The Politics of Unitary Vision
Individuals perform best when they govern the various impulses vying for attention within their souls and channel their energies toward a deliberate end. Different individuals will, of course, orient their lives around different ultimate ends. But the very ability to pursue ends — rational ones of our choosing — is part of what it means to be human.
Given that this is true of human beings, why should it not be true of political communities as well? What is politics but the collective pursuit of rational ends? Like a human body, a polity has various impulses competing within it — individual citizens with their particular interests. But a polity becomes coherent and healthy when it channels these impulses toward ends that in some sense supersede and complete them. Politics thus transcends individuals in their finitude. We can achieve in community what no one achieves alone.
This way of thinking about communal life demonstrates what I call the "politics of unitary vision." The polity is invested with some overarching goal or purpose, and everyone is expected to cooperate in its achievement. There are times, of course, when this mode of political organization is appropriate, as when a country is engaged in war against an external foe. When a people's very existence is at stake, we expect to see politics become more highly telic and carefully coordinated. But not every time is wartime, and those who approach politics this way during times of peace have committed themselves to a particular understanding of what politics is: corporate striving for corporate ends. (Notice the body metaphor that underlies the view — "corporate," from the Latin term corpus.)
Given the impositions this approach to politics makes on individual freedom and autonomy, one might wonder why anyone should find it attractive. But surely it has proven attractive for the power it generates — the awesome power of the unified collective. This is not only a power that wins wars; it's also a power that builds civilizations and overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The great monuments of ancient Greece and Rome were built on this model, as were the cathedrals of Europe. Beyond power, there is the sense of solidarity and deep meaning that citizens enjoy when they contribute corporately toward ends that unite and transcend them. Certainly Aristotle had such goods in mind when he equated the ultimate political end (telos) neither with victory in war nor with the building of great monuments, but with the communal practice of virtue (aretē). Politics at its best, Aristotle thought, is the collective pursuit of complete human excellence.
Many Americans today, progressives and conservatives alike, long to recover this understanding of politics. They differ, no doubt, in their views of the ends to be pursued, but they are alike in desiring the power and the sense of purpose that attends the politics of unitary vision.
Yet this approach also led, in the 20th century, to the murder of roughly 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. It was responsible for at least 5 million (some estimates suggest more than 7 million) famine-related deaths that occurred in the wake of Joseph Stalin's first five-year plan (1928-1932) to achieve "socialism in one country," and for the Great Purge he orchestrated between 1936 and 1938 to eliminate his political rivals. And it was the cause, from 1958 to 1962, of the deaths (some say up to 55 million) from famine and persecution during the Great Leap Forward masterminded by Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
How can one and the same understanding of politics result in such divergent outcomes: a regime of human excellence, a regime of death? What is it about this political mode that in the modern context, if not the ancient, leads to crushing centralization, persecution, and loss of life?
The answer is that, long for it as we may, the politics of unitary vision only works under a strict set of political conditions. When these conditions are not met, the results are invariably disastrous.
The conditions can be identified by considering four cases — two archetypal, and two from the real world. The two archetypal cases are the "best regime" described by Aristotle in his Politics and the "kingdom of God" described in the New Testament. Neither has ever been achieved, but both have captivated the political imagination of the West, and we stand to learn from considering them. The two real-world cases are the republic of Geneva during John Calvin's tenure and the United States under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The first succeeded (though at a high cost); the second failed while nevertheless offering a source of inspiration for future political reformers.
ARISTOTLE'S BEST REGIME
When I teach Aristotle's Politics to undergraduates, I always stress the differences between an ancient Greek polis and a modern nation-state. The polis was small — smaller than the state of Rhode Island — and only a fraction (roughly 15%) of its inhabitants were citizens with the right to participate in politics. The rest were women and children, foreigners and their families, and slaves. This meant that the political class of the Greek polis was significantly more homogeneous than that of a modern nation-state. And it could easily pass laws without so much as consulting the vast majority of inhabitants.
Students are typically appalled by this degree of exclusion. But by the time they arrive at Aristotle's account of the best regime in Books VII and VIII of the Politics, and discover that its telos is the cultivation of human excellence and virtue, many of them change their tune. They rather like the idea of a politics devoted to virtue — imagining, no doubt, the unhampered progress such a community might make toward social justice or, alternatively, toward shoring up traditional moral values. This seems to them just the remedy for the manifest disorders of our age. Conveniently forgetting the distasteful features of the Greek polis that make such a politics of unitary vision possible, they suddenly want to know how to put Aristotle's best regime into practice.
