Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Daniel Mahoney is Professor Emeritus at Assumption University, where he serves as the Augustinian Chair and Professor of Political Science. Professor Mahoney earned his PhD from the Catholic University of America, and he has contributed important academic work, mostly exploring the intersection of religion, and politics, and history. He’s the author or editor of 12 books. His most recent book, The Statesman as Thinker, is the topic of our conversation today.
Professor Mahoney, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Oh, thank you, Dr. Mohler. Very happy to be here.
Albert Mohler:
You have written this most recent book, The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage and Moderation. You’ve got a couple of controversial words there in the first part of your title, “The Statement as Thinker.” So I’m going to just kind of throw something at you, and that is what exactly is a statesman, and why would you dare to write about statesmanship in the 21st century?
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Well, statesmanship I think is an old and noble term, but it’s also not one that’s regularly used in contemporary political discourse. Unfortunately, we reduce political leadership to the word leader, and the leader has some very unfortunate connotations in the 20th century. The Führer, the Duce. Stalin was the Vozhd, and leadership can suggest tyrannical command, and that kind of thing. So we’re often very promiscuous with our language, not thinking through the implications or the connotations of certain words, but the statesmen certainly in English has always connoted an outstanding form of political rule or political leadership. The best and the simplest way I could put it would be the statesman is somebody who is the polar opposite of the tyrant.
Aristotle tells us in his Politics that the tyrant rules for his own self-interest and in complete contradistinction to the common good. Well, the statesman is somebody who rules for the common good, but you might say a statesman is somebody who combines ambition with public spiritedness, with a concern for the common good. That’s very rare to put those three things together. I’ve distinguished the statesmen from the tyrant, and I think that’s a essential distinction. If one wants to think dramatically or at a dramatic historical moment, think Churchill versus Hitler in the summer of 1940, the magnanimous statesman versus the mad but also ideological tyrant.
There’s also a full range, a gradation of political leaders, I think, who can be public spirited without embodying what Cicero and the Greeks, and following them much of the Christian tradition called the cardinal virtues. You might say the virtues that proceed the great theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, the virtues of courage, moderation, justice, and prudence. And sometimes in the book I identify statesmanship with honorable ambition, people who-
Albert Mohler:
Well, you put a moral context to it, and that’s what’s so important, because people even I think in contemporary English usage, when they do refer to statesmen, think of it as something morally neutral. Joseph Stalin was a statesman. Franklin Roosevelt was a statesman. There’s an essential moral content to the meaning of that word, and I appreciate the fact you’re seeking to rescue the virtues here.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Oh, yeah, and for me, the notion of statesmanship, it’s empirical in the sense that it describes a real phenomena, but that phenomena is normative. The virtues are integral to the phenomena itself. It’s not a value free. Max Weber, the famous German sociologist was a very capable and wise man, didn’t really follow his own theory, but he was one of the first social scientists to talk about [foreign language 00:04:48] social science, value free. So he said he lumped it all together. The charismatic leader would include Hitler, and Churchill, and Pericles, and Lincoln, and Robespierre. My view is if you think that we are incapable as individuals and as members of political communities of distinguishing different forms of leadership or charisma, then we understand nothing at all, because we cannot understand reality without the moral qualities and the virtues integral to that reality itself.
So that’s a very important thing for Christians to realize, that it’s not just a matter of power with faith. Faith is always accompanied by or should be accompanied by a concern for virtue, and I would say religious faith deepens and completes those natural virtues, but it certainly doesn’t do away with them. They’re-
Albert Mohler:
No, and Protestant and Catholic alike, we would point to the classical virtues as part of God’s gift of the natural law and of creation order, of natural revelation. That’s not enough, but it’s still a part of God’s giftedness to humanity that the classical virtues have endured. I think of the founding of the American political experiment, and the fact that so many of the framers explicitly sought to ground their identity as if they jumped backwards over, or at least they attempted to jump backwards over 19 or 20th centuries of human history in order to be even depicted in statutory as if they’re Roman and Greek statesman.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Absolutely. I think the founders, their understanding you might say of the moral life is, well, it’s influenced in part by a modern tradition of natural rights. It’s deeply indebted to the biblical tradition, but it’s also in their understanding of political virtue of you might say high minded public spirited ambition. They were readers of Pellucidities Lives, and Thucydides, and Aristotle’s Politics, and a book that was very important for the Christian tradition as a book I talk about in the Statesman as Thinker, De Officiis, the book on duties by Cicero. That was probably the most important book of moral philosophy for not only the Catholic Middle Ages, but for many of the reformers, and it’s really a very noble and admirable description of the kinds of qualities of soul that are necessary for a decent human life, but also for the exercise of political authority in a free and lawful community.
