Lincoln and the Problem of Towering Genius. Norma Desmond: I am big. It s the pictures that got small. -- Sunset Boulevard

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1 Lincoln and the Problem of Towering Genius Joe Gillis: You re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big. Norma Desmond: I am big. It s the pictures that got small. -- Sunset Boulevard My theme is political ambition. This is a topic that has fallen on hard times. i This may seem an odd, even a counter-intuitive, claim. The world is full of ambitious people, especially young men and women, seeking to make names for themselves. The problem is not that we do not have ambition, but that we do not understand it and because we do not understand it, we are likely to misidentify it when we see it. There are two reasons for our misunderstanding. The most obvious misconception is the confusion of ambition with what the psychologist Orville Gilbert Brim has called the look at me phenomenon. ii Surveys have shown that a full thirty one percent of American teenagers almost a third -- expect to be famous one day, thus appearing to support Andy Warhol s prediction that in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Ambition is connected here to reputation or recognition whether it is merited or not, a version of the Kardashian phenomenon. Daniel Boorstin was perhaps the first to identify to the distinction between a heroic and a celebrity culture where people are famous for no other reason than that they are famous. iii Yet while the desire for fame and

2 2 recognition may be inseparable from ambition, they are not the same thing. Ambitious people desire not only to be recognized but to be deemed worthy of recognition. Second, the concept of ambition is invariably tied to related notions of honor and deference. Today these terms have an obsolete sound. Honor, as Peter Berger has written, occupies about the same place in contemporary usage as chastity, that is, as ideological leftovers in the consciousness of obsolete classes, such as military officers or ethnic grandmothers. iv This is a slight but only a slight exaggeration. While affairs of honor, as they are quaintly called, seem to belong to a distant and benighted past, there are still organizations like the military and military academies that take honor quite seriously. Many colleges and universities still abide by an honor code Yale is not one of them -- but Berger is right to note that motives of honor no longer have standing in American courts of law where concepts like loss of face seem increasingly archaic. v There are, of course, good reasons for the decline or obsolescence of grand ambition. All of these terms fame, glory, renown have traditionally been associated with aristocratic societies where titles and privileges are handed down. Acts of bravery, heroism, and self-abnegation were often linked to a person s role in a social hierarchy. These hierarchies are in turn composed of highly competitive super achievers. There is certainly a zero sum quality to terms like honor and ambition. They are diminished if they are shared. Hobbes, who understood the

3 3 aristocratic ethos of honor better than most, saw it as inseparable from a society based on orders and ranks. Glory is like honor, he wrote in De Cive, if all men have it, no man hath it. vi Moreover, the theme of great ambition is invariably related to the study of heroes or individuals of extraordinary accomplishment. There is, of course, a genre of popular history and biography that celebrates the accomplishments for good or bad -- of certain outsized individuals. vii Yet the study of heroes seems to have something old-fashioned, if not elitist about it. It is too often connected not just with heroes but with hero worship. Modern history and social science tend to be increasingly quantitative and data-driven, dealing more with the average than with outsized individuals. Political scientists focus most of their attention on tracking that restive nobody called the median voter. Furthermore, we are more apt to explain events in terms of general causes think of the triad of class, race, and gender -- rather than look to the exceptional qualities of certain rare individuals. When we turn to the study of heroes, it is more often with a subversive intent.. No man is a hero to his valet the proverb says. Today, it should be added, we are all valets. The Love of Fame The concept of ambition and related terms like glory, fame, and honor were once at the core of the study of politics. Ancient political theory had a rich

4 4 moral and psychological vocabulary for the study of these phenomena. The Greek term thymos often translated as spiritedness was deemed the central political quality. The man and they were always men who possessed this quality was likely to display a strong desire to excel, to be first in the race of life, a fierce loyalty to friends, and a longing for immortal fame. viii The original of all works of this genre is Homer s Iliad. The first words of the epic Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus son Achilleus suggest that there is a connection between rage and the desire for immortality. From the beginning of the story, Achilles knows that he has a choice between a short life but a glorious one if he goes to Troy or a long undistinguished life if he remains at home with his family. Achilles choice of the former is the only choice befitting a hero. The Iliad is a world whose leading figures eat, drink, and live for fame (kleos). The word hero originally applied to the offspring of gods who had coupled with mortals. ix These figures retained some of the divine longing for immortality that can only be achieved through conflict and war. War alone can confer immortality, at least through the songs and poems written about it. What distinguishes a hero is, above all else, the desire for fame, that is, what is said about us after we are gone. A person s kleos is his reputation. It is the closest thing to immortality that one is allowed in the Homeric universe. The question is whether the kind of rage and love of fame expressed by Achilles can be somehow transformed or transmuted so that it can be put into the

