A Lincoln for Our Time

A Lincoln for Our Time
By STEVEN B. SMITH, New York Times
LINCOLN'S TRAGIC PRAGMATISM
Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict
By John Burt
814 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $39.95.

There have been many ways to think about Abraham Lincoln, our most enigmatic president, but the image of him as a moral philosopher is not the most obvious. We have “Honest Abe,” the great rail-splitter of American legend, Lincoln the political operative and architect of the Republican Party, and Lincoln the savvy wielder of executive power as portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s recent film.

Yet several works have put the issue of Lincoln’s language, rhetoric and political thought front and center. Among them, Garry Wills’s “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” Ronald C. White Jr.’s “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech” and Allen Guelzo’s “Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas”all deserve honorable mention. But the first and still best effort to advance a philosophical reading of Lincoln was Harry V. Jaffa’s “Crisis of the House Divided,” published in 1959.

A student of the philosopher Leo Strauss, Jaffa argued that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas during the 1850s was the clash between Lincoln’s doctrine of natural right and Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty. This was, as Jaffa declared, identical to the conflict between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Plato’s “Republic.” Douglas argued that whatever the people of a state or territory wanted made it right for them. For Lincoln, however, only a prior commitment to the moral law could make a free people.

The originality of Jaffa’s book was his ability to make what seemed a purely historical debate address the deepest themes of the Western philosophic tradition. At issue were two contending conceptions of justice. Lincoln’s appeal to the “self-­evident truth” of equality in the Declaration of Independence provided the moral touchstone of the American republic. Douglas’s affirmation of popular sovereignty was a statement of sheer power politics in which questions of justice are ultimately decided by the will of the majority. For Jaffa, any falling away from the transcendent doctrine of pure natural law was tantamount to a slide into relativism, historicism and ultimately nihilism.

For the first time in over half a century, Jaffa’s book has a serious rival. John Burt, a professor of English at Brandeis University, has written a work that every serious student of Lincoln will have to read, although its sheer bulk alone — more than 800 pages — as well as the density of its prose may deter all but the most intrepid Lincolnophiles. It is a work of history presented as an argument about moral conflict, and a work of philosophy presented as a rhetorical analysis of Lincoln’s most famous speeches. Unlike Jaffa, who projected Lincoln through the long history of natural law from Plato and Cicero through Aquinas, Locke and the American framers, Burt refracts Lincoln through the philosophy of Kant, Rawls and contemporary liberal political theory. His is very much a Lincoln for our time.

Burt begins from the problem of how to resolve conflict in an open society. Does liberalism presuppose agreement around a common moral core — all men are created equal — or is it merely a modus vivendi for people with different values and interests who consent to work together for purely opportunistic reasons? James Madison, in The Federalist No. 10, thought it was the second. He saw a vast republic of competing factions that would cooperate because none could muster the resources to exercise a permanent dominance over the others. But what happens, as in the case of slavery during the 1850s, when these factions cease to pursue interests that can be negotiated and become wedded to principles central to identity? Compromise over interests is possible; compromise over principles is far more difficult.

The problem of moral compromise is at the center of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. At the time of the founding, as Lincoln told the story, slavery had been treated as a regrettable evil and one that would slowly be put on the path to “ultimate extinction.” There was even a certain shame over slavery, which accounts for why the word is not mentioned in the Constitution. But in the succeeding generations this view radically changed, and what was once seen as merely a peculiar institution came to be regarded by John C. Calhoun and others as a “positive good,” crucial to the Southern way of life. Lincoln’s barb that if slavery is a good, it is a good that no one has ever chosen for himself made no difference.

A welcome aspect of Burt’s study is that it presents the debate between Lincoln and Douglas as a real debate between two principled political actors struggling to make sense of their time. Douglas’s defense of popular sovereignty was not the first step down the slippery slope to nihilism; it was an effort to defuse the slavery issue by returning it to the state and territorial legislatures. Douglas remained loyal to the Madisonian vision of politics that seeks to find some reasonable middle ground in which differences can be accommodated. His claim that he was indifferent as to whether slavery was voted up or down was not simply a piece of callous value neutrality, but an effort to prove to Southern slave owners as well as to Northern anti-abolitionists that he was a man with whom all of them could do business.

Lincoln came to regard slavery as a unique moral evil, something beyond the limits of a consensual society. There are some things — like taxes — that are subject to deal-making, and others — human dignity, for one — that are not. On slavery as an institution, Lincoln was prepared to negotiate; on slavery as a principle, he would not. This is not to say that Lincoln ever crossed into the territory of William Lloyd Garrison and the New England abolitionists, who regarded the Constitution’s compromises on slavery as a treaty with the Devil. This kind of higher-law idealism — think of Thaddeus Stevens as played by Tommy Lee Jones — may be rhetorically attractive but contains its own hidden dangers. The most obvious danger of a politics of conscience is the ever-present threat of violence and war. For those who cannot or will not see things our way, there may be no other recourse but to force of arms.

Lincoln never succumbed to the narcissism of the Emersonian beautiful soul, putting the purity of his own convictions above the law. He retained a statesmanlike ability to treat his opponents not as enemies to be conquered but as rational agents who might be persuaded through reasoned argument. As he told his audience in Peoria, Ill., in 1854: “I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation.” Democracy meant for him more than a Madisonian modus vivendi; it represented a commitment to a structure of fairness that respected the moral autonomy of free men and women.

If Burt’s Lincoln is a Rawlsian liberal seeking something like the basic requirements of justice, he is also someone with a tragic sense of “negative capability.” By this Burt means that our moral concepts remain so deeply embedded in our lives and histories that we can never fully understand what they entail except retrospectively. Our moral commitments unfold over time and cannot be rendered intelligible on the basis of first principles alone.

For example, when, in Peoria, Lincoln called slavery a “monstrous injustice,” could he have imagined that this would later commit him to securing the passage of the 13th Amendment? Or was it conceivable that his position would eventually lead to the election of our first African-American president? Probably not. Burt’s Lincoln sounds like a Hegelian philosopher for whom our moral conceptions become known to us only in the fullness of time and under the force of circumstances that no one — not even a Lincoln — can imagine.

It is at this point that Burt’s reading offers a powerful challenge to Jaffa. For Jaffa, Lincoln was a philosophical rationalist whose commitment to natural law proceeded from almost geometric logic; its consequences can be known to all on the basis of unaided reason. Think of the scene in Spielberg’s “Lincoln”in which he deduces the necessity for equality from the same axiomatic premises he recalls from reading Euclid’s “Elements” as a young man.

But Burt sees Lincoln as a historicist for whom our moral conceptions emerge only over time and in ways that we can never fully comprehend. We are always viewing our lives as through a glass darkly. “The story of democracy, in Lincoln’s view,” Burt writes, “is the story of something with a destiny, but it is a destiny never fully understood either by the founders or by Lincoln himself.” But where will this destiny take us? American democracy remains a work in progress. The unanswered question is whether destiny — the obscure and mysterious workings of fate — will issue in a new birth of freedom or a new dark age.

Burt argues that Lincoln’s decision to pursue a politics of principle over deal-­making was ultimately an act of faith, something beyond the limits of reason alone. Like the biblical Abraham, told to sacrifice his only son, he could not possibly have known where the consequences of his acts might lead. This does not mean Lincoln bade farewell to reason, but his decisions to fight a war, emancipate slaves and push for racial equality were choices that only history could make clear.

Burt suggests, but never directly asks, the W.W.L.D. question — what would Lincoln do? What are the conditions for compromise in our own intensely polarized age? He admits that after giving the question long consideration, he has been unable to come up with anyone who managed this as well as Lincoln. Let me only suggest the names of Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel.

Lincoln’s example was rare, though not unique. The problem with making Lincoln so absolutely singular is that it puts him outside of history. Those who invoke Lincoln’s legacy today tend to see him either as a Machiavellian wielder of political power or as a secular saint of modern democracy. Each of these views is false. Lincoln reminds us that statecraft requires an attention to both principle and compromise. Principle without compromise is empty; compromise without principle is blind. This is a valuable lesson for our politicians even today.

Steven B. Smith, the Alfred Cowles professor of political science at Yale, is the author, most recently, of “Political Philosophy.”