Honor's champion

Public Interest, Spring, 2003 by Diana Schaub

WE know there can be honor among thieves, but who ever heard of honor among liberals? The word conjures up visions of liege-lords and knights-errant, of chivalry and gallantry. It bespeaks a world enchanted, both beautiful and barbaric. The modern world-democratic and disenchanted-has presumably rejected codes of honor, and it has certainly given up the point d'honneur (the practice of dueling or judicial combat). It isn't only the forms and trappings of honor that have been lost; as Sharon Krause says in her new book Liberalism With Honor, even "the language of honor went out of fashion with the French Revolution.... These days honor seems quaint and obsolete, even frivolous, and it makes us vaguely suspicious." The grounds for suspicion arise from honor's links to manliness and aristocracy; in other words, honor seems both sexist and elitist.

Krause aims to restore honor to honorable mention. She argues that liberal democracy will always stand in need of knights in shining armor--or at least updated equivalents thereof. Against the charge of sexism, she counters that damsels can be knights too. While dragon-slaying might have been an exclusively male pursuit, women today can enter the lists in opposition to tyranny, whether it be the tyranny of an overreaching government or the tyranny of public opinion. In times when the pen is as powerful an agent of resistance as the sword, and when political courage counts for more than battlefield prowess, women can become champions of liberty.

Against the charge of elitism, Krause shows how extraordinary men and women of honor have come to the rescue of democracy in distress. Far from being hostile to modern constitutional liberty, honor (and individuals motivated by honor) may be essential to its preservation. Yes, there are superior individuals, but superior individuals can be champions of equality (in the sense meant by the Declaration of Independence's assertion of equal rights). Krause offers in evidence a pantheon of great Americans: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King, Jr. And she reminds us that our Declaration of Independence concludes with the signers pledging to one another "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

DESPITE honor's contribution to our regime and its continuing force as a spring of human action, it is rarely acknowledged by contemporary theorists, whose view of human motivation tends to be an impoverished one. Taking their lead from the great reductionist Thomas Hobbes--who said that honor "is nothing else but the estimation of another's power; and therefore he that bath least power, hath always least honor"--today's rational choice theorists see only narrow self-interest and calculations of advantage at work in human behavior. Arrayed against them are a diverse lot of communitarian, civic republican, and liberal theorists who, in search of sources of moral renewal, stress the individual's obligations to others. They speak of the "sense of justice," the "agreement motive," the duty of reciprocal recognition, the responsibilities of participatory citizenship, and the virtues of civility and toleration. Krause, rightly, finds this sharp theoretical divide between the partisans of self-interest and the parti sans of civic duty to be unhelpful and untrue to the human psyche. While she shares the aspiration of the "virtuecrats" to invigorate liberalism, she thinks they've been looking in the wrong places, expecting too much of citizens in the way of altruism and too little of them in the way of spiritedness and proud self-command.

Honor is simultaneously self-centered and self-sacrificing. That combination is what makes honor potentially both compatible with liberalism and a transcendent corrective to it. Here is how Krause explains it:

And because obligations to others require altruism, they are always at odds with the self-interest that predominates in modern liberal societies. By contrast, honor rests on the sense of duty to oneself. Since it never renounces self-concern, honor does not require altruism and consequently has a natural (if partial) affinity with the liberal way of life. Yet while honor is self-serving, it is not limited to the lowest forms of self-interest. Honor rises above the natural limits on human action imposed by the motive of egoistic interest. As a result, it can animate riskier and more difficult actions, even actions that involve the risk of life. Honor is more reliable than altruistic obligations to others and braver than self-interest.

SHARON Krause was a student of Harvey Mansfield, and she shares with the notable Harvard conservative a conviction of the needfulness of what might be called the aristocratic residuum. She turns to both Montesquieu and Tocqueville in order to understand the essential features of honor. Guided by these thinkers, she regards contemporary substitutes for honor like "self-esteem" and the notion of intrinsic human dignity as inadequate and, indeed, pernicious, because they have the effect of detaching self-respect from achievement.