So I think we need to recover these categories, because to come back to something I said a moment ago, they help us understand reality, and they help us understand ourselves. Now, there’s some tensions here, because anyone who spends an hour with scripture knows that humility, humility before God, our Father and friend, is in some tension, I think, with greatness of soul, but I don’t think there is a radical opposition and-
Albert Mohler:
No, there can’t be, or we’re in big trouble.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
There can’t be. Yeah, I mean God ordains our authority, and the natural virtues are part of the created natural order. And so if there’s tensions, perhaps there’s always a possibility that somebody with great gifts can forget the source of those gifts, but I also think in modern moral life and political life, sometimes there’s a failure to appreciate that we’re obliged to use our talents and gifts at the service and defense of liberty and human dignity of the common good.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
If we don’t do that, I would say that’s a terrible moral abdication.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. The Christian biblical worldview begins with the fact that the gifts are not evenly distributed, and so there are individuals of greatness, and that’s true in the biblical account, both in the Old and New Testament. It is not an egalitarian document, as if there is no differential in the gifts given to people and the vocations invested in people. At the same time, the Bible is very clear about the power of sin, and I would identify very much as an Augustinian, in which case you look for greatness, but you never expect the greatness to be untainted. You just thank God for the greatness when it appears in the right clothes, at the right time, with the right beliefs in order to protect the virtues.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And I think that you make a very important point that the affirmation of the Imago Dei it’s not identical to this aggressive, modern egalitarianism that levels, and denies distinctions, and denies perhaps a differentiation, the goods and talents that God has given each of us. Augustine is very interesting, because as you’ll remember, Cicero is a major figure in my book because I think he provides a template, and use a fancy word from philosophy, kind of phenomenology of the moral political virtues, but Augustine in the City of God is very critical of Rome, but we have to pay close attention. He saw danger in Roman virtue that people would think of virtue as too self-sufficient, Rome as the real source of authority rather than God.
But on the other hand, if you look closely, Augustine admired the best of pagan virtue, and it was Cicero’s Hortensius, a book lost of us, that turned him to philosophy that allowed him to see that our reason can give us access to wisdom. And so Augustine is a good-
Albert Mohler:
And pagan virtue is not entirely pagan Augustine would say. The pagans may not know that their virtue is grounded in a metaphysical source, but it is.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
I think that’s quite right. And the other thing is that I think Christianity can add to classical wisdom something you alluded to a moment ago, namely the fall, original sin, a certain skepticism about the absolute exercise of power by anyone including the virtuous, but that doesn’t mean that we reduce, we deny the possibility of public spirited leadership, or we make no distinctions as I did at the beginning of my remarks, between the statesmen, the tyrant, the ordinary, or even mediocre politicians. So to be aware of the fall, it’s a powerful argument, not necessarily indebted to modern liberal political philosophy against for limited government, but statesmanship is a category that only really belongs to free government, because as we said before, it’s normative. I think to refer to the statesmanship of Stalin or somebody like that, or Mao Zedong is to misuse language.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. By the way, I think of one of the statesmen as thinkers you cover quite well in the book, and that’s Winston Churchill. And I often think of the Augustinian understanding of humanity with that anecdote about Churchill as a boy being told that he is a bug, and he will say, “Then I will be a lightning bug.” And a lightning bug is still a bug, but a lightning bug is a lightning bug.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. It’s certainly interesting. Two figures I deal within the book, two great 20th century statesmen, Winston Churchill and the great French statesman, Charles de Gaulle, they both had a sense even in their teenage years that they were cold to something excellent. De Gaulle wrote a paper when he was in high school at the age of 15, that in the year 1930, General de Gaulle would save France and Europe from the German invader, and Andrew Roberts reports in his very fine biography of Churchill that Churchill once told a buddy of his at Sandhurst about the same time that he was called to high things.
Albert Mohler:
He called it the dream.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
The dream.
Albert Mohler:
He said it was revealed to him in a dream, and he talked about it with his contemporaries as a teenager.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Exactly. So it’s quite extraordinary. These were man who had a sense of destiny, but never ever would they think that they would do anything to accumulate power, or that the rapacious and immoral exercise of authority could create a field for greatness.
Albert Mohler:
You think of someone like William Manchester in his first volume on Churchill, which by the way, prosaically is one of the most beautiful introductory chapters of any work of biography ever written.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yeah, it’s very well done. I agree.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. It’s not the most factually insightful biography, but it is lyrically the very best.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Martin Gilbert is 100% accurate, but he writes a little bit not badly, but a little bit like an academic historian.
Albert Mohler:
Exactly.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
William Manchester is a journalist who knows how to write, and knows how to evoke the faith of the spirit.
Albert Mohler:
Right. What I’m referencing there with Manchester is where he speaks of Churchill in the introduction, and he says this, he says, “He would like a Manichaean, he would gather all the forces of light against the forces of darkness and would accumulate massive super constitutional power in order to defend liberty and give it away.” It’s just an amazing thing.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Well, the Romans had this office of the dictator, and the dictator is misunderstood. It was a constitutional office, and it meant that during a time of crisis when the republic or the homeland was threatened, one man, prime minister, chief executive, a general in the Roman context, would do his duty, save the republic, and go home. And that was, for example, the model of Cincinnatus.
