WORLD COMMUNITY
Podcast # 2: The Rise of Nationalism in the Modern World
In Europe the period of modernism in philosophy begins in the 17th century. Building on the major transformation from theism to humanism during the Renaissance, in the realm of political theory and action it spawned the nation state. If the state is not grounded on a covenant with God, where are its roots to be found? Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau presented and developed the concept of a “social contract” among human beings as the foundation of the nation state. My purpose in introducing this quick history of the early development of the idea of the social contract is philosophical rather than historical. The fundamental principle at issue concerns the best possible form of human community. The early modern thinkers who formulated and developed the idea of the social contract considered the nation state to be the telos of history — the highest development of human existence on earth. This development is essential for the overall theme of world community, because it lays the foundation for the first of two forms of world community I will treat in this series of podcasts: the idea of empire. I will focus on the United States as the paradigm for that important development in the creation of human community.
The Social Contract
Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, more than a century before the American revolution. This work laid the modern foundation for thinking about the nature of civil society. It begins with an examination of the nature of human knowledge. In direct opposition to the Medieval practice of founding knowledge on “super-natural revelation,” Hobbes insisted that philosophy — “knowledge acquired by reasoning” —must serve as the basis for understanding the foundations of human society (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, Liberal Arts Press, 1958, p. 3). In other words, philosophy, not religion, must guide our thinking about the nature of human society and the best way to construct a human community. Even when they disagree with Hobbes about the nature of that community and about the nature of philosophy itself, most modern thinkers share his demand that human reason, not divine revelation, must shape our way of thinking about fundamental concepts, principles, decisions, and actions.
Hobbes devotes his primary attention to what he calls “commonwealth,” and he clearly has in mind a nation or, what is often called a “nation state.” One of his basic assumptions is that in a “state of nature” — what human beings would be outside of the commonwealth — all people would be equal in the ability to destroy each other: “As to the strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger” (Leviathan, p. 105). On this point we only need to pick up the daily newspaper for fresh evidence of how right Hobbes was, especially if the person who uses the power to kill is also prepared to die in the process. Hobbes concluded that this form of equality makes all people natural enemies. He also pointed to the tendency of any two people to “desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy” (ibid.).
Hobbes agreed with Plato and Aristotle in looking for the source of community in human nature. What is it about human nature that gives rise to community? Rather than love and friendship, Hobbes turned to fear and aggression as the basis of the state.
In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: first, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly glory. The first makes men invade for gain, the second for safety, and the third for reputation. The first use violence to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue (Leviathan, p. 106).
These three causes of strife among people lead to what Hobbes calls a “war of every man against every man” (ibid.), and this natural condition of warfare prevails not only when people are actively fighting each other but even when there is the threat of battle. He points out that when that kind of war prevails, people are not inclined to work, because they cannot enjoy the fruit of their labor. Agriculture, shipping of goods, architecture, the arts, the humanities, and the sciences are all vain pursuits, because in such a condition human beings are in constant fear of violent death. “The life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Leviathan, p. 107).
This natural condition of universal war renders all moral judgments meaningless, because no act can be just or unjust, right or wrong, good or bad. He says: “Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no justice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues” (Leviathan, p. 108). Hobbes is quite clear about the origin of values such as justice and injustice. They are not in the individual human being but come into existence only in society. Nothing is yours or mine in the state of nature, but whatever we own is ours only as long as we can keep it. Society comes about not only because people fear death from others when their backs are turned, but because most of the positive things we desire exist only with the creation of the commonwealth and the rule of law (Leviathan, pp. 108-109).
Law, according to Hobbes, is opposed to liberty. He defines liberty as “the absence of external impediments.” In the state of nature we are free to do or have whatever we desire, especially to preserve our own life. In other words, we have a natural right to everything. But for the sake of peace — to end “war of every man against every man” — we must give up that right to all things as long as other people are willing to do the same. People relinquish or transfer their natural right by means of a contract. This is the origin of the idea of the “social contract” (Leviathan, p. 112). Hobbes says:
The final cause, end, or design of men, who naturally love liberty and dominion over others, in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves in which we see them live in commonwealths is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby (Leviathan, p. 139).
