"The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West" is the title of an early essay by Isaiah Berlin, and it is one of the central themes of his work. In a very strong way, Berlin was in favor of this decline, even eager to help. He worried, but only a little, in fact, very little, that the loss of hope for a perfect society, for a final solution to all humanity's problems, would make politics a dull business. Without utopian aspiration, it would be impossible, he wrote, to generate enthusiastic participation or to inspire "sacrifice, martyrdom, and heroic feats." He was more aware of the dangers of those last three than most of his contemporaries, and quite happy that few people in the immediate aftermath of World War Two (in Europe, at least) were eager to kill themselves and others for a great cause. No doubt, he would have been surprised and saddened to see ideologically constructed utopias replaced by theologically constructed utopias. A general decline in the construction business was what he favored-and it was also what he thought was happening. In this regard, Berlin was an optimist.
He had two reasons to be optimistic. The first was his belief that the singularity of utopian thought had been fundamentally challenged by the pluralism of the Romantic movement and would be overthrown by what we now call "multiculturalism"-the growing recognition and acceptance, if not always appreciation, of cultural difference. Ever since the Greeks, the idea of "the good society" was shaped by the definite article that introduced it. There was only one good society, one correct idea of goodness, which men and women would one day, all of us, unite in acknowledging. That is what "enlightenment" meant for most of its protagonists: in the light of reason, we would all see the same thing, recognize and endorse the same coherent set of values. This kind of monism dominated Western thought-and probably still does, philosophically, if no longer politically. The idea benefits from religious reinforcement-- "On that day," the biblical prophet Zechariah declared, "the Lord shall be one, and his name shall be one." Monism may be most potent today in its religious versions. But for Berlin it was fundamentally a philosophical idea.
He believed that it was an untenable idea, that it implied a moral universe without contradiction, which wasn't the moral universe that we inhabited. Monism didn't account for the actuality of value pluralism-not only as anthropologists and historians describe it, but also as we experience it everyday, finding our most cherished ideals incompatible with, or at least in tension with, one another. Berlin also believed that monism's untenability was increasingly understood-or, at least, the understanding was beginning to gain ground. His essays on 18th century romanticism, on Vico and Herder above all, were intended to advance this understanding, and I think they did that, even if they also made many people in his own philosophical community acutely uncomfortable. This is his summary statement:
If some ends recognized as fully human are at the same time ultimate and mutually incompatible, then the idea of a golden age, a perfect society compounded of a synthesis of all the correct solutions to all the central problems of human life, is shown to be incoherent in principle. This is the service rendered by romanticism... (The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 237))
Berlin's second reason for being optimistic about the decline of utopian aspiration was more practical than intellectual. He thought that all he had to do was point to the history of the twentieth century. This was a history dominated, to use the terms that he made famous, by political hedgehogs rather than political foxes-that is, by men and women pursuing, with brutal intensity, a singular view of how things ought to be. Berlin was sure that the brutality was inherent in the pursuit. If you believe that a utopian solution to all human ills is possible, he wrote in the "Decline" essay, "then surely no price is too heavy to pay for it; no amount of oppression, cruelty, repression, coercion will be too high. This conviction gives a wide license to inflict suffering on other men, provided it is done for pure, disinterested motives" (Crooked Timber, 47). We know that the "wide license" was widely invoked by the politically pure, with disastrous consequences. For Berlin, the most important invocations were those of Marxists and Communists, who stood in the direct line of Western philosophical enlightenment.
So, presumably, we should learn from our disasters. Political history and intellectual history combine to warn us off utopian aspiration. And what is left, according to Berlin, is liberal politics. He didn't mean liberal in its narrow American or European meanings-not New Deal liberalism and not laissez faire liberalism or libertarianism. He used the word to describe a politics that encompasses a wide range of positions on state policies and arrangements, but whose protagonists have, all of them (all of us), accepted limited government and the full panoply of civil liberties and rights-above all, the right of opposition (which incorporates the freedoms of assembly, speech, and press). For liberals of this sort (our sort), all political victories are partial and temporary. Political conflict is permanent; interests and ideals clash and the clashes will never finally be resolved. Liberals are people who accept the idea that "You win some, and you lose some." And that acceptance frees politics from cruelty and repression. It lowers the stakes; the losers know that they will have another chance; the winners know that they won't always win.