But that would be difficult, even in the ancient world. The typical Greek polis was rife with factions. Aristotle himself described the rival claims to political authority asserted by the rich (because they contribute the most), the poor (because they are most numerous), the well-born (because of their ancient lineage), and the virtuous (because of their excellence and wisdom), and he admits that each has a partial point. Even those who agree that virtue should be the end of politics disagree over which virtues are best: Some think the active life of ruling is best, while others prefer the life of leisure and philosophy. Amid such factional contestation, Aristotle's unitary vision for a regime dedicated to the practice of "complete virtue" was hardly likely to get off the ground. Aristotle probably never expected that it would: He consistently described his best regime as something one would "pray for."
Aristotle did, however, take pains to describe some of the social conditions necessary for supporting such a city, which should give us pause. Slavery would be required, but not because Aristotle was immoral or unenlightened; it was because the citizens of the best regime needed copious amounts of free time to pursue virtue and participate in politics:
The citizens should not live a worker's or a merchant's way of life, for this sort of way of life is ignoble and contrary to virtue. Nor, indeed, should those who are going to be citizens in such a regime be farmers; for there is a need for leisure both with a view to the creation of virtue and with a view to political activities.
All major civilizations prior to the Industrial Revolution relied on slavery (or serfdom), but Aristotle's best regime would require slavery most of all, since its telos — the "complete virtue" of all citizens — was to be a full-time, lifelong pursuit.
The best regime would also require a uniform, compulsory form of public education. How else could rulers ensure the unity of mind and habit among citizens? As Aristotle observed:
Since there is a single end for the city as a whole, it is evident that education must necessarily be one and the same for all, and that the superintendence of it should be common and not on a private basis.
If a polity is like a human body with so many "members" and a clear goal to pursue, its members (citizens) must learn how to subordinate themselves to that goal. "One ought not even consider that a particular citizen belongs to himself," said Aristotle, "but rather that all belong to the city; for each is a part of the city." There should be neither diversity of culture or creed, nor sources of identity at odds with civic oneness.
This means, finally, that in the best regime, there can be no appeals to individual rights. "Right" is what the city requires in order to accomplish its end. Nowhere is this clearer than in Aristotle's brief discussion of human procreation:
Concerning exposure and rearing of offspring when they are born, let there be a law that no deformed child should be raised....A number should indeed be defined for procreation, but in cases of births in consequence of intercourse contrary to these, abortion should be induced before perception and life arises (what is holy and what is not will be defined by reference to perception and life).
There is here a concern for what is holy (hosios), or perhaps an invocation of "the holy" as a reinforcement for law, but there is nothing inviolable about life itself. How else to explain the practice of exposure? Deformed children are not useful to the city; therefore, they have no value.
A general tendency to devalue life is not an anomaly of antiquity, or even the 20th century, but rather typical of the politics of unitary vision. That is because the telos, consisting of goals so exalted that no human being can accomplish them alone, is also more worthy than any particular human being or group of human beings. Once the political community is directed toward a grand, unitary vision, human beings have value depending on their potential contributions to that end. Those who contribute nothing (or, worse, who dare to oppose the end in view) are dispensable.
THE BODY OF CHRIST AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD
In the political history of the West, Christians have been especially attracted to the politics of unitary vision, both because Christianity is itself highly telic in nature and because the image of the Church as the "body of Christ" has supplied such a vivid political metaphor.
With respect to the body of Christ, St. Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians put it this way:
For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ....And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and members individually.
Because the Church should behave like a single body, it is a great failing when factions or divisions (schismata) emerge. Rather, the Church should be of one mind, cooperating in its common enterprise (koinonia).
Evidently, the Church in Corinth had difficulties with this: It suffered badly from internal strife. So, too, did the Church in Jerusalem, according to the Book of Acts. For, on the one hand, we are told that "the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul, and...neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common [koina]." On the other, we learn that a certain couple, Ananias and Sapphira, tried to hold back some of their fortune from the common store, for which God struck them dead.