5 5 service of the community. This was very broadly speaking the task set out by Socrates in Plato s Republic where this Homeric quality of thymos is enlisted into the preservation and defense of the city. The character of Glaucon who possesses this quality in spades is essential for the founding of Socrates city in speech. Thymos is turned into one of the three aspects of the soul serving as the middle term between reason and appetite. The question the book asks is whether thymos can be made an ally of reason. Can the thymotic passions like anger, honor, moral indignation, shame, and disgust that are especially heightened during times of war be made to serve the public good? Can the Achillean warrior be transformed into a conscientious citizen, loyal to friends and fierce to enemies? To be sure, this is a question that Plato never succeeds in answering. x The idea that thymos could be domesticated and turned into a public-minded guardian of the city formed the basis of what could be called the moral code of the Greek gentleman (kaloskagathos). xi This code was canonized in Aristotle s Nicomachean Ethics in which he presents a list of qualities or moral excellences that are a halfway point between the demotic virtues of the citizen and the intellectual virtues of the philosopher. The peak of moral excellence is described as greatness of soul (megalopsychia) precisely because it deals with matters of personal honor. Aristotle even describes it as the crown (kosmos) of the virtues because it contains all the other virtues to a superlative degree. In his pride his perpetual looking down the perfect gentleman has something akin to the philosopher who is similarly aware of his own excellence. The gentleman considers virtue toward

6 6 oneself as of a higher status even than justice or virtue toward others. To be a person of great soul is to be concerned not just with honor, but above all with being deserving of honor, with knowing how much to claim for yourself. Like all the virtues, greatness of soul is a mean between the extremes of too-much and too-little. A person claiming too little for themselves is modest (something Aristotle regarded as a fault) and claiming too much is vain. The great-souled man will know just how much honor is his due. xii Aristotle gives an extraordinary list of the psychological and even physical characteristics necessary for a person of great soul. He makes clear that the gentleman, unlike the philosopher, is a man of some inherited wealth, chiefly landed property, although his way of life will be urban. xiii Such a person exhibits a lofty detachment to the more or less petty things that weigh most of us down. He is slow to act, unless something of great importance is at stake. He repays favors with interest so as not to be under any obligation to others. The gentleman speaks his mind without fear or favor because to dissemble would be beneath him, except when he speaks with irony to the vulgar. He may occasionally hurt others, but never out of deliberate cruelty. In addition, the great-souled man possesses beautiful but useless things, suggesting not only the possession of wealth, but a cultivated aesthetic sense. And as if this were not enough, the gentleman must be tall, walk slowly because to hurry is undignified, and speak in a deep voice.

7 7 Aristotle s ideal of the gentleman remained and to some degree still remains the ideal of the Christian West. The heroic ethic received its canonical expression in great ethical treatises of Greek and Roman antiquity and in a Christianized form it became the basis for the famous medieval chivalric code of honor. This code was given expression in such medieval romances as the Chanson de Roland and the Song of El Cid. These were great epic poems chansons de geste stories of heroic deeds and were the first to appear in the West after Virgil s Aeneid. These epics expressed a code of honor that would later come to be parodied in the first great novel of European literature, Cervantes Don Quixote. Karl Marx, whose skill as a literary critic has often been noted, wrote: Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society. xiv In other words, Marx understood the book less as a satire on the medieval code of chivalric honor than as a statement of its obsolescence, that ideas of chivalry and honor were appropriate for certain kinds of society with certain kinds of economic relations, but that these ideas were being made redundant by a new kind of society that he called capitalist society or that we might call market society. The Transformation of the Honor Code The decline in the status of honor and ambition is related to fundamental changes in our moral and political vocabulary beginning around the sixteenth century. (It is arguable that the critique of ambition actually goes back to early