But low stakes make for a dull game-"not the kind of thing," Berlin wrote in another essay ("The Pursuit of the Ideal"), "that the idealistic young would wish...to fight and suffer for, in the cause of a new and nobler society."(Crooked Timber, 18) Certainly, liberal politics is less dangerous than politics often was in the last century, and as a result, perhaps, it isn't "wildly exciting." Berlin didn't want anything wildly exciting, but it is an open question whether we can simply renounce excitement, and expect people to live by the renunciation. And do we really want to turn away the "idealistic young"? Or to give up the hope for a "new and nobler society"?
There is something about politics that invites high ambition-both individual and collective-and high ambition always threatens to raise the stakes. That is my theme today. I want to argue that politics is a risky business, if not all the time than some of the time, and this is so because of its inherent character. One can be against politics for that reason, but even anti-politics, as East European dissidents learned, can be dangerous. Liberalism is a historic achievement, long in coming, difficult in the making, and always precarious. And once it is achieved, it has to be defended; it isn't self-sustaining-quite the opposite. The limits upon which it depends have to be asserted and then re-asserted against powerful enemies. And this necessity makes, whether we like it or not, for harsh conflicts-and then for aspiration, hope, anger, and enthusiasm, the very emotions that liberalism is sometimes thought to have banished. The banishment is always temporary, the conflict necessarily reiterative.
I doubt that dullness is the inevitable feature even of everyday liberal politics, of arguments about the extent of the welfare state, for example, or about the distribution of its burdens. This is what Hannah Arendt disparagingly called "housekeeping"-a phrase that I don't think Berlin would have approved, since the arguments are really important. But I am not going to address the possible excitement of everyday liberalism, but rather the necessary excitement of its occasional days.
What is at stake in political life is coercive power and then all the things that power promises: the pleasure of ruling over others, celebrity and prestige, and great wealth. Imagine, as I often do, and you probably do, too, that at least some people (our friends) pursue power only because they want to do good for other people. Then we will regard pleasure, celebrity, and wealth as the temptations that beset the powerful. But these are powerful temptations, and they are only sometimes resisted. Even those who want only to do good frequently succumb. They take pleasure in ruling because of the good that they do; they pursue celebrity and prestige because it will enable them to do still more good; and they accumulate wealth (never for themselves!) because they have to win the next election and they have to reward the instruments of their goodness.
The common recognition that "power corrupts" doesn't capture the real dangers of political ambition. When powerful individuals are trying to change the world, corruption may well be the saving grace of political life. Berlin suggests that it is the uncorrupted, the men and women totally committed to their utopian vision, sincerely seeking to make the world better, who are really dangerous. The greater the good that is sought, the more power that is necessary to achieve it. But whether political ambition is personal or ideological, whether the sought-after good is great or small, total or partial, the consequences are similar; only the scale is different. Political ambition produces what we might think of as a natural tendency toward greater and greater power and wealth-a natural tendency toward authoritarianism and hierarchy. I mean "natural" in this sense: that the tendency is independent of any particular constitutional mechanisms and arrangements. It can (and should) be restrained by liberal constitutionalism -I will come back to this point - but it is nonetheless visible in liberal and constitutional regimes. The Bush administration's pursuit of vastly enlarged executive authority is only the most recent illustration of the authoritarian tendency, and its upward redistributive policies, which were continuous with Clinton administration policies, are strong evidence for the hierarchical tendency.
