I am republishing this ten years old article to try to convince my distinguished audience of scholars that Trump is much older than Trump , a moment of a long history when unfortunately the planets have been aligned. No destiny here: Like Machiavel I believe in the Fortuna (le hasard. Nous sommes le fruit du hasard et de la nécessité) I added a touch of Hegel who volunteered that the great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, : "The first time as tragedy, the second as farcet
When I was finishing my dissertation on Thomas More, Donald was already an archetype, the quintessential caricature of the con artist, taking all the space and time of the media. Who could represent better the wave of privatization which was about to engulf the world?
SO HERE IT IS, A TRANSLATION IN FRENCH OF LE SAINT LA MÉGÈRE ET LE TRUAND publié EN 2016
The Saint, the Shrew, and the Crook
August 30, 2016
From Thomas More's liberal utopia to Donald Trump's neoliberal dystopia, via Ayn Rand's hysteria.
On the eve of the 2012 US elections, I published: Cold Hatred: What Is the American Right Thinking ? The chosen date was neither political nor even opportunistic. It was a coincidence. Less fortuitous, however, was the title of a 30-year-old article: "From Thomas More to Donald Trump". This time, it wasn't a coincidence. Nor was it the whim of an author seeking striking associations, and it was even less an intuition. I lack that entirely. I am a diligent reader who strives to read philosophical texts closely, placing them in their historical context; which, at that time, were primarily those of medieval and Renaissance philosophers. In 1992,
Donald Trump seemed to me to best characterize (in the sense of a caricature) the end of the line for a modern political ideology that had begun to build itself on the model of Thomas More's Utopia, this beautiful liberal idea, which is dying before our very eyes. Nothing new under the sun. All aging systems of thought tend to descend into caricature. Donald Trump was certainly not the only one to run for office, but he was its most grotesque representative and, consequently, the one most likely to rally around his invectives those nostalgic for an American neoliberalism that had distorted the principles of liberalism to the point of being unrecognizable.
For this liberal idea was harmonious at its inception! Told like a Christmas tale, it emerged in December 1516 from Gutenberg's almost-new printing press. Let us indulge ourselves for a moment and begin reading the two books that make up Utopia, adding the formula consecrated a century later by Mother Goose Tales: Once upon a time. Once upon a time, there was a very unhappy kingdom where everything was going terribly wrong, where the princes were wicked, corrupt, indebted, lazy, and narrow-minded… One day, a high-flying consultant of the time gathered a panel of experts around a table, asking them to offer their learned opinions on the social problems plaguing the kingdom. They uttered nothing but platitudes, if not outright nonsense, of which they were only just beginning to realize (only vaguely). It was a dead end, and the meal ended with a bitter aftertaste.
The second book begins with a curtain rising. A man with a pure gaze, a white beard, and a high forehead enters. He commands respect. He is a navigator by profession and
has just returned from an island called Utopia where, he says, everything is so well organized and managed according to principles of political economy that it is (almost) a small paradise, industrious but happy. This seems quite harmless, even naive, except that this unassuming little book is written byThomas More , a lawyer well-versed in the law, a future Chancellor of England who understood the meaning of power, a philosopher who had read everything, a seasoned trade ambassador, a man who eagerly awaited the return of great explorers from foreign and therefore strange lands, a master rhetorician who could construct an argument as solid as a cathedral, a man of faith who abhorred violence and injustice, and finally, a skilled courtier who knew better than to suggest to a king, especially Henry VIII, that he was merely a despot and not even enlightened.
The slightest misstep meant death. Why is it thought that the first book of Utopia , which describes the mismanagement of the kingdom, specifies on every page that it refers to the Kingdom of France? For the rest, Thomas More was destined for humor, and since he possessed a great deal of it, his text is light, funny, and peppered with Greek and Latin puns. His hero is named Hytholdeus: the teller of tall tales in Greek. Quite a reassuring name. Right under the noses of the king and the princes of robes and swords, and to the great delight of the burgeoning bourgeoisie, he describes a well-run but fantastical place, so whimsical that one doesn't realize that its very success stemmed from its lack of divine or kingly authority. Henry VIII had a good laugh. His courtiers scoffed. The learned sneered.