These all-too-human failings of the early Church to live successfully as "one body" are important to note for what they teach us about the necessary conditions for the politics of unitary vision. The first is that size matters. Just as the political class of Aristotle's best regime would have been relatively small and homogeneous, so too was the group of Jesus' initial disciples. But when believers became multitudinous (plēthunontōn), factions naturally arose among them. Second, the simplicity or complexity of the work to be done to achieve the vision itself matters a great deal with respect to unity. Divisions arose not only among the multitude of disciples, but even among the apostles themselves, as day-to-day practical questions became more complex.
Further conditions come to light when we reflect on the essential differences between a church and a polity. The early Church (the ekklēsia) was voluntary, held together by shared beliefs, and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Most polities bear none of these marks. Polities are not voluntary associations — both entry and exit are difficult. Shared beliefs are difficult to maintain in polities, which tend over time toward pluralism — marked differences of value and belief. And entire polities are rarely if ever possessed of the Holy Spirit, particularly insofar as their pluralism includes religious pluralism.
Thus, whatever degree of unity is possible in a church is not so easily achieved in politics. It is in fact a non sequitur to suppose that the body metaphor, because it works to some extent as an ecclesial image, must also work as a political one. The problem is this: The human body is a whole made up of parts — the parts have no life outside their participation in the whole. But a polity is a whole made up of parts that are also wholes. Herein lies a fundamental problem of politics: how to create a whole (polity) out of parts (human beings) who also demand, to some extent, to be recognized as wholes (dignified persons).
The politics of unitary vision is, among other things, an attempt to solve this problem by investing politics with an end so attractive that citizens might willingly subordinate themselves to it. Both Aristotle's best regime and the kingdom of God are archetypes in this respect. But the kingdom of God has been significantly more influential historically in animating real-world political movements, as well as in stirring the imagination of political ideologues in the modern era.
According to the New Testament, the kingdom of God will be ushered in by Jesus Christ (the Messiah or anointed one) at the end of time, the eschaton. Because it is supposed to be an actual kingdom (hē basileia), it is a political vision. But the kingdom is also, as Jesus bluntly informed his worldly judge, Pontius Pilate, "not of this world." In other words, it is not a political vision that human beings can simply implement here and now.
Yet the temptation for some Christians to think in terms of "immanentizing the eschaton" has proven irresistible. The phrase derives from the work of Eric Voegelin, one of the 20th century's most perceptive analysts of political messianism. To "immanentize the eschaton" means to attempt, by the work of our own hands, to usher in the kingdom of God on earth, or at least the thousand-year paradise on earth which, according to Revelation 20, is supposed to precede the Last Judgment and the kingdom proper.
Voegelin analyzed several fringe movements within Christianity prior to the Reformation that attempted to accomplish this but were crushed by the Church. He noted that in the wake of the Reformation, similar groups saw an opportunity to achieve what could not have been achieved under the watchful eye of Rome. Voegelin's generic name for such groups — one culled from their own tracts — was the "People of God." Voegelin also analyzed the tracts of several individual writers, brilliantly correlating their religious visions with the mass ideological movements of the 20th century.
His argument was that without the Christian vision of a perfected kingdom of God, the most notorious mass movements of the 20th century would never have arisen. Even if the modern movements were atheist in character, they nevertheless drew from the distinctly Christian vision of progress toward political perfection. Again, they violated this vision by immanentizing it, but they were animated by it nevertheless.
To this day, no millennial political movement has ever succeeded in creating anything remotely resembling a kingdom of God on earth — quite the reverse. Why not?
One reason is that the millennialists' vision of political perfection, as attractive as it may be, is impossible to achieve with human beings as they are. Millennial political movements have cheated badly in this regard: They seek a redeemed politics without awaiting the redeemer; they try to build a perfect kingdom out of chronically imperfect material. Upon discovering that most, if not all, human beings are presently unfit for the kingdom of God, the millennialists' options are few: They can retreat into ever smaller and purer communities, at which point they become weak and vulnerable to attack. They can go on the offensive themselves by attempting to kill their way toward purity. Or they can follow the path of Karl Marx in speculating that only when socialism (his version of the kingdom of God) succeeds will a New Man emerge who is capable of living socialistically.
None of these options has ever worked, and the conclusion seems inescapable: When the politics of unitary vision becomes otherworldly in focus — utopian in the ends it pursues — it becomes at the same time impossible, and dangerously so. Either the millennialists themselves go up in smoke, or they become murderers on a grand scale as they attempt to rid the world of impurity. And because the end they posit (a perfect kingdom) seems to them so immeasurably valuable, they are often more than willing to kill for it.