So many Americans rightly compare George Washington do, but when de Gaulle was given what his wife called the Royal Order of the Boot in July 1945, he went home. Of course, he became the leader of the opposition of Parliament.
Albert Mohler:
He didn’t go home to retire, but, yes, he went home.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
He went home. He didn’t retire.
Albert Mohler:
He turned in his seals of office.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And both de Gaulle and Churchill for wrote their memoirs during their years out of power after the Second World War, both would return, de Gaulle to establish a new French republic, because France had been undoubtedly very badly governed from 1789 onwards. So France was a country in search of a viable, stable, lawful political order. And de Gaulle more or less gave it to them in 1958. Churchill had other tasks, but he took on a new role as a world statesman, most famously two speeches he gave. One in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946, the famous… He called it The Sinews of Peace because he was laying out a strategy to maintain peace, and liberty, and Western civilization, but it’s famously remembered as the Iron Curtain Speech because it’s dramatic image of the Iron Curtain from stepping to-
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. Trieste.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yeah, it’s a beautiful passage and a memorable speech. And then he gave a great speech at Zurich on September 19, 1946 just a little over a year out of power. And while Churchill didn’t want Britain to be a full member of an emerging European community, because it had its commonwealth, and it had a special relationship with the United States, he wanted Britain to be a friend of the pacification of Europe. But what he said in that great speech is, “I am going to say something that will astonish you.” So it’s September ’46, the was has just ended, and he said, “The future of Europe, a Europe rooted in peace and freedom will be found in the reconciliation between a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.” It took only somebody with Winston Churchill’s moral authority could have delivered the Iron Curtain Speech at a time when public opinion was still enamored of the alliance with Uncle Joe and the Soviet Union, and could have spoken about the need to incorporate a free and revitalized Germany in the community of free nations. And both speeches are as memorable as anything Churchill ever delivered.
One thing I should add about Churchill in the book, I do deal with the question of his religious views, which are interesting. I would say he was certainly not a Christian of Orthodox conviction, but he was deeply influenced by Christian ethics. He was certainly not an atheist. I sometimes say he had a bit of a classical pagan soul, but in all his wartime speeches, he never said, “We’re fighting for democracy against the Third Reich.” He says, “We’re fighting to defend liberal and Christian civilization.” And he had a deep sense that what Nazi Germany, and communism too, and its Soviet form represented was a frontal assault on the conception of human dignity that had arisen in the West, and-
Albert Mohler:
That’s right. Well, you pointed to Christian civilization. I think that’s absolutely crucial for not only Churchill, but for many others. I’m a Baptist. I’m an evangelic. I’m a conversionist, and so when I look at someone like Churchill, I see someone who does not fit that paradigm and actually kind of was clear that he didn’t. He spoke of himself as an external buttress on the cathedral rather than a pillar within, but on the other hand the entire-
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
That was almost a self-deprecating remark.
Albert Mohler:
Right.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
He gave a great speech October 5, 1938 on the Munich Pact, and again there he spoke about a barbarous pagan ethic. This was a new paganism. This wasn’t Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle. This was a paganism that warred on all the virtues, warred on human dignity, and warred on the essential Christian conviction that every human person is made in the image and likeness of God. And in his own way, Churchill believed that. He-
Albert Mohler:
Well, I want to say he believed in Christianity. That’s the point I was going to make. He believed in the essential centrality of Christianity to Western civilization, and about that he never wavered.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Never wavered.
Albert Mohler:
And so he considered himself very much a member of the Church of England.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
He did.
Albert Mohler:
And never more so than in moments of urgency, such as during the war, but also in moments of national identity such as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. His statements were emphatically affirmative of the essential Christian character of Western civilization.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
He did. And you know he occasionally prayed?
Albert Mohler:
Yes. So did Lincoln.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
So did Lincoln. And Churchill also said I think in 1931, I mentioned this just in passing, so you may not remember it, but he said, “If Christ were to come back to Earth,” he says, “Maybe he would minister to the poor untouchables in India,” who he thought needed the grace and mercy of God, needed to be recognized for the human persons that they were. I always struck by that remark, because there’s a Christian sensibility, the sense that the care for the least of our brethren is a hallmark of Christian civilization, and this great war-
Albert Mohler:
Said by a man born in Blenheim Palace.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yes. He was just the first cousin of the Duke Marlborough and a direct descendant of John Churchill, who in a way was the… I mean, people sometimes ask me about Marlborough, and I say, “Well, he was the Churchill of the late 17th and early 18th Century.”
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, and Churchill described himself as a boy as the first son of the second son of the Duke of Marlborough.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
That’s great. Even as a boy, he was clever. He knew his history. He was witty, and he knew how to put a phrase together.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. And the fact that we’re talking about those phrases more than a century after they were uttered, that’s a very great deal,
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
That’s right. Lincoln is another one, by the way, who’s religiosity is probably ultimately unorthodox, but who had a deep-
Albert Mohler:
Maybe more so than Churchill, I would say as a theologian.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Maybe more so. I agree. I agree. And yet Lincoln’s entire thinking about ethics and politics is informed by the engagement with the King James Bible.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And in his early writings, I don’t know if you’ve ever read some of the work of Allen Guelzo, The Intellectual Story, and I’m sure you have.
