A Thousand Posts (3)

2011
In January and February, my posts on "Darwinian Marriage: A Response to Robert George" initiated a series of posts stretching over the next six years defending a Darwinian view of marriage as open to gay marriage against the argument of George and his followers (such as Ryan Anderson) that gay marriage is not "real marriage."  George has made the best case against gay marriage as contrary to the Thomistic natural law of marriage.  I have argued that the Thomistic natural law of marriage is actually open to gay marriage, and that this natural law defense of gay marriage is implicit in Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

In January, I wrote some posts on the continuing debates over evolutionary science--debates over what is included in evolutionary theory, over what counts as evidence for evolution, and over whether creationism or intelligent design theory should be taken seriously as alternatives to evolution.  For all of these debates, I argue, it is good to go back to Darwin's own writings.  Those who argue that the modern evolutionary synthesis is too narrow, because it does not include new ideas about evolution--such as epigenetic evolution, gene-culture coevolution, group selection, niche construction, and moral evolution--do not realize that all of these ideas were already there in Darwin's writings.

Although some of the modern evidence for evolution was not available to Darwin--such as the evidence from genetics and modern dating methods--Darwin was rigorous in weighing the evidence available to him, while recognizing what he called the "difficulties" for his theory, which turn out to be the same difficulties brought up by the critics of evolution today.

Moreover, Darwin saw that it was impossible to judge the persuasiveness of his "theory of natural selection" without weighing it against its alternative--the "theory of special creation."  And so the idea of "teaching the controversy" originated with Darwin.

Darwin saw that the fundamental controversy here points to the problem of ultimate explanation--that all explanation depends on some ultimate reality or uncaused cause that cannot itself be explained: it's either Nature or God.

In the fall of 2011, I was teaching my undergraduate course "Biopolitics and Human Nature," and one of the books for that course was David Brooks' The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. Brooks surveys the research in evolutionary psychology as supporting an Aristotelian conception of human nature and human happiness. To illustrate his points, Brooks tells the fictional story of one composite American couple--Harold and Erica. As Brooks indicates, he intends to employ the technique of Rousseau's Emile, a philosophical novel, in using a fictional narrative to illustrate his account of human nature.

In March and April, I wrote a series of posts on Brooks' book that began with a critical review of the book by Thomas Nagel.  Nagel is a prominent philosopher at New York University. In 1978, he wrote one of the first responses to E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology coming from a philosopher. Like most philosophers at the time, Nagel showed the reaction of a Platonic transcendentalist in denigrating Wilson's biological account of morality. Nagel rejected sociobiological ethics because it failed to see that ethics is "an autonomous theoretical subject" like mathematics that belongs to a transcendent realm of pure logic. He argued that ethics exists at two levels--the behavioral and the theoretical. And while he acknowledged that biology could illuminate the behavioral level of ethics--the patterns of ethical action as motivated by moral emotions--he dismissed biology as irrelevant to the theoretical level of ethics as concerned with rational standards of moral justification and criticism. Insofar as morality is a matter of normative reasoning, it has nothing to do with any empirical science of human behavior.

With my memory of this essay, I was not surprised to see Nagel criticizing Brooks's book. Here we see the fundamental debate that has been the subject of many of my posts--the conflict between a Platonic or Kantian transcendentalism and an Aristotelian or Humean empiricism. Brooks shows how a Darwinian moral psychology confirms the Aristotelian and Humean tradition of empirical ethics, which will provoke the opposition of Platonic and Kantian transcendentalists like Nagel.

As can be seen in the comments on my post on Nagel, many readers of my blog object to my claim that Aristotle and Hume belong to the same empiricist tradition of ethics, because they see Hume as an ethical subjectivist or even nihilist who must be opposed to Aristotle's virtue ethics.  When I first began reading Hume as a college student, I was taught this view of Hume as opposed to Aristotle.  But later, as I read Hume more carefully, I changed my mind, and I began to see Hume as part of a tradition of ethical empiricism and naturalism stretching from Aristotle and Cicero to Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, a tradition opposed to the rationalist and transcendentalist tradition stretching from Plato to Kant.

Brooks defends the Humean tradition of moral psychology--or, as Brooks puts it, the British Enlightenment as opposed to the French Enlightenment--in showing how the deepest influences on our decisions arise largely from unconscious decisions, in being shaped by human genetic history and cultural history, rather than from conscious and rational calculations of individual interests.  Reason is important but only as guided by emotion or desire, because, as Aristotle said, "thought by itself moves nothing."  Deliberate choice should be understood as "reasoning desire" or "desiring reason."  I first saw this in one of Aristotle's biological writings--On the Movement of Animals.

In April and May, I wrote some posts on Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization.  Rather than pursuing a reductive explanation of war as determined by one or a few factors, he encompasses all the major factors influencing the whole history of human warfare over two million years, while showing how evolutionary theory can explain the origins and interrelationships of all of these factors. Gat's book helped me to think about the evolution of the natural desire for courage in war.

I continued to think about the evolution of war and possibly declining violence in modern times in October, November, and December, when I began writing a long series of posts on Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

That human history shows a general decline in violence has emerged in recent years as one of the greatest discoveries of social scientific research.  It has taken me many years to realize that.  And it has only slowly dawned on me that this has deep implications for political theory, because it provides dramatic support for Darwinian liberalism.

I decided that the empirical data of wars and violence over the last 200 years strongly supported some of Immanuel Kant's arguments for a liberal peace.  (Here is one place where I agree with Kant!) Liberal commercial republics are less inclined to go to war than other kinds of regimes, and as the cultural values of liberal commercial republicanism have spread around the world, there has been a decline in war and violence.

In fact, as Robert Wright argued in Nonzero, the entire evolutionary history of life might be rightly understood as a history of expanding cooperation producing ever increasing gains through the logic of nonzero-sum games.

This seems to confirm the evolutionary liberalism of the 19th century--particularly, as formulated by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin--because we seem to see here that Darwin was right in his vision of the future: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.  This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races."  According to Darwin, the most recent advance of sympathy extends it even beyond humanity to include the lower animals, so that now we can see "the most noble attribute of man" in the "disinterested love for all living creatures."

In Darwinian Natural Right (pp. 143-49), I had rejected this as Darwin's "moral utopianism," while I defended Darwin's "moral realism."  Darwin's moral utopianism is clearest in the section of the Descent of Man where he cites "our great philosopher Herbert Spencer."  In some of my blog posts, I have criticized Spencer's evolutionary utopianism.

But I now think that I was wrong about this, because recognizing the evolutionary trend away from violent conflict and towards peaceful cooperation arises not from a naive utopianism but from an optimistic realism that vindicates evolutionary liberalism.