CALVIN'S GENEVA
Neither Aristotle's best regime nor the kingdom of God has ever succeeded in history, nor were they meant to — not, at any rate, under the kinds of constraints that actual human beings face here on earth. But the city of Geneva under the religious leadership of John Calvin was different. Here is an instance of the politics of unitary vision that succeeded. What conditions contributed to its success?
Geneva embraced the Reformation in 1535, and Calvin arrived a year later. Once there, he was persuaded by a fellow French reformer, William Farel, to stay in the city and assist in reforming the Genevan church. Geneva was a small but cosmopolitan republic with thousands of non-native habitants. Of its roughly 13,000 natives, fewer than 2,000 were citizens capable of voting in the General Council. Geneva thus resembled an average-sized Greek polis both in its population and its political class.
The formal institutions of Genevan government predate Calvin's arrival there. It was a typical republic in that its main offices were elective. A General Council of all citizens met annually to elect senior officers, but the real authority was the Petit Conseil, or simply "the Council," which was composed of 25 members in addition to four leaders called "syndics." This was the political body whose cooperation Calvin and Farel needed most for their reforms to succeed. Indeed, the drama of their efforts in Geneva boils down to the variability of their fortunes with this body.
Calvin and Farel's vision for Geneva focused on edification — in the literal sense of the "building up" (aedificatio) of the church. Their goal was not salvation, which Calvin viewed as entirely in the hands of God. Neither was it to inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth. That they eschewed these otherworldly goals while limiting their efforts to one small city likely contributed to their success.
Still, the idea of an entire city cooperating in a single scheme of edification would be difficult to advance. In European thought and practice during the 16th century (and earlier), there was little difference between "citizen" (or subject) and "church member" — they were the same people viewed through different lenses. Thus religious edification would place demands on every individual in the city, and the administration of this vision would require coordination between Geneva's ministers and magistrates.
The instrument through which Calvin and Farel first laid out their vision for Geneva was their Articles on the Organization of the Church and of Worship at Geneva, presented to the Council in January 1537. That document opens as follows:
[I]t is certain that a Church cannot be said to be well ordered and regulated unless in it the Holy Supper of our Lord is always being celebrated and frequented, and this under such good supervision that no one dare presume to present himself unless devoutly, and with genuine reverence for it. For this reason, in order to maintain the Church in its integrity, the discipline of excommunication is necessary, by which it is possible to correct those that do not wish to submit courteously and with all obedience to the Word of God.
The plan was, thus, to use monthly communion as an occasion to ensure that every resident of Geneva held right beliefs and lived according to basic moral standards.
Administratively, Calvin and Farel proposed that the Council itself should send a committee of its members to every quarter of the city to observe "if they see any vice worthy of note," and to report wrongdoers to the ministers. If the ministers' remonstrances proved ineffective, the wrongdoers would be excommunicated, or worse. Excommunication was the extent of the Church's power, but Calvin encouraged the magistrates to weigh whether having recalcitrant sinners in their midst was conducive to edification: "If there be anyone so insolent and abandoned to all perversity that he only laughs at being excommunicated and does not mind living and dying in such rejection, it will be your duty to consider if you must for long tolerate and leave unpunished such contempt and mockery of God and his gospel." The ultimate civil threat was, of course, execution.
Beyond this, Calvin and Farel proposed that all inhabitants of Geneva, including the magistrates themselves, make a confession of faith in order to determine who was "in harmony with the gospel." Only then could it be certain that all inhabitants were really "united in one Church."
Months prior to this, Calvin and Farel had presented a confession of faith to the magistrates — the Geneva Confession of 1536. In most respects, it was unremarkable for Protestant Christians, making no controversial claims about doctrinal matters. However, it was, in one respect, extremely bold and difficult for the magistrates to accept. In a section titled "Excommunication," Calvin went so far as to list types of sinners who would be excommunicated "until their repentance is known." The list included "idolaters, blasphemers, murderers, thieves, lewd persons, false witnesses, sedition-mongers, quarrellers, those guilty of defamation or assault, drunkards, and dissolute livers." Far exceeding similar lists given in scripture, Calvin's catalogue made clear that the Geneva Confession was not merely about doctrine, but moral discipline as well. The pair was proposing nothing less than the enforcement of morals.
