“What is modern? And what is its history?” Harvey Mansfield opens his most recent book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, with these questions. He answers them as he discusses the modern concept of reason and its role in human affairs through examinations of the writings of great thinkers from Niccolo Machiavelli to Friedrich Nietzsche. But underlying these questions is a more immediate one, a question which ought to be of interest to every one of us: “Who are we?”
Mansfield’s opening dares his readers to take on this question. The book, he declares, is dedicated “to all those who could not, or did not” take the course on which it was based. Now there is no excuse.
Like generations of Harvard students, we have the opportunity to discover who we might be through the masterful teaching of Professor Mansfield. Are we modern beings defined by history and the age of rational control? Rational beings who can control God and nature? Moral beings who can strive for purity of thought and action? Creative beings who can will ourselves to power? Or, are we merely “last men,” lacking direction and dogged by boredom? If we can understand ourselves better, Mansfield implies, we may be able to uncover something about ourselves that will allow us, if not to escape the pitfalls of the modern and postmodern eras, then, at least, to strive for something better.
Mansfield’s book does not waste time. His thesis is stated overtly and baldly, as he introduces us to Machiavelli, whom he claims is the first modern. “With Machiavelli,” Mansfield tells us, “was born a single idea … the idea of rational control. Reason is to be used not merely to understand our problems but to control them.” From Machiavelli until Nietzsche, political philosophers have been reimagining, resurrecting, or reacting to this fundamental idea. Insofar as we are moderns, we agree with Machiavelli that we must be concerned with the real and possible: the “effectual truth.”
Machiavelli, Mansfield makes clear, is radical. Modernity is a fundamental departure from both classical and Christian ways of thinking. It demands a new understanding of human nature that “liberates” us from God and from the “imaginary” aspirations of the Greek philosophy. We can replace our concern for the afterlife or for classical virtue with a concern for necessity. Human beings can be separated into those who wish to rule and those who wish not to be ruled. Both need to acquire arms in order to assure their position. Reason is the ultimate weapon. We can use our reason to face necessity and to counter fortune.
Whatever is left to us of modernity was formed not only by Machiavelli, but by the philosophers of rational control who came after him. Therefore, to understand ourselves, we must read on—and look at the works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and finally Nietzsche. According to Mansfield, Nietzsche was the last modern, or the first post-modern. Nietzsche’s philosophy concluded the age of rational control.
Through this narrative of the history of political ideas, Mansfield allows his readers to confront modern political philosophy on its own terms—to see a recapitulation of the modern mind. But his acknowledgement of Nietzsche as the last modern philosopher leaves us with a problem: even if we understand modernity, will we understand ourselves? If we are not moderns, who are we?
Certainly, we live in a world influenced by the ideas of modern political philosophy—and Mansfield provides a key to this influence for the low price of his book. He introduces us to Hobbes, who provides an image of man in his natural condition, wherein he has a right to his own person, yet nothing to safeguard this right. God has no place in this state of war, where each person has the right to preserve his life in whatever way he judges necessary. What comes out of this natural state of war? The idea of the social contract—a new kind of government based upon reasonable consent. “Nature teaches men to preserve themselves,” Mansfield explains, “but … reason teaches men to seek peace by consenting to a common power over them, the sovereign.” Reason now is the foundation of government.
Locke gives us the right to private property by expanding man’s natural right to his own body to include a right to the products of man’s labor. This has direct political implications. For when men, once again driven by reason, exit the state of nature into the social contract, they do so not only to preserve life but to protect private property. Locke domesticates Machiavelli and Hobbes, and we see his influence overtly enshrined in documents like the Declaration of Independence.
Rousseau calls into question the worth of rational control, and in doing so reasserts the idea of morality. Reason and its newest incarnation, science (natural and political), do not, in Rousseau’s eyes, “bring about progress in morals … but rather retrogression.” Since we cannot go back to nature, and we cannot rely on reason, we must have a new standard against which to measure ourselves: History with a capital H. According to Rousseau, Mansfield explains, men must perfect themselves “in response” to natural accidents they meet. Human beings are determined then by history—and indeed it is often the measure against which we still evaluate our actions.
