03 ON GOVERNMENT AND GOVERNMENTS

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition;

By that sin fell the angels; how can man then,

The image of his maker, hope to win by’t?

—Shakespeare, Henry VIII

The Necessity

Government is a universal feature of civilized life. Whatever the form it takes, however liberal or oppressive it may be, however large or small the community to which its power extends, government is an absolute necessity. Its adoption or acceptance is not, therefore, a matter of deliberate choice. The only conceivable alternative would be a state of anarchy which would constitute self-destruction for the community in question—which is, in effect, no choice at all.

Now, it is only where choice is involved that the question of morality enters into human action. Thus the institution of government bears, in essence, no moral quality. It could be said to be morally neutral.1

And the same could be said of most of the functions served by a national government: such functions, for example, as the maintenance of law and order, the external representation and defense of a national community, or the concern for its health and welfare, the administration of justice, and the regulation of competing and conflicting economic interests. These, too, are necessities, in their way—necessities that have to be served, whether one likes it or not. They are, for the most part, rather sad necessities, flowing from the inability of men to govern themselves individually in a manner compatible with the interests of the entire community. But necessities they remain.

Government has no need to make excuses for the fact that its functions are so largely riveted to these rather uninspiring purposes. Precisely because these services are necessary, they are useful and morally acceptable. But what this does mean is that government, while worthy of respect, should not be idealized. It is simply not the channel through which men’s noblest impulses are to be realized. Its task, on the contrary, is largely to see to it that the ignoble ones are kept under restraint and not permitted to go too far.

Efforts may be made, from time to time, by individual politicians or statesmen to use government (or to pretend to use it) for the achievement of what appear to be glorious ideals. But then the uses to which they are professing to put it are ones not inherent in its basic purposes. They usually lend themselves poorly to such exploitation. And the motives for their employment cannot be seen as admirable.

Government deserves to be valued and respected, in short, for what it is, and sometimes, when it is at its best, even admired for the manner in which it performs its essential tasks. But the tasks themselves are uninspiring ones; and the service it renders to their completion can scarcely be more glorious than the ends they are intended to serve. The people who want government’s head to be in the clouds should remember that its feet are mired, understandably but inevitably, in the clay.

The Power-Hungry Individual

In addition to the uninspiring nature of its basic origin, there is another quality of all government that serves in no small degree to restrict the hopes and enthusiasms it deserves to attract. It is this: government always implies and involves power. No government is without it. No government can be without it. It is government’s most essential attribute. It lies in the very definition of government that it represents the greatest center of power in any national community.

Now, power is not, in truth, a nice thing. It is very heady stuff. It engenders an excitement which, like some radioactive field, infuses the entire atmosphere in and around any place where it is centered. It is probably not too much to say that all those who become involved with the power of government, whether in the competition for its acquisition or in the enjoyment of it when once acquired, are affected by this excitement, usually quite severely and never very attractively. We saw, in the first chapter of these reflections, how vulnerable is the self-regard of the individual to inflation by the enjoyment, or the prospect of the enjoyment, of a position of authority and superiority vis-à-vis others. It is here, in and around government, in the competition for just such a position and the enjoyment of it, once attained, that the human ego becomes most deeply and helplessly engaged. And it is idle to attempt to measure whether the effect of this is greater upon those who are involved in the competition for political power (which we call politics) or upon those who already enjoy its delights, brief or precarious as these may be. In either case, it inflicts upon those involved in it a peculiar species of agitation, unlike any other—an agitation that distorts not only the person itself but sometimes the entire pattern of external personal relationships.

Particularly dense, of course, is this atmosphere in the immediate proximity of those individuals who occupy, personally, the highest pinnacles of power. I have seen, and I am sure others have, individuals who show signs of a real intoxication of the spirit simply from being in the physical proximity of persons of high office. Anyone who has ever had to talk personally with great heads of state, even without aspiring to any share of their power, knows how hard it is to avoid falling under the spell of the aura in which their persons are enveloped. This will be confirmed by anyone who has had the experience of trying to say to an exalted personage, be it president or crowned head or mighty dictator, things one suspects beforehand that he or she will not want to hear. One is deterred by the feeling that to do this would be an encroachment not only on the dignity of the person but on that of the office as well.