Initially, Calvin and Farel's vision for Geneva failed. Most citizens simply refused to make the confession and, in the election of 1538, voted to replace supporters of the two ministers on the Council with magistrates who were adamantly opposed to them. By March of that year, all supporters of Calvin and Farel on the Council were deposed, and two sharp demands were laid upon them: first, that they not "mix up in politics but...preach the gospel of God," and second, that they "live in the Word of God according to the ordinances of Bern" — a Protestant city to the north — rather than their own ordinances.
Unwilling to stand down, Calvin and Farel refused communion to all inhabitants of Geneva on Easter Day of 1538 due to their unruliness and ridicule of the word of God. But their plan backfired: They were summarily exiled from Geneva.
This is the typical way the politics of unitary vision ends in republics and democracies where citizens have the power to vote: Rival factions arise over the vision or its implementation; demands are made of the visionaries to compromise or halt altogether. If they compromise, the vision becomes more pluralistic, less unitary. If they halt, the vision simply fails. A last alternative is for them to double down — as Calvin and Farel did — but this typically spells death (for the vision, if not the visionaries) once rival powers assert control.
Remarkably, this is not the way things ended in Geneva. Rather, due to the inability of Geneva's elected magistrates, in the absence of Calvin and Farel, to maintain political or ecclesial order in the city, Calvin was invited back in 1541, at which point the fortunes of his unitary vision were greatly improved. Upon returning, Calvin proposed, and the Council accepted, a set of "ecclesiastical ordinances," which enshrined most of Calvin's program into law. The major exception was the establishment of a body in charge of excommunication. But by 1555, Calvin had secured this, too.
What accounts for Calvin's ultimate success? I have mentioned the small size of the city and its ruling class, as well as the fact that the ends Calvin articulated (edification through doctrine and discipline) were practicable, not utopian. Burdensome as Calvin's moral discipline must have seemed to a city accustomed to license, his vision was in fact enforceable.
Two further factors seem important. First, though historians (and his associates) sometimes comment on Calvin's hotheadedness and impetuosity, he was an exceptionally gifted leader, if not in his earliest days in Geneva, then certainly by the time of his recall. He was too prudent to mistake earthly politics for the kingdom of God or the body of Christ. He was also courageous in standing up to his opponents and extraordinarily patient in executing his plan.
Second, and less laudably, Calvin proved more than willing to secure his unitary vision by executing his enemies. In 1555, he approved the execution of his chief political rivals. One of them, Ami Perrin, had led an uprising and managed to flee Geneva before he could be punished; he was nevertheless sentenced in absentia, along with three accomplices who did not flee, to have his head cut off and his body quartered. Two of his accomplices were in fact decapitated and quartered, their quarters hung from the gallows in the four corners of the city, their heads placed in symbolic locations to terrify any latent supporters of Perrin. Nor were these the only political executions during Calvin's years of leadership.
Such use of harsh capital punishment was not unusual in the 16th century. But it is also a recurrent and necessary feature of the politics of unitary vision, wherein a single vision is imposed on a diverse and fractious population. Those who resist the vision must be either tamed or eliminated.
THE WILSON PRESIDENCY
Calvin's politics of unitary vision did not terminate in Geneva; it was exported to America and animated much of the Puritan practice of politics in the colonies. However, once the Constitution became operative in 1789, the politics of unitary vision became obsolete. The United States was simply too large, its citizens too diverse, its political factions too numerous, for this style of politics to work. Also, because Americans placed such high value on political equality and freedom, they would not permit themselves to become the playthings of a centralized power with a single vision to which all must conform. Visions belong to individuals and voluntary associations, perhaps even to particular states that comprise the union, but not to a nation as diverse as America.
Indeed, America's entire constitutional structure was designed to prevent the politics of unitary vision from emerging, except in cases where some obvious pressing need, such as military defense, demanded it. The separation of powers, checks and balances, term limits, federalism: All redound to the same purpose of preventing American government from engaging in grand, single-minded pursuits. The government was rather to have strictly enumerated powers and limited ends.
Enter President Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Calvinist minister, former president of Princeton University, and former governor of New Jersey. One can only speculate about the degree to which Wilson's Calvinist upbringing inspired his understanding of politics, but the influence seems strong, as does the influence of Hegelian philosophy which Wilson encountered as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins.