Albert Mohler:
The most common guest on this program thus far.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
He’s a friend, and a wonderful man, and one of the great intellectual… He began as a religious historian writing on Jonathan Edwards and others, and his first kind of movement into the Lincoln period of the Civil War was a book called Redeemer President, but when Allen has shown is that as a young man, more rationalist, more skeptical religiously, Lincoln was obsessed with in a almost secularized Calvinist way with fatalism.
Albert Mohler:
That’s Right. He would call it Providence.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And that morphed very quickly into a deep and abiding reflection from the 1840s until his assassination in April 14th to 1865, on the relationship between divine providence and free will.
Albert Mohler:
An argument can be made, and I thought of this reading your book. An argument can be made, and I’ll just put it straightforwardly, that many of the great statesmen on the world stage when they have arrived could well be described in some sense as Manichaean. They have to divide the world between light and darkness, and they have to believe that the light can overcome the darkness, and they rally a nation, a people, an army, a generation to defeat the darkness. And you see that in Churchill, who again, Manchester calls him a Manichaean. And then if you look at Lincoln, much of what he says in the early period is very mannequin. His last speeches, and especially his second inaugural, appear to be a self conscious attempt to overcome that in order that a people divided by war could become one people again.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Reinhold Niebuhr has a book called The Irony of American History, which ends with just a two and a half page reflection on the second inaugural, but I think a very rich one where he says, “Lincoln managed on the one hand to uphold, you might say, in a viable standard of right and wrong, good and evil, that God is in judgment of Americans taking the bread from the labor that black people have earned with the sweat of their brow.” He never equivocates on the fundamental standard of right and wrong, of moral judgment. On the other hand, he shows in a kind of Augustinian way that our own motives are mixed, that God is-
Albert Mohler:
Both sides, yeah.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Both sides are under divine judgment, but again, without the kind of moral relativism that often accompany political judgment today.
When Christians lose, you might say the limited truth in that kind of moral Manichaeanism, because look, one only has to read scripture to see that there is a cosmic battle between good and evil that is real. And at the same time as one of my heroes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, always said, “The line dividing good and evil runs through every heart.” And the problem with these terrible ideological and tyrannical movements that marred the 20th century was that they were so sure that evil was localized in a particular group or class. We see this today with the new Racialism. You know exactly who the evil doers are. If you only get rid of them. That’s why all this talk about systemic racism has nothing to do with fighting the scourge of racism, because it itself is a secularized perversion of religious Manichaeanism where that still is tied to this notion through political revolution or through social struggle or the right kind of political order we can expunge evil from or this earth, and that-
Albert Mohler:
Right. And that’s part of the reason why the left is always replaced by another left, replaced by yet another left is because that Manichaeanism is never satisfied.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Absolutely. They’re never satisfied, and there’s a great spiritual and political maturity, a kind of moderation that comes. And I think Lincoln had it at the end of his life. When you recognize evil for what it is, but you also turn the sword inward in the language of Jesus Christ, that we’re not going to expunge evil from this world short of the consummation and the coming and the kingdom of heaven, but we are capable of restricting evil within ourselves. We are capable of creating or arriving at a political order that reflects some of the better angels of our nature without forgetting the human propensity to injustice and sin. So I’ve always liked Niebuhr to think, because I think he captures that. Whether Lincoln knew it was an Augustinian moment, he had arrived at a position I think of great spiritual maturity and lucidity with the second inaugural. And then you’re absolutely right.
Albert Mohler:
I have to believe the King James Bible had a lot to do with that, because Lincoln’s reading in the classical literature is not as extensive as Americans might think, but the King James Bible, I mean, it came out of him in virtually every single speech.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
The other great influence on him was Shakespeare. I mean, it’s amazing. I remember reading in Lord Charnwood’s great biography from the early 20th century of Lincoln, Lincoln was deeply obsessed. I don’t mean that in a critical way, but preoccupied with the question of the human soul, human motives, and this temptation to tyranny that he saw at work in slavery. And he actually read large chunks of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the cabinet as they were riding down the Potomac. Who else? I am sure these very worldly men, and they were quite capable men, Seward and the other, but I’m sure they’re thinking, “What the heck is this man doing reading Shakespeare’s Macbeth to us?” But he always said, “There’s nothing like it.” So he was less widely read than you might think, but what he read were the books that got to the heart of things, got to the heart of the soul, got to the heart of the truth, and so he was just a remarkable man.
I think of all the figures I deal with, he may be the most enigmatic. Well, de Gaulle is enigmatic in a different way because of his austerity of character, but Lincoln has one of those souls that is complex. George Washington embodied the Roman virtues in an American context, was a thoroughly decent man, who loved liberty and loved his country, but one doesn’t… I don’t think there was probably a terrible amount of complexity in his soul, but with Lincoln, there was great complexity.