8 8 Christianity, but that is a problem I do not wish to address here). xv These changes were inseparable from the transition from the medieval world based on hierarchy, status, and honor to a new bourgeois or commercial world based on equality, contract, and interest. This transition has been described in a number of ways. Marx called it the transition from feudalism to capitalism; Henry Maine called it the transition from status to contract; Tocqueville called it the transition from the age of aristocracy to the age of democracy, but no one provided a more powerful description than the economist and intellectual historian Albert O. Hirschman in his book The Passions and the Interests. xvi In this brilliant study, Hirschman showed how the arguments for the commercial society were first made possible only after the destruction of the ancient heroic ideal that had made a return during the Renaissance with its rediscovery of the Greek and Roman celebration of glory. A whole series of writers beginning with Hobbes, but including Montaigne, Bacon, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Hume, and Kant turned their collective eye on the discrediting the idea of the hero as nothing but a species of vanity and vainglorious ambition. xvii In place of the heroic ideal with its pursuit of glory, these writers posited an alternative conception of human nature based on the benefits of commerce and self-interested behavior. Hirschman made two important points in this book. The first is that the transition to capitalism was only made possible due to the prior emergence of certain ideas and arguments. Markets are not simply natural forms of human

9 9 association as today s libertarians often believe, but are embedded in a dense web of moral argumentation in which the pursuit of interest so long considered a deadly sin within the Christian moral universe came to be seen as a virtue for containing the destructive passions for fame and honor. The market society was an idea before it became a reality. The second discovery was to show that the concept of self-interest is not a universal key for understanding all human behavior as this is so often claimed by economists and social scientists today. Rather the idea of self-interest emerged as a strategy to counteract the dominance of certain passions, especially the kinds of desires associated with fame, honor, and heroic immortality. The pursuit of interest was deemed to exercise a tranquilizing affect on society and on human behavior generally. The passions were seen as wild and irrational, while interests were thought to be calm, gentle, even placid. A society devoted to money making, as opposed to aristocratic practices like war, was described by such metaphors as polishing, refining, and softening morals. A society dominated by the pursuit of interest could be counted upon as being less grand, noble, and heroic, but more peaceful, prosperous, and secure. The idea of a modern commercial order came to fruition in America. It is no coincidence as they say that the signing of the Declaration of Independence occurred the same year as the publication of Adam Smith s Wealth of Nations, the first great treatise of market economics. The advocates of the commercial society

10 10 from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams all regarded an ethic of self-interest rightly understood as a sane and sensible alternative to visions of moral perfection beyond the reach of all but a few, disdain for the common useful, and mundane employments, and most of all a world preoccupied to a degree that we can scarcely imagine with intangible goals like honor and glory. xviii And yet the effort to transform the competition for honor and glory into the bourgeois striving for commercial success was never complete. The ancient and medieval codes of honor never completely disappeared, even in the New World. Douglass Adair has noted that Plutarch s Lives remained a widely read and imitated book during the founding generation. xix This neo-classical love of fame survived throughout the early republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged not only their lives and liberty but their sacred honor to the cause to which they affixed their names. The authors of the Federalist Papers took the pen name of Publius after one of the founders of the Roman republic. And George Washington was regularly referred to as a modern day Cincinnatus for the Roman farmer who left his plow to serve the republic and then returned to his fields, relinquishing power. xx No one among the founder s generation embodied the characteristics of Aristotle s megalopsychos more fully than Washington. He combined effortlessly the qualities of rank, authority, and the capacity to command that immediately compel respect. The quality of Washington s hauteur is captured brilliantly in an anecdote

11 11 related in James Madison s notes on the constitutional convention. During the convention, it was Washington s custom to open his home for a reception for some of those attending. Alexander Hamilton, who knew Washington well, mentioned to Gouverneur Morris that Washington was reserved and aristocratic even to his intimate friends. Morris suggested that this was a mere façade, so Hamilton bet him a dinner with wine for a dozen people if on their next meeting he would appear to treat Washington as his equal. The dare was accepted: On the evening appointed, a large number attended; and at an early hour Gouverneur Morris entered, bowed, shook hands, laid his left hand on Washington s shoulder, and said, My dear General, I am very happy to see you look so well! Washington withdrew his hand, stepped suddenly back, fixed his eye on Morris for several minutes with an angry frown, until the latter retreated abashed, and sought refuge in the crowd. The company looked on in silence. At the supper, which was provided by Hamilton, Morris said, I have won the bet, but paid dearly for it, and nothing could induce me to repeat it. xxi Washington may have exemplified the aristocratic ethos, but no one thought about it more profoundly than John Adams. To be sure, the image of founding a nation conjured in the minds of the revolutionary generation the images of classical antiquity s greatest lawgivers. The names of Lycurgus, Solon, and Theseus were never far from their minds. The revolution made it possible to relive the deeds of

