Philosophers make bad kings
Canadian politics is fuelled by dogma, not reason. Michael Ignatieff, stay away
Andrew Potter
National Post
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Canada is a rather un-philosophical place, usually described as a nation of institutions, not ideas. No revolution for us, no grand declaration or statement of founding principle. At best, we are the existentialists of the community of nations, always going on about: "Who are we? Why are we here?" As a result, Confederation is a rickety contraption at the best of times, a hesitant set of arrangements that manages to hang together in defiance of history, geography and perhaps even reason itself.
How to explain, then, our ongoing fascination with the figure of the philosopher king?
Pierre Trudeau is the avatar of our obsession. He was indeed a rare figure in Canadian politics: an intellectual and a polarizing figure in a country long-accustomed to the do-nothing-by-halves-that-you-can-do-by-quarters leadership of men like Macdonald, King and Diefenbaker. Though the Czechs since Havel might beg to differ, Liberal MP Don Boudria was not far off the mark when he suggested, after Trudeau's death, that he was "the closest any Western country of the modern age ever had to a philosopher king." Ever since Trudeau left office, Canadians -- or at least, Liberals -- have been moping around waiting for a replacement, for an inspirational leader who would join the twin virtues of reflection and action to a statesman-like and principled approach to government.
In its June issue, Saturday Night magazine ran a profile of the University of Toronto philosopher and public intellectual Mark Kingwell. In passing, the writer opined that Kingwell might just be the philosopher king we've been looking for: "Given his looks, not to mention his talent for thinking on his feet and putting big ideas into compelling language when the cameras are on, he may very well have missed his calling. In a slightly different world, the man might have made an exemplary prime minister."
Even with the "slightly different world" hedging, it is no slight to Kingwell to call that a long toss. A more realistic candidate arrives in the figure of Michael Ignatieff, currently the director of the Carr Center on Human Rights at Harvard. Invariably described as dashingly handsome (in 2003, Maclean's named him Canada's "sexiest cerebral man"), the cosmopolitan Ignatieff is a member of the closest thing Canada has to a landed aristocracy. His father, George, was a distinguished mid-century diplomat who was later Chancellor of the University of Toronto. He is the great-grandson of George Munro Grant, the famous principal of Queen's University, and his uncle was the philosopher George Parkin Grant, author of the nationalist classic, Lament for a Nation.
This past March, Ignatieff was the keynote speaker for the Liberal party's national biennial convention. Afterward, it was suggested that Ignatieff is positioning himself for a run at politics, perhaps eventually the leadership of the Liberal party. In a tremendous bit of puffery in The Globe and Mail last month, Michael Valpy wrote: "To those Liberals urging him to enter political life, Mr. Ignatieff is seen as both a philosopher-king in Mr. Trudeau's iconic mould and someone who would generate excitement around progressive ideas in a party seen as having become lacklustre, drifting and visionless under [Paul] Martin."
Like many bad ideas, we owe this one to Plato. With some trepidation, Socrates, Plato's leading character, suggests in The Republic, "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils -- nor the human race, as I believe -- and then only will this our state have a possibility of life and behold the light of day."
What Plato is suggesting is the need to combine knowledge with political power. As against the mere "opinions" that guide us in the transient world of appearances, the true king needs the wisdom that comes with knowledge of the unchanging and eternal forms, of the nature of man, and of the ideal state in which he ought to live. It is precisely because the philosopher has access to this sort of transhistorical knowledge that he is best fit to rule.
It is not hard to see why just about everyone, philosophers included, were leery of Plato's scheme right from the start. To begin with, it was clear that philosophers would make terrible rulers, while rulers tended to be the most unreflective sorts of men. Moreover, people like Machiavelli and Hobbes thought that philosophy simply had no role to play in politics, while Kant and Spinoza both worried that an association with politics would have a corrupting influence on philosophy.
Yet even if Plato's specific project was not taken too seriously, the general idea of a perfectly regulated society, ordered in accordance with eternal laws and a theory of human nature, hung around. Eventually, it was picked up with enthusiasm by some members of the French Enlightenment, and, later, by Marxists.
In her recent book, The Roads to Modernity, Gertrude Himmelfarb points out that the animating ideal of the French Enlightenment was not liberty, but reason. For the philosophes, the function of reason was to reveal the universal principles of the nature of man and society, independent of history, culture and circumstance. Diderot and Voltaire both endorsed the ideal of the enlightened despot who would translate these absolute and unimpeachable dictates of reason into practical politics. In the entry for "philosophe" in the Encyclopedie, Diderot wrote: "How happy the people would be if kings were philosophers or philosophers kings."