Albert Mohler:
Right. It could have been too much. I mean, with Lincoln, the amazing thing is that he actually also had the gifts of statesmanship in terms of action, and that’s a very rare combination. I would say Churchill very similarly, just an incredibly rare combination. In your book, you have six major characters, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Václav Havel. Now, and by the way, I’m with you entirely on five of those, still remain to be convinced on the sixth, but nonetheless, I begin with Edmund Burke and Alexis Tocqueville. I still think that I could spend the rest of my life in terms of a secular conversation, in conversation with those two. I find myself in intellectual conversation with both of them almost every day.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Me too.
Albert Mohler:
I think my basic understanding of the entire political structure and of government, and how culture works, and what liberty means is very much tied to those two figures. I was surprised in one sense and pleased that you identify them as statesmen because it just… And both of them held office, but not major office, and frankly not for long, and neither one of them is remembered primarily for holding any political office, either in Parliament or in France, especially ambassadorial positions, but nonetheless, both of them still are major figures astride the world stage, and I appreciate you beginning with them.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And I would say this, some of our conservative friends who are tempted by, oh, on the Catholic right, integralism or others who’ve sort of lost faith in liberty under law, or I think if they turn to the tremendous intellectual and moral resources made possible by Burke and Tocqueville, they would see that there’s another way of conceptualizing liberty, a proud defensive liberty, a tough minded defensive liberty that is shorn of all hostility to religion and utopian illusions. About the amount of time each spent as a statesman, I meant Burke and Lincoln respectively, I guess I would include the period 1790 to 1797, the period when Reflections on the Revolution in France was written, the Letters on a Regicide Peace, Thoughts on French Affairs, and many other great works, and the great valedictory Letter to a Noble Lord. I would say that Burke’s public opposition to the first manifestation of ideological despotism, of ideological fanaticism in the world was an active statesmanship in the British parliament.
Albert Mohler:
Oh, Absolutely.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
In the British parliament he spoke on.
Albert Mohler:
I’m agreeing with you, not disagreeing.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
No, I know. But you’re right. He only held… First of all, the Whigs. He was a Whig. He broke with the Whigs over the French Revolution. You’ll remember the great letter from of the olds Whigs to the new. He was shocked that people like Fox were so ebullient about the French Revolution, and so blind to the fact that it was something very new and different under the sun. “It was an arm doctrine,” as he put it, much as Soviet communism was, but the Whigs were only in power briefly, I think 1783, and he held a lower level cabinet position for six months, or maybe less. Yeah. Tocqueville on the other hand, he too was like Burke. He was a parliamentarian under the Orléans monarchy. And then he ran for office and won after the revolution of 1848.
As I show in my chapter, he was extremely critical of the socialist turn that the French revolution was making with the revolution of 1848, but on the other hand, he wanted nothing to do with the conservative authoritarianism that Louis-Napoleon, and the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte represented. So Tocqueville really was in his own self appellation a party of one. While he had great respect for the old regime, he knew you couldn’t go back. He called himself a strange kind of liberal, because most of the other liberals were too indulgent toward the left or too open to anti-religious sentiment. He was the only Frenchman of note who understood that the American model provided important resources for thinking about constitutionalism, and the rule of law, and how a democracy could be decent and effective, I call him-
Albert Mohler:
And liberal in that sense, the sense in which you’re using the word liberal means belonging to the tradition and the advocacy for classical liberalism, classical liberty, not liberalism in any modern political sense.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Absolutely. The word means so many different things today. Liberalism I’d say for about 100 years now, has been dominated by an impulse, the Pas d’Ennemi à gauche, no enemies to the left. Lincoln Steffens, the muckraker journalist, went to the Soviet Union in 1923, and he said, “I have seen the future, and it works.” And you were a long way from Burke’s clarity.
Albert Mohler:
I have read Lincoln Steffens, and he lies.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And he lies.
Albert Mohler:
Lincoln Steffens, yeah. I mean, it’s a word. I just want to pause, because when people hear it, it’s also generational, and they don’t understand that we’re talking about it in an 18th century and early 19th century sense, which means the constitutional principles of ordered liberty that both Burke and Tocqueville yearned for.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
For you and me, I think Burke and Tocqueville are the great theoreticians and to some extent practitioners of this tradition of ordered liberty, and it is a kind of liberalism. It’s also a kind of conservatism, because they knew there could be no tradition of liberty without conserving that. I mean, I always tell my students over the years, “Just think for a minute. While there was some talk among the revolutionaries that they were doing something, making Republican government work for really the first time, that this was a new order of the ages, there was some heady talk like that, but never would they have thought of calling the writing of the Declaration or the establishment of the Constitution in 1787, seeing it as the commencing of year zero.”
Albert Mohler:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that again, that’s the French Revolution.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
I mean that was completely alien. The year establishment of the Republican Constitution in France was year zero.