This has become clear to me from reading Pinker's Better Angels along with a book that Pinker often cites--James Payne's History of Force.  What is implicit in Pinker's book becomes explicit in Payne's book--that the evolutionary history of declining violence confirms Spencerian/Darwinian liberalism, because it shows how human beings through a long history of trial-and-error learning have discovered the benefits of peaceful cooperation and the costs of violent aggression.  Moreover, this also confirms the classical liberal insight that declining violence coincides with increasing liberty.

Payne brings this out more clearly than does Pinker, because Payne is explicit in his commitment to classical liberalism or libertarianism.  If one accepts the classical liberal or libertarian definition of liberty as arising from the absence of coercive violence, then a decline in violence means an increase in liberty, as people enjoy the benefits of voluntary cooperation while minimizing the costs of violent conflict. (This conception of liberty corresponds to what Isaiah Berlin called "negative liberty.")

As Payne indicates, the classical liberal thinkers of the 19th century were the first political theorists to adopt the reduction in the use of force as their fundamental political principle.  Although previously some political theorists had condemned some uses of force, they also wanted to use force to promote what they regarded as good ends for social and political life.  The classical liberals were the first political theorists to see how the reduction in the use of force was the fundamental condition for human progress.

This led me to add a chapter on Pinker to the 4th edition of Political Questions, which now has the subtitle Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker.  It seemed to me that Pinker's Better Angels should be seen as a major work of political philosophy that illustrates how empirical Darwinian science can illuminate, and perhaps even resolve, some of the fundamental debates in the history of political philosophy.

This also led me to organize a Liberty Fund conference on "Liberty and Violence" that met at the Westward Look Resort in Tucson, Arizona, in 2014.

In 2011, I was doing a lot of thinking about Thomas Aquinas.  At the end of the summer, I presented a paper at the American Political Science Association convention on "Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right: Replies to Critics," which renewed an argument from an article published in 2001.  In the fall, I taught a graduate seminar on Aquinas.

From June to September, I wrote a series of posts on how Thomistic natural law was rooted in Aristotle's biology, and how this could be confirmed by modern Darwinian biology. 

I also wrote some posts on Tom West's Straussian interpretation of Aquinas as an esoteric writer defending philosophic reason against biblical revelation.

In June, I wrote about how the neuroscience of self-awareness could support Locke's principle of self-ownership as the natural ground of equal rights.

In May, I wrote some posts on issues that had come up at a Liberty Fund conference on "Hayek and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge."  I decided that I needed to think more about three issues--Hayek's account of the open society as the repression of the tribal instincts of human nature, the evolution of oxytocin as one neural mechanism supporting morality and exchange in a free society, and the evolution of trade in prehistoric societies.

As I have indicated in various posts, I am not persuaded by Hayek's argument that the evolved instincts of human beings are adapted for life in a "closed society," and therefore the "open or free society" requires a cultural tradition of impersonal rules for an abstract society that suppresses those instincts, while the yearning for socialism and "social justice" manifests an atavistic desire to restore those primordial instincts.

Contrary to Hayek, it seems to me that even in small foraging groups, there was some individual autonomy, and individuals were inclined to resist domination by the arbitrary wills of others. In some respects, the modern liberal society revives the individual freedom of foraging societies, while combining that with all the advantages of modern civilization as based on global exchange networks. Our evolutionary ancestors were adapted for engaging in social exchange and detecting cheaters who violated the norms of fair exchange. Those evolved mental capacities for social engagement provided the psychological conditions in which the cultural evolution of a modern exchange society could succeed.

My debate with Hayek has continued over many years, particularly in 2013, at the Mont Pelerin Society meetings in the Galapagos and at a workshop in Freiburg, Germany, on the evolution of classical liberalism.

In July and December, I wrote out my response to Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against Darwinian naturalism: the theistic doctrine of the human mind as created by God in His image provides the necessary support for the validity of human thought, including the validity of modern science. If we embrace Naturalism--the view that nothing exists except Nature, and so there is no God or nothing like God--we are caught in self-contradiction: if human thought originated not from a divine Mind but from the irrational causes of Nature, then we cannot trust our minds as reliable, and thus we cannot trust our belief in Naturalism. Naturalism destroys itself by destroying the rationality of believing in Naturalism, or anything else. Insofar as science--including evolutionary science--depends on the validity of human thought, and insofar as theism is the indispensable support for trusting in the validity of human thought, science is not only compatible with theism, science depends upon theism.

The weak link in Plantinga's argument for metaphysical naturalism as self-defeating is his assumption that adaptive behavior is completely unrelated to true belief. The evidence of evolutionary history suggests that evolution produces cognitive faculties that are reliable but fallible. The mental abilities of animals, including human beings, are fallible because evolution produces adaptations that are good enough but not perfect, and this results in the mental fallibility that is familiar to us.  But despite this fallibility, the evolved mental faculties cannot be absolutely unreliable, because the adaptive cognitive faculties of animals, including human beings, must correspond in some manner to the reality of the world to which they are adapted.

A Thousand Posts (2)

2009
In January, my post on "Evolutionary Psychology's Slow Acceptance of Darwinian Morality" pointed to the most important turn in the recent history of evolutionary psychology--the acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality in The Descent of Man. 

In his famous lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" in 1893, Thomas Huxley adopted a Kantian transcendentalist view of ethics and invoked the is/ought dichotomy in rejecting Darwin's claim that the evolutionary explanation of morality was part of the evolutionary science of human nature.  For over a century after Huxley's lecture, most Darwinian biologists--including George Williams and Richard Dawkins--agreed with Huxley's rejection of Darwin's evolutionary ethics.  Therefore, they were disturbed by Ed Wilson's efforts--in Sociobiology (1975) and Consilience (1998)--to revive Darwin's evolutionary study of morality.  In the 1980s and 1990s, I had argued in agreement with Darwin and Wilson, but my argument was scorned by the leaders of evolutionary psychology.  Remarkably, however, by 2009, the tide had turned as the growing research on the evolutionary psychology of morality confirmed that Darwin was right after all.  One of the leaders of this movement was Jonathan Haidt.  I wrote my first post on Haidt's research in November of 2009.  I returned to Haidt in September of 2012 and October of 2016.  In January of 2011, I wrote a post on how Sam Harris had persuaded Richard Dawkins to change his mind and accept Darwinian ethics.

An evolutionary moral psychology assumes the reality of an evolved human nature.  But my colleague at Northern Illinois University--David Buller--has dismissed the idea of human nature as a superstition in his book Adapting Minds, which is a general critique of evolutionary psychology.  In January, I wrote a post arguing that Buller's denial of human nature depends on a silly definition of human nature as consisting only of traits that satisfy three conditions--first, they must be unique to human beings and thus not shared with any other animals; second, they must be invariably and exactly the same for all human individuals everywhere; and, third, they must be eternal essences that are not historically contingent.  It is easy for Buller to argue that human evolution has not produced a human species with such traits. But a sensible definition of human nature does not require these conditions. We could define human nature as constituted by regularities in that suite of generally recurrent anatomical, physiological, and psychological traits that characterize the human species.  These regularities do not have to be uniquely human, invariably the same for all individuals, or eternal essences.  These regularities of human nature include what I have identified as the 20 natural desires.