Like Calvin, Wilson understood politics as a highly telic pursuit of religiously inspired ends. But he tended more than Calvin to immanentize those ends, and even to cast human beings in the role of Christ the redeemer. Speaking to a group of young people while president of Princeton, Wilson claimed that in order to be effective in the world, one must first make contact with "the person and power of Christ," and then ask oneself: "What would Christ have done in this world at this time, in our place, with our opportunities?" In what "direction" would Christ push his "enterprises?" "What would he have wished to see accomplished in the world, and what would he have set himself to accomplish?"
Years later, in his failed attempt to persuade the U.S. Senate to accept the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I, Wilson again showed his religious cards: "The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God. We cannot turn back. The light streams on the path ahead, and nowhere else."
Hegelian influences appear consistently in Wilson's progressive philosophy of history, as well as his "organic" conception of the state. Wilson viewed history as a causal agent, scarcely separable from God himself, moving human beings toward political unity in "the state." The state was a living organism much like a human body, endowed with cooperative members and directed toward ends that transcend the ends of individuals themselves. "Society is in no sense artificial," Wilson insisted; "it is as truly natural and organic as the individual man himself...a living, organic whole."
Wilson viewed this "organic whole" as the goal or telos of political history worldwide. He believed that in his own time, in America, this whole had at last become "self-conscious" and "self-directive." In other words, America was now ready for the politics of unitary vision.
One is entitled to ask why Wilson thought conditions had changed so fundamentally in America (to say nothing of the world) that such a politics was now possible. His answers were clear, if dubious. First, he thought the Civil War had removed all sources of American heterogeneity. Second, he thought that the advent of steam power, the railroad, electricity, the telegraph, and the modern newspaper all effectively made the country smaller, thereby offsetting the problem of size — especially when combined with systematic popular education. Their overall effect was to help our "democratic state" discover its true meaning in "national organic one-ness and effective life."
Wilson's unitary vision for the American nation had three foci: economic regulation, individual welfare, and global order. Economic regulation was needed, he thought, to protect people from the economic power of Big Business. This idea was neither new nor radical. What was radical, however, was Wilson's vision for individual welfare, which looked to government as a guarantor of "complete self-development." The clearest statement of this is found in his book, The State:
Government is the organ of society, its only potent and universal instrument....What, then, are the objects of society? What is society? It is an association of individuals for mutual aid. Mutual aid to what? To self-development....The case for society stands thus: the individual must be assured the best means, the best and fullest opportunities, for complete self-development: in no other way can society itself gain variety and strength.
Wilson never said what "complete self-development" entailed, but he was confident that it was government's task to ensure it.
He was also confident that complete self-development would eventually yield a perfectly harmonious society without conflicts of interest. Thus, he wrote in The New Freedom of climbing "the slow road until it reaches some upland" where citizens can "look in each other's faces and see that there is nothing to conceal, that all they have to talk about they are willing to talk about in the open and talk about with each other." The goal was a polity "where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, co-ordinated beehive."
It should go without saying that this vision of perfect cooperation, as in a beehive, is not for human beings as they actually are, but as Wilson dreamed they might be. Wilson's vision was thus utopian. It was likewise utopian in foreign affairs where his goal was to bring about world peace.
Given his multi-faceted, radical vision for America and the world, how did Wilson's presidency fare? The results are, in fact, exactly what one might expect: The non-utopian economic reforms succeeded as far as Wilson pushed them, but beyond this, his politics of unitary vision could not succeed in a large, pluralist nation such as the United States, much less worldwide, except to the extent that one would be willing to curtail fundamental rights and freedoms and eliminate one's political rivals. Wilson certainly attempted both, but in the end, he could not permanently achieve the latter.
Wilson was aware that he could not succeed under the constraints of the Constitution as written. His objections to the Constitution were rooted precisely in his unitary vision of politics. The framers of the Constitution might have conceived of American government as a machine, with parts that pull in different directions sustaining the balance of the whole. But to Wilson, they should have understood it as an organism, with organs that must all work in unison:
No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence. Government is...a body of men, with highly differentiated functions...of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is indispensable, their warfare fatal.
Wilson desired a constitutional structure that would not throw obstacles in the way of his political visions. At the very least, he wanted a method of constitutional interpretation that was not stuck in the past. "All that progressives ask," wrote Wilson, "is permission — in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine."