Himmelfarb recognizes it would be unjust to blame the Revolution and the subsequent Terror directly on the philosophes, since most of them were dead by the mid-1780s. Yet the influence from their writings was certainly there, especially through Rousseau's impact on Robespierre. In The Social Contract, Rousseau called for a civil religion, a political "reign of virtue" that would force concrete individual wills to conform to the impossibly abstract "general will." Accordingly, the Revolution was an attempt at the root-and-branch transformation of French society. It was to be the recreation of the human race, the perfection of man and the making of the world anew.
It was also supremely undemocratic. The whole notion of a philosopher kingdom -- that is, the rule of reason -- is at odds with the essential elements of democratic self-rule: popular sovereignty, representative government and the separation of powers. This didn't exactly faze the philosophes. Most of them subscribed to some version of the these royale, which rejected any institutional change that would diminish the authority and power of the king.
Himmelfarb contrasts this with the intellectual bedrock of the American Revolution, which was founded on the inevitable fact of human imperfection. Recognizing this, the Americans gave themselves a constitution full of checks and balances that were designed precisely to preserve individual liberty despite these imperfections. That is, they looked to the actual practices and beliefs, the "habits of heart and of mind" that were at work in the colonies, and built their institutions in light of those practices.
In endorsing the pragmatic American reliance on the facts on the ground as against the utopian impulses of the French, Himmelfarb echoes Aristotle's original objection to Plato's notion of the philosopher king. Aristotle saw that even the wisest philosopher could not do better than the "anonymous wisdom" of the laws, customs, and traditions of a civilized country. In the end, the utopian wish for philosopher kings is a disguised wish for tyranny and terror.
Canadians certainly have no reason to fear a Robespierrean Terror or a Marxist revolution from our philosopher kings. Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act continues to enrage Quebecers, but the after-image of tanks in the streets of Montreal can't obscure the fact that the exercise was little more than the harassment of soft targets, aimed not so much at suppressing an insurrection as rallying public support to the federalist cause. And even though Trudeau was famously soft on communists and was in no way hostile to economic engineering, he could really do no better than the short-lived National Energy Program.
The irony is that Trudeau was at his most successful as a leader when he was at his least philosophical. Rather, the desire among Canadians for a new philosopher king in the Trudeau mould expresses, more than anything, a desire for a return to his "just watch me" style. Canadians long for a leadership of vision informed by principle, but firmly grounded in the realities of our geopolitical situation. Politics may be the art of the possible, but we rely on our leaders to shape its contours, to test the limits of what might be achieved, to take us places we thought were out of reach.
This is the underlying appeal of someone like Michael Ignatieff. By all accounts, his speech to the Liberal convention was terribly exciting, elaborating a national vision that defended a strong central government, advocated the decriminalization of marijuana and insisted that Canada be a player in continental missile defence and global security. It was widely described as "Trudeauvian" in spirit, and as a thinly veiled critique of the dithering tendencies of the current regime.
But would this appeal translate if he took office? Since Michael Valpy first started flying the Ignatieff-for-PM kite, a number of journalists have pointed out just how unsuitable he would be for the job. Although he returns to Canada on a regular basis, Ignatieff has barely lived here as an adult. His loyalties are somewhat suspect, since (like the columnist Mark Steyn) he tends to use the pronoun "we" when speaking both to American and Canadian audiences. Finally, Ignatieff is an outsider who has simply not paid his dues to the Liberal party establishment.
Yet even if these could be sidestepped, Ignatieff faces one insuperable obstacle: He's too philosophical. Politics demands adherence to a party line. By contrast, the essence of the philosophical mind is not that it adheres to some dogmatic conception of reason or truth, but that it is open to facts and to reasons. The true philosopher will admit to the possibility of partial truths, is willing to follow his arguments where they lead, and will revise his beliefs when the facts change.
This flexibility is a defining feature of Ignatieff's thought. He may be one of a new school of liberal interventionists advocating the projection of power abroad in the name of human rights, but he is no ideologue. In the June 26 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Ignatieff published an essay entitled "Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom is Theirs to Spread?" The nuanced argument is critical of how George Bush is proceeding in Iraq, yet full of hope and admiration for the underlying goals.
In a profile published in these pages back in April, Tony Keller suggested Ignatieff's views could be "a bracing tonic for the Canadian body politic." He would lead us out of our smug anti-Americanism and help us accept our global responsibilities.
This is doubtful. More likely, this sort of thinking will be rejected by the Canadian political immune system. Whether it is about health care, missile defence or the war on terror, Canadians are incapable of having an adult discussion, and woe to any politician who dares do anything so radical as obey reason. Our political discourse takes place in a dogma-addled environment that would swallow up an intellectual alien like Ignatieff, and it would be a shame to see him forced to mouth the banalities that are required for survival in Canadian federal politics.
Immanuel Kant was right when he opposed the notion of the philosopher king, on the grounds that "the possession of power is inevitably fatal to the free exercise of reason." We should certainly be wary of any philosopher who would be king. But in the case of Michael Ignatieff, he should be wary of us.
© National Post 2005
