Histories and Human Nature
Welcome to the first of an ongoing series of monthly columns I will be writing for Real Clear Books. My hope is to introduce readers to thoughtful and engaging books that, while not obscure or unduly academic, may not get the full attention they deserve. As an avid reader of non-fiction works – and of serious literature, too – I hope to provide comments on recent books that have caught my attention and that speak to both enduring questions as well as the pressing concerns of our time. From time to time, I will also highlight older books, classic and otherwise, that deserve our renewed consideration – or perhaps deserve our serious attention for the very first time. Rather than being solemn or unduly serious, I hope to convey some of the pleasure to be found in coming to terms with books great and good, and others, less choiceworthy perhaps, that still merit our attention.
We live in an age of increasingly narrow intellectual specialization, where academic historians and social scientists – with a few notable, and welcome, exceptions – no longer address themselves to what used to be called the reading public. Such specialization is often combined with indecipherable academic jargon and an ideologically charged hostility to both the American project and to Western civilization as a whole. The exceptions that come to mind – a David McCullough, an Allen Guelzo, or a Gordon Wood – stand out for their clarity and literary felicity, their civic-mindedness, and their refusal to subordinate good writing and historical reflection to the ideological shibboleths of the moment. In that spirit, one cannot do better than to return to the greatest historians at the source of our tradition. In “The Greek Histories: The Sweeping History of Ancient Greece as Told by Its First Chroniclers: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch,” Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, distinguished classicists in their own right, present well-translated selections from the first chroniclers of classical Greek politics, history, and civilization.
In contrast to our contemporary unending oscillation between angry moralism and unthinking relativism, the sober Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War in a way that is both realistic and humane. He thus left us with what he himself called a “lasting possession.” The classical historians endure because they understood that human nature and human motives do not fundamentally change; they knew that their works could speak to future generations in markedly different times and places.
Herodotus, the earlier chronicler of the Persian Wars, mixed historical narrative with colorful and instructive accounts of other peoples and civilizations. He richly illustrated the unity and diversity of the human race but he did so without hiding behind coercive ideological slogans as the partisans of globalism and diversity do today. Xenophon – statesman, warrior, historian, and student and disciple of Socrates – completed Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta in his lesser-known “Hellenica” (Thucydides’s narrative stopped several years before the end of this 27-year conflict.) Xenophon’s even more compelling work known as “Anabasis” provides a fascinating account of 10,000 Greek mercenaries slogging their way into Asia and then back to Greece after having been recruited and deceived by Cyrus the Younger. As Lefkowitz and Romm rightly point out, Xenophon’s artful self-presentation adds much to the charm and insight of the book.
Lastly, the great moral biographer and historian (of sorts) Plutarch, the author of 23 pairs of “Parallel Lives” of great Greeks and Romans, is represented by his memorable account of the Athenian orator Demosthenes standing up to the imperialism of Philip of Macedon and by his cautionary tale of the dissolute Greek statesman Demetrius. Plutarch illustrated virtue and vice at work in public life like nobody before or after him. Modern historians should take note. Thankfully, that ennobling tradition lives in the work of public historians such as Richard Brookhiser whose slim, elegant portraits of Washington, Hamilton, the Adams family, Gouverneur Morris, and Lincoln combine artful historical narrative and careful attention to detail with a Plutarchian grasp of moral character as an essential feature of statesmanship, rightly understood. If Plutarchian history and moral biography exists today, it does so almost completely outside of the academy. That fact is worthy of some serious reflection.
In conclusion, let me mention two new works that both fascinate and instruct. The first, “Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us” by the distinguished French political philosopher Marcel Gauchet, is a book that only a deeply thoughtful French scholar and thinker could write. For an Englishman or American, it is easy to endorse a sweeping Burkean critique of the French Revolution and all its works. I myself am inclined to that position. In that view, the dictatorship and terror of 1793 is inherent in the sweepingly imprudent and immoderate rejection of the French Old regime in the spring and summer of 1789. To try to build everything de novo (“from scratch”) is an invitation to disaster. But the French Revolution is part of France’s “democratic” heritage and a sweeping or categorical rejection of the Revolution is a much less available option for patriotic French citizens and scholars.
Gauchet, a distinguished anti-totalitarian political philosopher, captures France’s continuing fascination with Robespierre, a tyrant who largely lacked tyrannical ambition, a champion of the “Rights of Man” who came to identify “Virtue” with “Terror,” and a constitutionalist who is remembered for using the guillotine as an instrument of state policy. Robespierre, a defender of private property against radical egalitarians and proto-socialists, straddled the gap between liberal freedoms and what the Israeli historian J.L. Talmon famously called “totalitarian democracy.” Gauchet never apologizes for or attempts to exonerate Robespierre. Instead, he allows us to see the complexity of the revolutionary leader’s thought and motivations, shedding light on how his legacy continues to divide the French to this day. Yet, for this convinced “Burkean,” Robespierre’s identification of civic virtue with murderous terror remains a criminal blight on history. Complexity can only take one so far.
For those who want serious thought presented in a truly accessible way, I recommend J. Budziszewski’s “How and How Not to Be Happy,” just out from Regnery Publishing. This remarkably lucid book owes nothing to the superficial and pseudo-scientific “happiness studies” that proliferate all around us. With concrete examples and an admirable attentiveness to lived experience, Professor Budziszewski shows how all of us want to be happy. The Stoics, he suggests, were wrong to think that virtue, as indispensable as it is, could substitute for happiness. No man is truly happy on the rack. But the vast majority of human beings confuse happiness with paltry pleasures or at best with genuine but incomplete sources of happiness, such as beauty, bodily health, fame, power, earthly fortune, or even a legitimate sense of meaning or commitment.
In contradistinction to the claims of the happiness industry, Budziszewski makes clear that true happiness is neither a feeling nor a set of acquired skills. Near the end of the book, Budziszewski quietly and unobtrusively renews the wisdom found in the great philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas’s “Treatise on Happiness”: to find lasting serenity, human beings must defer to a transcendent perfection greater than themselves. His book provides a rich and challenging perspective for religious believers and unbelievers alike. Budziszewski makes his case for authentic happiness through a patient examination of human nature and human experience – and not through an a priori reliance on religious propositions or dogmatic claims. And despite the deep seriousness of the issues at stake, his book is a very enjoyable read.
Daniel J. Mahoney is a Senior Fellow at the Real Clear Foundation. His latest book, “The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation,” will be released by Encounter Books on May 10, 2022.