And yet, in liberal and democratic regimes, the tendency toward authoritarianism never produces a full-scale tyranny, and the tendency toward hierarchy never ends in the enslavement or enserfment of the lower classes. I want to argue that this happens, or, rather, doesn't happen, chiefly because of popular resistance-in the form of insurgent movements, radical mobilizations, and political struggles of many different sorts. But all these movements, mobilizations, and struggles are fueled by utopian aspirations, which carry their own dangers, as Berlin argues, of tyranny and enslavement. In the most successful liberal regimes, utopian ideologies are somehow contained; the maxim, "no price is too heavy," is rejected by most activists and militants. The most radical ideologists end up leading isolated sects rather than powerful movements and parties. But the containment of insurgency has this problematic effect: it supports, or it eases the way for, the drift toward authoritarianism and hierarchy. Here is the central problem of liberal politics. How can we resist the steady aggrandizement of the rich and the powerful, without succumbing to the lure of ideological purity and singularity-the certainty that we are moving, against wealth and power, along the one right path to justice?
Consider first what I have called the "natural" tendency. Those who have political power steadily enhance their position and the well-being of their friends and allies, repressing or excluding the "others"-religious or ethnic minorities, the lower classes, workers, women, immigrants, and so on. To sustain their rule, they seek "power after power," as Hobbes wrote, strengthening the monarchy or the executive branch, building up the army, creating secret police units, setting limits on press freedoms. They discourage the opposition, or co-opt leading oppositionists, or find more or less legal means of repression. They reward their financial supporters with franchises, licenses, monopolies, and government contracts-and even more with the assistance of state agencies in overcoming competition, resisting labor agitators and union organizers, avoiding the enforcement of safety and environmental regulations, and much more. All this can be done in the context of a national emergency, but it is also entirely possible within (some interpretation of) constitutional limits. It can happen over a relatively short time span, though more often it occurs gradually, so that it really does look like a natural process: the powerful get more powerful; the rich get richer.
Resistance doesn't come easily, even when the formal "right of opposition" is maintained. It may take some extraordinary event-a military defeat, an economic collapse-to get things started, to open the way for an insurrection. That is the word I will use for things like the labor movement of the 1930s or the civil rights movement of the 1960s, both of which succeeded in redistributing wealth and power in the United States, though they fell short, far short, of the highest ambitions of their protagonists. Let's acknowledge that the focus of those high ambitions was, in Berlin's words, a "perfectly just society" or a "new and nobler society." Nothing less would have driven (mostly young) men and women - communist and socialist organizers for the CIO, say, or civil rights activists in Mississippi - into forms of political work that were unconventional and often dangerous. We have all been taught that material conditions are the "root cause" of political action, but high hopes and utopian aspiration are at least as important. If we were ever to renounce those latter two, the rich and the powerful would be a lot more comfortable than they have any right to be.
The tendency toward authoritarianism and hierarchy is anti-liberal in an obvious sense: it produces a political world where some people lose all the time and other people win all the time. Which is to say: it raises the stakes of political life in a dangerous way, for those who win all the time have a lot to lose if there is a successful insurrection, and those who lose all the time have "a world to win." At the same time, insurrectionary politics is also, often, anti-liberal because its protagonists may well believe that "no price is too heavy" to pay for the long-sought and much-hoped-for triumph of justice. We see the pursuit of power after power in the insurgent movement itself, where, for reasons Robert Michels described long ago, authority and hierarchy are taken to be necessities of the political struggle-even when the struggle is for equality. And then the same pursuit spills over into the larger society, most importantly and most dangerously in the form of violence and terrorism. To be sure, the spillover was minor in the two American movements I have used to illustrate my argument, but so also, some might say, were the victories they managed to win.
Liberalism survived these two insurrections-or, better, was saved by these two, for they succeeded in reducing the authority of capital and modifying the racial hierarchy just enough so that their militants could tell themselves that they had accomplished something significant, and that they would have further opportunities to accomplish something more. Liberalism succeeds when it can provoke and then incorporate radical movements-when it can both accommodate and deflect utopian aspiration. I don't think that Berlin's account of liberal politics captures this crucial point:
Of course, social or political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values...makes this unavoidable. Yet they can, I believe, be minimized by promoting and pre-serving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair-that alone, I repeat, is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behavior, otherwise we are bound to lose our way. A little dull as a solution, you will say.... (Crooked Timber, 19)
But dullness isn't the issue. What we have to worry about is that the "uneasy equilibrium," between capital and labor, say, will tend steadily toward the aggrandizement of capital; or that the "uneasy equilibrium" between bureaucratic power and popular forces will tend steadily toward the aggrandizement of the bureaucracy. This is true most simply because those who already possess wealth and power also possess the means to defend and strengthen their possession. So the equilibrium is indeed constantly threatened and constantly in need of repair, as Berlin says, but the repair is likely to require a "collision" on a larger scale than he imagines. How then do we make sure that the worker insurrection doesn't end in a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (or the vanguard of the proletariat)? And what is to prevent the uprising of popular forces from ending in the populist despotism of a Maximal Leader? We have seen this happen again and again, and it does indeed reflect the high ambition to enact a singular version of justice and righteousness-but it also reflects, on the other side now, the natural tendency toward authoritarianism and hierarchy.