12 12 these mythical heroes. In his Discourses on Davila, Adams discussed the love of fame and divided it into three parts. Credit is on the lowest rung supported by merchants and tradesmen; reputation was cherished by gentlemen; but glory was the highest species of fame and was reserved for the great actions of lawgivers and the first officers of the state. Adams was following a long tradition in ranking the lawgiver or legislator as standing atop the ladder of fame. xxii Another example of this neo-classical model of fame can be found with Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was a protégé of Washington and even something of an adopted son. His heroes were all drawn from Plutarch as were the various pseudonyms that he adopted in his writings. A particular incident told by Adair is revealing. In a letter written to Benjamin Rush of January 16, 1811, Jefferson recalled a dramatic incident twenty years before. In April 1791, a meeting was convened with Jefferson, then Secretary of State, Adams, the Vice President, and Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury. The room was hung with a collection of portraits and Hamilton inquired who they where. Jefferson named them as Bacon, Locke, and Newton, adding the three greatest men the world had produced. Hamilton took exception, saying: The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. xxiii Jefferson drew from this conversation the lesson that Hamilton favored the overthrow of the new republic by an aspiring monarch just as Caesar had overthrown the Roman republic. But I think another lesson can be drawn. Jefferson s models of greatness were drawn from the realms of philosophy and science. Hamilton s expresses something closer to the classical model of the

13 13 statesman or political founder as the ideal. This seems entirely appropriate to their characters. Perpetuation and the Dangers of Mobocracy This brings us to the evening of January 27, On that evening an aspiring Whig lawyer named Abraham Lincoln gave a speech to the Young Men s Lyceum in Springfield Illinois titled On the Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions. xxiv The Lyceum Address or Perpetuation Speech, as it is usually called, was given when Lincoln was just a few weeks short of his twenty ninth birthday and still several years removed from a national political career. Most readers agree that this was Lincoln s first major speech not for what it says about such standard Whig tropes as liberty and union but for what it reveals about Lincoln s own ambitions. Interest in the speech dates to Edmund Wilson s unsympathetic treatment of it in Patriotic Gore that argued that Lincoln was projecting himself onto the very role the charismatic tyrant -- against which he was warning his audience. xxv At the core of Lincoln s speech is an examination of the theme of political ambition, both what it is and the dangers it poses to the perpetuation of constitutional government. The Perpetuation Speech has three main parts. The first deals with the dangers of lawlessness posed by mob rule; the second deals with the problem posed by the towering genius or aspiring tyrant who may seize the opportunity created by lawlessness to establish a tyranny; and the third, mostly forgotten theme, deals

14 14 with the loss of collective memory that comes from the fading recollection of the revolution and the founding period. Lincoln s speech could be parsed as follows: I. The Dangers to Constitutional Government (1-12) a. The blessings of liberty (2) b. Examples of mob justice (5-8) c. The mobocratic spirit (9) d. The political religion of the nation (12) II. The Obstacles to Perpetuation (17-19) a. An undecided experiment (17) b. Towering genius (17) c. The quest for distinction (18) III. The Problem of Historical Memory (20-24) a. The danger of the passions (20-21) b. The silent artillery of time (22) c. The solid quarry of sober reason (23) Lincoln s speech begins with an announcement of its theme, namely, the perpetuation of our political institutions (1). After first congratulating himself and his audience for living under a system of laws conducing more essentially toward to the ends of civil religious liberty, than of which the history of former times tells

15 15 us, he warms to the theme of the evening (2). The problem is that these institutions were established by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors (2). How will the present generation, much less the future ones, be able to preserve and perpetuate those institutions and what are the obstacles that stand in the way? This is the question Lincoln set for himself and his audience. The longest section of the speech deals with the problem of violence and mob rule. Here Lincoln is speaking the standard language of the Whig opposition to Jacksonian democracy that is always identified with unruly passions and the dangers of mob violence. xxvi He is not addressing any political group or party but the mobocratic spirit that is alleged to be now abroad in the land. For Lincoln and his Whig associates, political legitimacy is conferred not through direct expression of the popular will but through the rule of law and representative institutions. Lincoln claims that examples of lawlessness have become pervasive from the pleasure hunting masters of Southern slaves [to] the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits (5). He then selects two examples one from Mississippi, the other from Missouri both slave states to illustrate his case. Although slavery is not an explicit theme of the Perpetuation Speech, if one reads closely it is clear that slavery is in both cases a proximate cause of mob violence. The Mississippi case began with the lynching of riverboat gamblers and then proceeded to include slaves suspected of plotting insurrection, white men who were thought to be in league with them, and finally to strangers who were simply minding their own business. This