But if this kind of contract is not backed by sufficient force, it immediately loses its power and people quickly return to defending themselves by any means necessary. According to Hobbes, only three kinds of commonwealth are possible: monarchy (the rule of a single person), democracy (the rule of all people in the society), and aristocracy (rule by only some of the people). Because of the horror and terror of life without the law and order established by society, Hobbes insists that the power of the sovereign must be absolute (whether in monarchy, democracy, or aristocracy). The difference among the types of commonwealth is not a difference in power but only in the way absolute power is exercised (Leviathan, p. 154). For that reason, Hobbes prefers monarchy — it is simply a more effective way of exercising absolute power. He admits that giving absolute power to the sovereign — the Leviathan — will probably lead to “evil consequences,” but the alternative of not giving absolute power to the sovereign is much worse, because it leads to “perpetual war of every man against his neighbor” (Leviathan, p. 169).
Thomas Hobbes is not the only proponent of the social contract as a basis for community in the modern world. John Locke is one of many who have contributed to articulating and revising this basic way of thinking about the foundation of civil society. Locke differs from Hobbes in important ways, but they agree on the basic need for a socially constructed state or nation to establish and preserve peace and avoid the horrible condition that prevails in the state of nature. The main difference between Hobbes and Locke becomes clear when we apply their separate models to larger and larger commonwealths. Hobbes insists that individuals have no right to leave or dissolve the commonwealth once it is established (Leviathan, p. 144). The American Revolution would have horrified him. But he would surely have applauded the great success of the British Empire and its ability to exercise its great power and assure peace and security in many parts of the world. For Hobbes, the major problem with the British empire would have been that it was not more absolute, larger, and more lasting. The idea of a world community ruled by a single power with an absolute sovereign is the logical outcome of Hobbes’ view of the best commonwealth. Locke’s vision was more liberal, less absolute. He would surely have favored a more decentralized and a more pluralistic form of world community, no doubt tending more toward democracy than monarchy. But I think that neither Hobbes nor Locke would have given up the idea of the nation state, no matter how large it grew and regardless of the specific form it might take (monarchy, democracy, or aristocracy). The social contract of the modern world is inseparable from the idea of the nation state. This is the theoretical center of modernism in the political order.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau might at first seem to oppose the modern move toward the nation state. He begins his book called The Social Contract [1762] with these famous words: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Gerard Hopkins [New York: Oxford University Press, 1962], p. 169). This might be interpreted as a call for individualism and a return to the state of nature. However, I agree with Sir Ernest Barker, who claims that Rousseau’s apparent yearning for the “state of nature” is not a call for eliminating the nation state but just the opposite. Barker claims that Rousseau’s philosophy provides a bridge “from natural law to the idealization of the nation state” (ibid. p. xxxii). Rousseau prepares the way for the 19th century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who presented the nation state as the culmination and goal of history. For Rousseau the state is, as Barker puts it, “a progressive force which lifts man gradually upward from his primitive condition” (ibid.). Rousseau’s central concept of the “general will” lends support to this interpretation of the state as the highest development of human existence. Only in society is it possible for this unified force to exist. Rather than the “will of all,” which is produced by a collection of individuals, the “general will” is a radically different form of existence. It is a vision of a social reality that transcends all individuals but which may be expressed by a single person. Barker says that this idea, in Rousseau’s hand, becomes “a keen two-edged sword which seems to defend democracy, but ends by arming Leviathan” (ibid. p. xxxiii), mentioning Napoleon Bonaparte as the kind of Leviathan he has in mind. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the British and the French tried to create empires designed to achieve a world community following the model of the nation state created by the social contract. The colonialism that became so widespread in the 19th and 20th centuries was spawned by that vision of world empire. Today it is the United States that comes closest to fulfilling the dream of an empire that covers the entire globe.
The American Empire
We are used to talking about the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and even the “Evil Empire,” as President Ronald Reagan liked to call the Soviets during the Cold War. But the term “American Empire” is strange to our ears, even though the roots of American Empire extend as far back at the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson used the phrase “Empire of liberty” to refer to the new nation that was being constructed on the North American continent. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, who insisted that those who are ruled by Leviathan have no right to rebel against absolute power, the Founding Fathers rejected the British Empire but rapidly created one of their own. The Harvard University historian Niall Ferguson treats this irony in his book Colossus. He says:
Like Rome, it began with a relatively small core — the founding states’ combined area today is just 8 percent of the total extent of the United States — which expanded to dominate half a continent. Like Rome, it was an inclusive empire, relatively (though not wholly) promiscuous in the way it conferred citizenship. Like Rome, it had, at least for a time, its disenfranchised slaves. But unlike Rome, its republican constitution has withstood the ambition of any would be-Caesars — so far (p. 34).