But this, of course, is only an extreme case. The excitement of power envelops the entire entourage, and even the would-be entourage, of great authority. It inflicts, I repeat, a form of distortion of personality that affects not only values but also relationships. It was from experience in government, and not from Henry Adams, that the writer of these lines first gained his appreciation for this distortion; but no one, to his knowledge, has ever described it better than did Adams, in his intellectual autobiography.2 “The effect of power and publicity on all men,” he wrote, “is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends in killing the victim’s sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates.” And it was Adams, the grandson of one president, great-grandson of another, and a man who throughout his life was exceptionally close to a number of men in power, who pointed out that this distortion of personality affected not only the subject’s relations with competitors in the power struggle but also his ulterior friendships. A friend in power, he insisted, was a friend lost.

I write all this not in any spirit of reproach to all who fall under this particular spell. I am aware that many of those who have set out to pursue a good cause have soon been made aware that the cause in question could be effectively advanced only from a position of power, and that it was for this reason that they entered, albeit reluctantly, into the competition for its acquisition. I do not blame them for doing so. But that they, once involved in it, remain wholly unaffected by the distorting discipline it exerts, I must be allowed to doubt. In this sense it could perhaps be said, to use a religious simile, that such men have taken upon themselves the burden of sin (in this case, the sin of ambition) in order that the rest of us might be protected in our relative innocence. However that may be, the fascination, the headiness, and the other distorting effects of the possession or the proximity of power, or of involvement in the quest of it, remain, affecting the idealistic as well as the cynical among those who suffer the exposure.

These observations relate not just to the phenomenon of power in government but to power in any organized form, wherever it accumulates in significant measure. Its effects can be observed in business firms, in educational institutions, in private associations, wherever authority exists and wherever it is asserted through hierarchy. Rare is the wielder of authority whose self-regard is not agreeably inflamed by it. I suspect that there are moments when even the most saintly mother superior (and the same would be true of her male counterpart) cannot escape twinges of satisfaction over the authority she exercises and the marks of deference her position arouses in the institution she heads. Such conflicts between the inflamed ego and the conscience are particularly excruciating, of course, where a religious dedication implies commitment to the virtue of humility.3 In the case of governments, even this restraining commitment is lacking. Here the virtue of humility, pursued beyond a point, can even be a serious obstacle to success.

This being so, it must be recognized as one of the uniformities embracing all governments, democratic and otherwise, that they attract to themselves, and function within, an atmosphere of inflamed ambitions, rivalries, sensitivities, anxieties, suspicions, embarrassments, and resentments which, to put it mildly, seldom, if ever, bring out the best in the personalities involved, and sometimes provoke the worst. Government, in short, is, for unavoidable and compelling reasons, an unpleasant business. It cannot be otherwise. And we find in this fact another reason why, whatever else one may think of government, it should not be idealized. Its doings are something that should be viewed by the outsider only with a sigh for its unquestionable necessity, and by the participant only with a prayer for forgiveness for the many moral ambiguities it requires him to accept and for the distortions of personality it inflicts upon him.

