Should we be more German?

David Calleo

For a generation after World War Two, a great many political theorists have made their reputations analysing the 'German disease,' an ailment that may more generally be defined as the predisposition in mass societies toward totalitarianism. For obvious reasons, Germany seemed the definitive illustration. Today, by contrast, political analysts seem increasingly preoccupied with what might be called the 'British disease' — perhaps best described as the predisposition in mature industrial societies toward anarchy, low productivity and inflation. The shift is not without its ironical aspects, nor without major implications for political philosophy itself. One of the reigning clichés of postwar British and American political science has been the self-evident superiority of Anglo-Saxon 'liberalism' over German 'Idealism.' German and Anglo-Saxon political cultures have been seen as shaped by two antithetical philosphical traditions, one leading to Churchill and Roosevelt, the other to Hitler. Anyone surveying the British condition in the Seventies, however, may wonder if the triumph of the 'Anglo-Saxon' tradition on its home ground has not been more complete than might have been wished. Under the circumstances, the idealist tradition in political thought, with its emphasis on national consensus and collective good, is perhaps due for a certain reassessment. Even if the subject is broad and elusive, a brief discussion can at least suggest some of the possible philosophical and political dimensions of an idealist revival.

By idealism, broadly speaking, I mean that tradition of political philosophy springing from Plato and Aristotle, revived in modern times by Rousseau, widely influential among early nineteenth-century German philosophers, and given its definitive German expression in the writings of Hegel. Since World War Two, this tradition has been in disgrace. Among its postwar detractors, the Germans themselves have been particularly prominent. The noted sociologist, Ralf Dahrendorf, provides a distinguished illustration. According to his celebrated Society and Democracy in Germany, the 'Hegelian notion of the state has influenced political thought and practical politics in Germany to the present day,' and with practical results 'readily demonstrated in German history of the last one hundred years.' The idealist disease springs from the very nature of the tradition. Almost by definition, idealism posits the existence of a common good and, by a long tradition, endows the state with the duty and authority for finding and implementing that good. This way of looking at politics, Dahrendorf says, results in a characteristic 'German propensity for synthesis' and has meant that 'all institutions of German society are characterised by the attempt to evade conflict or to abolish it in superior authorities and institutions. . . ' As a result, Germans tend to be 'apolitical' by temperament, dangerously deferential to authority, irritable at the normal clash of interests, and convinced that conflicts should be settled by expertise and cooperation. Hence, Efahrendorf suggests, Germany's idealist tradition has laid the groundwork for both Imperial autocracy and Nazi totalitarianism.

Dahrendorfs study depicts the 'AngloSaxon' political tradition as the polar opposite of the German. British and Americans, untroubled by the German predilection for synthetic unity, revel in vigorous assertions of individual self-interest. AngloSaxon politics, like Anglo-Saxon sport, is robustly contentious — with rules that regulate but do not suppress conflict. Social contests are not sublimated in a bogus collective identity and the state is not endowed with dangerous overblown prestige. In consequence, Dahrendorf argues, British and Americans continue to enjoy a sturdy democracy.

Dahrendorfs models, to be sure, do not give a very complete picture of the actual workings of 'Anglo-Saxon' politics. To describe the American system, for example, as the clash of interests undisturbed by any conception of a higher common good is a caricature. Among other things, such a view ignores the dominant role of the executive. The American President, for example, is not merely an umpire, but the chief architect of policy. For better or worse, he is the General Will embodied. Ultimately, his prestige and power depend upon how effectively he can maintain his claim to represent the national interest as a whole, as opposed to the more particular interests of the Congress and bureaucracy. It might be argued, of course, that if Dahrendorfs liberal model of lustily clashing interests is a poor representation of the past, it is a surer guide to the present, particularly in Britain. Hence, indeed, the British disease.

In a broad historical perspective, Dahrendorf s critique may be seen, in effect, as another round in the ancient dispute over 'positive' and 'negative' definitions of freedom. For 'positive' can be read idealist or German and for 'negative,' lib eral, libertarian, or Anglo-Saxon. Roughly speaking, the negative or libertarian school defines freedom simply as the absence of coercion. In its perspective, an antipathy exists between law and freedom, or bet ween government and liberty. Democracy does not resolve the problem, since it can easily lead to a 'tyranny of the majority.'