I elaborated some of these points in April in posts on nature and human nature and on Marjorie Grene's account of natural teleology and the concept of species.  In September, I defended the Aristotelian and Darwinian understanding of species.

In the spring, I taught a graduate seminar on David Hume. In May, I wrote a long post on "A Research Program for a Humean Science of Human Nature."  In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume laid out his grand vision of a comprehensive science grounded on a science of human nature.  Every topic that I have taken up on this blog could be understood as part of this Humean science of human nature rooted in Darwinian evolutionary science. This science could be sketched out according to at least ten broad themes running through my blog posts: (1) Darwinian liberal education, (2) deep history, (3) ethology, (4) behavioral game theory, (5) neuroscience, (6) social history, (7) moral psychology, (8) evolution of religion, (9) evolutionary aesthetics, and (10) the Darwinian future of human nature.

In May and June, I travelled around England and Scotland, and I wrote a series of posts on the natural history of Great Britain based on my travels.  During this trip, I visited Darwin's house in Down and wrote some posts on that.  As I indicated, some of my first reading of Darwin included the notebooks that he began writing after he returned to England from his trip on the Beagle.  I was impressed with those notebooks as showing Darwin's mind at work, and my writing of this blog is in some ways following the style of Darwin's writing in his notebooks.

My visit to Darwin's house and reading about his family life led me to write about how Darwin's pondering the suffering and death of his daughter Annie manifested his understanding of love and death.  I wrote this in response to Peter Lawler's assertion that Darwin advanced an "impersonal theory of evolution" denying the personal reality of love and death.

From the end of June to the end of September, I wrote many posts on the history and philosophy of Platonic moral cosmology, in which I set up a debate between Remi Brague and C. S. Lewis, on one side, and Catherine Zuckert and Joseph Cropsey, on the other.  Brague and Lewis see Plato's dialogues (particularly the Timaeus and book 10 of The Laws) as defending a divinely designed teleological cosmology as setting the cosmic standards for the moral and political life of human beings, but they also see this Platonic moral cosmology as overturned by modern science (including Darwinism) in a way that promotes moral nihilism by teaching that the cosmos is indifferent or even hostile to human concerns.  By contrast, Zuckert and Cropsey see Plato's Socrates as denying, or at least questioning, that moral cosmology taught by Timaeus and the Athenian stranger, and suggesting that instead of finding moral guidance in the cosmos, humans need to look to their own human wants and desires.  Even if the cosmos does not care about or for us, we care about and for ourselves.  This Socrates identified by Zuckert and Cropsey belongs to a tradition of Socratic skepticism that includes Cicero, Hume, and Darwin.

If Zuckert and Cropsey have the correct interpretation of Socrates' position, then Socrates is close to my position--that human morality and politics depend not on a cosmic teleology but on an immanent teleology of human natural desires.  If human beings are by their natural desires directed to certain ends or purposes, then we can see those ends or purposes as intrinsic to their nature, regardless of whether those ends or purposes have any cosmic reference.  Darwinian biology supports such an immanent teleology because it recognizes the goal-directed behavior characteristic of various animal species, including the human species.

While some Straussians like Zuckert and Cropsey reject Platonic cosmic teleology as false, others insist that it needs to be supported as at least a "noble lie" that sustains popular conceptions of natural right, and that the Darwinian denial of cosmic teleology is (as Nietzsche put it) "true but deadly."

In September, I endorsed the "Midwest Straussianism" promoted by Catherine and Michael Zuckert.  The Straussians seem to have affirmed three propositions that are contradictory: 1. America is modern. 2. Modernity is bad. 3. America is good.  To overcome the contradiction, the West-Coast Straussians have denied #1, the East-Coast Straussians have denied #3, and the Midwest Straussians have denied #2.  I agree with the Midwest Straussians that modernity is good, and for me this includes not only modern political thought, but also modern natural science.

From October to December, I wrote many posts on the evolutionary biology of human rights as rooted in evolved human nature, and in doing so, I argued that the idea of human rights does not depend on any religious belief in the creation of human beings in the image of God.  As part of this discussion, I wrote about the debate over female genital mutilation as a violation of human rights.

2010
In January, I travelled to England to direct a week-long seminar at Oxford University on "Evolution and Ethics."  The participants were mostly philosophy professors and students from China.  In October, we met again in China (Beijing) for a conference to present papers coming out of the seminar.  This led to a series of posts on the evolutionary psychology of ethics.

As I anticipated, much of the discussion at the seminar turned on the debate between the Platonic or transcendentalist view of ethics and the Humean or empiricist view. A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics is on the side of the Humean view that sees ethics as rooted in human nature, particularly in human emotions, beliefs, and desires. On the other side, the Platonic view taken by those like Kant looks to a transcendent conception of the Good that is somehow woven into the order of the cosmos. (As I have indicated in various posts, the careful reader of the Platonic dialogues might doubt whether Plato himself--or Plato's Socrates--was a Platonist in this way.)

A growing number of leading philosophers today are adopting a Humean/Darwinian moral psychology supported by recent research in evolutionary science, neuroscience, anthropology, and animal behavior. But one can still see the powerful influence of a Kantian transcendentalism in moral philosophy that regards morality as an autonomous realm of pure reason totally separated from the empirical realm of nature as studied by natural science.

Kantian philosophers like Richard Joyce worry that evolutionary ethics promotes moral nihilism by teaching that morality is fictional. Joyce agrees with Kant that by definition moral judgments presuppose belief in a transcendent world of moral facts beyond the empirical world of natural facts. But since he denies the truth of that belief, because there really are no such moral facts, he concludes that we cannot know that morality is true, and therefore we cannot know that moral rightness and wrongness really exist. Moreover, he argues that evolutionary ethics necessarily leads us to this conclusion that morality is fictional, because an evolutionary account of morality explains it as arising from the natural facts of human desires and capacities without any reference to any distinctively moral facts.

I agree that believing in a moral law grounded in divine will or transcendent reason might strengthen the moral motivation of people with such a belief. But it seems clear to me that people can still have a strong motivation for moral conduct when they believe that morality has no other ground than the evolved human nature of our moral emotions.

That a Kantian philosophical idealism does not necessarily support good moral judgment is indicated by the fact that most of the German philosophers who supported Nazism were Kantian idealists. For me, as I indicated in a post in January, this suggests that the evils of Nazism flowed from a metaphysical tradition of idealist utopian philosophy that stretches from Plato to Fichte to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

My reasoning for rejecting Kantian categorical normativity is clarified in my post on "Philippa Foot and the Hypothetical Imperatives of Natural Goodness" (March).

