and possibilities." There had to be principles, lasting principles, stipulating which "collective hopes and possibilities" can properly be pursued in the political arena and which must be relegated to the private sphere.

The vagueness and incoherence that beset Elshtain's book and the communitarian movement as a whole arise from an unwillingness on the part of some of left-liberalism's most acute and unsparing critics to accept and endorse the fundamental principles underpinning the limits and restraints that they recognize as essential to civility within a liberal democracy such as our own.