Albert Mohler:
Right. That’s a refutation of Christianity more than anything else.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
It was. And by the way, the French revolutionary calendar got rid of Sunday. The décades, which was the 10th day of the week was sort of the day that people had off from work, but even Robespierre, who wanted to make up a civil religion based on the supreme being and certainly favored terrible persecution of the Catholic church and the Christian religion, even he was concerned. He said, “Boy, people have off on the décades, and they go to the taverns and drink instead of going to church to worship.” So he wanted to make up his own religion, so people would not be unruly on the fake Sabbath. Yeah. No, liberalism is a contested tradition.
Albert Mohler:
And it’s a word I avoid honestly.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Me too.
Albert Mohler:
Because I talk about ordered liberty, and I just want to make clear that in the political sphere, in one sense, in a very real sense, to believe in ordered liberty put you on the left in the 18th century, but far on the right in the 21st century.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
That is absolutely right.
Albert Mohler:
And it’s the same ideas in this context are profoundly conservative.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And that’s why I would say that Burke and Lincoln are figures who are at the same time liberal and conservative for precisely the reason you just highlighted, I wrote a book, I think you know from 2010 or 11 called The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order, and I talk about certain figures, sometimes I call them conservative minded liberals or liberal conservatives, but it seems to me, those of us who belong to that grand Burkean, Tocquevillian, Churchillian tradition, we are the party of ordered liberty. We are the party of constitutionalism, and I would add one other thing that was really central to Tocqueville’s statesmanship and thought, as he said the great task was to keep the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion together. Now, for Tocqueville that did not mean or necessarily mean an established church, but it meant secular authority that was friendly to a Christian understanding of human dignity, an understanding of what it means to exercise.
Tocqueville always said, “If you don’t have faith, you’re going to have despotism,” because faith besides opening us up to truth and transcendence, it allows us to order our souls in ways that are compatible with living in a political order dedicated to human liberty. And if we don’t govern ourselves, if self government just doesn’t mean the people having a say in government, it means the governance of the self. Liberty under law is not just the external law, but it’s the moral law.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. That’s the reason why, again, the US Constitution is only fitting for a religious people.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
That’s exactly right. By the way about Tocqueville, I was going to mention he was briefly foreign minister of France.
Albert Mohler:
That’s why I mentioned ambassador for just in terms of foreign policy.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Foreign minister, but he was between a rock and a hard place, because he saw the rise of Louis-Napoleon, which is largely a reaction to the sort of red threat, the socialist threat.
Albert Mohler:
That’s right.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
But I think Tocqueville is one of those people who all of his thought is Statesmanlike. It’s directed at providing sound, prudent, and I would say quite elevating judgment to guide the right exercise of democratic freedom, but I think Tocqueville will definitely be remembered much more for his thought than his action. In the book, I deal with his memoirs because his life as a statesman is quite interesting, seeing this man trying to defend the cause of liberty and human dignity against both the reactionaries and the revolutionaries, and we Americans have been luckier. We’ve had until quite recently. Now I think we’re faced with ideological threats that, if I can put it this way, seem terribly un-American.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely, and terribly toxic, will undo ordered liberty, because it hates. These ideologies hate ordered liberty. I need to turn to a couple… Let me just tell you. One of the joys of a book, and as I said, I’ve got an entire stack of your book here and appreciated every one of them, but-
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
I can recognize a few of them there.
Albert Mohler:
I’m sure you can, and I commend them, but the fun of a book is where you’re surprised, and the surprise can be pleasant or unpleasant. Okay?
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Okay.
Albert Mohler:
So let me just talk about the pleasant surprise. I knew of your admiration for de Gaulle. You’d already written a monograph on de Gaulle.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Correct.
Albert Mohler:
As a boy trying to understand the world around me, I quickly discovered Winston Churchill as a hero, and yet not de Gaulle, partly because de Gaulle so irritated Churchill, and because I came of age when de Gaulle represented a certain strain of anti-Americanism, and so honestly, that’s how I kind of thought of de Gaulle, and I have to tell you that one of the experiences of my adult life has been kind of a continuing reappraisal of Charles de Gaulle, and he’s kind of protean, I would argue, and that all these great leaders are, and that if you took him at any one season, you wouldn’t see the whole. But reading de Gaulle’s memoirs, and then understanding more of his sense of France. That’s as he said, “A certain sense of France,” has led me to believe that he was one of the indispensable men of the 20th century, and one from whom we can continue to learn in the 21st.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yeah, let me say this about de Gaulle. I mean, de Gaulle really had a soul, a complex soul that embodied many of the classical virtues, this desire to do something great for his country, but always within the bounds of honor, liberty, and something he cared very much about, the independence of France. During the war, it is true Churchill helped de Gaulle immensely. There’s a French historian, François Kersaudy, who has written a book called Churchill. I guess the French would say,” [foreign language 00:46:20].” But it’s despite all the tension during the war, and they mainly had to do with de Gaulle’s prickliness in reminding the allies that France wasn’t finished and couldn’t be taken for granted. Churchill actually had great sympathy for that.
