The Ennobling of Democracy

National Review, March 16, 1992 by Richard Brookhiser

Thomas Pangle's The Ennobling of Democracy is an academic's book, by an academic who cares passionately about his subject and who has suffered for his concerns. A dozen years ago Pangle, who now teaches at the University of Toronto, was extruded from the political science department of Yale, even though he was one of Yale's most popular lecturers, for the simple reason that he was a follower of Leo Strauss. "There are two kinds of people who should never be on a faculty: Leninists and Straussians," remarked one of Pangle's soon-to-be-ex-colleagues at the time (it's surprising the critic included Leninists on his Index of Prohibited Teachers).

If that Yalie read Straussians today, perhaps he would have a better opinion of them. One of the main raps against Straussians has ben the almost kabbalistic focus of their reading on half a dozen political philosophers--Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche--with a few exegetes and elaborators--Aristotle, Locke--thrown in. Straussians maintained that only these men were acute enough to lead us out of the cave of cultural presuppositions in which most of us spend our lives. Yet the Straussians' endless recycling of their greatest hits too often yielded an odor of damp and bat guano all its own.

In the last few years, however, Allan Bloom has written about Heidegger and Tocqueville. Francis Fukuyama has given us Hegel and his whimsical French disciple Alexandre Kojeve. In The Ennobling of Democracy, Pangle has made the most additions to his library, surveying deconstructionists, Vaclay Havel, John Paul II, and even Benjamin Franklin. It is good to see the Straussians getting out and about.

The announced goal of Pangle's extended reading is to rediscover the arguments for "liberal constitutionalism" (by which he means, not the thought of Anthony Lewis, but the world the Founders made), and to bolster those arguments where necessary with the help from outside the liberal tradition. That the liberal tradition needs bolstering he is convinced, though not because its contemporary academic critics are especially intelligent or persuasive. Pangle begins by warming up on deconstructionism, but he hardly raises a sweat. Deconstructionism takes from Heidegger and Nietzsche a belief in the arbitrariness of all values, while passing over their insistence that some values must be willfully, even brutally, affirmed. What we get as a result are lightweights like Richard Rorty, who simultaneously endorse "the values of the Enlightenment" while "cut[ing] the links which connect those values with . . . Nature."

While the intellectuals of Paris and points west talked about structures of oppression inherent in language, the intellectuals of Prague were overthrowing oppressors. Pangle half hopes that Eastern Europe's experience may revive our seriousness. But he also fears that the new Europe may become "a Swedish California stretching from the Urals to the Atlantic." In the end, Americans have no alternative but to re-examine their own roots.

Pangle's re-examination forms the core of the book. He revisits the expected philosophers: Locke, the authors of The Federalist Papers, and Montesquieu, who was in many ways the French mediator between them. He also pays tribute to the Christian tradition of Natural Law. Straussians typically handle theology with tongs, unless they can portray it as a mask for secret skepticism. Laying the tongs aside, Pangle declares that "the substantial differences between classical political philosophy and biblical thought were not so great as to prevent . . . a variety of remarkable effective and convincing syntheses in each of the great religious dispensations." Since the dispensation of the majority of Americans has been Christian, Pangle honors the Natural Law tradition of Thomas Aquinas, which flowed into English Protestantism through Richard Hooker and watered Americans at least as recently as Martin Luther King Jr.

The Founders and their immediate successors did not expect their synthesis to clatter on like a perpetual-motion machine. They felt that each new generation of Americans would have to be educated to uphold it. Pangle cites chapter and verse from the writings of Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Noach Webster, who wrote that every American child "as soon as he opens his lips . . . should lisp the praise of liberty." Such knowledge, and only such knowledge, "will guard our institutions." Pangle proposes a universal civic education, supplemented, for the best students at the highest levels, with instruction in Socratic philosophy, which "provides us with awareness of the genuine strengths of our principles, precisely by forcing us to deal with the most telling actual nd potential challenges" to them.

Summarized in this fashion, Pangle's thesis is not unlike William Bennett's speeches at the Department of Education, or Pat Buchanan's warnings against the "landfill of multiculturalism" in New Hampshire. But it is presented with a breadth that Cabinet secretaries and candidates don't have time for.