Crane, 'Political Style: The Artistry of Power', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9512
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9512-crane-political
@@@@95.12.9, Hariman, Political Style
Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Pp. 259. ISBN 0-
22-631630-0.
Reviewed by Gregory Crane -- Tufts University
I would like in this review to draw attention to a new book
which, although it does not primarily concern itself with
antiquity, nevertheless has much to offer those of us who study how
power is concentrated and disseminated in the classical period.
Robert Hariman's Political Style: The Artistry of Power uses
subtle analyses of four texts to articulate four different
political styles: Machiavelli's The Prince introduces the
realist style, Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the last days of
Haile Selassie's rule serves as a case study in courtly style,
while Cicero's Letters and Kafka'sThe Castle
represent republican and bureaucratic styles. It is hard to assign
Hariman to a neat academic pigeon-hole: he is Professor of Rhetoric
and Communication Studies and Endowment Professor of the Humanities
at Drake University. He certainly lives up to the expectations of
rhetoric, for his writing engages complex issues, does not shirk
from sophisticated topics and nevertheless remains eminently
readable. As an expert on communications, he has a keen eye for the
mechanics whereby humans share ideas. As a professor of the
humanities, he uses texts, but his reading, far from being a
reductive scavenger-hunt for data, enhances the complexity of every
text on which it focuses.
I found each of the four main chapters delightful both because
of their content and because of their methodology, for in each case
Hariman interweaves his canonical texts with more recent but
equally elusive phenomena: few would probably link Oprah Winfrey,
Madonna, the Emperor Pu Yi and Haile Selassie, but the courtly
style illuminates the practices of each; Cicero, Thomas Jefferson,
and Vaclav Havel appear as men who are not only politicians but
actors struggling to "craft a persona emblematic of public life"
(5) and to establish a language appropriate for political discourse
in a republican world--a sympathetic treatment of all three men by
a left-of-center writer is worth the price of admission. While the
soulless and depersonalized bureaucracy that haunts Kafka's work
may seem all too familiar to anyone who has wrestled with an
American Registry of Motor Vehicles or Post Office, the student of
ancient bureaucracies from Mesopotamia to Rome will probably find
this section of interest as well. Hannah Arendt stressed the close
relationship between totalitarianism and the anonymity of
bureaucratic control.[[1]] She saw totalitarian rule as it emerged
in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as typically and distinctly
modern, but the basic elements of totalitarianism appear already in
fifth century Athens,[[2]] and the student of classical Greece may
also find Hariman's views on bureaucratic style useful. The chapter
on the "courtly style," with its case studies from the Ethiopian
court and its forays into the ostensibly anti-courtly modern world,
is an excellent piece of work: those trying to understand the role
of Demos in Aristophanes' Knights would do well to consider
Hariman on the body of the sovereign in courtly style. Anyone who
reads Hariman's description of Selassie's "pee lackey" will be
reminded that the grotesqueries to which Kleon and the Sausage
Seller stoop are not merely the stuff of comedy. As a student of
fifth-century ideologies and especially of Thucydides, however, I
found the chapter on the realist style (which makes only brief
direct references to classical antiquity) particularly germane, and
it is to this that I will turn for the remainder of this review.
The Realist Style
Hariman's chapter on Machiavelli is the best description of
political realism that I have yet had the good fortune to find. A
few months ago, I ran into a classicist from another institution
who also turned out to have been studying the relationship between
Thucydides and the tradition of political realism. In exchanging
impressions, we both admitted to one another--not without some
relief--that neither of us had been able to muster much enthusiasm
for the extensive and often eloquent bibliography composed by
political philosophers and experts in international relations.
Several scholars with an interest both in political theory and in
Thucydides have recently helped to bridge the gap,[[3]] but
Hariman's analysis of the realist style is both penetrating and
succinct.
Students of realism have generally sought to enumerate a set of
assumptions common to realists of various types: realists, for
example, view the state as the primary actor; they see political
and international relations as a competition between rational
actors maximizing their advantage; they separate interstate
conflict from conventional norms of justice; above all, they see
power, however power may be constructed in a given society, as a
universal object of competition, and the hunger for power becomes
a common denominator that makes cross-cultural comparison possible.
Different realists vary this set of assumptions, which come to
assume the role of litmus tests popular in American politics: one
text even helpfully includes a table of "realist assumptions" and
who shares them[[4]]--thus further reducing the concept of realism
to a checklist. Since many people use these sets of assumptions to
define their relationship to realist thought, these labels
constitute an important and legitimate hermeneutic tool, but they
do not tell the whole story any more than do the labels by which
any group, western or non-western, ancient or modern, "dominant" or
"marginal," defines itself.
Hariman's analysis leaves these well-known labels aside. Instead,
his model of realist style is much more powerful, and its power
lies in the attention which he pays to text and language and to
style--elements which realist authors have (for reasons Hariman
pursues) generally avoided. Hariman provides a different and (in my
view) much more compelling account of Machiavelli, his influence
and, indeed, a central force in modern political thought precisely
because he does not marginalize language in his search for some
"scientific" truth. Many traditional realists give the impression
that, although they sense the limits of human foresight and doubt
that we will ever have a mathematically exact model of human
behavior, they would be delighted if such a thing were possible. It
is as if they admired Thucydides' history, but wished they could
replace him with a political equivalent to Euclid's
Elements, with its elegant and rigorous progression from
axioms to theorems.
The Prince, for all its distinctness, belongs to a well
established genre in which wise men offer public advice to
princes--there were many such texts in the renaissance and Hariman
traces the tradition to Isocrates' letter To Nicocles (those
with an affinity for the fifth century may be tempted to add a
number of Pindar's epinicia, and the genre could easily be
expanded further). But Machiavelli turned the conventional genre on
its head: every other renaissance author had grounded his authority
in references to past texts. In Erasmus' Institutio Principis
Christiani, for example, "the dead have become exempla,
rhetorical figures having as much presence as the living and more
authority, and any distinction between ancient author, prior ruler,
and current prince is, well, something not quite determined (27)."
When Augustino Nifo rewrote (and one can say plagiarized)
Machiavelli, he added all the references to classical authors that
Machiavelli had chosen to exclude, thus bringing The Prince
into line with practice of the time and illustrating the gap which
separated The Prince from the conventions of its genre.
The issue went beyond including a few more footnotes.
Machiavelli's peculiar model of power is inextricably linked to his
marginalization of past texts: "Whereas Isocrates understood power
as an effective text, and implied that rulers can only rule
effectively if they, like speakers, adapt themselves to the
restraints imposed by their audiences, Machiavelli developed the
modern metaphysics of power by writing in a manner that subverted
the authority of textual consciousness, freeing those who would
rule from the constraints of eloquence (23-24)." Hariman goes on to
state that, for Machiavelli, "the essence of his subject is
something that is correctly communicated only through artlessness,
he abjures explicit textuality because power is not itself textual.
As rhetoric is extrinsic to reality, so power becomes objectified,
something existing independently of language, texts, and textual
authority (24)." The realist style, according to Hariman, requires
the pose of the artless reporter: realists must minimize their use
of explicit rhetorical form precisely because they ground their
authority in a clear understanding of the "real" world.
Hariman places Machiavelli's vision of power at the center of
modernity. This is, of course, nothing new, but Hariman does not
content himself with references to the separation of morality from
statecraft or the emphasis upon physical force. Hariman sees the
contempt for textuality as a force that continues to inform
political discourse: "Machiavelli's technique of denigrating other
political texts as texts, necessarily alienated in a material
world, has become a rhetoric of self-assertion that now is
reproduced endlessly. So it is that diplomats can denigrate human
rights as slogans, corporate executives can dismiss worker-safety
laws as bureaucratic red-tape, and journalists can debunk political
speech as mere rhetoric. In every case, understanding the modern
age requires reading Machiavelli not only as the proponent of
self-assertion for the few fortunate enough to have lo stato
within their reach, but also as the modern writer schooling all of
us to attain self- assertion by overruling our texts (42-43)."
"When political intelligence is represented as the calculation of
forces in a real world, then political rhetoric becomes its shadow
and political commentary the futile attempt to discern the light in
the shadows. Thus, his strategies for aggrandizing his own text
ultimately work against him. By setting his discourse over the
other writers, Machiavelli set in motion an attack upon all
political discourse that has to destroy his own position. The
Prince is not enigmatic, strictly speaking, but the experience
of reading it is paradoxical. Machiavelli's reader loses through
the act of reading itself the resources for integrating this
political treatise into the political world (48-49)."
It is not hard to see the irony of the Machiavellian position.
On the one hand, Machiavelli undercuts the authority of his own
text, for, if texts are secondary to reality, then The
Prince too constitutes at best a negative hermeneutic that
explodes all texts (including itself). On the other hand,
Machiavelli's text itself became a canonical document (for some the
founding text) of political science, and it continues to be studied
and cited. The realist text, with its disdain for rhetoric and the
tactics of persuasion, can be the most rhetorical and persuasive of
all. Marx, for example, rejected the airy phantasms of Hegel and
Feuerbach, striving to base his philosophy on "facts" and "data,"
but his work engendered in part a vast and stultifying sacred
literature that did as much violence to empirical study as any
fundamentalist religious tract.
The strength of Hariman's analysis of realism lies in its
commitment to texts and to the real impact which they, by their
style and particular form, exert upon the world. Most writers on
realism have taken for granted, and thus readily overlooked, a
central point that The Prince set out to make: they assume
that political science/philosophy concerns itself with a real world
and that texts are, at best, a means by which to apprehend this
real world more clearly. Hariman, with his sensitivity to rhetoric
and to the subtleties of communication, resists this. While he does
not go so far as to imply that the medium is the message, his
analysis insists that medium and message cannot be separated: few
writers in any field would challenge this statement, but scholarly
practice often fails to give proper weight to medium and message.
The text is important because, whether or not there exists a
sovereign Platonic reality "out there," the text allows us to
interpret reality for ourselves and to extract meaning from events.
Hariman's analysis places at least one traditional question in
a new light. Machiavelli's yearning for a scientific realism is
related to the transformation of European science. If Machiavelli
turned his gaze from ancient authors, the anatomists would likewise
begin relying less on Galen and more on direct observation
(although Galenic phantoms, such as organ descriptions based on
animal rather than human anatomy would remain in the literature
well after scientists had begun dissecting human cadavers). Even
more intriguing, I think, would be an investigation into the
rediscovery of Greek mathematics. The axioms and postulates of
Euclid do in fact constitute a language that generates "knowledge"
as certain as any human system ever has. Parallels to medicine
might suggest that Machiavelli simply wished to replace textual
authority with a pure empiricism. The mathematical model, by
contrast, suggests movement in a different direction. Instead of
eliminating language as a barrier, many political scientists since
Machiavelli have wished to replace the inchoate and fuzzy language
of traditional texts with a rigorous and reliable scientific
discourse. Rhetoric is thus problematic not because language and
textuality per se are flawed but because rhetoric embodies
in itself the errant and unreliable tendencies of natural language.
Hariman's analysis is valuable not simply because it provides a
strong reading of Machiavelli and subsequent realist thought, but
also because many of his insights shed light upon Thucydides as
well--indeed, instructors teaching Thucydides might use the chapter
on Machiavelli as a starting point for discussion of a realist
author.
First, Machiavelli seeks to define "his subject against an
alternative; this technique persuades the reader of the artlessness
not only of Machiavelli's text but of power itself (5)." The
apparent candor of Thucydides and the author's self-effacement are
among the most carefully studied aspects of Thucydidean style.
Thucydides attempts to present a narrative that perfectly mirrors
its subject and presents "just the facts,"[[5]] but the apparent
artlessness of his narrative, whether consciously contrived or
not,[[6]] contributes to its subtle power.[[7]]
Second, Hariman describes Machiavelli's view of power as
"topographic," and illustrates this outlook with a quote from
George Kennan's Machiavellian analysis of Soviet Power: Russian
"political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly,
wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. Its main
concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny
available to it in the basin of world power (36)." "The shift from
textuality to topography," according to Hariman, "creates a
gravitational pull toward imperial formulations. When power is
understood in terms of speech, it is checked, relational,
circumscribed by the exigencies of being heard by an audience or
understood by a reader, and always awaiting a reply. When power is
understood in terms of vision it is unchecked, expansive, requiring
only the movement of the person seeing to acquire the means for
complete control of the environment. Machiavelli is comprehensible
as the exponent of the modern state not because he described the
state but because he composed a discourse capable of carrying the
expansive potential in state power (41-42)."
The irresistible fascination of power is, of course, a major
theme throughout Thucydides' History. At the climax of the
Funeral Oration (Thucydides' closest approximation to idealist
discourse), Perikles calls upon the Athenians to lose themselves in
worship of Athens' power (2.43). In the opening section we hear
that fear, not loyalty and friendship, allowed Agamemnon to
assemble the expedition against Troy (1.9). In their first speech
of the History, the Athenians argue that the quest for
power--the combined influence of advantage, fear and
honor--constitute natural influences: the Athenian acquisition of
maintenance of empire is thus no more than human and should arouse
no ill will (1.76). The "topographic" model of power as an
irresistible "gravitational" pull is very similar to the model of
Athenian acquisitiveness presented by the Corinthians at 1.67-71
and the more general analysis of imperialism by Alcibiades at
6.16-18.
Third, the rejection of textuality may at first seem not to apply
to Thucydides. When Erasmus wrote the Institutio Principis
Christiani, he drew upon a continuous written textual tradition
that was two thousand years old. "Learned" texts of this type were
inconceivable in the fifth century BCE, because the written textual
tradition in generaland prose in particular were still in their
infancy: Stewart Flory has argued strongly that Herodotus composed
the first book-length prose text.[[8]] Thucydides himself did much
(perhaps too much) to establish conventions for the prose
monograph.
Nevertheless, thin as the textual tradition may have been,
comparatively speaking, Thucydides establishes for himself a
position much like that which Hariman attributes to Machiavelli.
Thucydides opens his history with a revisionist analysis of the
distant past in which he dismisses heroes and heroic poets as well,
and where Homer comes in for explicit attack. Recent as prose
writing may have been, Thucydides refers (disparagingly) to his
predecessors, citing Hellanicus (Thuc. 1.97.2), and the famous
boast at 1.22 that his history will be an "heirloom for all time"
glances defensively at unnamed others who compose to give pleasure
rather than instruction. Most readers have felt that Herodotus
(never explicitly mentioned) looms over Thucydides' text.[[9]]
Thucydides' insistence at 1.22 on direct observation, cross-
checking and analysis and his suspicion of orality reflect a
compulsion to base his words on some tangible reality.[[10]]
Fourth, I would like to conclude with the tension that Hariman
locates in Machiavelli's realist style. "When political
intelligence is represented as the calculation of forces in a real
world, then political rhetoric becomes its shadow and political
commentary the futile attempt to discern the light in the shadows.
Thus, his strategies for aggrandizing his own text ultimately work
against him. By setting his discourse over the other writers,
Machiavelli set in motion an attack upon all political discourse
that has to destroy his own position. The Prince is not
enigmatic, strictly speaking, but the experience of reading it is
paradoxical. Machiavelli's reader loses through the act of reading
itself the resources for integrating this political treatise into
the political world (48-49)."
The parallel with Thucydides is not, I think, as close in this
case as in the others, but the general problem--the inherent
contradiction of the realist text--confronts both writers. Many, if
not most, of those who have studied Thucydides closely have come
away with the suspicion that he never resolved in his own mind the
tension between language and reality, even between logos and
ergon (or "realism" and "idealism," to use two anachronistic
terms). The Athenians not only dominate the History. They
also approach more closely than any other actors a heroic
status--at least by Thucydides own terms--for the Athenians, as
they move from their speech at Sparta to the Mytilenean debate and
finally arrive at the Melian dialogue--bring their words and
actions into progressively closer alignment. Even so, Athenian
realism emerges as yet another rhetorical strategy and a
questionable guide to decision making. The Athenian Euphemus
delivers perhaps the most ironic speech in the entire history and
in so doing dramatizes the uncertainty of the realist style.
Pretending to a candor that is false and a realism that seeks to
deceive, he tells the Sicilians that Athens can have no designs
upon Sicily because imperialist expansion is not in Athens'
interest (6.76). The irony is that Euphemus, although consciously
lying (the Athenian expedition was sent to conquer Sicily), is
actually telling the truth, for, in the event, the Athenian
imperialist expedition is a catastrophe from which Athens never
fully recovers. Realism may have its attractions, but reality is
hard to pin down.
NOTES
[[1]] Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. (2
ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.
[[2]] Sagan, E. (1991). The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy
and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press. 135-158.
[[3]] E.g. Clark, M. T. (1993). "Realism Ancient and Modern:
Thucydides and International Relations". PS: Political Science
and Politics, 26(3), 491-494.; Johnson, L. M. (1993).
Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Interpretation of Realism.
Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press; Johnson-Bagby, L. (1994). "The Use
and Abuse of Thucydides." International Organization, 48,
131-153; Derian, J. D. (1995). "A Reinterpretation of Realism." In
J. D. Derian (Ed.), International Theory: Critical
Investigations, (pp. 363-396). New York: Macmillan.
[[4]] Wayman, F. W., & Diehl, P. F. (Eds.). (1994).
Reconstructing Realpolitik. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
[[5]] E.g., Edmunds, 1993.
[[6]] Hunter, V. J. (1973). Thucydides: the Artful
Reporter. Toronto: Hakkert.
[[7]] This is the main theme of Connor's famous article on
Thucydides as a post-modernist writer (Connor, R. (1977). "A
Post-Modernist Thucydides." CJ 72, 289-298) and a major
topic of his book (Connor, W. R. (1984). Thucydides.
Princeton: Princeton University Press).
[[8]] Flory, S. (1980). "Who Read Herodotus' Histories."
AJP, 101, 12-28.
[[9]] Thucydides' knowledge of Herodotus has been seriously
challenged in a dissertation: James Kennelly, Thucydides'
Knowledge of Herodotus, PhD diss. Brown U 1993.
[[10]] On this, see esp. Edmunds, L. (1993). "Thucydides in the
Act of Writing." In R. Pretagostini (Ed.), Tradizione e
Innovazione nella Cultura Greca, (Vol. 2, pp. 831-852). Rome:
GEI.