The urgent need for statesmen, not career politicians:
When thinking about the current crop of Australian political leaders, the adjectives great, wise, courageous and principled do not immediately spring to mind. Most leaders and politicians will do their thing, retire, collect their handsome pension, and then quickly disappear from view – and from history. Not many great ones are to be found. But there have been some in the past that we can mention.
A book that came out several years ago by the American political philosopher Daniel J. Mahoney has highlighted some of these important figures. I refer to The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation (Encounter Books, 2022).
His volume on statesmanship is well worth being aware of. In it he discusses a number of figures, including Cicero, Edmund Burke, Napoleon, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Vaclav Havel. Early on in the book Mahoney notes how the American Founding Fathers
read their Cicero and Plutarch and were no doubt inspired by the accounts of political nobility found in the pages of both immensely influential thinkers and writers. Their own noble deeds partake of classical greatness of soul as much as the purported “realism” of distinctively modern political thought. But it is undoubtedly the case that they aimed to establish political institutions where “power checked power,” institutions that would make political greatness less necessary, if not superfluous.
Modern political philosophy and social science has strayed far from the early thoughts about, and examples of, what great statesmanship is all about. They
veer incoherently between false realism and an idealism that acknowledges no constraints on the power of the human will to remake human nature and society. Through sinuous but logical paths, modern realism gives way to a totalitarian assault on the very “givenness” of the human condition, an assault on human nature itself and on all the virtues that define the well-ordered soul. What is needed is a return to true realism, to a moral conception of politics that is fully realistic but that also acknowledges that the good, the search for legitimate authority or even the best regime, the exercise of the practical virtues — courage, moderation, prudence, and justice — are as “real” as, and certainly more ennobling and humanizing than, the reckless and groundless pursuit of power as an end in itself.
A few quotes on just two of the men covered in this book will give you a good flavour for what Mahoney is arguing for. As for Anglo-Irish stateman Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the author of the memorable Reflections on the Revolution in France, Mahoney notes the Christian morality that underpinned his thoughts and work. He writes:
Burke was no enemy of modern commerce or of the economic arts that gave rise to the prosperity of European peoples. He was a friend and admirer of Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), the most significant modern philosophical defense of the market and the “system of natural liberty.” But Burke was above all a partisan of the “unbought grace of life.” He did not see how even modern liberty could survive (and flourish) without some degree of “manly sentiment and heroic enterprise.” If the spirit of chivalry and personal honor—informed by valor, gentlemanliness, and self-restraint—were ever “totally extinguished, the loss [I] fear,” Burke writes in this famous passage, “will be great.”
And again:
As a Christian and an eminently civilized human being, Burke rejected the notion that everything could or should be brought to the market. He loathed slavery and the slave trade, and he drafted a “Sketch of a Negro Code” in 1780 to put the slave trade on the road to “incremental abolition.” He made the “Code” public in 1792, and it “made a favorable impression upon William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner” [as one writer said]. Burke believed, in his own words, that the abolition of the slave trade would be in accord with “the principles of true religion and morality.” He wanted to regulate the slave trade out of existence…
And consider also Churchill. Says Mahoney:
To acknowledge Churchill’s greatness does not necessitate hagiography or what Churchill himself called “gush.” There is always an essential need and role for “discriminate criticism.” Roberts enumerates a long list of issues and decisions in the nine decades of Churchill’s life (1874–1965) where his judgment legitimately might be questioned….
But much of this is beside the point. Political greatness is not coextensive with infallibility or perfect judgment. On the issues that really mattered, Churchill was right, and not just in 1940 or as a critic of the disastrous appeasement of Hitler’s lupine imperialism in the half-decade or more before the outbreak of World War II. Today, many mediocre historians and critics, professional enemies of the very idea of human greatness, begrudgingly acknowledge that Churchill was right once, in 1940, and never or rarely before or after.
Churchill, unlike many other leaders, knew that both Nazism and Communism had to be resisted: “I would add that Churchill understood the lethal character of Bolshevism long before the majority of his complacent contemporaries. As early as April 11, 1919, in a speech in London, Churchill argued that ‘Bolshevist tyranny,’ as he called it, was ‘the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading’ in human history. He would reiterate that claim many times over the years.”