The Political Clique

What has been spoken of above had relation only to the reactions and tendencies of individuals involved in the governmental process. But there is also something to be noted in connection with the similar role and behavior of political groupings. The competition for power is conducted not just by individuals acting in loneliness but more often, and for very good reason, by groups of persons pooling their efforts at least momentarily with a view to achieving positions of dominant influence. Groups thus motivated will be found in the vicinity of the power center of every political regime, authoritarian or democratic. Wherever the dominant personality in the regime is a very strong one, possessing in one degree or another dictatorial powers and able to act largely independently in the selection of his ministers and other assistants, the efforts of these competing groups will normally be directed to the cultivation of his favor. In more democratically organized regimes, particularly in parliamentary systems where political parties play a dominant role and where political advancement is possible only through their mediation, the competition of groups of persons for power takes place, in the first instance, primarily through the innerparty struggle. It is only when this struggle has produced its winners, when intraparty leadership has been established, and when the party has succeeded in capturing the dominant strategic position in government, that an inner group, comprising normally only a tiny elite of the party, emerges at or near the center of power. Here this group will be found to be bringing to expression a wide variety of motivations, including the individual political ambitions of its various members; the interests of the group as such; the interests of the party; and finally, no doubt, such of the national interests as do not conflict too sharply with any of these more burning incentives. One will almost always find at or near every center of power, democratic or authoritarian (and here is where the uniformity comes in) a single group of this nature, momentarily successful, installed (however precariously) in the positions of influence to which it has aspired, and controlling most, if not all, of the instrumentalities of power. It is this, as a rule, that we have in mind when we refer to a “regime.”

I stress the words “momentarily successful” and “however precariously.” No regime lasts forever. Human mortality assures this even when the hazards and vicissitudes of political life do not. In this sense all political regimes are only temporary occupants of the heights of power to which they have climbed. None is entirely secure. None lives in a complete political vacuum. The heights each occupies always become, sooner or later, a besieged fortress. Every one of them is confronted by others anxious and striving to occupy those heights in its place. And awareness of this fact is what causes each of them, whether brought into power by democratic processes or by other ones, to constitute to some extent, psychologically, a conspiracy against all that lies outside its own ranks and presents a real or potential threat to its power. This last can mean, in the case of the dictatorship, the mass of the population, and particularly the better-educated and politically active parts of it. In the democracy, it will include not just the overt political opposition but all those elements that are susceptible to influence by the opposition.

Government’s Two Voices

In the calculations of every regime, of course, the interests of the populace, as a whole, or what the regime conceives to be these interests, play some part. In the case of the democracy, it will be largely a legislative body that is supposed to reflect those interests, and to the demands and reactions of which the regime is supposed to give heed; but there will also be the press, the media, and the opinion polls. Even in the dictatorship, popular opinion will have to be at least taken into account. (It was, I believe, Machiavelli who once pointed out that the interests of even the most despotic tyrant will always to some extent coincide with those of the people over whom he rules.)

Yet the interests of the populace at large will normally be no more than a secondary consideration for those in power. Closer to the heart of any governing regime will normally be its own political fortunes, actual or potential, in the face of whatever significant internal-political opposition it confronts or fears to confront. However seemingly securely installed at any given moment, a governing regime is always only one of the players in the internal political power game, and never forgets it.

It is important for outsiders to hold this reality in mind when attempting to judge a government by its words and its behavior, including the positions it adopts on international questions. These words and this behavior may, of course, at times reflect, particularly at moments of great national danger, the national interest as the regime sees it. But this will seldom be all that is coming to expression. Along with it there will always be reflected, to one extent or another, the competitive domestic-political interests of whatever group or individual occupies at the moment dominant positions of internal power.

The result is that what one is normally hearing, when one listens to the publicly expressed voice of a government, particularly in matters of foreign affairs, is actually a mixture of two separate voices: on the one hand, the voice of the interests of the entire country, as the regime perceives them, and to the extent it chooses to defer to them; and on the other hand, the voice of a single political faction, deeply concerned to serve its own fortunes in the face of whatever domestic-political competition confronts it and threatens it. Those two voices may at times fully coincide, but they do not usually do so; and there is no reason why they should. This being the case, the experienced statesman or student of international affairs, in attempting to interpret the motives of a government on the basis of its various pronouncements, will always be on the lookout for both of these voices and will judge the significance of what is done or said by the probable predominance, at any point, of the one consideration or the other.

Forms of Government

So much, then, for some of the uniformities that link governmental establishments of all sorts. They stand as evidence that the distinctions among governments are never, or almost never, absolute. There are certain reactions and proclivities (the ones we have just seen are examples) in which all governments, fulfilling what is essentially a common function and faced with similar problems, tend to resemble one another.

