The ambivalence of political courage

Review of Politics

Volumn 63, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 637-661

  Scorza, Jason A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 2642554561     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500032113     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. For instance, Montesquieu rebukes the laws of Sparta, writing, "Lycurgus, whose institutions were harsh, did not have civility as an object when he formed the manners; he had in view the bellicose spirit he wanted to give his people" (The Spirit of the Laws [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], p. 319). Albert O. Hirschman usefully illuminates the development of the distinction between calm and violent passions in the liberal tradition. See Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 63-66.
2. For instance, see Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996);
3. Kent Greenawalt, Private Consciences and Public Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
4. Bruce Ackerman, "Why Dialogue?" Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 5-22;
5. J. Donald Moon, "Constrained Discourse and Public Life," Political Theory 19 (1991): 202-29;
6. and Charles Larmore, "Pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement," Social Philosophy and Policy 11 (1994): 61-79.
7. For feminist critiques of manliness and aggressiveness in politics, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1987);
8. Elshtain, "Citizenship and Armed Civic Virtue: Some Critical Questions on the Commitment to Public Life," in Community in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 47-55;
9. and Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1988).
10. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 35-36. Arendt's view of courage is sometimes improperly conflated with a Nietzschean will to power.
11. For a clarification of this misunderstanding see Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), esp. p. 156.
12. See Judith Shklar, "The Liberalism of Fear," in Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
13. See Jeremy Bentham, Deontology (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Browne, Green, and Longman, 1834), p. 251.
14. See Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Great North Road," in Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson, vol.22 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911), p. 358.
15. Strictly speaking, this is Hemingway's definition of "guts". Attributed to Hemingway by Dorothy Parker, "The Artist's Reward," The New Yorker (30 November 1929).
16. For discussion of operational definitions of courage employed by clinical and experimental psychologists, see Stanley Rachman, Fear and Courage, 2nd ed. (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1990).
17. For an analysis of the philosophical meaning of courage, see Douglas N. Walton, Courage; A Philosophical Investigation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986);
18. George Henrik von Wright, The Varieties of Goodness (New York: The Humanities Press, 1963);
19. Peter Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977);
20. James D. Wallace, Virtues and Vice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), esp. chap. 3;
21. and Philippa Foot, "Virtues and Vices," in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Basil BlackWell, 1979), pp. 1
22. Socrates displayed courage as a soldier (by saving the life of Alcibiades during the battle of Delium); as an officeholder (by opposing the unconstitutional trial of thestrategoi while taking his turn presiding over the Athenian council); and as an ordinary citizen (first, by refusing to participate in the assassination of Leon of Salamis and, later, by refusing to abandon or renounce his philosophical explorations).
23. For Plato's accounts of the courage of Socrates see Laches 187e-188; The Apology 28e-29a;
24. and Symposium 219a-221b. For discussion of Plato's own view of courage, seeAristide Tessitore, "Courage and Comedy in Plato's Laches," journal of Politics 56 (1994): 115-133
25. The word courage is derived from the French word cceur ("heart"), and was, perhaps, originally associated with chivalry. Other names for courage have different derivations and connotations. For instance, "bravery" comes from the Italian word bravo (a thug or hired assassin). Some philosophers still make something of these distinctions. Walton, for instance, suggests that courage stripped of its lofty purpose and normative content is mere bravery. See Walton, Courage, p. 98. However, in ordinary usage, the differences between the various names for courage have become indistinct, even as our thinking about the nature of courage has become muddied. The question of what, exactly, courage is, and whether courage can be said to have strong normative content, has been reopened. This question cannot be closed merely by reference to etymology.
26. This problem was identified by Thomas Hobbes, who explained, in a protoliberal moment, how the passion of courage-defined as "sudden anger"-along with the kindred passions of honor and glory, could be used by political leaders to overcome the rational self-interest of citizens to avoid civil discord. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651] (New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1968), pp. 123,157.
27. As Amelie Rorty explains, "Psychologically, the magnetizing dispositions of courage typically diminish the force of other highly desirable categorical dispositions" (Rorty, "The Two Faces of Courage," inMind in Action [Boston: Beacon Press, 1988], p. 301).