Albert Mohler:
He did. He spoke of it openly.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yeah. Roosevelt had none. He thought de Gaulle… He misjudged him. He thought he was a prima donna.
Albert Mohler:
Well, he was, but that was a part of his self consciousness.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Absolutely.
Albert Mohler:
It was for France, not for de Gaulle.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Well, you’re getting right to where I’m heading. Churchill said to de Gaulle once… I mean to Roosevelt. Roosevelt says, “He thinks he’s Joan of Ark.” And Churchill said, “Well, he sort of is Joan of Ark.”
Albert Mohler:
That’s exactly right.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And de Gaulle says in his memoirs, “Roosevelt thought I was an egoist,” but he said, “He didn’t realize that my actions were for the sake of France. They weren’t simply self-interested,” and he was quite willing to leave power in 1946 when his vision of a revitalized constitution with stronger presidential leadership was rejected by the French political class. Then we get to the 1960s, I mean, de Gaulle was anti-communist. There’s no doubt about it. During the Berlin crisis of ’58, ’61, he was very hawkish. He alone of the Western leaders wanted to tear the wall down. He was a very strong ally of the United States during all those crises, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he wanted a NATO where Britain and France played a much larger role, and where they were not, as he put it somewhat indelicately, “Dictated to by an American generalissimo.” And that ultimately led him in late ’66 to withdraw France from the military wing of NATO, but it’s interesting. De Gaulle had very good relations in the last months of his presidency with Nixon and Kissinger.
Albert Mohler:
Oh, absolutely.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
I’ll tell you why. Nixon and Kissinger. They appreciated that even though de Gaulle was a pain in the neck, maybe he exaggerated the capacity for the French acting independently in the world, but Kissinger wrote then and later, he said, “You’re not going to get passivism out of France. You’re not going to get nuclear disarmament. In the big crises, they’ll be with us.” And paradoxically, countries like Britain and Germany had huge peace movements, disarmament movements and all of that, because perhaps they were too dependent on American power. And so de Gaulle may have been right about the asymmetries of NATO, but there is no doubt that his prickliness… Kissinger once asked in 1969 when Nixon and Kissinger went to Paris, and de Gaulle had wonderful relations with Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of Germany from ’49 to ’63, and they met over 40 times, and they signed a treaty of friendship, and they were both religious men.
There was a great mass in the cathedral at Reims. You couldn’t imagine that with the EU today, that there could be any understanding of the Christian foundations Europe and the European project, but Kissinger says, “Well, what if Germany starts acting up again, those old military traditions come back? What are we going to do about it?” And de Gaulle says, “War.”
Albert Mohler:
That’s right, but, professor, there’s something we just ought to comment on here, and that is this, the last seven decades represent the longest period in the history of Western civilization when the French and the Germans have not been at war.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
That is exactly right.
Albert Mohler:
That is no small thing.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And I think it’s really that period. There had been the beginning of that reconciliation. I mentioned Churchill’s great speech at Zurich. There was a coal and steel pact. There was the European Treaty of Rome and…
Albert Mohler:
Commodities.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yeah, but it was between ’58 and ’63 that the real alliance, the unshakeable alliance and reconciliation between France and Germany had everything to do with the personal relationship and dual commitment of Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle, and that, it was a moment in modern… We don’t see men like that anymore.
Albert Mohler:
No, and one of the most interesting moments that we often just don’t think about very much is that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the question of the reuniting of Germany was one that actually in the emergency called out the best in France again.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
It did.
Albert Mohler:
In the sense that France could have basically opposed and perhaps prevailed in preventing a reunited Germany. France had more to lose than anyone else, and yet France went for ordered liberty again.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
The European statesman who was most skeptical about the reunification of Germany and most worried about what we used to call German revanchism was Margaret Thatcher.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
She was really, really worried, and I think exaggeratedly so. It’s an irony, because Margaret Thatcher was probably the most tough minded anti-communist leader in Europe, and yet when the moment came for East Germany to be dissolved and United within the federal Republic of Germany, she was very, very nervous and apprehensive, but it is true Germany yields tremendous influence and power within the European community, but I would say when it comes to military strategic matters, the bigger problem facing Germany is a semi pacifist culture, not the other way around.
Albert Mohler:
Oh, absolutely. And I think that becomes glaringly apparent in the last year. We can certainly see that. The big question is what in the world would Germany do to defend itself? The question is thus far, not nearly enough. I want to ask you a hypothetical question. You hint at the end of the book, when you mention Reagan and Thatcher, two heroes to me, who I got to observe on the world scene. Let me just back up and ask you a question, kind of a hedgehog and a fox question. Is it better for a statesman to know many things or just a few things?