But there is still time. Ferguson quickly points out that the Roman Republic was twice as old as the U.S. is today when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. The Federalist Papers contain many references to the U.S. as an “empire,” and the “open space” into which it expanded was, of course, already inhabited. Those who like to think of the American Empire as “benevolent” and as devoted to spreading democracy and “self-government” first have to overlook what that meant for the Native Americans.
There is a lot more that needs to be ignored if we are to agree with what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview on February 27, 2003. When asked whether he worried that sending U.S. troops into Iraq would give the impression that the United States is becoming imperial, Rumsfeld said:
Well, I’m sure that some people would say that, but it can’t be true because we’re not a colonial power. We’ve never been a colonial power. We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United States does. We never have and we never will. That’s not how democrats behave. That’s how an empire-building Soviet Union behaved but that’s not how the United States behaves (cited by Ferguson in Colossus, p. 1).
The idea that the U.S. is a benevolent power that uses its might to fight evil and spread goodness throughout the globe has been part of the rhetoric coming out of Washington, D.C. for a long time. Chalmers Johnson opens his book The Sorrows of Empire with a simple declaration by President George W. Bush on August 31, 2002: “Our nation is the greatest force for good in history” (Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004], p. 1).
The idea that world community can and should be achieved through the good work of a single nation state grows out of and is fully consistent with the fundamental principles articulated by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. When we attempt to fulfill that vision by extending U.S. power throughout the globe and by creating an American Empire, the peace, security, and social benefits promised by Hobbes provide its basic justification. Is this appeal to security as the most important value consistent with the other provisions of the U.S. Constitution, such as those laid out in the Bill of Rights? We do not have to look far to find people today who argue that peace and security are more important than strict adherence to the fundamental principles of the Constitution. Richard Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. In a book recently published by Oxford University Press, Judge Posner takes a stand that sounds a lot like that of Thomas Hobbes. Posner says: “It would be odd if the framers of the Constitution had cared more about every provision of the Bill of Rights than about national and personal survival” (cited by Michiko Kakutani in a review of Posner’s book called Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, The New York Times, September 19, 2006). For Posner, as for Hobbes, security is clearly a more important value than liberty. Posner says: “The importance of demonstrating resolve at the outset of a grim struggle and to a degree justifies the excesses of repression that so often accompany our entry into war, including the war against Al Qaeda” (ibid.). He continues: “A constitutional right should be modified when changed circumstances indicate that the right no longer strikes a sensible balance between competing constitutional values, such as personal liberty and public safety” (ibid.).
American pragmatism, in its popular and applied forms, is currently being used to justify the goals of what is presented as an altruistic and benign empire that seeks to police the world and spread democracy to every part of the globe. Judge Posner is an example of that kind of pragmatist. President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, and a host of others take that stand and seek to justify their actions on similar grounds. For that reason, it is a shock to consider the alternative narrative presented by Chalmers Johnson, a political historian who is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus at the University of California San Diego. Johnson began his professional life with a substantially different vision of American policy. At one point he had free access to CIA documents because of his credentials as a loyal, conservative scholar of Chinese and Japanese politics. That is not his current way of thinking, which already becomes clear in the prologue to The Sorrows of Empire. He puts it this way:
Americans like to say that the world changed as a result of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade center and the Pentagon. It would be more accurate to say that the attacks produced a dangerous change in the thinking of some of our leaders, who began to see our republic as a genuine empire, a new Rome, the greatest colossus in history, no longer bound by international law, the concerns of allies, or any constraints on its use of military force. The American people were still largely in the dark about why they had been attacked or why their State Department began warning them against tourism in an ever-growing list of foreign countries. (“Why do they hate us?” was a common plaint heard on talk shows, and the most common answer was “jealousy”). But a growing number finally began to understand what most non-Americans already knew and had experienced over the previous half century — namely, that the United States was something other than what it professed to be, that it was, in fact, a military juggernaut intent on world domination (Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, pp. 3-4).