16 16 process continued, Lincoln alleges, until dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side almost as a drapery of the forest (6). The second case of mob violence cuts closer to his audience. Lincoln discusses the case of a freeman named McIntosh who was the victim of a Saint Louis lynch mob. In comparison to the riverboat gamblers who he describes as worse than useless in any community, he calls the lynching of McIntosh perhaps the most highly tragic, of anything of its length, that has ever been witnessed in real life (7). Yet behind this case is another, scarcely alluded to, the murder of the abolitionist newspaper editor, Elijah Lovejoy in Alton Illinois, just two months before Lincoln s speech at the Springfield Lyceum. Abolitionism was scarcely a popular cause in central Illinois and Lovejoy s defense of McIntosh caused him to have to move his newspaper from Saint Louis to Alton. Lovejoy was next to William Lloyd Garrison probably the most famous abolitionist of his generation. Lincoln s reference to mobs who throw printing presses into rivers [and] shoot editors could scarcely have been lost on his audience (9). The Den of the Lion and the Tribe of the Eagle After devoting himself to the fairly conventional themes of lawlessness and mob violence, Lincoln turns to the second and what I believe is the major theme of his speech, namely, the problem of vaulting political ambition. The towering

17 17 genius -- a term with romantic Byronic overtones may seem strange for a small town lawyer who had once run a general store, but was in fact an important motif of Lincoln s thought. The theme of the hero or genius runs throughout the nineteenth century from Carlyle s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), to Emerson Representative Men (1850), to Flaubert s Sentimental Education that examines the desperation and ennui of an entire generation come of age in the generation after Napoleon. xxvii The theme of ambition was first alluded to in Lincoln s brief address to the people of Sangamon County in his abortive run for election: Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition, he wrote. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being esteemed by my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. xxviii Lincoln returned to this theme in the year prior to his nomination for the Senate seat from Illinois when he reflected mournfully on the failure of his ambitions: Twenty two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, were both ambitious; I, perhaps, more so than he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. xxix William Herndon, Lincoln s law partner and biographer, famously called Lincoln s ambition a little engine that knew no rest. xxx

18 18 Lincoln introduces his theme by distinguishing between the ambitions of the founding generation and those of the post-heroic world in which he finds himself. The founders invested all of their moral energies in attempting to establish a republican form of government. This was bound up with the quest for fame and celebrity: Their all was staked upon it: -- their destiny was inseparably linked with it. Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical, namely the capability of a people to govern themselves (17). The experiment in republicanism was by no means a foregone conclusion. If they succeeded, he writes, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time. If they failed, there were to be called knaves and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten (17). Lincoln s concern was with the danger of an aspiring Caesar-like dictator, who will use the occasion of lawlessness and insecurity to impose a form of oneman rule. The danger of tyranny grows not from the failure of republicanism but from its success. The very success of the founders experiment has bred resentment of it. Lincoln s account of ambitious demagogues and tyrants has long precedent in the history of political theory. Plato analyzed the tyrannical soul in Book IX of the Republic. The tyrant, as Plato described him, is a person of unrestrained desires who projects his excessive longings his eros on to policies of war, conquest, and

19 19 empire. Tyranny is ultimately a psychological derangement of the soul for which Plato sought a remedy in philosophy. Or to take another image from Plato s Gorgias, the tyrant is compared to a sieve whose desires and appetites perpetually evade his capacity for self-control. xxxi Lincoln s account of the tyrant not only draws on the Platonic tradition, but on the analysis of ambition in the Federalist Papers. xxxii It may not be immediately obvious, but the problem of ambition is written all over the Federalist. As early as Federalist 10, Madison is concerned with the causes of faction and traces it to (among other things) the problem of ambition: A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to human passions have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for the common good. xxxiii The strategy of the Federalist authors was not to attempt to eliminate ambition, but to control it and even to redirect it toward public purposes. In Federalist 72, Hamilton spoke about the love of fame being the ruling passion of the noblest minds. xxxiv This was Hamilton s formula for those of high ambition who

