Aristotle, Tocqueville, and “Populism Rightly Understood”
Daniel Mahoney is someone I have known for over 30 years, after meeting him at the MPSA’s book lobby at the Palmer House in Chicago in April of 1991. We have been familiar with each other and shared many mutual friendships (one of which was the late Peter Lawler). So, in the spirit of Aristotle’s Amicus Plato (“Plato is my friend”), I would like to offer a friendly rebuttal to Dan Mahoney’s recent piece of August 11, 2023 in the American Mind “Populism Rightly Understood,” as he overlooks some important aspects of populism, which I argue are restored to mind by reflecting on the matter with Aristotle, whom Mahoney neglects in his essay.
In my reading, the bulk of the start of the piece focuses more on elites and education than on the people. Perhaps the real goal of the piece is to be found in its subtitle (either done by the editors or him) that “Populists need to investigate the moral grounds on which ordered liberty is based.” But what exactly is meant here by this? Are “the moral grounds” really truly up for legitimate debate? Are they not clearly known both from the study of the history of classical political thought and the history of classical republicanism? And why must populists do this, as they are not innovating anything radical but rather are seeking to restore what was and has been tossed aside by the intellectual elites that currently have political, economic, and social authority both in America and elsewhere? Thus, Mahoney’s question here seems to take those who seek to defend populism down the wrong path.
The first two paragraphs of Mahoney’s piece introduce the contempt or concern for the character of the people that elites, especially the intellectual elites of the late 19th and 20th centuries, have had towards the people. But their complaint about the masses was nothing new. It can be found in the pages of Plato’s Republic and his critique of democratic man. To be sure, this mass man is indeed something to worry about. As Mahoney notes, “Tocqueville to Ortega y Gasset to Hannah Arendt were not wrong to criticize ‘mass society’ as a breeding ground for totalitarian tyranny and repression.” While using the authority of Irving Kristol and Christopher Lash, Mahoney seeks to differentiate populism from “Mass Society” that is inclined to tyranny and oppression. Mahoney writes, again using Kristol and Lash to point out, that it was the elite, not the people, who embraced the nihilism and had nothing but contempt for the constitutional order and ordinary morality and decency. Mahoney says, echoing Kristol, that, “The people, not the few, had no taste for the ‘modernity without restraint’ that Anglo-American democracy once resisted with a modicum of wisdom and a modicum of moderation.”
We get Mahoney’s thoughts on populism only in the penultimate paragraph of the essay, where he writes:
“I am enough of a populist to think that by and large ordinary people, although increasingly bereft of religious, civic, or liberal education, are for the most part less corrupt than the few who have largely succumbed to an aggressive and debilitating nihilism. But without the renewal of liberal, civic, and religious education in our admittedly deeply troubled times, we will surely perish. Elite nihilism cannot be countered by undirected anger, the howling of the mob, or even ‘owning the libs.’”
Here, following Strauss on the need to educate elites, Mahoney makes the common error of students of Tocqueville, to think the elites will shape and rule over the mass and ought to rule over them. This reflects Strauss and Tocqueville’s Aristocratic bias—something Aristotle would argue is problematic and fails to understand that the many and their character. Aristotle argues that the many—that is the multitude or people or demos as long as they are not slavish are better judges than the wise one or the wise few (see Politics 3.13). So, what Mahoney does here does not really offer a defense of the people, or popular rule (which is the heart of what populism is ultimately about). Ultimately, I think that Mahoney concedes to what I call the civic engagement approach that many Mansfield students embrace who look a bit askance at populism because of the demagogue problem. The problem with the use of demagogue is that it is thrown around too freely against any charismatic leader that one opposes or dislikes. Who is called a demagogue, very much depends on the eye of the beholder. This is to say—it is highly subjective and highly framed by partisan lenses. We need to remember in the 80s, the campus left, and a great deal of liberal media accused Reagan of being one. The problem with how many of Harvey Mansfield’s students (and NeoCon critics of Trump) tend to use the term, reveals within their charge an additional charge (and contempt of and for) those who support the one being so accused. All too often the charge is in fact little more than a quasi-aristocratic contempt for the nature and character of the multitude and those who are able to rally them as leaders.