Mahoney continues:
Churchill saw what was at stake in the totalitarian assault on liberal and Christian civilization like few people before or after. Among twentieth-century statesmen, only de Gaulle shared this admirable lucidity and the determination to resist the inhuman totalitarian temptation on the intellectual, military, political, and spiritual fronts. These two great statesmen fully appreciated that World War II was much more than an age-old geopolitical conflict: it was no less than an effort to save and sustain a civilization at once Christian, liberal, and democratic. They still cared for the West as the West, a civilization worth preserving because it alone fully valorized the dignity of human beings who are souls as well as bodies, persons imbued with dignity and not playthings of ideological despotisms that in decisive respects were “beyond good and evil.” That noble spiritual and civilizational vision is increasingly moribund in the democracies today.
Churchill always manifested what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called “the courage to see.” This courage to see is at the heart of Churchill’s ability to combine love of peace with truly indomitable courage, resistance to totalitarian aggression with a sincere desire to avoid the “twin marauders” of war and tyranny, as Churchill called them in his Iron Curtain Speech.
The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderationby Mahoney, Daniel J. (Author)
Mahoney and Mohler
But to give you a bit of an updating here, I want to draw your attention to a 70-minute interview Mahoney took part in with Albert Mohler late in 2022. It is a lengthy interview covering quite a bit of ground, but near the end of it they discuss more recent examples of great leaders and statesmen. Here in part is what they say about Thatcher and Reagan:
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yeah, she was a very courageous woman. I think her speech at Bruges in ’88 where she defended a certain vision of Europe that had very little to do with the post political, technocratic, post-Christian vision of the Eurocrats today is a very great speech. She was a formidable woman. She played a major role in the … Cold War. Reagan was always intellectually underestimated. We know his radio addresses, he may not have written all of his speeches, but he played… Reagan in ’87 insisting that he would demand that Gorbachev tear down the wall. Everyone in the bureaucracy, all his advisors, except for his speech writer, Peter Robinson, wanted to get rid of that.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. And they thought he had until he said it.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
He did. That was Reagan’s Luther’s famous remark, “Here I stand and do no other.” He was not going. He knew however much he got along with Reagan… I mean with Gorbachev, welcomed this new thinking in the Soviet, something was going on. He knew the end game had to be the fall of the Iron Curtain symbolized by the Berlin Wall. So I had to end the book with a tribute to the two of them. I didn’t think, especially on the statesmen as Thinker Front, that they quite demanded a place in my pantheon, but they are two heroes of mine, and I call them conviction politicians. I do not want to underestimate the role that principal and thought played. Think of I wrote a piece this summer for the, I believe, 70th anniversary of the publication of Whitaker Chambers’s Witness, great book.
I’ll tell you, Reagan was deeply shaped by that book, and that’s no accident that in 1984, you remember, the Marxist would say, “It’s no accident that Reagan posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom Whitaker Chambers.” And that was not only a sign, I think, of Reagan’s deep anti totalitarian convictions, but that was a book that spoke to his heart and mind, and now, they were great, great men. I don’t like these elements on the right today who besmirched them. A lot of younger people who don’t know much about them, or caricature of them as libertarians who didn’t care.
Albert Mohler:
And some of them accept the left’s caricature of both of them as if they’re intellectual lightweights. That’s kind of the reason I brought them up, and I noted how you treated them in the book, and it’s very respectful. I just want to suggest that it sometimes takes some time to determine just how much of a thinker anyone was. And so I’ve gone back, and I’ve read some of Reagan’s speeches when he was president of the screen Actors Guild, and when he was fighting communism and in Hollywood, and testifying in Washington DC when he didn’t have speech writers, and it’s amazing how clear his thought is, and how-
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
People are always going to underestimate it, and we have to understand as a liberal anti communist, he fought the Stalinist in the Screen Actor’s Guild. He fought them with great intelligence and perseverance, and because of the idea, the myth that McCarthy, the McCarthyism was this darkness over the whole of America we forget the damage that those communist party members did in Hollywood.
Albert Mohler:
The conservatives turned out to be right.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yeah, Reagan has always been underestimated, terribly underestimated. And I would also say, Margaret. Have you ever come across a book by… Oh, her name was Robin Shirley Letwin. She was an American, was part of a kind of a British circle. She wrote a book on Margaret Thatcher, and she made very clear, in addition to the Christian element that is always underestimated, Margaret Thatcher wanted to recover an appreciation of what she sometimes called the vigorous virtues, and that not only meant courage, but it also meant learning the value of work again, taking care of your family, healthy enterprise, and she thought that they were perfectly compatible with a Christian conscience. https://albertmohler.com/2022/11/16/daniel-j-mahoney/
That full interview is well worth reading or listening to. And his book is a must read to see what ails us today, and why there is such a paucity of great leadership and why we have so few true statesmen today.