But since men need not only liberty but order, the practical problem of politics, according to this liberal tradition, is finding the trade-off between individuals' rights and state power.

The Idealist tradition, by contrast, defines freedom as the individual's selfdevelopment. In the 'ideal' society, the state's laws and policies are what they should be in order to allow the individual to realise his best potential as a human being. Thus, for the idealist, the principal problem of politics is how to direct the state's power toward ends that genuinely foster the citizen's freedom — in the sense of his development. Such a view implies, of course, an ideal — some notion both of the proper development of the individual and, by extension, of the proper character of the society and policy needed to promote that development. Elaborating some version of the good society, workable for a particular time and country, becomes the principal task of political philosophy, and embodying that ideal in practical institutions and practices is seen as the proper goal of the statesman. Institutions, policies, and leaders are judged legitimate insofar as they serve the common good — the proper development of the individuals who form the community.

The totalitarian potential of this idealist tradition is evident. To define freedom as conforming to an ideal opens the door to some of history's familiar political horrors — from the Inquisition to Soviet psychiatric wards. Rousseau himself noted that men must sometimes be 'forced to be free.' The definitive model for idealist totalitarianism remains, of course, the Nazi regime. Hence, the tendency to link the pitfalls of German philosophy with the crimes of German history. After Hitler, this linkage, and its widespread acceptance, were only natural, particularly for Germans and German exiles agonising over the meaning of the catastrophe that had traumatised their generation.

In addition, other, more ideological, reasons made it natural and convenient to denigrate German idealism in the postwar years. It was far easier to legitimise the consequences of a war between 'democracy' and 'totalitarianism' than of a war between Germany and her rivals for world power. The idealist 'syndrome,' moreover, could be stretched to cover not only Imperial and Nazi Germany, but Stalinist Russia and its leftist sympathisers, a great convenience in the cold war. Philosophical idealism in the political sphere, moreover, has a certain affinity with 'mercantilism' in the economic sphere — that is, with systematic economic planning and management justified by some larger conception of national interest. Such mercantilist proclivities not only displease domestic libertarians, but fly in the face of that international 'interdependence' which has been the animating principle of postwar American foreign policy. Standard American condemnations of Nazi Germany nearly always list 'autarchy' as prominent among Hitler's crimes. Indeed autarchy is the twin of 'appeasement,' those two evils of the Thirties that the postwar order has been constructed to avoid.

That America should have taken up free trade and interdependence in the postwar period is, of course, not surprising. Free trade and opposition to economic nationalism are natural policies for the world's predominant political-economic power. It is in the economic sphere, however, that the postwar Pax Americana has increasingly seemed most vulnerable. This vulnerability lies in the tension between international and national goals. Since the war, Western governments, including the United States itself, have tried to sustain not only the free trade and the free international capital movement demanded by Pax Americana, but also the Keynesian national economic management demanded by their own citizens. Keynesianism, it may be argued, is essentially a mercantilist programme. Keynes, indeed, grappled all his life with the theoretical and practical difficulty of reconciling national planning and management with an open world economy. In the early Thirties, he actually came to embrace a sort of protectionist nationalism. By the time of Bretton Woods, he was trying for an international monetary system that would, in effect, square American international power with European and American domestic aspirations. His compromise worked well enough for nearly thirty years. But in the later Seventies, as prosperity has receded and the international system grown increasingly unruly, domestic Keynesianism and free trade again seem more and more in tension. Restoring serious national planning among Western countries will require, under present conditions, strong states prepared to buck domestic and international market forces. Among the obstacles to such a political evolution in Western Europe will be an intellectual climate dominated for three decades by antinationalist, anti-idealist, anti-protectionist clichés. In this sense, anti-idealism is the Pax Americana's first line of defence.