One of the problems we have in understanding the people is that most attempts to understand the character and nature of the people (or the many) today only frame human political life within the context of gesellschaft (large scale society) vs. grounded local gemeinschaft (community).
For Aristotle, gesellschaft (society) is a problematic foundation to base solid political life on, as political life can only be founded on communities. For Aristotle, empires or large nations are not political, but they can only be despotisms or monarchies—thus ruled like a master (for the empire) or like a father (for the nation). Political life is reserved for the community of those who share a common life together and share in the ruling and being ruled in turn. This is why Montesquieu, very much channeling the wisdom of Aristotle, argued that republics cannot be large—that no moderate regime can be large. Large bodies tend to only be despotic in character, the rule of the master over the slave. Such rule precludes rule over the free, as in such ‘states’ no one is free, not even the ruler. This is why Aristotle in Politics 3 demands that the political community neither be founded on mere economic utility via a social contract nor be so large that the citizens would not know each other as fellow citizens who share the common benefit of a shared life together.
This insight (about the importance of small-scale communities) can be found in Tocqueville but only in part as he stumbles upon it with his discussion of townships and associations. Yet in the end, his own work suggests that both townships and associations will ultimately be crushed by the forces of equality. He argues that the spirit of equality destroys all intermediary bodies and communities that have shaped human life up to this point in history. Tocqueville then warns about administrative centralization which will necessarily arise from the egalitarian demand that the state deliver what society demands. Thus, with all the intermediary institutions dissolved and the administrative state ruling over the people who have very little ability to control or oversee it, one finds humanity in a state where every soul is radically isolated and alone. All of this produces the soul-crushing “individualism” about which Tocqueville frets and fears, a phenomenon better captured by Durkheim’s concept, anomie, because Tocqueville’s term confuses it with a view of human self-determination that is advanced both by his discussion of “self-interest rightly understood” and the drive of Americans to form associations. For Tocqueville, this outcome is inevitable because in our world only gesellschaften are permitted today because for egalitarian man gemeinschaft is either seen as inegalitarian or oppressive. And given the inevitability of gesellschaften there can only be “mass society.”
Another problem with embracing Tocqueville is that he establishes the logic and apparent inevitability thesis that underlies Tocqueville’s argument about democracy, it unleashes the inevitable historicist view of human political development that one finds in Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek that there is an inevitable evolution from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft. The argument of this progression is that humanity has developed and manifestly benefits from what gesellschaft produces for humanity write large (that is understood as an aggregated sense of that social and more progress) and that any desire for gemeinschaft is nothing more than nostalgia and politically dangerous if engaged in. Thus, trying to address the value of populism and the people’s legitimate right to form self-governing communities, from Tocqueville’s view of the issue, there is really nothing for “us” but “Black Pills” (see what dark prediction that Tocqueville forecasts in the last chapter at the end of Volume 1, part 2). Defenders of Tocqueville will argue that he leaves the issue open and provides a political science that seeks to override and mitigate the centralizing tendencies, and so, he leaves it open regarding the ultimate result. The problem with such a defense of Tocqueville is that his political science seems not to fully understand the diversity within the multitude (in fact he seems to lump together Americans and not address class differences (which exists even when Tocqueville visited America) and that his level of analysis and operation ultimately operates at the level of gesellschaft.
I would argue to understand why the people and populism is choice worthy and defensible one needs to turn from Tocqueville to Aristotle. For Aristotle, the virtue of the people (that is their goodness) is to be found in their wisdom, which is to be understood in their ability to judge and decide what is best or good. That is not to argue that Aristotle thought that they were the peak of moral virtue (he did not), but rather collectively the people or the many, but Aristotle explicitly argues that as they were not overly slavish (see Politics 3.13) were as wise as either the wise man or the aristoi (the best ones). And it was this political virtue that justified their claim to have authority and rule over the political community (as opposed to the wise king, the best aristocrats, the wealthy oligarch, or the powerful or mighty tyrant).
