Flogging Brooks: an Addendum

OK, OK, dead horse alert. Here's a follow-up to my post last week on David Brooks's bizarre reading of Rousseau and Hobbes, a reading driven more by identity-crisis angst and wingnut cliche than coherent analysis. Brooks tried to blame American optimism about the possibilities of remaking Iraq on Rousseau and the hippies, while suggesting that sage conservatives, endowed with a "tragic" sense, needed to reclaim a little Hobbesian cynicism. In his self-congratulatory haze, Brooks never paused to admit who it was that actually invaded and who it was that protested, recognizing on some level that such an admission would surely explode his argument into bits. Brooks, conservative punditry's very own suicide bomber.

In my earlier critique, however, I left out a salient point. If you actually read Rousseau and Hobbes, it isn't hard to figure out which one would be more likely to endorse a hubristic Iraq invasion: Hobbes, hands down.

Recall that, for Hobbes, international relations is an ongoing "state of nature" since there is no common authority above nations to secure the peace. And Hobbes makes it very clear that in the state of nature, you have a right to kill anyone (or attack any nation) you deem a potential threat. He's not just talking self-defense or "pre-emptive" war, he's talking "preventive" war in the Bushie sense. As Hobbes writes in Leviathan's pivotal Ch. 13, "And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himselfe, so reasonable, as Anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him" (1985, 184).

The contrast with Rousseau is striking. In the Dedicatory Epistle to the city of Geneva that opens his Second Discourse, the supposedly Pollyanna Switzer writes:

I would not have wished to live in a newly instituted republic, however good its laws might be, for fear that. . . the State would be subject to be disturbed and destroyed almost from its birth. For freedom is like those solid and rich foods or those hearty wines, which are proper to nourish and fortify robust constitutions habituated to them, but which overpower, ruin, and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are unsuited to them. Once people are accustomed to masters, they are no longer able to do without them. If they try to shake off the yoke, they move all the farther away from freedom because, mistaking for freedom an unbridled license which is its opposite, their revolutions almost always deliver them to seducers who only make their chains heavier (1964, 80).

Sounds like a good summary of post-invasion Iraq. So democratic populism owns a lot better "tragic" sense than does authoritarian individualism, even if you look back three centuries. I'm starting to think that "conservative intelligencia" is an oxymoron.