There is no guarantee against these dangers. But there are reasons for the relative success, so far, of the Western liberal democracies-I mean, success relative to everyone else, for there is no real success; no actual equilibrium has yet been established, for example, between capital and labor, and it is very important to recognize that critical truth. Still, we haven't "lost our way." Why not?
The first reason must be the constitutionalist tradition (whether or not there is a written constitution) - the acceptance of constraints on executive power that goes back to the struggle against absolute monarchy and reflects a gradual assertion of legislative authority and judicial independence - and, what may be even more important, the gradual entrenchment of "due process." A commitment to a set of procedures, which are open to everyone's engagement, may be the most important of liberalism's constraints on the uses of power. This commitment goes very deep in our political culture. I have vivid memories of meetings of radical groups, back in the turbulent 1960s, where the one thing that we all agreed on was the authority of "Robert's Rules of Order." That little book shaped our discussions and made us liberals in spite of ourselves. Some dissident among us stood up and shouted, "Point of order!" and we all stopped to listen.
The second reason is the establishment, alongside legal due process, of an informal bargaining process. Insurrections commonly begin by rejecting not only the old bargains but the whole business of "wheeling and dealing," which is taken to be corrupt and degrading. They end, however, by strengthening the bargaining position of the popular forces - by improving the deal. Utopian militants are always unhappy with this outcome, but in a culture where it is accepted wisdom that "something is better than nothing," they aren't able to prevent it. So it is critically important to maintain this culture. I sometimes think that theorists of democracy who value deliberation over bargaining may underestimate its importance. Juries deliberate, aiming at a verdict - that is, a true speech, a singular right outcome. Citizens, by contrast, argue and mobilize and demonstrate and organize - all in order to create a position of strength from which they can bargain. Even if, as I believe, the mobilizations are often driven by a dream of perfect justice, there will be some among the militants ready to take what they can get.
The third reason figures in American, but probably not in British, political life (though there must be some functional equivalent in Britain). In the new world, where men and women can reinvent themselves, there has always been a deep distrust of inherited wealth and power. So Americans take great pleasure in our intermittent disruptions of entrenched authority and hierarchy. We root for the underdog not only in athletic contests but also in politics - though we are also, perhaps, a little too quick to think that victorious underdogs are behaving like overdogs. In our politics, "union bosses" are easier to hate than corporate CEOs, because the first are betraying an egalitarian ideal, while the second are acting "naturally." Still, insurrections are a little easier here than in traditional authoritarian and hierarchical societies, and this in turn makes them easier to incorporate.
For these three reasons, and perhaps for others too, utopian aspiration is less dangerous in liberal democratic societies than it might be. But these reasons only come into play, or only come into useful play, if there are political activists aspiring to create a "new and nobler society." Without the steady pressure or, better, the intermittent uprisings, of men and women in pursuit of some ideal of justice, liberalism will give us only oligarchs and plutocrats. The great virtue of a liberal democracy is that it holds open the door for those activist men and women who challenge its own inherent tendencies. And so long as the door is open, we will have political excitement-not all the time (no one could endure it all the time) but some of the time. And with the excitement will come the dangers that Berlin described and that I readily acknowledge. I want only to suggest that, given the natural tendency of political and economic life, dullness also has its dangers.
Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advances Studies in Princeton (NJ), is the editor of Dissent.