Yet to understand the character of the people or the multitude, we must come to understand them as they are. Who are they, what is their makeup, what is their way of life, are they slavish or not, etc.? Thus the only foundation for a defense of the rightness of populism (which is the people’s claim to have authority rather than that of the few elites—be they wise, noble, wealthy, or powerful) is the goodness of the people. And the place where Aristotle most fully flushes out the character and variety of the people, we would need to turn to Aristotle’s Politics book 6, especially chapter 4 where Aristotle addresses the different varieties of the multitude. Aristotle does a far better job than Tocqueville in flushing out the varieties of the multitude which define the character of democracy—whether it will be a good kind or a tyrannical kind.
In Politics 6 chapter 4, Aristotle speaks of at least four kinds of multitudes—two rural and two urban. The rural is superior to the urban, in Aristotle’s view. But the two urban ones are not equal in their character, that is two different urban multitudes—the artisans (or skilled laborers) are the manual laborers (banausoi) rather different from each other. For Aristotle the latter is far more problematic as they have no means (capital) but their bodies and this makes them the poor (the poor are those who have no means, except their bodies). Aristotle in Politics 4, chapter 11 explicitly distinguishes between the rich (who are arrogant and not able to be ruled) and the poor (who are slavish and who are rapacious and envious). This is why in Politics 6, chapter 4 Aristotle argues best are that rural farming is best, next to the pastoral, then the urban artisan/commercial multitude, then the manual laborers (banausoi) who are the worst and because they are so-slavish are the most destructive if they outnumber the other types of multitudes.
Thus, to understand the justice of the people’s rule and of populism, we need to understand which multitude is the ruling or controlling one. What exactly is their nature? As with the domination of certain kinds of multitudes Aristotle teaches us, is what leads to the kind of regime that will emerge. For Aristotle’s most radically urban multitude, the manual laborers (banausoi), being so poor, are the most slavish and therefore excluded from producing a just or moderate regime. The neoliberal and progressive regime that pushes for heterogeneous mass migration that imports not skilled populations, but unskilled (especially so among the vast mass of illegal migrants) can only produce the nightmare Tocqueville fears and the Last Urban Democracy that Aristotle worries about. Yet, Aristotle offers ways to moderate the last democracy, and that is by dividing up the multitudes into smaller communities or groups and insisting they vote not in mass but via their communities.
Aristotle’s answer would not be the education of the masses, but rather to shape it so that the better multitudes have more influence, and the worse multitudes have less. Aristotle’s balance of the different multitudes is actually a form of true equality, as it does not lump everyone together but gives each local unit and grouping of people who make up that unit input into the regime rather than generating a mass who would have great power but is incapable of deliberating and thus can only be manipulated by those who can and will manipulate it. So, the course of Aristotle is: first, to break up the multitudes into their decentralized natural communities, and second, to not allow any voting group to become too large (all the citizens who compose the given political community” should know or have a friend who knows every member, so they all can assess the merits of those who seek office), and finally, third, to eliminate those among the elite who seek to undo the moderated democratic political order that emerges out of these networks of communities.
So, I would argue that any defense of populism needs to understand that what is needed is not so much education (which ultimately tends to have a greater effect on elite formation than mass education—something that Mahoney points to in Leo Strauss’s comments about liberal education) but restoration of structural institutional and constitutional arrangements to return power (that is actual control) to the people via their truly representative (that is correctly proportioned so all the citizen have the ability to know and judge the character of those choose as) representatives. The problem with thinking that education or re-education can resolve the problem of the elite’s hatred of the regime and their concept for and disgust of the multitude is simply unrealistic. Such education or re-education needed to have been done 30 years ago and it is now far too late for such things. As Machiavelli noted, once the fever has set in, any truly adequate cure will likely kill the patient.
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