Limits and Hope: Christopher Lasch and Political Theory

Social Research, Summer, 1999 by Jean Bethke Elshtain

Now we know what Plato feared and what his ideal city was intended to cure: a world of division and discord; a world in which human purposes are not of a piece; a world in which our human "nature" itself is the big problem for, too often, we are overtaken by the baser rather than better parts of that nature. We must, therefore, work to expunge all that is base in order to attain the pure gold of a harmonious order. Hoping to insulate the world and the individual against conflict, at least in this ideal city "in speech," Plato moves in the direction Lasch warns against: he invites a world of overreach and grandiose and the all-encompassing ambition that accompanies it in unscrupulous hands. One characteristic of Plato's ideal city is its timelessness: once created it should continue to work perfectly; once humans (or a sufficient number, at least) are appropriately denatured, they will see to it that the best laid schemes of the philosopher are enacted.(5)

To be sure, Christians thinkers like Augustine and hard-nosed politicos like Machiavelli recognized, each in his own way, the limits to human deed-doing. Augustine insisted that we recognize that the City of Man can never be a City of God and if we try to make it such it will more likely turn into a living hell. Machiavelli gave fortune (Fortuna) a big role to play in his world of luck and adventure and power plays. But even Machiavelli cannot avoid a clarion call for a great prince to rescue "bella Italia" from her division and travail. Once we get to the early modern "social contract" theorists the gargantuan tasks political philosophers assign themselves begin again. Consider Thomas Hobbes, who paints an unbearably bleak picture of human beings in the state of nature where life is "nasty, brutish, and short." He seeks a cure through a heroic project of bringing order--as absolute as possible--to bear against wild and dangerous disorder. Only when we have deeded to an absolute Leviathan--that "mortal God," in Hobbes's words--the power to "name all the names," to command and it will be done--then and only then is there a cure for our night-marish condition.

Or what of John Stuart Mill, he of the apparently sweetest reason? Mill, too, seeks an end to the seductive allure of "Instinct," the "worst" rather than the "better" part of human nature. Backing off from a totalizing and absolute utopia, Mill nonetheless traffics in the very optimism Lasch chastens. He tells us that optimism is well placed given the spreading rationalization of human society. He assures us that human relationships, properly denuded of dangerous emotion, can be uplifted to the sphere of rationalistic understanding. Reason must triumph; indeed, the very "apotheosis of Reason" must come to reign, besting the "degrading" and "pernicious" idolatry of "false worships"--the world of tradition, religion, "Instinct."(6) Mill paints a particularly unflattering portrait of all male and female relationships throughout all of human history, for they derive only from an "odious" deal having an "odious source," brute sensation and the rule of force. Cleansed and purged of this odium, the rule of "perfect justice" will one day come to prevail in gender and in all matters.