But this is not to say that there are not also highly significant differences among governmental systems. And before we turn to these latter, there is one phenomenon which I should like to dispose of and to eliminate from further discussion at this point, for it is of such abnormality that it could only confuse whatever else is said on this general subject.

What I have in mind here is the phenomenon of twentieth-century totalitarianism, as manifested by the Stalinist and Hitlerian regimes of recent memory in the peak years of their atrociousness. These regimes differed in certain essential respects from all the other variations of government that the history of Western civilization has to offer. History provides many examples of highly authoritarian or despotic regimes which proceeded with harshness and cruelty against those who were conceived to have broken their laws or to be endangering or challenging their authority. Where these two truly totalitarian dictatorships differed from the other tyrannies was not only in the sheer dimensions of their cruelties (affecting millions of people, whereas the victims of the others might have run to hundreds or, at the most, thousands) but also, more important, in the fact that the victims of those cruelties were, in overwhelming proportion, the innocent rather than the guilty. Millions of people were persecuted and punished under these regimes for what, by no fault of their own, they were, or were thought to be, rather than for what they did; or, again, for what they were suspected of thinking, rather than for anything they actually thought or said. In many instances, the motivation for their mistreatment would appear to have lain partly in the calculation that it would serve as a useful form of intimidation for others. It was deemed useful that others should know what could happen to you if you incurred the regime’s disfavor. And if persecution of the innocent could further that impression, why not? Thus the reason for the abominable cruelties inflicted upon millions of people lay not necessarily in the impression that they had, individually or collectively, done anything wrong, but simply in the unfeeling calculation on the part of the respective dictator that their punishment might be in some way advantageous to him from the standpoint of his security or his political purposes.4

So extreme, so unprecedented, so clearly pathological in motivation were these and other qualities of the two great dictatorships in question, so much were they the product of their own time and so little are they likely to be reproduced anywhere in ours (or, as I think we may hope, at any other time) that I would ask the reader to regard them as excluded from the scope of the general observations I shall now have to make about the distinctions among governments.

In many respects, as has just been said, governments tend to resemble one another. But there is one fundamental distinction that runs through the entire spectrum of governmental systems and exceeds all others in significance; and that is the one that would probably be best understood, particularly in the United States, if it were described as the difference between “democratic” and “nondemocratic” governments.

Personally, I dislike seeing the term “democratic” used in this connection. It was not, in the first place, the term most of the founding fathers of our republic would have used to describe the system they were creating. Even in their time, the word “democracy” accommodated a considerable number of meanings and could even be employed in a pejorative sense by people who were strong supporters of a system of representative government. And more recently it has been so widely misused as to have lost much of whatever meaning it once possessed. It has been extensively and cynically appropriated, and introduced into their titles and constitutions, by a number of regimes, particularly Communist or pseudo-Communist ones, that had no intention of conceding to their peoples anything in the nature of genuine popular self-government. The words “democracy” and “democratic” have, in short, been so extensively abused as to be deprived of any very clear meaning; and the employment of them in public discussion merely encourages the sloppy imprecision of language that runs through so much of American political discourse and literature.

Faced with this confusion as to what is meant by the word “democratic,” I have cast about for a better designation for this fundamental distinction among governmental systems that I have in mind and to which I attach unique significance. I have thought of saying that it was the difference between, on the one hand, systems where the mass of the people were given the assured power to throw out of office, within a reasonable span of time, any regime that no longer met their expectations, and to replace it by another that did; and, on the other hand, systems where this was not the case. But this formula, enticing as it was for its brevity and simplicity, left out a number of important specifics. It recalled, in particular, too many historical episodes in which governments were removed, and replaced, by urban mobs purporting to represent “the people” but having no clear patent for doing so.

I am reduced, therefore, to describing what I would regard as a proper system of self-government as one that embraced and respected what is in this country the traditional division of governmental powers into the executive, legislative, and judicial, with both the executive and the legislative branches being subject to some proper form of electoral control. Where such institutions are realities—where their integrity, that is, is not impaired or threatened by irregular bodies of armed men or by regular armed forces that step out of their normal constitutional role, or by some other irregular means—there we have before us, I would submit, a fundamental distinction, separating such systems from those that do not meet these criteria at all.