As far as implementation goes, Wilson never attempted extensive congressional reform. Neither did he pursue the "complete self-development" of individuals. That was because he was interrupted by World War I, and by the dream of achieving by means of war his vision of democracy and world peace.
What Wilson succeeded in implementing was a new style of political leadership — one more akin to monarchical or prime-ministerial leadership than to that of an American president. He saw that without strong leadership, the national vision would lie dormant: "We have no one in Congress who stands for the nation," he complained. "Each man stands but for his part of the nation." Since the nation was now presumably unified in purpose, strong presidential leadership was essential. But even strong presidential leadership would not be enough for Wilson to achieve his utopian dream of world peace. Coercion would be necessary — as Wilson was likely aware.
Perhaps no one has seen more clearly how draconian Wilson became during the war years than American sociologist Robert Nisbet. In The Present Age, Nisbet argued that the United States during World War I was the first "total" or "totalitarian" state of the 20th century, a brief forerunner to the more infamous totalitarian states of Europe and Asia.
Given that more than half the American electorate opposed the war, Wilson created a propaganda machine called the "Committee on Public Information" (CPI), which he tasked with fanning enthusiasm and silencing opposition. The CPI trained up an army (roughly 75,000) of Four Minute Men empowered by the president to speak to any gathering, invited or not, about the war effort. According to Nisbet, "their real purpose [was]...that of lauding the war aim and the government." The CPI went further, said Nisbet, in recruiting several hundred thousand "neighborhood watchers" to serve as spies or monitors upon their own neighborhoods.
By May 1917, Wilson had instituted a mandatory draft for all men between 21 and 30 with the following astonishing remarks:
It is not an army that we must shape and train for war — it is a Nation....But this cannot be if each man pursues a private purpose. All must pursue one purpose. The Nation needs all men, but it needs each man, not in the field that will most pleasure him, but in the endeavor that will best serve the common good....The significance of this cannot be overstated. It is a new thing in our history and a landmark in our progress. It is a new manner of accepting and vitalizing our duty to give ourselves with thoughtful devotion to the common purpose of us all.
At last, Wilson was creating his organic state.
His next step was to centralize the economy, or huge swaths of it, on the grounds that this was necessary for the war effort. He did so by creating a War Industries Board with absolute power to dictate production methods, set production quotas, allocate raw materials, set wages, and fix prices. Then came the Sedition Act of 1918, which locked into place what Nisbet called "the most complete thought control ever exercised on Americans." Wilson's attorneys used this legislation to crush political opposition, fining and imprisoning many members of the anti-war movement along with leading socialists, anarchists, Jews, and Germans whose political views appeared to threaten American democracy.
But even with these draconian measures, Wilson could not ultimately force the nation, much less the world, to pursue his dream of American-led world peace. The war was won, but with the rejection of Wilson's post-war vision and his League of Nations, Wilson's presidency ended in failure.
HOW (NOT) TO ACHIEVE THE POLITICS OF UNITARY VISION
The politics of unitary vision can only succeed under a strict set of political conditions. When these conditions are not met, the results are disastrous. We can now specify those conditions.
First, the polity must be small, both geographically and in terms of its political class. Without meeting this condition, all subsequent conditions are impossible to meet.
Second, the polity needs to be relatively homogeneous. Of course, no polity is perfectly homogeneous. Indeed, some degree of diversity is necessary if a polity is to function as a single body: Diverse members are needed to perform different roles. But there can be no serious diversity of ends (call this "telic diversity"), for that would be like a body with multiple heads — the antithesis of unity.
Third, leaders and citizens must be willing to regulate diversity and to eliminate telic diversity absolutely. When there is a single, clear end to pursue, anyone or anything that does not advance that end should be considered valueless or worse, harmful.
Fourth, leaders and citizens must be willing to subordinate individual rights to political ends. It is not possible to maintain an organic political unity when citizens insist that they are ends-in-themselves with inviolable rights and freedoms.
Fifth, leaders must be willing to eliminate, by imprisonment or execution, members of the political class who oppose them.
And sixth, the ends need to be achievable (non-utopian) in the concrete sense that they can actually be enforced, as well as sustained over time by a uniform educational system (or rather, a system of propaganda).
These six conditions are necessary but not sufficient; in order to meet them, myriad other considerations must come into play. But these six conditions are the sine qua non of the politics of unitary vision.