In 2010, I wrote a lot about the natural evolution of religious belief.  I have identified the desire for religious understanding as one of the twenty natural desires rooted in our evolved human nature. Human beings generally desire to understand the world as governed by gods or God, because this satisfies their natural longing to make sense of things that would otherwise be incomprehensible.

The recent research on the evolutionary and cognitive causes of religious belief goes a long way to substantiate my position. The general reasoning for how religious belief evolved as an innate disposition of human nature is laid out by David Hume and Charles Darwin. This new research provides elaborate theoretical and empirical grounds for their naturalistic account of religion.

One of the proponents of this research is Justin Barrett, whom I met at the Oxford seminar. He is an evolutionary psychologist who argues that the evolved propensity of the human mind to detect intelligent agents supports a natural tendency to believe in divine agents. Barrett is a Christian evolutionist.  His work largely confirms what Hume says in his Natural History of Religion. Barrett is a Christian who sees his evolutionary explanation of religious belief as compatible with his own Christian belief that God has created human beings so that they can discover him.  I have also written about Jesse Bering (in February of 2011), who explains the evolutionary psychology of religious belief in a way similar to Barrett's explanation, but Bering is an atheist.

Also in 2010, I wrote about Rebecca Goldstein's philosophical novel on the "36 arguments for the existence of God" (February), the evolution of Heaven and Hell (April-May), the evolutionary game theory of how religion supports cooperation (April), and Confucianism (June, August, October).  My writing on Confucianism was drawn from my paper on Darwinian and Confucian Ethics for the conference on "Evolution and Ethics" in Beijing in October, which included some of the same Chinese professors and students who were at the Oxford conference in January.

Religious belief is uniquely human because it arises from the uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought and communication that allows human beings to construct a shared imagined reality.  In February, I wrote about how Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have explained human symbolism as one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic.  Recognizing these four levels of evolution helps to explain the "animal culture wars" (April): if "culture" is defined as inherited behavioral traditions, then some nonhuman animals have culture; but if "culture" is defined as inherited symbolic traditions (like religious belief), then this is uniquely human.

In 2010, I wrote a lot about Aristotelianism.  In March and April, I wrote a series of posts on Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl's Aristotelian liberalism and showed how a Darwinian moral and political psychology supported this.  In the fall, I was teaching a graduate seminar on Aristotle, and I wrote some posts in September, October, and December, on "Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics," which went into my paper on "The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue" for the conference on "Science and Virtue" organized by Peter Lawler and Marc Guerra at Berry College (Mount Berry, Georgia) in November.  In 2013, the papers for this conference were published in The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke, edited by Lawler and Guerra (NIU Press).

In July, I pointed to my essay for "Cato Unbound" on "Darwinian Liberalism," which would lead to papers and lectures in later years on the Darwinian psychology of classical liberalism.

My list of 20 natural desires includes the natural desire for courage in war, because human beings generally desire war when they think it will advance their group in conflicts with outside groups.  The is the one desire that has provoked the most criticism from people who are uncomfortable with the idea that war might be rooted in evolved human nature.  In 2010, I began to write the evolutionary psychology of war in various posts (in February, June, and December).  I returned to this issue in 2011, in response to the publication of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Also, in 2010, I began writing about anarchism (June) and equality in the Lockean state of nature (July), and I would return to these topics in subsequent years.

To be continued . . .

A Thousand Posts

This is my 1,000th post!

As suggested by my publisher in England, I began this blog at the end of August in 2005 to promote my book Darwinian Conservatism.  I soon realized that I wanted to continue the blog as a way to collect and organize my thoughts about Darwinian evolution and political philosophy.  I did not foresee that I would write as many as one thousand essays.  Much of this writing has found its way into my conference papers, articles, and books.  For example, the 4th edition of Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker includes a lot of material that originally appeared on this blog.

It seems fitting to use this post to survey the highlights of my posts over the past 12 years.

2005
My first post was a reprinting of my article in First Things (November, 2000)--"Conservatives, Darwin, & Design"--with commentaries by Michael Behe and William Dembski and my response.  This article was the first presentation of my argument for "Darwinian Conservatism"--"Conservatives need Charles Darwin."  Behe, Dembski, and many others have dismissed this as a silly idea.  Most of my posts have been, in one way or another, attempts to show that this might not be as silly as many people assume.

Conservatives believe that Darwinian science must promote a morally corrupting atheistic materialism.  I have tried to explain why this is not true.  In the final months of this first year of the blog, I did that by replying to various critics of Darwinian Conservatism--including not only Behe and Dembski, but also Herbert Gintis, Bob Cheeks, and Richard Weikart.

At the same time, I agreed with the proponents of intelligent design theory who insist that biology classes in the public schools should "teach the controversy" by teaching intelligent design theory as an alternative to Darwinian science.  I suggested teaching the controversy by teaching Darwin.  Why not allow students to actually read Darwin and notice that Darwin argues for his "theory of natural selection" as superior to the "theory of special creation."  To understand Darwin's argument, one must understand the alternative theory that he was rejecting.  Along with Darwin, students could also read some recent science writing defending evolution along with the writing of intelligent design proponents criticizing evolution.  The students would then have to weigh the evidence and arguments on both sides and make up their own minds.  This would include studying the moral, political, and religious implications of this debate.  This would, I am sure, be a much more engaging way for students to study biology than the old-fashioned textbook class.

Although I have never taught high school students, I have taught college students in classes at Northern Illinois University that were cross-listed in both the political science and biology departments.  I have found that allowing the students to think through the issues for themselves is stimulating.  Many of the biology students found this more interesting than their regular biology classes in which they were prohibited from considering the criticisms of evolutionary science and deciding for themselves.

2006
In January and February, I began a series of posts continuing to the present defending what I call "Darwinian natural right" against the claims of Leo Strauss and the Straussians that modern biology cannot support the idea of natural right.  Contrary to what the Straussians assume, natural right can be rooted in an immanent teleology of evolved human nature rather than a cosmic teleology of eternally fixed species.  My best debating partner here has been Carson Holloway, a Catholic Straussian, who began his debate with me in graduate seminars at NIU.  In June, I began a long series of posts debating Peter Augustine Lawler, a Catholic conservative influenced by Strauss.

In October, I wrote the one post that has received more pageviews than any other--"So What's Wrong with Incest?"--which mostly supports Edward Westermarck's evolutionary account of the incest taboo.  Apparently, a lot of people are interested in incest.  I have noticed, however, that over the past year, the views of this post have declined.  Are people less interested in incest than they once were?  In any case, I have written many posts on Westermarck and the incest taboo, because this is, as Edward Wilson has noted, one of the best developed illustrations of how evolutionary science can explain a moral rule.