Into this latter category—that is, the category of the “nondemocratic” governments—would fall, I suspect, a large proportion of the entities that figure today as sovereign states. This, however, is almost the only quality these latter have in common. They embrace a wide variety of governmental systems, running over the entire spectrum from mock democracy, through traditional conservative authoritarianism, to unstable military dictatorships and primitive tribal chieftainships.

It is on this “nondemocratic” side that the majority of states, members of the United Nations, would today, I suppose, be found. Most pay lip service, of course, to what are commonly held to be democratic principles, but offer in reality few effective limitations on arbitrary personal or oligarchical power.

But to say that is not necessarily to condemn them all indiscriminately. Some of them, no doubt, correspond closely to the customs, perceived requirements, degree of enlightenment, and expectations of the respective societies. In this sense they probably represent just about the best that circumstances will permit. And this I find neither distressing nor surprising. I know of no reason to suppose that “democracy” along West European or American lines is necessarily, or even probably, the ultimate fate of all humanity. To have real self-government, a people must understand what that means, want it, and be willing to sacrifice for it.

Certainly, many of these “nondemocratic” systems are inherently unstable. But so what? We are not their keepers. We never will be. They need not greatly concern us, except where the lack of self-government is linked, as in the recent case of Iraq, with the maintenance of unduly strong armed forces and with a power-hungry and essentially aggressive leadership, and where the combination of these two factors comes to constitute a threat to the peace of the region. Otherwise, let us, acting on the principle that peoples tend, over the long run, to get the kind of government they deserve, leave the peoples of these “non-democratic” countries to be governed or misgoverned as habit and tradition may dictate, asking of their governing cliques only that they observe, in their bilateral relations with us and with the remainder of the world community, the minimum standards of civilized diplomatic intercourse.

But what, then, about the countries we are accustomed to think of as “democratic”? The advantages of those qualities that I have seen as essential to any proper system of self-government (the separation of the essential powers, and the safeguards against any vitiation, by intimidation, of the regular governmental functions) are so basic that the differences among “democratic” governmental systems seem quite secondary. But such differences do exist; and one or two of them might be worth a word of mention.

First, there is the difference in the relationship between executive and legislative branches that distinguishes the American system from the European parliamentary democracy. Under the American system the chief executive, embracing the offices both of chief of state and of what, in European usage, would be called the prime minister, is directly elected, and this for a fixed term, by the populace. In the European parliamentary democracy all this is different. Here the offices of chief of state (president or royal figure) and prime minister are not combined. The chief of state may be a crowned head, inheriting his title and office and retaining it normally for life, or, if the system is not a monarchical one, he can be a person popularly elected to the office of chief of state for a given term, but incorporating in his person, so long as he occupies that position, the dignity of the sovereign entity over which he presides, and fulfilling the representational and protocol functions inherent in that office. The powers of such a monarchical or presidential figure vary greatly from one country to another; but seldom, under the European system, is the person in question charged with responsibility for the day-by-day running of the government. This last is the task of the prime minister. And the latter is normally dependent on the continuing support of a parliamentary majority. Upon losing this support, he falls from office, whereas the office of the chief of state remains unaffected.

Each of these systems—the American one and the European parliamentary one—has its advantages; each has its drawbacks. Viewed abstractly, the European system seems to me to be the preferable one, partly because it assures at all times a workable relationship between the political head of the government, the prime minister, and the legislative branch the confidence of which he is obliged to retain; but partly, too, because I think the burden borne by the American president, being, as he is, at one and the same time the protocolary head of state and also, in effect, the prime minister, and sometimes the party leader in the bargain, is really too much for any one person. Anyone obliged to confront this plethora of duties could cope with them, as indeed our presidents have come to do, only by a corresponding bureaucratization of his office.

