The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

He learned from Thomas Macaulay’s famous critical review of his father’s Essay on Government that trying to construct a political vision from purely deductive principles is a guaranteed failure, because it ignores the complexities of real life.

To start with, he learned from Coleridge (who was an avowed Burkean conservative as well as a poet) that the social world around us is not just the result of wrongheaded thinking or systematic injustice, as his father and Jeremy Bentham believed. It reflects a complex organic historical development and consists of institutions that give meaning and purpose to the lives of ordinary people, however pointless they may seem to the ivory tower philosopher. Social reality has a hidden purpose, Coleridge taught—a purpose that, like Nature herself, we tamper with at our peril.

Then Coleridge and Macaulay both showed him that the first task of an intellectual is not to trash and overturn existing institutions of his society, as both Bentham and Marx tried to do. It is to understand first of all how and why they came about. By doing so, we can discover certain basic principles of human nature to serve as the basis of thoughtful reform instead of headlong revolution.

And from the French philosopher Auguste Comte, Mill learned that once we have discovered those principles, it might be possible to construct a science of man (which Comte called sociology) that will be as certain and universally applicable as Newton’s Principia.

The amount of individuality in a society, he would write, “has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.”34 One could in fact sum up Mill’s final vision of the free society as “Every individual his own genius.”

Of all his works, the one that lives on today is the shortest, On Liberty, which he wrote with his wife, Harriet Taylor, and published in 1859. It has enshrined Mill’s interest, even obsession, with protecting the freedom of the individual to do what he or she desires (Mill was a keen supporter of votes for women) without interference except to protect public safety. It is the Nicomachean Ethics of today’s libertarians.

It also set Mill in direct opposition to Hegel and Marx. “Mankind are greater gainers,” its introduction reads, “by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”36 It is hard to imagine any sentence more at odds with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or Marx’s Grundrisse.

At the time, On Liberty had another important purpose. It spelled the definitive end of the teleology—or the idea that everything that happens serves some greater higher telos, or purpose—that both Plato and Aristotle (not to mention Saint Augusti...

In the Politics, Aristotle did see individual householders as the foundation of a free society, but he still believed that human nature itself was directed toward a single telos.b Mill responded that we are here to fulfill not one final single...

For Mill, it is the healthy diversity of purposes and destinies that makes for a happy society and a truly free society. The purpose behind individual liberty is not allowing people to do whatever they want, it is allowing people to do what his father had never permitted him: to discover in their own ...

This was also the great key to Western civilization and its history, Mill argued: the increasing empowerment of the individual. “What has made the European family of nations an improving, instead of stationary, portion of mankind?” Mill asked. Not any innate superiority, but “their remarkable diversity of character and culture.” This diversity has created a “plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development,” from the various Greek city-states to modern nations: indeed the more the better.

For Mill, uniformity is the enemy of progress, because it becomes the enemy of individuality and personal choice.

For Mill, uniformity is the enemy of progress. Diversity is the regular source of growth and renewal,

Allowing men and women to say what they believe, Mill argues, and publish what they think is true promotes the spread of new discoveries and truths while pushing out the false and misleading. This is what is sometimes referred to (somewhat misleadingly) as “the marketplace of ideas.”

Freedom of speech adds to the creative intensity of life.

The free exchange of ideas will prevent a culture from growi...

Even debates about issues that seem entirely settled, like whether the earth is flat or if the Holocaust happened, can serve this purpose of wakening us ...

It is a fact, Mill argues, that “the fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful...

The other half, he implies, is the result of dogmatism and the freezing up of society against its lone voices of dissent.

Socrates, Jesus, Martin Luther, Galileo: Shelley had treated them as great poets, whose insights illuminated eternal truths.

The value of these figures for Mill is as history’s great dissenters, the unpopularity of whose opinions serves as a ben...

That society which opens a space for individual dissent, and actively debates its own most basic tenets and truths, is for Mill the one that lives and breathes and g...

“A people, it appears, may be progressive for a certain length of time, and then stop. When does it stop? When it ...

This is what happened to Egypt and China, Mill affirms. It hadn’t happened to Europe—yet.42 But could it? In 1859, Mi...

The first was the expansion of democracy. This was a paradox for someone who, on the political front, was one of democracy’s biggest champions—including votes for women. However, Mill sensed in the sheer bulk of mas...

“the tyranny of the m...