28. Montesquieu writes: "L'heroisme que la Morale avoue ne touche que peu de gens. C'est l'heroisme qui derruit la Morale qui nous frappe et cause notre admiration"(Montesquieu, "Mes Pensees," Oeuvres Completes, ed. Roger Caillois [Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1949], 1:1305). ["The heroism that morality favors does not affect that many people. It is the heroism that destroys morality that affects us and causes our admiration."]
29. See William Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 217-222
30. See Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
31. Richard Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, ed. Merrill Peterson and Robert Vaughan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 269.
32. Shklar's account of fear has been criticized for being limited and onesided. For instance, it has been suggested that she focuses on the fear of state oppression to the exclusion of the equally common fear of being stateless. See Yael Tamir, "The Land of the Fearful and the Free," Constellations 3 (1997): 296-314.
33. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 8.
34. In addition to obvious violations of human rights by totalitarian regimes (e.g., the political use of torture and murder), we can understand this to include cruelties performed by ostensibly liberal regimes {e.g., systematic discrimination against, and intimidation of, members of minority groups).
35. See Judith Shklar, "The Liberalism of Fear," p. 11. Previously published in Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
36. See Shklar, "The Liberalism of Fear," p. 11;
37. and Shklar, Ordinary Vices, p. 242.
38. Shklar, "The Liberalism of Fear," p. 15.
39. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, p. 234.
40. Ordinary Vices , Ibid., pp. 5, 242.
41. Ibid., pp. 23-24.
42. Shklar's admiration for Montaigne is due, in no small part, to his identification of cruelty and torture as the foremost human evils. Like Shklar, Montaigne associates cruelty with cowardice, although he is much harsher in his declamation of cowardice than is Shklar. See Michel De Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin Classics), II: 27.
43. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 25.
44. Shklar, "The Liberalism of Fear/' pp. 3-4.
45. Other liberal theorists either have been less attentive to this problem or have found a way around it. For instance, Galston does not share Shklar's nervousness when theorizing about virtue from a liberal point of view, although he does acknowledge that the virtues needed by liberalism may "come into conflict with other powerful tendencies in liberal life" (Galston, Liberal Purposes, pp. 217-22.)
46. See Herodotus, Herodotus, trans. A.D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), V. 78.
47. See Callistratus, "Song of Harmodius," inLyra Graeca, trans. J. M. Edmonds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), III.
48. For discussion of varieties of patriotic zeal, see Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
49. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. C.E Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), II.43.1.
50. Cicero, De Officiis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), bk. 1.23.
51. See Machiavelli, Discourses, III. 3.
52. Ibid., I. 9.
53. For instance, public opinion surveys reveal that American citizens still perceive courage to be an important quality of political leadership. One recent national survey found that 82.7 percent of Americans believe that courage is an extremely important or very important characteristic of leaders, while only 3.4 percent believe courage to be either not very important or not important at all. Courage ranked higher than charisma, forcefulness, and religiousness, but slightly below good judgement, honesty, and fairness. See Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Today Study Number 3023 (May 1987).
54. John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage [1956] (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1964), p. 60.
55. Although Kennedy sometimes refers to the responsible and unselfish officeholder as "conscientious," I prefer to reserve this term to describe persons who follow their personal moral principles rather than official duties which can, themselves, be inconsistent with these principles.
56. Consider Arendt's account of the centrality of courage to political life. Arendt writes, "The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one's self into the world and begin a story of one's own" (Human Condition, p. 186).
57. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, pp. 25, 242.
58. This transformation resembles the disillusionment experienced by many ex-communists during the 1930s and 1940s, as the extent of Stalin's betrayal of their idealistic vision of the revolutionary workers' state became clear. See Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone et al., The God That Failed (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1950).
59. Recall the confrontations between police and veterans groups during the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida.
60. It is worth noting that some of the most ardent anti-communists had once been communists themselves. See James Burnham's preface to the 1960 re-print of The Managerial Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1960).
61. Emerson made at least two public speeches condemning what he called "Mr. Webster's treachery". See Emerson, "The Fugitive Slave Law, Address to Citizens of Concord, 3 May 1851"; and "The Fugitive Slave Law, Lecture in New York City, 7 March 1854," in Complete Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904), 11:181.
62. Emerson, "John Brown: Salem Speech, January 6,1860," ibid., p. 280.
63. Quoted in James M. McPherson, Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982), p. 116.