But to say this is not to advocate any change in the present American system. For one thing, the advantages of any governmental system lie largely in the degree to which the people who live under it accept it, are accustomed to it, understanding its workings, and know how to express themselves through it. This advantage would be forfeited in any effort to turn the American system into a parliamentary one. But beyond that, any change in the American system would necessitate constitutional amendment; and anything of that sort, our country being what it is, would hold unpredictable dangers. It has been evident ever since the adoption (and later abandonment) of the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) that a considerable body of the American public has a very poor idea of what a constitution really is supposed to be. Instead of recognizing it as a document defining and prescribing the institutions under which a political system is to function, they seem to regard it as some sort of a super legislative body, and consider the possibility of amendment a device whereby a piece of legislation that finds their favor could be adopted and anchored in such a way that its removal by the normal legislative process would become extremely difficult. This expedient would constitute, as it did in the case of the Prohibition amendment of 1919, a serious abuse of the provision for constitutional amendment. But so strong are these tendencies, as illustrated by the recent agitation over abortion, that there seems to be a real danger that any attempt at all to make further use of the power of amendment would merely open the way for heightened demands that this possibility be exploited for what are essentially purely legislative purposes. What a pity—that the reasonable intentions of the founders should be so frivolously distorted!

Alexis de Tocqueville, in the second volume of his great work on democracy in America (a volume that was actually addressed primarily to the qualities of egalitarianism in general rather than just in America), voiced his apprehensions lest democracy lead to an excessive centralization of power in the respective country. What he feared primarily was not that the central power would become a cruel despotism, harshly mistreating the respective people, but quite the contrary: that it would spoil them by catering assiduously to their material needs and thereby dulling in them the consciousness of the responsibilities of citizenship. It would, to be sure, give them occasional opportunities to sanction, by some sort of plebiscitary voting, the power it exercised over them. But by taking care of them so well in the material sense, it would deprive them of all individual challenge or responsibility, and thus make them into compliant tools of the central authority. And in this vision he thought he perceived ultimate dangers to human liberty greater than any presented by the aristocratic society into which he had himself been born. In that society the powers of the king were limited, after all, by the established positions and privileges of the nobility and the landed aristocracy. In the democracy no such barriers to the accumulation of power in a single center would exist.

While the relative power of the federal government in the United States is certainly greater than it was in Tocqueville’s time, his fears appear to me to have been seriously overdrawn, primarily by his underestimation of the restraints imposed on the central executive power by the judicial power and by the legislative branch. On the other hand, one has to go far back in history to find any central powers as extensive as those conceded to the American president in time of real or perceived national danger or even of extensive overseas military involvement. Beyond which, the failure of a great portion of the American public to vote in presidential elections does suggest a strong sense of indifference or of real helplessness on the part of the individual voter in the face of the remoteness of the Washington bureaucracy from his or her person and concerns.

We will return to this question when we come to the United States and its problems. Suffice it to note at this point that not all of Tocqueville’s fears were wholly without foundation. Democracy, too, in all its modern forms, and particularly as it now exists in the United States, is not the final answer to political problems. And if it is true that only a portion of Tocqueville’s fears has stood the test of time, that is no reason why the other part of them should not receive our respectful attention.

Human Rights

There is one phenomenon of recent years that does not fit neatly in the dichotomy of “democratic” versus “nondemocratic.” That is the promotion of the idea of a universal obligation to the accordance of “human rights.”

The elements of this subject are well known. On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved and issued a document entitled The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The reader will note the word “universal” in that title. What the Declaration set forth was not, we are allowed to infer, just a recommendation to governments—something to be adopted and implemented by them at their own discretion. It was seen, at least by the official American establishment of that day and this, as an obligation resting upon all governments by virtue not just of the respective Assembly resolution but by the force of “natural law”—a law regarded as already implicit in the inalterable terms of the human condition, and one that every government, regardless of its own policies and decisions of the moment, was supposedly under obligation to respect.

