|
by Peter Berkowitz, Contributing Editor, The New Republic Online
Review of The Ship of State: Statecraft and Politics from Ancient Greece to Democratic America, Norma Thompson, Yale University Press
"Since our opinions, even under the best circumstances, tend to embrace only a portion of the truth, and because opposing opinions rarely turn out to be entirely wrong, it is crucial to supplement our opinions with alternative points of view."
" In politics (as Mill maintains in Considerations on Representative Government), the liberal way requires an appreciation of the need to accommodate both the party of permanence and order and the party of progress and freedom, though the liberal argument for balance in politics prizes permanence and order for the contribution that they make to progress and freedom, and not for themselves or for the sake of any other human goods that they might promote."
" . . . liberalism, in the guise of reason and fairness, tilts us in our undertakings toward its favored good, freedom, so democracy, under the same guise, inclines us to embrace its highest ideal, which is equality, not only in those spheres where justice demands it but also in those where justice does not and perhaps should not."
" . . . [Thompson's] central substantive claim that ancients and moderns are impressively united in agreement that success for a political regime as well as for an individual depends upon a weaving of masculine and feminine propensities . . . "
" [Aristotle's] understanding of moral virtue--according to which the mean or standard for right conduct is the 'mean relative to us,' the standard relative to the concrete individual and the particular circumstances in which he must act . . . by expounding the idea of an objective standard that is nevertheless highly sensitive to context, by providing a kind of anti-formula formula for moral virtue--excellence consists in doing the right thing at the right time in the right way for the right reason--Aristotle provides an understanding of ethics that surpasses in insight and suitability the childish relativism and the arid rationalism into which today's democratic theorists constantly slip."
"When a certain feminine modesty is abandoned as a guiding moral and political principle, when "all the decent drapery of life is to be torn off," the complexities and the depths of human nature are not revealed but obscured, for it is part of our nature to make laws, to observe social conventions, and to embody wise restraints in tradition."
"Mary Shelley depicts in Frankenstein the knowledge-seeking and world- mastering impulses, inimical to every harmonization, embedded in the spirit of Enlightenment. Victor Frankenstein's exploitation of science to play God not only produces a monster cut off from human ties and touch, but also leads to the destruction of his own domestic tranquillity."
"According to Tocqueville, the powerful social force that modern democracy brings to the fore, in the name of equality, is a relentless drive to uniformity in thought and conduct. . . . While men were governed by the calculating principle of 'self-interest rightly understood,' women's education revolved around virtue and self-discipline. Women, who stayed at home out of the public sphere, were the guardians of mores, of the habits of heart and mind on which decent conduct, in private life as well as in public life, depended."
"The instability or contradiction in domestic relations that Tocqueville's analysis brought to light--democracy in America called upon women to play a role that was inconsistent with the equality and openness to which democracy was devoted . . . "
" . . . it is by no means obvious that we have found an alternative way to ensure the preservation and the transmission of the habits of heart on which democracy depends."
" . . . the essence of statecraft is not rhetoric but judgment or prudence, which Burke called "the god of this lower world." Judgment is grounded in experience of human affairs and knowledge of human nature. To get things done requires judgment, including judgments about rhetoric, about what must be said and how it must be said in order to get things done. For the sake of democracy and for the sake of justice, rhetoric, which is as useful to the vicious despot and conniving demagogue as it is to the enlightened statesman, must remain judgment's handmaiden."
" [Thompson:] 'What aspects of human nature, when recognized and kept in some basic form of balance, provide the strongest foundations for the agreements and arrangements that a flourishing political community needs?' To pursue such an investigation would force into the open important issues . . . "
" . . . manly or assertive qualities--those propensities that cluster around courage, including hard- headedness and hard-heartedness--and those that have been traditionally thought of as female or caregiving qualities--those that cluster around gentleness, including compassion and the tender sentiments."
"Balance in the human spirit, which must not be mistaken for ambivalence or splitting the difference or playing both sides against the middle, is neither bland nor bourgeois nor boring. It is not a resigned concession to partiality, but a bold gamble on wholeness. It is not the midway point between virtue and vice, but an artful arrangement of virtues that enables them to supplement and to strengthen rather than to subvert each other. Since it involves an openness to the variety of human passions and possibilities, balance is a liberal imperative. Since courage without gentleness is destructive and gentleness without courage is defenseless, balance is a human good. Since balance is, for men and for women, not only an extreme but also a perfection, it is genuinely a thing of beauty to behold."
2:37:52 PM Google It! 
|