20 20 would seek out the presidential office. A key argument for extended terms was the danger that such individuals might pose to a republic if they were made constitutionally ineligible for the highest office. Yet the Federalist authors believed they had an answer to the ever-present danger of political ambition. In Federalist 51, Madison wrote: Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interests of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. xxxv In other words, by checking power with power, ambition could be controlled and limited by the institutions of the Senate, the Court, and popular representation. What Madison called the genius of republican liberty was its ability to democratize ambition. By making all offices open to election, it encourages ambitious persons of all types to enter the fray of public competition and test themselves against others. xxxvi Of course the treatment of ambition closest to Lincoln s heart was in Shakespeare s Julius Caesar. xxxvii Everyone will remember Antony s famous funeral speech where he reminds the audience that Caesar thrice rejected the kingly crown and then asks rhetorically was this ambition? Caesar s refusal is supposed to demonstrate his humility, but the fact is he rejected the lesser for a greater title. Only a universal empire could fulfill Caesarean ambitions. It was half a century later that Caesar s grand-nephew, Gaius Octavius, took the name Caesar Augustus and declared himself emperor of Rome. The name Caesar and its later variants like Kaiser and Czar would become the title for a new kind of political leader for which classical political philosophy had no precise equivalent. Caesarism is a form

21 21 of post-constitutional rule combining elements of traditional kingship with populist demagoguery and charismatic leadership. xxxviii Lincoln s analysis of the charismatic tyrant builds on these treatments, but he adds his own distinctive voice to this history. It is fair to say, I think, that Lincoln thought the Framers to be overly sanguine in their belief that the problem of ambition could be solved simply through an institutional fix, by arranging institutions that would constrain ambitious tyrants. The Framers seemed blind to the problem that future generations may well produce people like themselves, not content to live under an inherited system of government, but who would wish to create new modes and orders as a testimony to their own greatness. With the American Revolution successfully completed, the question that concerned Lincoln was what could be done to build on the success of the founding generation. In the key passage of the Perpetuation Speech, Lincoln gives an in-depth psychological portrait of great ambition citing the three standard examples of Napoleon, Caesar, and Alexander. I quote the relevant passage at length: But the game is caught; and I believe it is true that with the catching, end the pleasures of the chase. The field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they too will seek a field. It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passions as

22 22 others have so done before them. The question, then, is can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond as seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle. What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect some man of possessed of the loftiest genius coupled with ambition sufficient to push him to the utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us (17)? The above passage could have come directly out of the romantic cult of the genius. This idea was given philosophical expression by Kant for whom the idea of genius was irrevocably tied to the work of art. xxxix Kant helped to valorize the artist as the model of the creative life. The work of art was no longer regarded simply as an imitation of nature but as the expression of the creative individual who brings

23 23 into being something that has never existed before. Genius, he writes in the Critique of Judgment, is the talent (natural endowment) which gives the rule to art. xl Kant contrasts genius with the spirit of imitation. Imitation is the capacity to follow rules; genius is the talent to create the rules. For Kant, the mystery of the creative process was always greater more sublime than the products of that process. The genius of Mozart was more admirable than any of his works. The idea of the sublime connected by Burke to the experience of awe and terror came to be regarded as beyond the limits of reason or that in comparison with which all else is small. xli The human incarnation of the sublime the genius -- was the person with a mission, a calling, or a destiny, what Hegel would call a world-historical individual, the figure of a Caesar or a Napoleon. This type of person cannot be judged by the standards of ordinary morality but stands, so to speak, beyond good and evil. The political and military genius was regarded as an artist who created according to his own pattern and followed his own laws. The hero, Emerson wrote in his essay on Heroism, was a kind of warrior-poet, a combination of the poetic genius of Goethe with the military audacity of Napoleon. xlii The hero would be characterized by both a single-minded bent against his enemies ( a military attitude of soul ) and a confidence in the rightness of his cause. Heroism, he writes, feels and never reasons and therefore is always right. Such a person is not open to the censure of philosophers and divines and must even work contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and the good.

24 24 Heroism is vindicated because the hero obeys a secret impulse of an individual s character that stands apart from the good opinion of society. For this reason, the hero must act, if necessary, as a martyr for his cause trusting only himself and following only his inner voice. xliii The most obvious reading of the Perpetuation Speech is as a warning about the emergence of the romantic hero in politics. Lincoln s reference to those would achieve greatness through emancipating slaves is an unmistakable reference to the kind of radical conscience politics that was an offshoot of New England transcendentalism. In its secularized form, this carried over the older Puritan idea of seeing individuals as under the grace of conscience, emancipated from the lower order obligations to law and society combined with the romantic theme of the creative genius. Lincoln clearly regarded the abolitionist temperament as the most vivid expression of this kind of antinomianism putting the individual above the law whose goal was to purify the world from sin, by violence if necessary, and to create a new community of saints. It was this abolitionist imagination, as Andrew Delbanco as recently described it, and the fanaticism it implied that is equally at home in the politics of John Brown as in the language of the holy war that has been appropriated by both jihadists abroad and the Christian right. xliv In the debate still ongoing between an ethic of conviction and an ethic of responsibility, Lincoln seems to come out unequivocally on the side of the latter. Like Weber in the next