The most powerful and persuasive argument presented by Johnson concerns the growing number of American military bases throughout the world. Johnson says that as of September of 2001 the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged the existence of at least 725 American military bases outside the U.S. But he says that the actual number is probably closer to 1,000 (Sorrows of Empire, pp. 4ff).
In 1996 Johnson visited the Japanese island of Okinawa where he found thirty-eight of those bases on about 20 percent of the island (ibid. pp. 6-7). This discovery led him to begin questioning the purpose of those U.S. bases and the hundreds of others around the globe. As a consultant to the CIA from 1967 to 1973, Johnson had learned that the business of the CIA is “covert activities, not intelligence collecting and analysis” (ibid. p. 10). Johnson connects this to the growing militarism of the United States: “part and parcel of the growth of militarism in the United States, the CIA has evolved into the president’s private army to be used for secret projects he personally wants carried out (as, for example, in Nicaragua and Afghanistan in the 1980s). … Today the CIA is just one of several commando units maintained by our government” (ibid. p. 11). In the Prologue of this book, Johnson already offers his conclusion based on what he has discovered about the spread of the American Empire:
In my opinion, the growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the United States is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” is probably irreversible. A revolution would be required to bring the Pentagon back under democratic control, or to abolish the Central Intelligence Agency, or even to contemplate enforcing article 1, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
This article is the one that empowers Congress and makes the United States a democracy (ibid. p. 12).
Johnson claims that the United States is currently “embarked on a path not unlike that of the former Soviet Union in the 1980s” (ibid. 13).
Although my primary purpose in this series of podcasts is to examine the philosophical foundations of world community, it is important to assess as clearly and accurately as possible where things stand. Is the United States building an empire for the purpose of world domination? If so, the philosophical vision of Thomas Hobbes seems to be well on the way to full realization with a degree of power and control that Hobbes could never have imagined. Chalmers Johnson is only one of a number of scholars who have written on the topic of empire and considered the role of the United States in that context. In my next podcast I will continue to review some of the recent publications concerning the origin and growth of the American Empire with the primary goal of determining how far this philosophical vision has been achieved and what are its prospects for the future.
Podcast # 2: The Rise of Nationalism in the Modern World
In Europe the period of modernism in philosophy begins in the 17th century. Building on the major transformation from theism to humanism during the Renaissance, in the realm of political theory and action it spawned the nation state. If the state is not grounded on a covenant with God, where are its roots to be found? Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau presented and developed the concept of a “social contract” among human beings as the foundation of the nation state. My purpose in introducing this quick history of the early development of the idea of the social contract is philosophical rather than historical. The fundamental principle at issue concerns the best possible form of human community. The early modern thinkers who formulated and developed the idea of the social contract considered the nation state to be the telos of history — the highest development of human existence on earth. This development is essential for the overall theme of world community, because it lays the foundation for the first of two forms of world community I will treat in this series of podcasts: the idea of empire. I will focus on the United States as the paradigm for that important development in the creation of human community.
The Social Contract
Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, more than a century before the American revolution. This work laid the modern foundation for thinking about the nature of civil society. It begins with an examination of the nature of human knowledge. In direct opposition to the Medieval practice of founding knowledge on “super-natural revelation,” Hobbes insisted that philosophy — “knowledge acquired by reasoning” —must serve as the basis for understanding the foundations of human society (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, Liberal Arts Press, 1958, p. 3). In other words, philosophy, not religion, must guide our thinking about the nature of human society and the best way to construct a human community. Even when they disagree with Hobbes about the nature of that community and about the nature of philosophy itself, most modern thinkers share his demand that human reason, not divine revelation, must shape our way of thinking about fundamental concepts, principles, decisions, and actions.
Hobbes devotes his primary attention to what he calls “commonwealth,” and he clearly has in mind a nation or, what is often called a “nation state.” One of his basic assumptions is that in a “state of nature” — what human beings would be outside of the commonwealth — all people would be equal in the ability to destroy each other: “As to the strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger” (Leviathan, p. 105). On this point we only need to pick up the daily newspaper for fresh evidence of how right Hobbes was, especially if the person who uses the power to kill is also prepared to die in the process. Hobbes concluded that this form of equality makes all people natural enemies. He also pointed to the tendency of any two people to “desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy” (ibid.).