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that. There are some. I mean, you look at Lincoln, and Lincoln for all his greatness of soul, really was centered on that question of whether or not a union dedicated to liberty and to the truth of the Declaration of Independence was compatible with chattel slavery, and certainly the extension of slavery into new states and territories. Churchill had a very rich and capacious soul, but I think he’s mainly remembered for that Manichaeism you spoke about, that singular sense of the evil and danger posed by the totalitarians. Reagan and Thatcher were runners up in my book, because I couldn’t quite call them thinkers, although Mrs. Thatcher gave some marvelous speeches. Some of her speeches, like to the Scottish Kirk while she explained why she wasn’t a socialist, she’s a very serious Christian, and the left always when she-
Albert Mohler:
I cite that address quite often, including one published work about Lady Thatcher. That was an amazing speech, partly because she gave it in the face of a crowd she knew would reject nearly every word she was saying.
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 [foreign language 00:55:38] of 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 except 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 in 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.
Albert Mohler:
No, absolutely.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
And a Christian faith.
Albert Mohler:
She called herself a Methodist and the daughter of a green grocer.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
By the way, if you want to sum her up, her biography, that underlying background that never goes away, that’s pretty darn good.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, it’s true.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
You asked me before, so I’ll ask you a question. I think you have some doubts about my including Havel. Is that right?
Albert Mohler:
I do have doubts. After reading your chapter, I still have doubts.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Okay. And why? You think he was just too much of a literary figure…
Albert Mohler:
I mean, you have convinced me that he was capable of not only literary greatness, but of a very clear moral courage as well. I just have to say that I think in terms of I’m a Christian theologian, I just have to say I think his basic commitment to a European vision that was based upon a secular humanism, that’s just a failed project. I think it failed in his own lifetime. I think it failed before his own eyes, and-
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Havel is complicated because he saw the acuity of a certain kind of secular rationalism, but didn’t quite have it in him to be a Christian, but he-
Albert Mohler:
Or to associate with Christianity. In other words, as a statesman, those are two different things I want to as a Christian make clear, but with Havel it was neither.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yeah. I mean, his anti totalitarian writings, The Power of the Powerless, Politics and Conscience, he certainly understood the essential and integral connection between ethics and politics, and his critique of the mendacity of the totalitarian regimes and ideology is very powerful, but you’ll remember this kind of searching for the memory of being and the ground of being. It’s kind of a philosopher writer’s effort to find some element of transcendence that is I think in the end, finally, too optional.
Albert Mohler:
Can I just say something here I’ve never said out loud before?
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Sure.
Albert Mohler:
The parallel I see is between Vaclav Havel and Barack Obama.
Both very, very bright, intellectually gifted individuals, kind of almost superhumanly gifted with certain particular gifts, and yet neither of them I think really understanding the world in a biblical or Augustinian sense, and that’s always looking to ground human dignity in human beings, which I think is just an absolutely hopeless proposition.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if I would call him a secular humanist, because he clearly was yearning for some recognition of transcendence, but one wishes. Perhaps Havel was wounded by the Kindliness experience that he rejected, that the Christian inheritance wasn’t quite available to him, even though he saw communism as fundamentally mendacious at war with the human spirit. He wasn’t a philosophical materialist, and I would have to agree with you. I think he had too much confidence in the European project in its present form, and he had good personal relations with the Pope John Paul II, with the Dalai Lama, and people like that, but he also liked to hang around with Hollywood stars, and I mean-
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely. Again, I go back to Barack Obama. I just find historical parallels. I don’t mean identical, but historical parallels.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Havel is on many planes a whole lot better and more intellectually serious than Obama, but there is a desire to take one’s bearings, perhaps too much, caring too much what certain people think about you and-
Albert Mohler:
Well, Hollywood in particular. If you’re going to hang around with the Pennwriters group and Hollywood, you are not going to end up a Ronald Reagan or a Margaret Badger.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
I will say this though, Havel did regularly go to Miami, and he spoke up repeatedly in Defense of Liberty in Cuba, but none of his Hollywood friends, the people who visited him in Prague would ever do that, because sadly, Fidel remained right to the bitter end a hero or an object of affection on the part.
Albert Mohler:
Oh, absolutely.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
One of the saddest things in my lifetime, because it’s so pathetic, the very pleasant singer, Carol King, Tapestry, everyone knows the song, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” she went to Cuba in the nineties, sometime, early 2000s, and serenaded Castro on his birthday with the tune, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” and she probably had no idea how shameless that act was.
Albert Mohler:
The 20th century was littered with such moments. I really appreciate the conversation, Professor. I hope we can continue this another time and pick up where we left off. A book is meant to be an argument. You make your argument extremely well in the Statesman as Thinker.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
Thank you.
Albert Mohler:
I also recommend to listeners your other books, and I just want to promise you’ll come back on to discuss some of them as well.
Professor Daniel Mahoney:
I will be happy to do it, and I’m very glad right at the beginning we were able to talk about the central place of virtue and statesmanship. Yeah. Where there’s no moving forward for the West as the West or for ordered liberty unless we recover the dual categories of the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues.
Albert Mohler:
So well said. I will leave it at that. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.
Many thanks to my guests, Professor Daniel Mahoney, for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at Albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to Boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.