25 25 century, he regarded political ideals born of passion and conviction as a threat to political institutions. xlv Yet a minority view has held that Lincoln carried more of this higher law politics than he cared to admit, an attitude characteristic of the second generation seeking to free themselves from the grip of the fathers. The sentence about emancipating slaves caught the attention of Lincolnophobes like Edmund Wilson who argued that Lincoln had projected himself into the role against which he is warning his audience. xlvi His description of the person of towering genius just seems to cut a little too close to Lincoln s own ambition for us not to think of it as a piece of self-analysis. On Wilson s account, Lincoln eventually embraced this heroic role as wartime leader and as the prophet of the cause of righteousness. xlvii For Wilson and his protégés consider Gore Vidal s Lincoln -- Lincoln was the creator of the American national state akin to Bismarck s Germany and Lenin s Russia. xlviii Psychoanalytic readers, notably Dwight Anderson and George Forgie, have suggested that Lincoln was thinking of himself as precisely such a revolutionary usurper. xlix According to this account, Lincoln was engaged in a complex Oedipal struggle with the founders and feared that their accomplishments would put all subsequent generations in the shade, a classic example in the political world of what the literary critic Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence. l Lincoln s reference to emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen suggests the morally neutral form of this kind of great ambition. It can be used to achieve freedom as well as new forms

26 26 of domination. The description is frighteningly prescient of Nietzsche s Ubermensch. li Lincoln s person of towering genius is far from the more prosaic type of usurper feared by the conventional Whig politicians of his day. His conception is closer to the romantic image of demonic evil, that is, someone not only incapable of contributing to the greatness of others, but resentful of the very existence of a world that is not of his own creation. There is already an incarnation of this kind of human being in the work of Milton: the figure of Lucifer. What is especially Miltonic about Lincoln s tyrant, as John Burt has noted, is his resentment at a world that does not owe its creation to him. Such a person cannot stand the idea of playing a small part in a large drama that is a tribute to another person s greatness. lii Lucifer s motto is Non Serviam I will not serve. His is a revolt not against an unjust order but against any order of which he is not the author. In this respect he is the precursor not only of Kant and Nietzsche but of all those later antinomian figures who cannot accept authority except as an emanation of their own will. Furthermore, Lincoln does not believe that such persons of towering and ambition can be tamed or domesticated, fitted for life in a republic. They represent a perennial threat to the possibility of constitutional government. The question he leaves us with is what to do. Political Theology

27 27 Before providing an answer, Lincoln offers a third danger to the future of constitutional government. This is perhaps the least noted aspect of the speech and concerns the dangers of historical time. In the past, the dangers of a military usurper of the Caesarian or Bonapartist type had been offset by the passions of the people that had been directed toward protecting what the founders had established. But the passage of time has now turned these passions in a very different direction toward lawlessness and disorder. Popular passions had previously been directed toward maintaining the gains of the revolution and preserving the Constitution, but now these same passions are being used to undermine the foundations of selfgovernment. The feelings that once united a people in their struggle for liberty have now dissipated along with the circumstances that gave rise to them (20-21). Those with any living attachment to the American founding now half-a-century in the past have all but disappeared. The result has been the rise of a generation with no living memory to attach them to our political institutions. The question now confronting Lincoln and his audience is how to reattach the feelings and sentiments of citizens to a form of government once the old pillars and props that sustained it are decayed and crumbled away. The problem that Lincoln diagnoses is the loss of historical memory or what he calls in perhaps the most memorable phrase from the speech, the silent artillery of time. He notes that while the scenes of the revolution are [not] now or ever will be entirely forgotten, but that like everything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time (22). Like all

