The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny

From Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest. Page 30.

The first questioning of the existing state by the pre-Socratics and the eventual rise of a variety of Greek regimes which gave Aristotle the material for his empirically comparative work - all this is deep in our background; but it had little directly to do with the emergence of the pluralistic order in the West, with which we are here concerned, where "democracy" in principle opposes the rights of a majority to, in Madison's words, act in a way "adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Other founders or refounders of the American system, like Jefferson, were equally clear about the danger of the "tyranny of the majority."

Above all, it is no part of its culture that a government elected by a bare majority, or even by a fairly large majority, is thereby empowered to totally reconstruct the social and political order by sacrificing the minority. That great political philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that for some people government is "an instrument of passion; the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire." For others, which is to say, in general, for thos who have a traditional regard for the unity and continuity of a culture, the business of government is something different: "to restrain, to deflate, to pacify, and to reconcile, not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down," on the grounds that, as Oakeshott puts it, "the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny." For it is a basic principle of true, as against despotic, politics that it is more important for the civic system as such to be unshaken than for particular measures to be opposed or insisted on to the limit. A democratic community enjoying political liberty is only possible when the attachment of the majority of the citizens to political liberty is stronger than their attachment to specific political doctrines. And this is to say that on many controversial issues a certain comparative apathy must prevail among a large part of the population. But apathy cannot appear avirtue to the man who has committed himself to an intellectually elaborated scheme or policy.

In a famous investigation of the politics of the small town of Elmira, New York, in the 1950s, the scholars concerned (Paul Lazarfield, Bernard Berelson, and William McPhee) were at first surprised by the results. The democratic processes had worked very satisfactorily in the town for a very long period. So, on theoretical principles, the researchers expected to find the citizenry well informed about political issues, with firm and clear-cut opinions. They found, on the contrary, that the majority were fairly ill informed and fairly apathetic. They concluded, after admirable heart-searching on their own part, that this was the condition for a working democracy. On the other hand, it may be urged that the instability of many of the Greek states was due to the devotion to politics of all concerned and that, to a lesser degree, this has been the cause of many of the difficulties met with in France in the last fifty years (though it has been suggested that the ideological enthusiasm of the French electorate was to some extent compensated for by the cynicism and apathy of the deputies themselves).

At any rate, all the major troubles the world has had in our era have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania. The politician should be servant and should play a limited role. For what our political culture has stood for (as against principles of total theorists and abstractionists) is the view of society as a developing and broadening of established liberties and responsibilities, and the belief, founded in experience, that in political and social matters long-term predictions, however exciting and visionary, seldom work out.

Reviewing James Scott's See Like a State in The New Republic of 18 May 1998, Cass R. Sunstein sums up one of Scott's main points: "States should take small steps rather than large ones. Policies are apt to be more successful if they can be reversed once they start to go awry, and so good panners ensure reversibility." The point, obvious enough but not available to many enthusiasts, is what one might have thought the well-established conclusion that actions have unexpected results. Or, to put it another way, that in the human context we cannot predict on the basis of theory.

Meanwhile, we can again stress that it is part of the heritage of sanity, or of political adulthood, to admit that any real order cannot be perfect. But this does not mean that we can ignore, or fail to combat, tendencies to degeneration of the civic order - in part due to penetration of its intellectual atmosphere by the direct, or dilute, effects of the totalitarian ideas.