In November, I began a series of posts responding to John West's Darwin's Conservatives, which was the first book criticizing my Darwinian conservatism.  West is a proponent of intelligent design at the Discovery Institute.

In December, I wrote some posts engaging Timothy Sandefur, who generally supports the idea of Darwinian natural right, but who doubts the wisdom of my defense of "fusionism"--Frank Meyer's idea that American conservatism combines traditionalist conservatism and classical liberalism or libertarianism.  A recurrent theme of my writing on this blog has been a defense of this fusion, which I see in John Locke and Adam Smith as well as much of American conservatism, and which I present as founded in an evolutionary moral and political anthropology.

At the end of December, I wrote about my article on "Darwinian Liberal Education" in Academic Questions, which presents my argument for a broad conception of Darwinian science as a comprehensive interdisciplinary science that unifies the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.  Here the influence of Ed Wilson's conception of "consilience" is clear.

Reading Leo Strauss helped me to see how the fundamental dilemma of modernity explained the loss of liberal education as a comprehensive study of the whole. The natural sciences assume a materialist reductionism that cannot account for the human mind or spirit. The humanities assume a radical dualism that treats human consciousness and conduct as autonomous in their separation from the causal order of the natural sciences. The social sciences are then torn between these two contradictory positions.

We might overcome this dilemma, if we could see Darwinian biology as a comprehensive science that would unify all the intellectual disciplines by studying human experience as part of the natural whole. This would continue the Aristotelian tradition of biology, because, as Strauss observed, Aristotle believed that biology could provide "a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and knowledge of man."

But as I have indicated in various posts, Strauss and the Straussians are inconsistent on this issue, because they often affirm a distinctly modern (and Kantian) radical dualism of nature and mind that contradicts their Aristotelian naturalism.

2007
In February, I began my annual posts on the birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln--February 12, 1809--which provides the occasion for thinking about the remarkable points of comparison in their lives.

Also in February, I wrote a post on "Chimpanzee Political Science" that was the first in a long series of posts on my argument that political science needs to become a Darwinian comparative science of political animals.  My thinking here began when I was a college student interested in Aristotle, and I noticed that over one quarter of all of Aristotle's writing was on biology, and that his moral and political writing--like the Nicomachean Ethics--is full of comparisons between humans and other animals.  Then, as I studied the research in comparative animal behavior based on evolutionary science, I began to see how there could be a comprehensive Darwinian political science of political animals.

In April and May, I defended Darwinian conservatism in debates at the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society and at the American Enterprise Institute.  I wrote about these debates and the press coverage, including a long front-page article in the New York Times.

Also in July, I began a series of posts criticizing Leon Kass's view of modern science, which shows a dubious Heideggerian and phenomenological account of modern science as crudely reductionistic that has been embraced by many of the Straussians.

In October, I argued that behavioral game theory confirmed Adam Smith's moral philosophy, which began a series of posts on evolutionary game theory as applied to the history of political philosophy.

In November, my post on "The Genetics of IQ and the Declaration of Independence" became the first in a series of posts over the years on the moral and political implications of the evolution of intelligence.  If IQ is at least partly genetic, and if some racial groups tend on average to have higher IQ, does that deny the moral and political principle of human equality?  I argue that the principle of human equality of rights does not require an absolute equality of intelligence, but rather an equality in those minimal moral and intellectual capacities that dispose human beings to resist exploitation and to demand justice as reciprocity.  Here I am elaborating points from my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Rights: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature.

2008
The most common criticism of evolutionary ethics and politics is that it commits the "naturalistic fallacy" by falsely inferring values from facts or an "ought" from an "is."  In January and February, I wrote posts on "Moving from 'Is' to 'Ought,'" which initiated a series of posts over the years arguing that the ideas of the naturalistic fallacy or the is/ought dichotomy are mistaken.  Human beings and other animals move from "is" to "ought" through hypothetical imperatives constructed as given/if/then reasoning.  Given an animal's nature, if that animal desires to flourish (survive and reproduce), then it ought to act in certain specified ways to achieve that end.  There is nothing fallacious about this.

In the spring, I returned to one of the recurrent themes of this blog--the flaws in intelligent-design theory, particularly as developed by the folks at the Discovery Institute.  One of the flaws is theological.  While it is attractive to many Christians, who believe that the intelligent designer is God, it actually contradicts orthodox Christian theology by assuming a Gnostic antagonism between natural order and divine intelligence. It assumes a dichotomy such that either living beings naturally evolved or they were intelligently designed. William Dembski's "explanatory filter" posits that if we can explain something as a product of natural regularities, then we cannot attribute this to design. But Christian theology would say that everything is intelligently designed by God--either through His design of natural laws (including evolution) or through His designing things outside His natural laws. For that reason, many Christian scientists (like C. S. Lewis and Father Michael Heller who received the Templeton Prize in 2008) believe that if all living things could be explained as products of Darwinian natural evolution, this would be a wondrous manifestation of God's power for intelligently designing natural laws to execute His purposes. Whether God works through the ordinary laws of nature or through extraordinary miracles, it's all an expression of His intelligent design. From the point of view of Christian theology, Darwinian evolution is intelligent design.

I also pointed to a split in the intelligent design movement, in that Michael Behe, a prominent intelligent design biologist, has concluded that human evolution from primate ancestors can be explained as fully natural evolution, and he has moved towards theistic evolution, so that the intelligent designer could work primarily through natural laws set up at the beginning.

I have also challenged the "Darwin to Hitler" argument of intelligent design proponents like David Berlinski and Richard Weikart, because it passes over the fact that Hitler's Nazism contradicts what Darwin said about the natural moral sense.

My blog writing has often been influenced by whatever I have been teaching.  In the spring, I was teaching a graduate seminar on "American Political Novels."  My blog posts on Mark Twain and Ayn Rand were connected with my teaching Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Rand's The Fountainhead.  In Twain's writing, I saw some expression of a Darwinian evolutionary ethics of sympathy.  In Rand's writing, I saw her teleological ethics of life that can be rooted in evolutionary nature.

My blog writing has also been influenced by my work on conference papers, articles, and books.  At this time, I was writing a paper on "Biopolitical Science" for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.  In that paper, I argued for a theoretical analysis of political behavior as conforming to a nested hierarchy of three levels of deep history: the natural history of political universals as shaped by the genetic evolution of the species, the social history of political cultures as shaped by cultural evolution, and the individual history of political judgments in of individual political actors in particular circumstances.  I argued that a biopolitical science would study these three levels in the political history of all political animals.  This could be applied to chimpanzee politics, bonobo politics, and insect politics as well as human politics.  In this paper, I explained Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 as illustrating the three levels of biopolitical science.  Many of my blog posts, including posts in July on Lincoln, were related to this paper.

My post in April on "The Individuality, Contingency, and Historicity of Life" is also related to this paper.  A biopolitical science, like biology generally, must recognize the historical contingency and individuality of life.  Political animals have a political history that is unique for each animal community.