28 28 purely historical memories, they will increasingly lack a living or vital connection to the present. They will, in short, become history. Such histories will, of course, continue to be read, but like most histories they will cease to invigorate the present or to supply ideals and beliefs. History is as much an enemy as a friend. What, then, can be done to arrest or reverse the corrosive power of history? Lincoln s short speech is a masterpiece of analysis of the problems confronting the perpetuation of constitutional government. His analysis moves from the general problem of lawlessness and the danger of mob rule, to the dangers of vaulting political ambition, and finally to the corrosive affects of history and the loss of collective memory. Lincoln s one solution in fact the only concrete proposal to appear in the speech is the call to turn the Constitution into the object of a political religion. liii By making the Constitution and its law an object of patriotic reverence, Lincoln hoped to give them a sanctity that time and tradition could not confer. The God of Lincoln at least the young Lincoln was not the mysterious deity of the Second Inaugural who dispenses justice to North and South alike, but is closer to the god of the civil religions with their dedication to the cult of la patrie. Here again I must quote the relevant passage at some length: Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As

29 29 the patriots of 76 did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and its laws, let every American pledge his life, his property and sacred honor. Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father and to tear the character of his and his children s liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges let it be written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And in short let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars (12). This remarkable passage full of extravagance and showing all the signs of youthful rhetorical overkill is also one that has deep roots in the philosophical tradition. The case for a purely civil religion has many antecedents in Plato s Laws and Machiavelli s Discourses, but in modern political philosophy the idea is most famously associated with the final chapter of Rousseau s Social Contract. liv Here Rousseau offered his solution to the problem of religious intolerance and civil conflict. His idea of a civil religion was based on a few simple dogmas such as the existence of a single supreme being, the belief in the world to come, and the sanctity of the social contract and its laws. His formula particularly its anti-priestly

30 30 character would later become the basis for the various cults of the supreme being during the French Revolution. Rousseau s dream for a new political religion was not confined to France. In 1967, Robert Bellah revived this debate in a groundbreaking article titled Civil Religion in America. What we have from the earliest years of the republic, Bellah wrote, is a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity. This religion there seems no other word for it while not antithetical to and indeed sharing much in common with Christianity, was neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian. lv This might be called the domestication of Rousseau s ferocious Machiavellianism. Americans, Bellah claimed, maintained a civil religion that retained key elements of the prophetic tradition but combined these with a kind of worship of the Constitution and reverence for the American framers. The American civil religion, he continued, was never anticlerical or militantly secular. On the contrary, it borrowed selectively from the religion tradition in such a way that the average American saw no conflict between the two. lvi The Perpetuation Speech ends by appealing not to habits and sentiments but to the power of reason: Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense (23). In the past, in the struggle for independence against Britain, the passions had come to the support of liberty, but with the passage of time the passions have been redirected and have

31 31 become the source of lawlessness and disorder. Passion has helped us but can do so no more, he writes. Today these passions must be redirected again in defending the cause of the Constitution. Let those materials be molded in general intelligence, sound morality and in particular a reverence for the constitution and laws, he contends (23). There seems something false or at least inadequate to Lincoln s call on the power of reason to serve as basis of reverence for the constitution and laws. Is reason alone, shorn of the power of the affects and imagination, without the biblical images of guilt, atonement, repentance, and redemption, up to this task of affirming the rule of law? Lincoln s appeal to the redemptive power of reason seems false a kind of rhetorical after thought -- to his beliefs about the importance of memory and reverence as the moral foundations of constitutional government. The triumphalist tone of the peroration with its bizarre call to awaken Washington stands in marked contrast to the sober analysis of the charismatic tyrant and the dangers of historical amnesia that are the most powerful aspects of the speech. The Fate of Great Ambition Lincoln s reflections on political ambition can be usefully compared with another from approximately the same time. At virtually the same time that Lincoln was giving his Perpetuation Speech and some four thousand miles away, Alexis de Tocqueville was finishing the second volume of Democracy in America. In a chapter

32 32 from near the end of the book titled Why One finds so Many Ambitious Men in the United States and so Few of Great Ambitions, Tocqueville reflected on the fate of grand ambition in a democratic age: The first thing that strikes one in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to get out of their original condition; and the second is the small number of great ambitions that make themselves noticed in the midst of this universal movement of ambition. There are no Americans who do not show that they are devoured by the desire to rise, but one seems almost none of them who appear to nourish vast hopes or to aim very high. All want constantly to acquire goods, reputation, power; few envision all these things on a grand scale. lvii Tocqueville attributed the decline of great ambition to the leveling down of the aristocratic families that once held great power and wealth and the rise of the bourgeois habits of work, thrift, and industry, but also to the Christian virtue of humility that had made ambition appear morally disreputable. His work addresses the failings of the middle class democracies with their constant restlessness, materialism, and belief in progress. For Tocqueville, it was principally the equality of conditions brought about by modern democracy that has contributed to the erosion of large-scale ambition: