Chapter Thirteen
It seems appropriate to complete this survey with a few comments on the fate of the classical tradition. The neoclassical synthesis of early modern times began to fall apart some two hundred years ago. What destroyed it was the death of civic militarism. By the time of the American and French Revolutions, many enlightened thinkers had come to distrust the fierce bellicosity of the classical ideal of citizenship and to prefer a humane, peaceful, and commercial model of republicanism. Many were suspicious even of the primacy of politics in the classical republics, for modern liberals tended to be distrustful of the state and centralized power. Most would have agreed with John Adams, who in the course of the debate over the American Constitution in 1787, castigated Aristotle for excluding merchants from his ideal constitution: “It is of infinitely more importance to the national happiness, to abound in good merchants, farmers, and manufacturers, good lawyers, priests, and physicians, and great philosophers, than it is to multiply what are called great statesmen and great generals.”1
Worse than the classical authors5 fascination with political life was their obsession with war. In 1791, a clergyman preached to the General Court of New Hampshire that “no aera since the creation of the world” was “so favourable to the rights of mankind as the present.” He criticized harshly the “imperfect civilization” of “the Grecian and Roman nations”:
They who are acquainted with the true history of Greece and Rome, need not be informed, that the cruelty they exercised upon their slaves, and those taken in war, is almost beyond the power of credibility. The proud and selfish passions have always endeavoured to suppress the spirit of Freedom. Even Rome herself, while she pretended to glory in being free, endeavoured to subject and enslave the rest of mankind.—But no longer shall we look to antient histories for principles and systems of pure freedom. The close of the eighteenth century, in which we live, shall teach mankind to be truly free.2
Some Renaissance humanists had been uneasy at the way the classical authors associated freedom with hegemony, but at the close of the eighteenth century, that association seemed a blatant and intolerable contradiction. True freedom could never lead to a desire to dominate other peoples. Classical and modern republicanism had nothing in common. As Alexander Hamilton put it in The Federalist, “The industrious habits of the people of the present day, absorbed in the pursuits of gain, and devoted to the improvements of agriculture and commerce are incompatible with the condition of a nation of soldiers, which was the true condition of the people of those [ancient Greek] republics” (8 [47]).
There was a growing conviction that warfare could be legitimately practiced only for motives of safety, never gain or glory—that is, for immediate self-defense against aggression, not for the larger aims of self-preservation assumed in the traditional idea of “defense.” There was a growing hope that warfare might vanish entirely with the spread of republicanism, commerce, and civility. Land-based empire was now perceived as an unmitigated evil, destructive even to the imperial power itself. New European empires were to arise overseas, but from this time on they would be justified not as imitations of imperial Rome but as the peaceful diffusion of European science and progress over a grateful globe. The new language of nineteenth-century imperialism was heard as early as 1794 in the influential Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind by the Marquis de Condorcet, who convinced himself that the peoples of Africa and Asia were “waiting only to be civilized and to receive from us the means to be so, and find brothers among the Europeans to become their friends and disciples.”3
Everything the classics had to say about war and statecraft now seemed of questionable value. The hold of the classical tradition on Western thought about those matters, and others, began slowly but inexorably to weaken. Soon the influence of the classical historians was replaced by the new scientific history of Niebuhr, and that of the classical treatises on the art of war was eclipsed by the new military science of Jomini and Clausewitz.
Civic militarism was quite dead, but in ethical and strategic thought, the influence of the classics lingered for a long time. Many military thinkers continued to find something especially paradigmatic about the ancient military experience. As late as World War I, the German war plan was based on the tactics of Hannibal at Cannae; but that war showed that the twentieth-century military experience had become different indeed, and it rendered the final blow to the ancient ideal of glory.
This was the second great intellectual watershed that doomed the classical tradition. In the late eighteenth century, the Western world began to lose faith in militarism; in the late nineteenth, it began to lose faith in morality. The classical and neoclassical traditions had always been based on a universal belief in natural law. Ideas about the functions and justifications of warfare commanded assent because they were supposed to reflect eternal truths about human nature. The existence of these has seemed increasingly questionable since Darwin, and in this century, natural law has become an almost unintelligible notion to the great majority of intellectuals. Parts of Grotius’s neoclassical synthesis survive in contemporary international law, but they have lost their philosophical coherence. This is why the moral and strategic vocabularies of war have drifted apart, producing the mutual incomprehension described in my introduction to this book.
Is there any reason they should not remain apart? I suggest that there is. Neither the ethical tradition nor the strategic tradition by itself seems an adequate instrument for the discussion of war. Consider the current state of the ethics of war, about which there has been a notable revival of interest among late twentieth-century philosophers and theologians. There are three main contemporary approaches. Firstly, there is pacifism, or the belief that all war is evil. Secondly, there is defensivism, which holds that wars are justifiable only when undertaken for immediate self-defense against aggression. Thirdly, there is the traditional just war in various revised forms.4 Since the collapse of natural law, each of these positions is usually defended by utilitarian arguments. Pacifists commonly argue that at least under modern conditions no war can be worth the cost—an argument more plausible in the case of nuclear war and succinctly summarized by the slogan Better Red than dead. Defensivists think that those risks are sometimes worth taking for the survival of the state or culture, but since the only cause they recognize is self-defense, they are faced with the problem of defining “aggression.” And believers in the just war are unwilling to give up entirely the ancient vindicative concept of war, while recognizing how much it has been abused in the past; they think war can still be a valid moral instrument of collective security, pursued for the protection of the innocent and the punishment of the wicked, and it cannot serve that function if states must wait until they are attacked themselves. Each of these moral positions is also a strategic position; the utilitarian arguments all rest upon cost-benefit analyses that cannot be attempted without adopting the strategic vocabulary. It seems equally obvious that the vocabulary of strategy cannot work in isolation: Military goals make no sense except as instruments of political goals, which, on the highest level at least, involve the ethical choices mentioned previously. The modern divorce between military thought and larger philosophical questions produced the body of literature known as “nuclear strategy,” which may be described as the reductio ad absurdum of the decisive battle.
There is much in the classical tradition that we are well rid of. But we cannot afford to ignore its lessons. War will not go away. There is need for a new synthesis that can make possible an informed public discourse about these matters in terms that are both realistic and responsible.
Notes
1. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, in The Works of John Adams, ed. C. F. Adams (Boston, 1850-1856), vol. 4, 526.
2. Quoted in P. A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 568. The other citations from American authors I also owe to Rahe.
3. Quoted by Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven, 1995), 10.1 know of no comprehensive study of Enlightenment thought about war, but see Kingsley Martin, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Political Ideas from Bayle to Condorcet, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York, 1963); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2 (New York, 1969). J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).
4. Representatives of these several schools include: for pacifism, D. A. Wells, “How Much Can ‘the Just War’ Justify?” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969), 819-829; for defensivism, F. R. Struckmeyer, “The ‘Just War’ and the Right of Self-Defense,” Ethics 82 (1971), 48-55; and for the just war, Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York, 1977).