Kant’s moral philosophy returns reason to her throne, but it does not do away with the notion of “History.” He introduces the concept of “pure” morality used not as a means to achieve an end (happiness, immortal life), but because it is itself rational. Human beings could not interact with one another if we all lied. Therefore, lying is irrational and immoral. Rational beings, then, are moral beings who never lie. We may not be convinced that life can be led morally, yet Kant’s philosophy reveals itself in our distaste for politics. Lying and manipulation—Machiavellian politics—is dirty, if real. Morality and rationality are goals to be looked for, hoped for … one day.
Hegel is not satisfied with hope. He turns back to government, to the modern state, for the actualization of reason. For Hegel, the state is the fulfillment of human freedom in the world. History progresses inevitably toward the state. History “is the process of mind and must be rational.” What does this mean? That Kant’s hope can be replaced by a certainty that reason in the form of the modern state will solve the problems of human necessity and realize freedom in the world. We can be confident that “reason governs the world.” It will be realized at the end of history. Hegel, in other words, is the original author of any concept that includes an end to History.
Marx, as Mansfield describes him, inherits Hegel’s ideas, and gives us the revolutionary idea of communism. He does this by thinking of human beings as fundamentally economic. Human freedom can be assured if we understand ourselves to be part of a species and if we produce only what we need, such that our labor is both limited and valuable. We must give over individual concerns. Indeed, Mansfield shows us that Marx even asks us to dismiss “the importance of individual death.” Thus, all human beings can be encouraged to realize a new end to history with as much speed as possible: the communist revolution and the freedom from necessity it offers.
But the modern age does not end with the communist revolution. Instead, “what Machiavelli began, Nietzsche brought to an end—and with both a bang and a whimper modern rational man proved to be what [Nietzsche] called the ‘last man.’” Nietzsche paints a picture of the failures of rational control: secure in his body and private property, confident in the end of history and satiated by economic prosperity, “the modern man, with nothing to do, bored with himself … has little pleasure for the day and for the night, but honors health.” Nietzsche’s philosophy provides a way out of this living death: creativity. If an individual is able to pull himself away from the herd, to break with even himself, he can create something new. This is Nietzsche’s “will to power.” It may be man’s salvation, but it requires a radical acceptance of cruelty—at least cruelty towards oneself—a willingness to turn away from one’s fellow men towards … something … something of one’s own creation.
So, having viewed the “rise and fall of rational control,” where are we left? Who, after all, are we? Machiavelli’s “new modes and orders” form the foundation of our modern politics, to which have been added the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, the idea of historical progress compiled out of the philosophies of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and the feeling of alienation so vividly described by Nietzsche’s “last man.” We yearn for the creativity and self-conquest described in Nietzsche’s will to power. But we may not be up to the task either of conquering ourselves or of condoning cruelty—nor, perhaps, should we be. The picture Mansfield leaves us is of a people caught between the age of rational control and a new, undefined world, one which does not yet know itself.
But Mansfield does not leave us in this no-man’s land. He leaves us with more reading. Our reading should begin with Mansfield’s book, which is far more serious, complicated, and funny than my review can describe. The Rise and Fall of Rational Control is an introduction to a lifelong course of reading, some assigned and some implied. Mansfield assigns us to read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to know our own age better, and to read Aristotle’s Ethics to know what came before.
In our reading, we will discern not only who we are, but what it is to be human simply. Political philosophy, as Mansfield explains it, can break us out of history. By studying it, we need not be historical beings, dependent upon our age for our identity.
As we are introduced to Machiavelli’s effectual truth, the images of natural man given to us by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, as we wonder about morality with Kant, look to the end of history with Hegel and Marx, or see the limits of modernity with Nietzsche, we should ask one all-important question: are they right? Or better put: what in their philosophy (if anything) is right? It is not that the history of political philosophy does not matter. In some ways, Mansfield explains, “This history is less accidental than other history because, to a greater degree than citizens or statesmen, philosophers are reacting to thinkers that came before them.” But the study of political philosophy is unlike any other. “If ever there was a calamity in which all great books were lost, the activity of political philosophy could be recreated,” (at least by the greatest of minds) “directly out of political life.”
The work of any political philosopher can be measured against the reality of life lived in fact. We need great thinkers like Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche who see reality more clearly than we do. We need great teachers like Harvey Mansfield who understand both great books and political life better than we can. Political philosophy, the study of great books, is not an academic discipline among others, but the record of an inquiry into the fundamental human activity that is manifest always and everywhere. Mansfield opens this inquiry for us all.