Hobbes agreed with Plato and Aristotle in looking for the source of community in human nature. What is it about human nature that gives rise to community? Rather than love and friendship, Hobbes turned to fear and aggression as the basis of the state.
In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: first, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly glory. The first makes men invade for gain, the second for safety, and the third for reputation. The first use violence to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue (Leviathan, p. 106).
These three causes of strife among people lead to what Hobbes calls a “war of every man against every man” (ibid.), and this natural condition of warfare prevails not only when people are actively fighting each other but even when there is the threat of battle. He points out that when that kind of war prevails, people are not inclined to work, because they cannot enjoy the fruit of their labor. Agriculture, shipping of goods, architecture, the arts, the humanities, and the sciences are all vain pursuits, because in such a condition human beings are in constant fear of violent death. “The life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Leviathan, p. 107).
This natural condition of universal war renders all moral judgments meaningless, because no act can be just or unjust, right or wrong, good or bad. He says: “Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no justice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues” (Leviathan, p. 108). Hobbes is quite clear about the origin of values such as justice and injustice. They are not in the individual human being but come into existence only in society. Nothing is yours or mine in the state of nature, but whatever we own is ours only as long as we can keep it. Society comes about not only because people fear death from others when their backs are turned, but because most of the positive things we desire exist only with the creation of the commonwealth and the rule of law (Leviathan, pp. 108-109).
Law, according to Hobbes, is opposed to liberty. He defines liberty as “the absence of external impediments.” In the state of nature we are free to do or have whatever we desire, especially to preserve our own life. In other words, we have a natural right to everything. But for the sake of peace — to end “war of every man against every man” — we must give up that right to all things as long as other people are willing to do the same. People relinquish or transfer their natural right by means of a contract. This is the origin of the idea of the “social contract” (Leviathan, p. 112). Hobbes says:
The final cause, end, or design of men, who naturally love liberty and dominion over others, in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves in which we see them live in commonwealths is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby (Leviathan, p. 139).
But if this kind of contract is not backed by sufficient force, it immediately loses its power and people quickly return to defending themselves by any means necessary. According to Hobbes, only three kinds of commonwealth are possible: monarchy (the rule of a single person), democracy (the rule of all people in the society), and aristocracy (rule by only some of the people). Because of the horror and terror of life without the law and order established by society, Hobbes insists that the power of the sovereign must be absolute (whether in monarchy, democracy, or aristocracy). The difference among the types of commonwealth is not a difference in power but only in the way absolute power is exercised (Leviathan, p. 154). For that reason, Hobbes prefers monarchy — it is simply a more effective way of exercising absolute power. He admits that giving absolute power to the sovereign — the Leviathan — will probably lead to “evil consequences,” but the alternative of not giving absolute power to the sovereign is much worse, because it leads to “perpetual war of every man against his neighbor” (Leviathan, p. 169).
Thomas Hobbes is not the only proponent of the social contract as a basis for community in the modern world. John Locke is one of many who have contributed to articulating and revising this basic way of thinking about the foundation of civil society. Locke differs from Hobbes in important ways, but they agree on the basic need for a socially constructed state or nation to establish and preserve peace and avoid the horrible condition that prevails in the state of nature. The main difference between Hobbes and Locke becomes clear when we apply their separate models to larger and larger commonwealths. Hobbes insists that individuals have no right to leave or dissolve the commonwealth once it is established (Leviathan, p. 144). The American Revolution would have horrified him. But he would surely have applauded the great success of the British Empire and its ability to exercise its great power and assure peace and security in many parts of the world. For Hobbes, the major problem with the British empire would have been that it was not more absolute, larger, and more lasting. The idea of a world community ruled by a single power with an absolute sovereign is the logical outcome of Hobbes’ view of the best commonwealth. Locke’s vision was more liberal, less absolute. He would surely have favored a more decentralized and a more pluralistic form of world community, no doubt tending more toward democracy than monarchy. But I think that neither Hobbes nor Locke would have given up the idea of the nation state, no matter how large it grew and regardless of the specific form it might take (monarchy, democracy, or aristocracy). The social contract of the modern world is inseparable from the idea of the nation state. This is the theoretical center of modernism in the political order.