Given these conditions, it is enlightening to consider why Woodrow Wilson failed and, indeed, why the United States can never be fertile ground for the politics of unitary vision.
First, the United States is too large (the first condition), and therefore defies any attempt to satisfy all subsequent conditions. Wilson grossly underestimated the problem of size. He took it to be mainly a problem of heterogeneity, and believed it to have been solved (the second condition) by the Civil War and modern communications technology. He was of course wrong to believe that these developments had eliminated heterogeneity. But he also failed to notice the difficulty in a country the size of the United States of regulating diversity and absolutely eliminating telic diversity (the third condition). He attempted to meet this condition with propaganda, and the deportation or imprisonment of citizens who viewed politics differently from him. But the scale of opposition was simply too large for him to succeed.
Nor was Wilson able, for long, to subordinate individual rights to his telic political vision (the fourth condition). Here the problem was not only the size of the United States, but also its historical character. The belief that individuals are ends in themselves, with rights to freedom and political equality, is so central to American identity that it cannot be eliminated by force. Here Niccolò Machiavelli was onto something when he deemed it impossible to dominate republics by force when the citizens are "accustomed to freedom." The only reliable way to dominate them, he thought, was to destroy them.
It is true, as Wilson discovered, that Americans will voluntarily subordinate their individual rights to collective security in times of emergency. Thus Wilson presented the war as vital to the safety not only of America but of the world. Americans, however, will not tolerate "emergency politics" for long. It is one thing to declare "war" on foreign powers or noxious entities like poverty, hunger, or drugs. It is another thing to maintain the severe sacrifices of war in a country that prizes freedom.
The size of the United States and its ruling class also prevented Wilson from successfully eliminating his political rivals (the fifth condition). The founders took this into account when conceiving our union: Expand the size, as James Madison recognized, and you will expand the number of factions. Then one need only ensure that numerous factions are free to counter each other in the institutional offices of government. The result, Madison thought, would be stalemate: No faction should be capable of dominating the political landscape.
Madison was wrong in believing that factions would never be able to dominate: Since its founding, the United States has been governed by rotating factions, not an absence of factions. But Madison was at least partially right in that no faction has been able to maintain its dominance in American politics. And this is what Wilson learned the hard way. In a country the size of the United States, a pluralist democracy with widespread representation in the legislature and an independent judiciary, it is impossible to maintain the politics of unitary vision for long, because it is impossible to eliminate the opposing members of the political class: They are too numerous.
Finally (the sixth condition), Wilson chose ends that were, given the size and diversity of the United States, simply beyond the power of law enforcement and propagandistic education to achieve. It is highly dubious whether Wilson's goal of world peace could have been realized under any conditions this side of the eschaton. Be that as it may, the effort that would be required to coerce a country as large as the United States — one with a constitutional commitment to freedom of thought and expression and to political equality more broadly — into pursuing such a vision would be greater than any political leader could achieve.
Given what this historical survey reveals, it is frankly unethical to adopt the politics of unitary vision in the United States today (outside the context of a clear existential threat), no matter how apparently holy or just the desired end may be. This is illuminated by the "publicity test" proposed by Immanuel Kant: Can you, the advocate of a unitary vision for America, inform your fellow citizens of what the vision is, and the means that would be necessary to achieve it, without having to lie or otherwise soft-pedal the truth? If you cannot, the reason is likely that you are violating, or will soon be violating, the tacit terms of liberal political life: that we grant each other reciprocal freedom and equality, and do not try to "lord over" each other, treating others as subjects rather than citizens. This is why the advocates of unitary visions in the United States so often lie about their intentions: Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
Ultimately, the politics of unitary vision is unethical because we know it cannot succeed. In the tradition of ethical reflection known as the "just war tradition," one of the ethical requirements for using force to pursue a just cause is the "likelihood of success": How confident are you that you will succeed and that you will do more good than harm? If the answer is not "exceedingly confident," then the pursuit is not just imprudent, but vicious, even criminal. Surely something similar must hold true in domestic politics when the life and liberty of our fellow citizens are at stake.
The inability of the advocates of unitary vision to articulate a credible end game is a serious admission of moral guilt. If you intend to push hard for a unitary political goal that cannot be achieved without significant coercion, and you have no clear sense of how it will turn out, your political activism is not only imprudent; it is immoral.