In June, I wrote my first blog post on David Christian's "Big History," which based on the idea that the discipline of history should encompass all of history from the Big Bang to the present and beyond.  Evolutionary science can be understood in this way--as a comprehensive science of cosmic evolution from the beginning of the universe.  I returned to Big History in 2016 (in January, February, and June).  This is connected to my interest in Lucretius's On the Nature of Things as ancient Big History.  I would like to write an article someday on Lucretian political philosophy as Big History.

Also in June, I wrote about Daniel Smail's neuroscience of history, which is another form of Big History, or what he calls "deep history."  Traditionally, historians have written about the history of the past 6,000 years, and whatever might have happened before that time--before the invention of writing--has been dismissed as "prehistory."  Smail points out that this reflects the legacy of Biblical history and the assumption that the world is no older than 6,000 years.

In May, June, October, and November, I wrote a series of posts on the neuroscience of the soul, including male and female brains, and the neuroscience of law.  I am interested in how the mind or soul can be explained as an emergent product of the evolution of the primate brain, and how that emergent mind gives us freedom of thought and action.

In August, I wrote about my responses to seven commentaries on Darwinian Conservatism by Neil Blackstone, Lauren Hall, Carson Holloway, Peter Lawler, Timothy Sandefur, Richard Sherlock, Michael Shermer, and John West.  These seven commentaries and my response were published in 2009 in Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, edited by Kenneth Blanchard.  This writing clarified the debate among conservatives and libertarians over my conception of Darwinian conservatism.

Much of this debate, as I indicated in posts in September and October, can be seen as a debate between "metaphysical conservatism" and "evolutionary conservatism."  I elaborated this point in an article that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review.

Ed Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge has had a deep influence on my thinking about evolutionary ethics and about the unification of knowledge that Wilson calls "consilience."  In October, I wrote a post endorsing Wilson's promotion of "empiricist ethics" as superior to "transcendentalist ethics."  I agreed with him that Aristotle, Hume, Smith, and Westermarck belonged to the empiricist ethics tradition as opposed to Kant and many "normativist" philosophers today who belong to the transcendentalist ethics tradition.  (In fact, here I proudly noticed some influence on Wilson coming from some of my writing.)  But I criticized Wilson for not seeing how Thomas Aquinas's natural law belonged to the empiricist tradition, although Aquinas's divine law belonged to the transcendentalist tradition.  This is part of my defense of Thomistic natural law as Darwinian natural right, which I first laid out in a 2001 article.

I also criticized Wilson for not seeing how the consilience of all knowledge was best understood through an emergent order rather than through a reduction of everything to physics.  I remember well how Wilson and I argued about this in a telephone call shortly after the publication of Consilience in 1998.

My rejection of Kantian transcendentalism is a recurrent theme that comes out in my post (in November) on John Hare's Kantian critique of Darwinian natural right.  Hare has been one of my best debating partners for many years.  He defends a Kantian "divine command theory" of ethics that puts him in opposition to my position.

 

To be continued . . .

 

The Genetics of Flightless Cormorants as Evidence of Evolution

 

The flightless cormorant is found only in the Galapagos Islands and only on the coastlines of the two most western islands--Fernandina and Isabela--which are also the youngest islands geologically, with the most active volcanoes.  Charles Darwin would surely have been fascinated by them, because he used the occurrence of flightless birds as something best explained by his theory of natural selection. But he did not see these flightless birds during his time in the Galapagos, because he did not land on either of these two islands.  I saw them on my first tour of the Galapagos in 2013, on a yacht named Cormorant, and I wrote a post on them.

Flightlessness have evolved many times--in 26 families of birds in 17 different orders.  But other flightless birds like ostriches, kiwis, and penguins do not have close relatives among flying birds because their split from flying birds occurred over 50 million years ago. But the Galapagos flightless cormorant is closely related to other cormorants, from which they split off only about two million years ago.

Cormorants are large water birds that live near coastlines or lakes.  The Galapagos cormorant is the only flightless cormorant among 40 species of cormorants.

To look for the genetic basis of this evolutionary split, Alejandro Burga and his colleagues compared the genomes of flightless cormorants and three closely related species of cormorants to look for the genetic variants influencing the loss of flight.  They concentrated on genes that affect bone growth that might explain the short wings of flightless cormorants (Burga et al. 2017; Cooper 2017). 

They found that a gene called Cux1 and some others influence the growth of cilia.  In single-celled animals, cilia on the surface of cells function in movement.  In birds and mammals, cilia on the surface of cells pick up biochemical signals for bone growth.  Mutations in Cux1 in humans create diseases, called ciliopathies: human beings affected by ciliopathies have small limbs and ribcages.  In the Galapagos cormorants, variations in Cux1 stop bone growth prematurely, so that the wings are too small for flying.  These birds can still live well on land and in the water, and their short wings might help them in swimming underwater as they hunt for food.

This shows how genetic evolution could have created the Galapagos cormorant as a new species of cormorant, without any need for the miraculous intervention of the Creator or the Intelligent Designer.  It was once common for creationists to argue that microevolution within species was possible, but not macroevolution across species.  But now most creationists have expanded microevolution to include the natural evolution of new species from ancestral species, and yet they say this is within the "kinds" created by God.  So they can concede that flightless cormorants evolved as a new species.  Nevertheless, they say, flightless cormorants are still cormorants, and cormorants were one of the "kinds" originally created by God, with the genetic potential for evolutionary radiation into new species of cormorants.

Notice, however, that Cux1 is found in many animals--from single-celled animals to birds and mammals, including human beings.  Darwinian scientists would see this as evidence for the evolution of all "kinds" of animals by common descent from ancient ancestral species, and perhaps ultimately from one or a few primitive forms of life. 

Can the creationists respond by moving the category of "kinds" to ever higher levels of taxonomy?  At one time, creationists identified "kinds" as species.  Now, they say "kinds" could correspond to "families" in modern taxonomy, or even higher levels.

The problem, as Todd Wood and other creation scientists have admitted, is that the biblical Hebrew word min that was translated as "kind" in King James English is an "imprecise term."  If one believes that the Bible is the divinely revealed Word of God, and not a book written by human beings, then one must wonder why God chose to write in such "imprecise" language.  Why did God chose not to precisely explain the genetics of flightless cormorants and other forms of life?

I am reminded of James Madison's comment in Federalist Number 37 on how imprecise language often is: "When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated."

If the Bible is imprecise in its scientific language, perhaps that's because God did not write the Bible as a textbook of science, but rather as a book of salvational history.

REFERENCES

Cooper, Kimberly. 2017. "Decoding the Evolution of Species." Science 356: 904-905.

Burga, Alejandro, et al. 2017. "A Genetic Signature of the Evolution of Loss of Flight in the Galapagos Cormorant." Science 356: 921.