Now, the plea for observance by individual governments of certain elementary standards of humanity in the treatment of their citizens falls in the same category as the plea for the respect of motherhood, in the sense that it is something to which no right-thinking person can be on principle opposed. This, presumably, was the reason why the Declaration in question was accepted by the General Assembly without a single dissenting voice (though there were a few abstentions). No more than any others could this writer oppose the advocacy of so worthy a cause. He does, however, have certain reservations about the way this objective is brought forward in the Universal Declaration and in the policies and utterances of various American and United Nations officials.

The idea of a “natural law” has roots of great distinction running back through the entire history of Western philosophy. I am impressed with the eminence of the personalities and the institutions that have supported this concept over the centuries. But I find the various expressions of it confusing, sometimes contradictory, and, in any case, unconvincing. The idea of a “law” meaningful to man and subject to his interpretation, yet remote from human authorship, leads me into philosophical thickets where I cannot follow. I can see that some portions of mankind, departing from man’s fallen and fractured state, have indeed worked out, with a view to his own safety, comfort, and peace of mind, admirable ideas as to what governments ideally owe to their subjects or citizens in the way of forbearance, humanity, and respect for the dignity of the person. I can see that the inspiration for some of these ideas lay in religious faith—an inspiration I fully respect. I can welcome the sponsorship of these ideas by governments and individuals as a great and noble service to the advancement of civilization. All this I can see; but natural law?—no. Alone the multiplicity of ideas about the meaning of “natural law” and the abundant contradictions among them would suffice to arouse my skepticism.

I have particular trouble with the concept of human “rights,” as such. Rights before whom? Before God? In the Christian sense—impossible. The individual Christian is at liberty to hope (or so Christ tells us) for God’s mercy; but how could he assert a “right” to anything in the face of God? By whom was he supposedly made? By whom, if not by God himself, could such a right have been bestowed upon him? And to whom, then, could he have recourse if he considered it to be violated?

It is argued that this “right,” albeit of natural or divine origin, is a right before any government. That is all very well; but by whose authority is it conceived to exist? And is it considered, then, to exist without any corresponding duty or responsibility? Can there be, in other words, any such thing as rights devoid of some equivalent obligation? I had come to believe, over the course of the years, that freedom was something definable only in terms of the restraints that it implied. Could it be otherwise with rights?

Article 25 of the Declaration says that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care, and necessary social services. . . .” Is this, too, really to be without obligation on the beneficiary’s part? Is he really to be at liberty to spend his life going fishing, or taking his ease in others ways, and still be entitled to demand that he be provided with all these things that Article 25 assures to him? And if so, who is supposed to pay for them? I would submit that the concept of rights as something wholly unrelated to duties is unrealistic.5

I am also intrigued by the fact that the extension of these rights is something demanded from all of the world’s governments without regard to their institutions and practices in other respects. The demand, that is, is addressed to dictatorships and other nondemocratic governments as well as to democratic ones. And here I am struck by the difference in vocabulary between the time of World War I and our present day. The world Woodrow Wilson hoped for was one that would be made “safe for democracy.” Not “safe for human rights,” mark you, but “safe for democracy.”

Perhaps this change in concept is all right. If, like myself, one holds no high hopes for the development of a world consisting only of democracies, perhaps reason could be seen for addressing the plea for greater humanity to all governments alike, ignoring the degree of their commitment to popular representation. But this does seem to me to raise the question as to whether we have dropped what I understood to be our traditional opposition to benevolent despotism. And it raises, too, a question as to whether a favorable momentary response by a nondemocratic regime to the call for “human rights” would always be enough. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in the final passages of his excellent book The Age of Jackson, observed that “freedom does not last long when bestowed from above.” Is there not, then, something missing when we demand from oppressive and undemocratic regimes the respect for rights that fit very poorly with their treatment of the individual in other respects?