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau might at first seem to oppose the modern move toward the nation state. He begins his book called The Social Contract [1762] with these famous words: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Gerard Hopkins [New York: Oxford University Press, 1962], p. 169). This might be interpreted as a call for individualism and a return to the state of nature. However, I agree with Sir Ernest Barker, who claims that Rousseau’s apparent yearning for the “state of nature” is not a call for eliminating the nation state but just the opposite. Barker claims that Rousseau’s philosophy provides a bridge “from natural law to the idealization of the nation state” (ibid. p. xxxii). Rousseau prepares the way for the 19th century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who presented the nation state as the culmination and goal of history. For Rousseau the state is, as Barker puts it, “a progressive force which lifts man gradually upward from his primitive condition” (ibid.). Rousseau’s central concept of the “general will” lends support to this interpretation of the state as the highest development of human existence. Only in society is it possible for this unified force to exist. Rather than the “will of all,” which is produced by a collection of individuals, the “general will” is a radically different form of existence. It is a vision of a social reality that transcends all individuals but which may be expressed by a single person. Barker says that this idea, in Rousseau’s hand, becomes “a keen two-edged sword which seems to defend democracy, but ends by arming Leviathan” (ibid. p. xxxiii), mentioning Napoleon Bonaparte as the kind of Leviathan he has in mind. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the British and the French tried to create empires designed to achieve a world community following the model of the nation state created by the social contract. The colonialism that became so widespread in the 19th and 20th centuries was spawned by that vision of world empire. Today it is the United States that comes closest to fulfilling the dream of an empire that covers the entire globe.
The American Empire
We are used to talking about the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and even the “Evil Empire,” as President Ronald Reagan liked to call the Soviets during the Cold War. But the term “American Empire” is strange to our ears, even though the roots of American Empire extend as far back at the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson used the phrase “Empire of liberty” to refer to the new nation that was being constructed on the North American continent. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, who insisted that those who are ruled by Leviathan have no right to rebel against absolute power, the Founding Fathers rejected the British Empire but rapidly created one of their own. The Harvard University historian Niall Ferguson treats this irony in his book Colossus. He says:
Like Rome, it began with a relatively small core — the founding states’ combined area today is just 8 percent of the total extent of the United States — which expanded to dominate half a continent. Like Rome, it was an inclusive empire, relatively (though not wholly) promiscuous in the way it conferred citizenship. Like Rome, it had, at least for a time, its disenfranchised slaves. But unlike Rome, its republican constitution has withstood the ambition of any would be-Caesars — so far (p. 34).
But there is still time. Ferguson quickly points out that the Roman Republic was twice as old as the U.S. is today when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. The Federalist Papers contain many references to the U.S. as an “empire,” and the “open space” into which it expanded was, of course, already inhabited. Those who like to think of the American Empire as “benevolent” and as devoted to spreading democracy and “self-government” first have to overlook what that meant for the Native Americans.
There is a lot more that needs to be ignored if we are to agree with what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview on February 27, 2003. When asked whether he worried that sending U.S. troops into Iraq would give the impression that the United States is becoming imperial, Rumsfeld said:
Well, I’m sure that some people would say that, but it can’t be true because we’re not a colonial power. We’ve never been a colonial power. We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United States does. We never have and we never will. That’s not how democrats behave. That’s how an empire-building Soviet Union behaved but that’s not how the United States behaves (cited by Ferguson in Colossus, p. 1).
The idea that the U.S. is a benevolent power that uses its might to fight evil and spread goodness throughout the globe has been part of the rhetoric coming out of Washington, D.C. for a long time. Chalmers Johnson opens his book The Sorrows of Empire with a simple declaration by President George W. Bush on August 31, 2002: “Our nation is the greatest force for good in history” (Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004], p. 1).