The Oldest Fossils of Homo Sapiens as Evidence for Evolution

Having debated scientific creationists and intelligent-design proponents who deny the evidence for evolutionary science, I have thought a lot about what counts as evidence for evolution, and about whether any evidence could settle this debate.  I have been thinking more about that in recent weeks when the journals Nature and Science have published articles reporting the discovery of the earliest known Homo sapiens fossils and the identification of the genes responsible for the splitting of the Galapagos flightless cormorant from all other cormorants about two million years ago. 

One might think that evidence like this strongly supports evolution. But I doubt that any scientific creationists or intelligent-design proponents are going to change their minds because of this.  Why not?  Is there something wrong with the evidence?  Or is there something wrong with the critics of evolution such that they are not open to considering such evidence?  Do the critics have any fossil or genetic evidence that demonstrates how, when, and where the Creator or the Intelligent Designer created Homo sapiens or flightless cormorants?  Or would some of the critics say that the Creator or Intelligent Designer created separate "kinds" of animals and then allowed natural evolution to create separate species--including human beings and flightless cormorants--within the boundaries of those "kinds"?

First, consider the new fossil evidence for human evolution.  Articles in Nature have reported the discovery of the oldest known fossils of our Homo sapiens ancestors at a site in Morocco called Jebel Irhoud (Hublin et al. 2017; Richter et al. 2017; Stringer and Galway-Witham 2017).  An article in The New York Times summarizes these reports. 

These fossil skulls have been dated at about 300,000 years.  They are in the same sedimentary layer with flint blades for spears that have been burned with fire.  So there is evidence of the controlled use of fire and refined use of hunting tools.  Although these early Homo sapiens have the flat faces very similar to humans today, their brain structures are different in that these early human skulls are elongated rather than showing the distinctly round shape of human brain cases today.

Here we see the evolutionary steps in ancient human fossil skulls.  A is a skull found in Spain that is about 430,000 years old.  It is thought to be an early form of Neanderthal.  It has the characteristic Neanderthal brow-ridge.  But it also has the smaller brain size of earlier ancestors. 

B is a late Neanderthal skull that is about  60,000 to 40,000 years old. Although Neanderthal is no longer believed to be a direct human ancestor, there is evidence of hybridization from the mating of Neanderthal and human beings, so that the human genome today has some Neanderthal genes.  

C is one of the Jebel Irhoud fossils, dated at around 350,000 to 280,000 years old, which is thought to represent an early form of Homo sapiens.  The face has the delicate and flat features characteristic of modern humans.  But the braincase has an older form--an elongated shape rather than the more rounded form of the modern human braincase.

D is a Homo sapiens fossil that is approximately 20,000 years old, which shows the rounded braincase.  This rounded braincase could indicate some distinctive traits in the modern human brain that support the uniquely human cognitive capacities that constitute the human mind, but no one knows exactly what the shape and size of the human braincase means for human thought.

Notice that the dates for such fossils is always "approximate."  Dating fossils so far into deep history is always open to doubt.  As I have indicated in a previous post, creationist critics of evolution like Ken Ham argue that there can be no absolute proof in "historical science" (based on what we can only speculate happened in the deep past) as opposed to "observational science" (based on what we can all see in the present or judge from records of the recent past).  So here, Ham would say that his "biblical worldview" tells him that these fossils cannot be older than 6,000 years, because that is the age of the Earth. 

The dating of the Jebel Irhoud fossils was done by thermoluminescence: assuming that the flint blades were burned in a fire, heating those blades produces light that is detectable in the laboratory, and that light indicates the accumulated radiation dose since the blades were first burned, which then can date the blades.  Since the blades were found in the same sedimentary layer as the fossil skulls, the thermoluminescence dating of the blades can date the fossils.  Someone like Ham can complain that there are a lot of dubious assumptions and inferences in this dating method.

Finding old human fossils in Africa seems to confirm Charles Darwin's belief that human evolution originated in Africa.  Although he did not have any human fossil evidence available to him at the time, he inferred that since the primate species most closely related to human beings--the great apes--were in Africa, that pointed to Africa as the likely place of origin for human beings.

In his article for The New York Times, Carl Zimmer says that these new human fossils discovered in Morocco "rewrites the story of mankind's origins."  That does indicate a problem, however, in that it illustrates how unpredictable and accidental these discoveries are.  It seems that the evolutionary story of mankind's origins is being rewritten every year or so when some new fossil is discovered.  The fundamental problem is the rarity of these human fossils and their fragmentary character.  For example, a few years ago, I wrote a post on the discovery of the only complete adult hominid skull from the Early Pleistocene, which illustrates the how limited the human fossil record is.

But still there is enough of a fossil record that can be combined with comparative studies of human and primate genomes to trace at least a rough outline of the descent of the human species from common ancestors shared with the higher primates--particularly, chimpanzees and bonobos.

In fact, this paleontological and genetic evidence of human common descent from ancient primate ancestors is so persuasive that even many scientific creationists and intelligent-design proponents now must admit that the evolutionary account of human origins from primate ancestors is scientifically confirmed.  As I have indicated in some previous posts (here and here), creationists like Ken Ham and Todd Wood and intelligent-design theorists like Michael Behe accept the natural evolution of species at or below the taxonomic level of families.  For Ham and Wood, this is because the Creator did not separately create all species, but rather created all "kinds" of animals and plants, and then allowed natural evolution by natural selection to create separate species within these "kinds."  Behe is explicit in affirming that the evidence for the evolution of the human species from primate ancestors is compelling, and there was no need for intervention by an Intelligent Designer.  If biblical "kinds" correspond to "families" in modern taxonomical classification, as Ham and Wood say, then God created the family of Hominidae, which includes chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and humans.  The human species could have evolved naturally from some common ancestor shared with chimpanzees and bonobos.

So here it seems that the evidence of human evolution really does support Darwinian science in its rejection of the theory of special creation.

REFERENCES

Hublin, Jean-Jacques, et al. 2017. "New Fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the Pan-African Origin of Homo sapiens." Nature 546: 289-92.

Richter, Daniel, et al. 2017. "The Age of the Hominin Fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the Origins of the Middle Stone Age." Nature 546: 293-96.

Stringer, Chris, and Julia Galway-Witham. 2017. "On the Origin of Our Species." Nature 546: 212-13.

The Evolution of Mammalian Leadership

If Aristotle was right in claiming that political animals achieve the coordination and collective action of individuals for shared ends, and that leaders can help them solve coordination  and collective action problems, then the comparative study of political animals might illuminate the evolutionary roots of leadership, including human leadership.

Although human political leadership has been long studied by political philosophers and social scientists, only in the last few decades have some biologists studied political leadership among nonhuman animals, and only very recently have some scholars started to combine these two areas of research to develop a general evolutionary science of animal leadership (King, Johnson, and van Vugt 2009; Smith et al. 2016; van Vugt and Ahuja 2011).  I am beginning to think about how this might provide an evolutionary explanation for Machiavellian leadership among chimpanzees and human beings.