Thomas More and his co-producer, Erasmus, undoubtedly stifled more than one fit of giggles. But don't be fooled: the source of humor being profound sadness, the two companions were desperately seeking a solution to the violence of their time. The full title of the book should be read: Utopia, or the Treatise on the Best Form of Government.
Once you strip the second book of its wordplay and other provocations (such as the memorable golden chamber pots), you discover a framework of perfectly articulated postulates defining human beings in terms of their usefulness to the common good. It's revolutionary and solidly constructed, quite close to Bentham's liberal utilitarianism, with two variations. First variation: producing and being useful in Utopia means not engaging in the production of surplus and useless goods, but rather of what is necessary and useful to everyone, while incorporating new technologies if deemed useful. It's neither a growth model nor a stagnation model. New ideas and technologies are embraced. A kind of sustainable development model. A second, and significant, variant: within the logic of utilitarianism, the Utopian is indeed defined as a selfish being, constantly seeking to maximize their own pleasure (first postulate), but—and this is the crucial caveat—their greatest pleasure lies in giving pleasure.
The selfish individual becomes altruistic through selfishness (second postulate). And thus, from its very inception, the origin of a common good compatible with the selfish impulses of humankind was established, all without the involvement of religion. This was merely the starting point. For the next five centuries, political philosophers developed their theories on the modern state, striving to fit these two key pillars together as best they could: the individual with a right to individuality and the freely accepted common good that subsumes particular interests. While they all (relatively) agreed on the individual as defined by their particular interests, they diverged on how the individual understood the common good.
Transcendental reason? Instrumental reason? Deterrence? A kind of universal human instinct? They all convinced themselves they had found the certainties upon which a universal law could be structured for eternity, a law that would forever banish arbitrary power. Whatever the formulas, none of them considered for a single moment that a government and its institutions, within a state, were not necessary to manage the common good, the antidote to an arbitrariness they all abhorred. Hobbes's profound distrust of arbitrariness pervades the Second Amendment of the American Constitution. The separation of powers in most parliaments follows Montesquieu's model. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 was inspired by Kant's Critique of Practical Reason . Behind the UN's charters of rights and freedoms, one can read, almost as an echo, his Project for Perpetual Peace .
Then came the 20th century. The obsession was no longer the common good, and certainties were undermined by the age of suspicion. As a result, the individual took center stage. Sartre declared him absolutely free and without any obligation other than to himself, even as he made a feeble attempt to link existentialism and humanism. The edifice faltered all the more because the political landmarks and borders of states had begun to disintegrate rapidly at the same time.
The common good created in the West became as unmanageable as it had been in Western Europe at the beginning of the violent Renaissance, shaken by challenges strikingly similar to our own. Michelet had said it with one of his trademark striking phrases: when the state fails, witches appear. And indeed, in the United States, it was a witch, dubbed the Goddess of the Market, who introduced the idea of the entrepreneurial hero, a creator of wealth, whose mission was to destroy a decadent and sluggish enemy: the state, which, having become a provider, supported those she denounced as parasites and no longer managed the common good, that is, its prosperity. Her name was Ayn Rand .
A philosopher in the tradition of positivism, she chose the novelistic narrative, which made her popular, to present her entrepreneurial heroes, saviors of humanity. Like Thomas More, she was the second best-selling author after the Bible. This is not the only point of similarity she shares with Thomas More, whose personality was, however, the exact opposite of Ayn Rand's. Indeed, it adopts the first premise of Utopia: the individual is defined as selfish and calculating, seeking maximum pleasure. The comparison ends there, and abruptly: not only does it reject the second premise of altruism, but it throws it out completely, literally.
Charity, kindness, sacrifice, helping others, and sociability are, for it, all abominable weaknesses that prevent entrepreneurial heroes from creating freely, from anchoring their visions in prosperous businesses that will eventually create jobs and prosperity, even if that wasn't the hero's goal—a goal that is superbly selfish. They create for themselves because they are gods. The business magnates of her time greatly admired it, most notably Alan Greenspan, the influential chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States. He shed tears as he followed his coffin, draped in a huge wreath of flowers in the shape of a crossed-out S ($). In her sprawling novels glorifying these godlike men, Ayn Rand heaps invective upon all those who live off the state (including civil servants, teachers, and social workers). They are parasites, good-for-nothings, insects—she goes on and on. The word " losers ," a favorite of one of her readers, Donald Trump, is not on the list, but she would certainly have approved.