The individual will feel a pressure to agree with a consensus shared by millions and millions of people whose views have assumed equal cultural value; the validity of a point of view will simply be that everyone else holds it. Those outside the cons...

Middle-class man would be replaced by mass man, Mill feared, the compulsive conformist who “practices a social tyranny more formidable ...

Some see this fear, like Mill’s, as a thinly disguised elitism. Others have pointed out that the dangers lie very much the other way: that the complete indulgence of individual preference to the point of what Mill approvingly called “eccentricity” opens the door to no cultural or moral standards at all—as

Still, no one wants to live in a world in which individual creativity has been reduced to designing our own vanity plates.

The other danger Mill sensed was the growth of socialism, specifically Marxist communism. Again, this was paradoxical from someone who came to describe himself as a socialist and saw relieving poverty as a social imperative. Mill’s later writings strongly reflect the view that an entirely market-driven system must eventually give way to one that shares more of the fruits of prosperity with others.

All the same, the touchstone of Mill’s version of socialism remained individual choice. As Nicholas Capaldi has argued, Mill’s socialism is one in which formal class distinctions disappear and everyone becomes an autonomous entrepreneur.

Mill never accepted the Rousseauian notion of a general will to which the individual must submit. On Mill’s terms, redistribution of income and resources must be voluntary, rather like a farmer’s co-op or a start-up software compa...

This was precisely the kind of socialism Karl Marx most detested. By the same token, Marx’s version was the one that Mill most feared. He watched the founding of the first Communist International, spoke to some of the English delegates who attended, and did not like what he heard. Marx, like Hegel, believed crisis and revolution were history’s path to freedom. Mill believed history showed they were the path to slavery. The idea of the proletariat seizing the means of production was “obviously chimerical,” he wrote, and would only plunge humanity into the brutal state of nature envisaged by Thomas Hobbes.

From it would emerge a society far worse than its bourgeois successor, he warned. If the compression of individuality by the majority was already becoming a problem, “it would probably be much greater under Communism.…”

Man’s progress would be stifled; the wellsprings of creativity would dry up; and society would be reduced to “a multitude of well-cared-for slaves, rather than a nation of free and independent men.…”

If, therefore, Mill concluded, “the choice had to be made between Communism with all its chances [of failure], and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices … Communism would be as dust in the balance.”

Mill had stated (echoing David Hume) that the story of history is the struggle between liberty and authority.

Are human beings happiest when they are left alone or when they submit to an order greater than themselves?

As the nineteenth century wore on, the heirs to Aristotle and the Enlightenment became the staunchest defenders of liberty, while the partisans of Plato were increasingly attracted to the authority side of the barricades.

This is the origin of the famous split between classical liberalism and its modern paternalist and statist cousin, progressivism.

By 1550, the Spanish were asking themselves a classic Platonic question: Our empire might be great, but is it just? Spain’s canon lawyers framed the issue slightly differently. By what right did the king of Spain claim sovereign rule over a people and land more than three thousand miles away?

Aristotle’s assertion in Book I of the Politics that some peoples are slaves by nature because they lack the reason needed to live in society and thus require a master to supply it.†

“How can we doubt,” Sepúlveda said, “that these people, so uncivilized, so barbaric, so contaminated with so many sins and obscenities,” are “as children to adults” and unfit to govern themselves? Therefore, conquest and rule by a civilized nation like Spain was not only just but actually for their own good: a classic argument for imperialism, then and later.17

Whatever is, must be right. Sepúlveda’s arguments were an example of how Aristotle could be applied to justify a status quo, regardless of its obvious shortcomings.

But then Las Casas went further. He knew he could not refute every instance of human sacrifice or cannibalism that had so shocked the Spanish conscience (compared with, say, burning people at the stake). So he showed that these actions were rational in the cultural context in which they had taken place.

All mankind is one. It took a long time for this revolutionary argument, with its inheritance from Aristotle and Thomist doctrine, to gain firm purchase in the West. In the age of Atlantic empire and the Middle Passage, when shiploads of black Africans were being sent to the Americas, Europeans’ instincts and self-interest ran very much the other way. Nonetheless, the nagging doubt that had triggered the Valladolid debate in the first place remained. By what right did one race of men enslave another race, Europeans continued to ask (if only in whispers), when they shared the same rational nature?

The ultimate answer was, none.

Interestingly, the final, decisive piece to the puzzle was supplied by Rousseau. Everywhere men are born free, he had wri...

That meant that no one was destined to wear chains, whether they were white Europeans or black Africans, ...