To call the anti-idealist analysis of the 'German disease' ideologically convenient does not, of course, prove it wrong. But the libertarian critique of idealism is subject to a number of serious criticisms on purely philosophical grounds. To begin with, the libertarian notion of freedom is inadequate. Freedom for the individual cannot be separated practically from some notion of selfdevelopment, nor from the opportunities needed to pursue self-development — opportunities, a large portion of which must, by their nature, be provided by the community. These opportunities, in turn, depend to a great extent upon the choices the society makes, consciously or otherwise, in allocating its resources. Just because reasonable men always differ on the nature of a good life, or on how a society can manage its resources to produce one, does not justify ignoring such issues, either in political philosophy or in practical politics. And just because experience has shown the constitutional state, with its checks and balances, to be the best structure for achieving some tolerable version of a good society, no one should assume that any constitutional system can be, in itself, a magic machine guaranteeing good decisions regardless of the quality of the country's leaders, culture and people generally. The same rule that applies to computers applies to constitutional government: garbage in, garbage out. The idealist tradition at least predisposes men to focus on the great questions that confront the community. When national unity is fragile because political institutions have great difficulty in managing painful adjustments to domestic or international change, idealism provides a useful way of looking at the problems of politics. It is a more useful tradition for those who must remake their society and its institutions. Liberalism, by contrast, is a political philosophy for good weather. As postwar prosperity apparently vanishes, so will the facile liberalism that presumed consensus through abundance.

To detail the present inadequacies of libertarianism does not, of course, eliminate the traditional dangers of idealism, in particular the justification it provides for state bossiness. Many idealist writers of the past were themselves preoccupied with this problem. The British philosopher, Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923), provides a good illustration. While laws and government policies could encourage a man toward his own appropriate self-development, Bosanquet argued, they could not make him free without his own active, creative initiative. That required elbow room — a sphere of private liberty for the individual. Hence, Bosanquet concluded, a good society could not, by definition, be achieved by coercion, no matter how pure the motives of its rulers. Public power should be used only to 'hinder hindrances' to freedom — remove obstacles that prevented the 'growth of mind and spirit' — a safer criterion for limiting state coercion, Bosanquet felt, than J.S. Mill's famous distinction between 'self-regarding' acts and those 'hurtful to others.' But if negative freedom was necessary in the ideal state, Bosanquet argued, it was not enough. Societies, like individuals, could not flourish indefinitely without making the effort to frame a rational plan for their lives. In a diverse, complex and dynamic world, to be sure, no one's 'sketch of the ideal' could be expected to be more than fragmentary and ephemeral. History could not be expected to stop with Plato's city state, nineteenthcentury capitalism, or Marx's socialism. Hence, Bosanquet's defence of a pluralist, constitutional state, sensitive to the dynamic of change. But individual liberty and constitutional balance were merely preconditions for freedom, not its achievement.

Recalling Bosanquet suggests how inaccurate historically it is to see the idealist tradition as exclusively German. Idealism was, in fact, part and parcel of the Romanticism that dominated cultural life in the last century and well into our own. The nation of Burke, Blake, Coleridge, Ruskin, Disraeli, or Gladstone can hardly be counted innocent of idealism. Under present circumstances, perhaps it is time for the British to rediscover the riches of their own political tradition.

What might a revival of idealist thinking contribute to current political debate in Britain? While idealist theory may have been unpopular among postwar academics, it seems ever more descriptive of the actual institutions of modern societies. For the contemporary embodiment of idealist thinking is found, above all, in the Welfare State. In this respect, Britain might be said to suffer already from a surfeit of idealist influence. On this view, relief from the 'British disease' is unlikely to come from the conscious resurrection of idealist philosophy. On the contrary, it is so often argued, only a vigorous resurgence of libertarianism can rejuvenate British enterprise and end the suffocating embrace of nanflying bureaucracy and oppressive taxation.

Such analysis suffers from the same defect as liberalism itself. It reflects — as Coleridge used to say about Ricardo — a 'partial view.' Britain might well benefit from more elbow-room for individual initiative. The welfare 'ideal' may no longer be adequate for contemporary societies. Keynesian 'management' may well have become the rationalisation and instrument of crushing economic parasitism. But the cure can hardly be a return to libertarian laissez-aller. Unless some consensus on the common welfare can discipline acquisitiveness, indolence, or power, those holding advantages under present arrangements are unlikely to give them up. As pay negotiations make obvious, liberty, to avoid selfdestruction, requires a national frame of common values, goals and loyalties. In a comfortable era, these may perhaps be taken for granted. But in a time of rapid change and painful adjustment, the conscious redefining of ideals and cultivating of consensus become an urgent necessity. In such times, the idealist tradition, if less useful for polemics than the liberal, certainly provides a more comprehensive perspective for thinking seriously about the real world. The thinking that results, to be sure, may sometimes be wrong. But it will not be improved by denying its necessity.