In the 1980s, economists from the Chicago School eliminated the impassioned rhetoric and fiery outbursts of passion, but they stayed the course and received several Nobel Prizes for their theories of free choice. This is the stage of cold hatred. The common good is transformed into calculation; free individual economic competition ultimately crowns the best and eliminates goods and services that might threaten their self-interest. The businessman-hero, rewarded with millions of dollars because he deserves it, as the advertisements stammered, will grace the front page of every magazine for decades. Nothing embodies this better than Gordon Gekko, the hero of the film Wall Street, remarkably portrayed by Michael Douglas. He is a Randian hero who, drunk on whiskey and himself, repeats the famous leitmotif "greed is good," a formula that redefines the common good, provided it is conjugated in the future tense. We believe it. Public choice theory invades the entire political sphere. In 2012, The Economist featured Mitt Romney, then a presidential candidate, on its cover with the headline: “ America’s Next CEO .” That says it all.
The common good hasn’t disappeared, but it has a new name: measured growth, governed by the laws of the market. It’s a postulate like any other, but it’s just that—a postulate. It’s even an act of faith, a profound belief with its own dogmas. Harvey Cox, a Harvard theology professor, discovered that they followed the logic of Thomas Aquinas’s Summae . Replace “God” with “Market,” and everything becomes clear: the market is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and its laws are impenetrable. Individuals, finally free to choose, must confront their interests in a free market. The magic of the market will work for the greater good of each and every one. The resulting prosperity, thus unhindered by governments and bureaucracy, will be able to spread its benefits. The problem with faith when it becomes blind is that it rejects everything that is not itself. Ignorance of other viewpoints became a virtue with Ronald Reagan, who asked not to be bothered with facts and statistics. In other countries, documents and archives from ministries that suggested the climate was changing were thrown away. The era of caricatures arrived at just the right time. In this sense, Donald Trump is not a random event: his rise was prepared by more than fifty years of intense ideologisation, which is certainly not over.
But whether he is elected or not, his eccentricities should not distract us from current issues. All political philosophers have offered abstract definitions of the common good. None has considered that there is an inherent common good that de facto imposes inherent limits on individual freedoms: the planet. It is a common good that has no legal status since it appears limitless. And this begins with Thomas More. When the island of Utopia becomes overpopulated, the Utopians leave to invade another, less populated island. They do so as gently as possible, persuading its inhabitants that they are bringing them a better way to manage their resources. And this continues: it is presupposed that there will always be another island. The idea of progress is the hope of another island to exploit. There are no more islands, and Thomas More would have great difficulty facing this limit. Not only are there no more islands, but on some of these islands there are philosophers who don't think according to the Western discursive framework that separates and opposes ideas (individual, common good).
What if they were not right, but offered a way of ordering the world, better suited to the fluidity of globalization? These are questions of realpolitik , but they wouldn't have concerned this philosopher, who was one of the few in his category (if not the only one) to have been aware that his postulates were not certainties. Thomas More ended his book with a smile: " I wish it more than I hope for it . " But these are the questions that trouble Western thinkers, trapped by their postulates, which they still think in terms of certainties. They do try to integrate the law of nature, but only as an appendix, or by maintaining unlimited individual rights. This is what large corporations have taken advantage of by having themselves legally declared as persons with unlimited rights. That's the caricature. The time has come to radically rethink the individual-common good, and this has begun to happen, but far removed from the discursive form of Western thought. The new will come, as it did five years ago, from somewhere else that will not be a Utopia (which has no place) but one that contemplates immanence. But that is another matter. Nicole Morgan
Notes
1-Political Options, Montreal, July-August 1992.
2-This American by adoption, born in Russia at the beginning of the last century, was the passionate advocate of extreme capitalism, attacking Marxism, needless to say, but above all all forms of European socialism, toward which, according to her, the United States was leaning. She did so through a dry philosophical discourse, but above all—and this partly explains her success—by featuring beautiful and solitary heroes in her sprawling novels. 3-“The Market as God: Living the New Dispensation,” The Atlantic Monthly , March 1999