The idea that world community can and should be achieved through the good work of a single nation state grows out of and is fully consistent with the fundamental principles articulated by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. When we attempt to fulfill that vision by extending U.S. power throughout the globe and by creating an American Empire, the peace, security, and social benefits promised by Hobbes provide its basic justification. Is this appeal to security as the most important value consistent with the other provisions of the U.S. Constitution, such as those laid out in the Bill of Rights? We do not have to look far to find people today who argue that peace and security are more important than strict adherence to the fundamental principles of the Constitution. Richard Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. In a book recently published by Oxford University Press, Judge Posner takes a stand that sounds a lot like that of Thomas Hobbes. Posner says: “It would be odd if the framers of the Constitution had cared more about every provision of the Bill of Rights than about national and personal survival” (cited by Michiko Kakutani in a review of Posner’s book called Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, The New York Times, September 19, 2006). For Posner, as for Hobbes, security is clearly a more important value than liberty. Posner says: “The importance of demonstrating resolve at the outset of a grim struggle and to a degree justifies the excesses of repression that so often accompany our entry into war, including the war against Al Qaeda” (ibid.). He continues: “A constitutional right should be modified when changed circumstances indicate that the right no longer strikes a sensible balance between competing constitutional values, such as personal liberty and public safety” (ibid.).
American pragmatism, in its popular and applied forms, is currently being used to justify the goals of what is presented as an altruistic and benign empire that seeks to police the world and spread democracy to every part of the globe. Judge Posner is an example of that kind of pragmatist. President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, and a host of others take that stand and seek to justify their actions on similar grounds. For that reason, it is a shock to consider the alternative narrative presented by Chalmers Johnson, a political historian who is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus at the University of California San Diego. Johnson began his professional life with a substantially different vision of American policy. At one point he had free access to CIA documents because of his credentials as a loyal, conservative scholar of Chinese and Japanese politics. That is not his current way of thinking, which already becomes clear in the prologue to The Sorrows of Empire. He puts it this way:
Americans like to say that the world changed as a result of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade center and the Pentagon. It would be more accurate to say that the attacks produced a dangerous change in the thinking of some of our leaders, who began to see our republic as a genuine empire, a new Rome, the greatest colossus in history, no longer bound by international law, the concerns of allies, or any constraints on its use of military force. The American people were still largely in the dark about why they had been attacked or why their State Department began warning them against tourism in an ever-growing list of foreign countries. (“Why do they hate us?” was a common plaint heard on talk shows, and the most common answer was “jealousy”). But a growing number finally began to understand what most non-Americans already knew and had experienced over the previous half century — namely, that the United States was something other than what it professed to be, that it was, in fact, a military juggernaut intent on world domination (Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, pp. 3-4).
The most powerful and persuasive argument presented by Johnson concerns the growing number of American military bases throughout the world. Johnson says that as of September of 2001 the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged the existence of at least 725 American military bases outside the U.S. But he says that the actual number is probably closer to 1,000 (Sorrows of Empire, pp. 4ff).
In 1996 Johnson visited the Japanese island of Okinawa where he found thirty-eight of those bases on about 20 percent of the island (ibid. pp. 6-7). This discovery led him to begin questioning the purpose of those U.S. bases and the hundreds of others around the globe. As a consultant to the CIA from 1967 to 1973, Johnson had learned that the business of the CIA is “covert activities, not intelligence collecting and analysis” (ibid. p. 10). Johnson connects this to the growing militarism of the United States: “part and parcel of the growth of militarism in the United States, the CIA has evolved into the president’s private army to be used for secret projects he personally wants carried out (as, for example, in Nicaragua and Afghanistan in the 1980s). … Today the CIA is just one of several commando units maintained by our government” (ibid. p. 11). In the Prologue of this book, Johnson already offers his conclusion based on what he has discovered about the spread of the American Empire:
In my opinion, the growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the United States is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” is probably irreversible. A revolution would be required to bring the Pentagon back under democratic control, or to abolish the Central Intelligence Agency, or even to contemplate enforcing article 1, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
This article is the one that empowers Congress and makes the United States a democracy (ibid. p. 12).
Johnson claims that the United States is currently “embarked on a path not unlike that of the former Soviet Union in the 1980s” (ibid. 13).
Although my primary purpose in this series of podcasts is to examine the philosophical foundations of world community, it is important to assess as clearly and accurately as possible where things stand. Is the United States building an empire for the purpose of world domination? If so, the philosophical vision of Thomas Hobbes seems to be well on the way to full realization with a degree of power and control that Hobbes could never have imagined. Chalmers Johnson is only one of a number of scholars who have written on the topic of empire and considered the role of the United States in that context. In my next podcast I will continue to review some of the recent publications concerning the origin and growth of the American Empire with the primary goal of determining how far this philosophical vision has been achieved and what are its prospects for the future.