Finally, I am afraid that demands on other governments raised in the name of human rights grate on my sensibilities as a historian. I was once obliged to point out, in lectures delivered long ago,6 that in the demands we placed upon the great European powers, in the name of the Open Door principle, in connection with their policies in China at the turn of the last century, you had an example of the satisfaction many of us Americans derived from demanding of other governments policies consistent with what we liked to believe to be our own cherished national virtues, even when there was no serious prospect that the other powers in question would or could do what we were demanding of them, and even—in some instances—when we ourselves apparently had no very serious intention of living up to these same demands. In many American minds, the mere fact that we had stated these admirable principles, and had demanded respect for them, and had done so in ways that would allow our government to appear in noble posture before world and American opinion, was felt to be quite enough. Whether any actual good came, or could have come, from this demand was beside the point. Our statesmen, it was understood, had made a high-minded gesture. It “sounded good.” They had received the appropriate domestic-political applause. What more could one want?

The reader will forgive me if I sense a certain whiff of this same sanctimoniousness in American statements and demands about human rights. I sense here the same implied assumption of superior understanding and superior virtue on our part. I sense it in the anxious inquiries as to whether the “human rights record” of this or that government is found, upon lofty inquiry, to be adequate or inadequate from our standpoint. I sense it in our inclination to rate other governments, independently of their remaining practices, outstandingly on the basis of our judgment of their performance in this one particular field.

Having said all this, I must now do penance by recognizing that the worldwide effects of the human rights movement in which both the United Nations and the U.S. government have invested so much of their energies and enthusiasm have been in a number of respects beneficial. A useful influence seems at least to have been exerted from time to time on regimes whose practices are far from lending themselves to classification as “democratic.” Even where these regimes have by no means been able to show a perfect human rights record, there has at least been inflicted upon some of them a certain self-consciousness before world opinion—a certain reluctance to be caught out in the more flagrant abuses of human freedom and dignity—which otherwise would have been lacking. Numbers of nondemocratic regimes, including those of Russia (in the pre-Gorbachevian era) but right-wing dictatorships as well, have put forward patently specious claims that they were extending human rights to their peoples; but I do not recall instances where they denied the obligation to extend them. This would suggest that in certain circumstances there may be greater value in these human rights demands than I have been inclined to attribute to them. I still find myself wishing that we could be a bit more discriminating in the choice of our official language, and a bit more demanding of ourselves in bringing gesture into some sort of a visible relationship with reality.

1. Again, after writing the above lines (which I have left unchanged), I was startled to come across, in Sebastian de Grazia’s excellent Machiavelli in Hell (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 76, the following passage: “Another passage in the Discourses approaches the question of morality more generally: ‘Men act either out of necessity or out of choice.’ Without pausing for nuances in such an assertion, we may simply recall that it fits the position of both Aristotle and Augustine that only with choice can an act be moral.”

2. The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1931), p. 147.

3. I am reminded, here of an episode recounted (I cannot remember where) involving a Reverend Buckminster, who was pastor of the church, in colonial Massachusetts, of which certain of my ancestors were members. The pastor was addressed by one of his flock, on a certain occasion, in terms that he felt were insufficiently respectful of his ecclesiastical dignity, and he put to the man the colonial counterpart of what today would be the question “Who do you think you are talking to?” When the answer came back—“To a poor worm of the dust, like myself”—the pastor, burying his face in his hands, is said to have replied, “Ah, I know it, I know it.”

4. These were not the only aspects of uniqueness that characterized these two regimes, the Nizi and the Stalinism. Among the others that might be mentioned was the cynical exploitation of the various vulnerabilities of mass psychology, and particularly the whipping up of hatred against the very elements they had selected as their innocent victims. It is only regimes of this nature that I have in mind when I use the term “totalitarian.” There is a great difference between these regimes and what one might call normal forms of dictatorial authoritarianism.

5. I realize that one of the paragraphs of Article 29 of the same Declaration contains a laconic and ambiguous sentence to the effect that “everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” Is it the duties, or the community, “in which” this development of the personality is possible? Even if it should be seen as the duties that are going to make possible “the full and free development of the individual personality,” this last is not quite what the right prescribed in Article 25 pertained to. The dedicated fisherman might find ample opportunity for contemplation “useful to the development of his personality” just in the indulgence of his hobby; but someone else would still have to pay for the remainder of the blessings associated with that idyllic life.

6. I have in mind the Chicago lectures of 1951 published in the volume American Diplomacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).