Alan Kahan

Aristocratic Liberalism

The use of Sparta in humanist language is a good example of traditional humanisms' inability to deal with change. In the Spartan version of the humanist ideal, enforced egalitarianism was a means to the end of avoiding corrupting individual dependence. Sparta was so arranged as to maintain virtue and suppress those who would make attempts to corrupt it, but the Spartan system was a closed one, inherently incapable of expansion so as to include, for example, helots. Its virtue could be only preservative, never progressive. From the problem of stability, the civic humanist tradition could not progress to that of going beyond a static virtue to one that changed and increased, from a state power that preserved to one that was a positive force for good.

A key to this difficulty lies in the inability of theories of politics obsessed with the autonomous individual to incorporate state action and legislation into their scheme in positive ways, a problem inherited by much of liberalism, whether humanist in inspiration or not. The autonomy and independence of the individual are too much an absolute value to admit the state to a positive role. In part, this is because virtue is directly dependent on the autonomy of the individual. An individual must be independent or else his actions cease to reflect his own virtue or vice; no longer capable of virtue, he is less than fully human. Any kind of dependence eliminates the possibility of the dependent individual's virtue. It also diminishes the virtue and the prospects of freedom of everyone else, for freedom and virtue are dependent on one's living in a political community of equally free individuals. This, of course, is the one dependence recognized as legitimate by humanism, the inevitable mutual dependence of all members of a political community, which arises from the fact that while all rule, all are ruled. Indeed it is not merely a legitimate dependence but a necessary one, for without a community to participate in, individuals cannot fulfill their humanity. But any more than a preservative role for the state smacks of an inadmissable outside dependence, and it is hard to imagine how the state can be a force for anything but corruption or preservation in the humanist vocabulary. The Enlightenment would resolve some of the tension between change and virtue for modern humanism, but it could not free it from a deep distrust of state action born of the clash between virtuous autonomy and the progressive sovereign community.

Given the tensions between humanist ideals on the one hand and change, state power, equality, and so forth on the other, it is not surprising that civic humanism should frequently take on the colors of an anti-modernist revolt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The humanist tradition also had to struggle with ideals that challenged its understanding of human nature as erroneous or irrelevant, that, for example, accepted or even praised speculation and entrepreneurship as public virtues rather than corrupting vices. It is in this period that the commercial spirit, the nemesis of the aristocratic liberals, begins to become the specter haunting humanist thought. The clash between civic man's virtue and economic man's interest becomes acute. England is where the problems of relating a commercial society to humanist values first comes to the fore.