MAMMALIAN LEADERSHIP IN FORAGING SOCIETIES
Jennifer Smith and her colleagues (2016) have provided a general synthesis of the research on animal leadership from an evolutionary perspective.  They examine and compare the patterns of leadership in eight small-scale human societies (including the Ache, the Cheyenne, and the Inuit) and eight nonhuman mammalian societies (including elephants, dolphins, and chimpanzees). 

They review the theoretical models and empirical studies of leadership in four domains: movement, food acquisition, within-group conflict mediation, and between-group interactions (peaceful or violent). 

They look for patterns of variation in leadership in five dimensions: distribution (across individuals), emergence (achieved versus inherited), power, relative payoff to leadership, and generality (across domains). 

They do ratings (from 1 to 5) for each of these five dimensions in each of the four domains.  So, for example, in within-group conflict resolution, the distribution of leadership could be rated at 5, if one individual usually leads in resolving conflicts, or, at the other extreme, at 1, if all adults are autonomous in acting to resolve conflicts.

In comparing the nonhuman and human societies, they found remarkable similarities in the patterns of leadership in the five dimensions.  First, in the distribution of leadership, they found that for most societies, human and nonhuman, leadership was moderately shared in most domains.  Nevertheless, leadership was notably more concentrated (less shared) in the domains of conflict resolution and between-group interactions.  Even in generally egalitarian foraging human societies, where adult individuals have a lot of autonomy, there is some leadership, particularly with individuals who have the reputation for being good leaders in resolving conflicts within the group and in dealing with outside groups.

Second, in the emergence of leadership, most of the 16 societies studied show  mostly achieved rather than ascribed leadership status--that is, individuals become leaders mostly through their own actions or qualities rather than through some inherited status.  The two exceptional cases are spotted hyenas and the Nootka (American Northwest Coast Indians), with leadership that is highly inherited in all domains.

Third, in the power of leadership, leaders in small-scale human societies are generally less powerful than leaders in the nonhuman mammalian societies.  That explains why human foraging bands are generally identified as egalitarian, in contrast to the hierarchical inequality of chiefdoms and state societies.  But even so, leaders in human foraging bands are more powerful in the domains of within-group conflict resolution and between-group interactions.

This suggests that mammalian leadership might have evolved to foster cooperation by solving the problem of collective action that is undermined by conflict and free-riders.  One solution to this problem is costly punishment of cheaters, and so a leader might become the sole arbiter of punishment and thus solve this collective action problem.  In fact, alpha male primates play a large role in peacemaking and conflict resolution (de Waal 1982, 1989; Flack et al. 2006; King, Johnson, and van Vugt 2009; O'Gorman, Heinrich, and van Vugt 2009).  Leaders and followers could then be in a mutually beneficial reciprocal relationship: leaders provide the service of costly punishment of cheaters in exchange for prestige accorded them by their followers (Price and van Vugt 2014).

Fourth, in the relative benefit of leadership, Smith and her colleagues see that across most of the 16 societies they studied, the fitness related payoffs for leaders are generally equal to or only slightly better than the payoffs for their followers.  Of course, this would not be true for the large, highly stratified human societies that arose after the rise of agrarian states.

Finally, in considering the generality of leadership, leadership is somewhat more generalized in nonhuman mammalian societies than in small-scale human societies.  In societies with strong dominance hierarchies--such as capuchin monkeys, meerkats, and hyenas--high-ranking individuals generally fill most leadership roles.

This all shows the continuity between nonhuman and human political leadership.  But, obviously, we must also explain the discontinuity, in that human leaders can manage collective action that far exceeds in scale and complexity the collective action of nonhuman animal societies.  This human difference arises from some distinctively human cognitive capacities for symbolism, syntactic language, and shared intentionality, which allow leaders to organize societies for collective action through rhetorical persuasion and institutional norms.  This has been the subject of previous posts here, here., and here.

Smith and her colleagues have looked only at human leadership in small-scale societies, so we must still explain leadership in large agrarian states that have often been despotic, and in modern liberal regimes that are more open and less despotic, although they allow inequality of status, wealth, and power.  This  has come up in various posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.


REFERENCES

de Waal, Frans. 1982. Chimpanzee Politics. New York: Harper & Row.

de Waal, Frans. 1989. Peacemaking Among Primates. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Flack, J. C., M. Girvan, Frans de Waal, and D. C. Grakauer. 2006. "Policing Stabilizes Construction of Social Niches in Primates." Nature 439: 426-429.

King, Andrew J., Dominic Johnson, and Mark van Vugt. 2009. "The Origins and Evolution of Leadership." Current Biology 19: R911-R916.

O'Gorman, R., J. Heinrich, and Mark van Vugt. 2009. "Constraining Free Riding in Public Goods Games: Designated Solitary Punishers Can Sustain Human Cooperation." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276: 323-329.

Price, M. E., and Mark van Vugt. 2014. "The Evolution of Leader-Follower Reciprocity: The Theory of Service-for-Prestige." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8: 1-17.

Smith, Jennifer, Sergey Gavrilets, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Paul L. Hooper, Clare El Mouden, Daniel Nettle, Christoph Hauert, Kim Hill, Susan Perry, Anne E. Pusey, Mark van Vugt, and Eric Alden Smith. 2016. "Leadership in Mammalian Societies: Emergence, Distribution, Power, and Payoff." Trends in Ecology & Evolution 31: 54-66.

van Vugt, Mark, and Anjana Ahuja. 2011. Naturally Selected: The Evolutionary Science of Leadership. New York: HarperCollins.

The Darwinian Critique of Trump's Social Darwinism

As President, Barack Obama often criticized the social policies of the Republican Party as based on what he called "Social Darwinism--every man or woman for him or herself."  Now, Obama must see Donald Trump's presidency as continuing in that tradition of Social Darwinism.  After all, Trump has declared: "Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat. You just can't let people make a sucker out of you."

Recently, two of Trump's top advisers--H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn--have applied this sort of thinking in an article in The Wall Street Journal to explain Trump's foreign policy.  They write: "The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a 'global community' but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage." 

Yesterday, David Brooks wrote an article for the New York Times on the disturbing implications of that sentence: "That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project.  It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs.  It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain.  It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath."

McMaster and Cohn might respond to Brooks that he has taken their sentence out of context, and that the rest of their article speaks about "fostering cooperation and strengthening relationships with our allies and partners" and about "reciprocity in trade and commerce" based on the principle that "America will treat others as they treat us."  But, still, that one sentence does seem to emphasize the primacy of selfishness in the competitive pursuit of gain.

That is what Obama has identified as Social Darwinism.  But as I have written in a post responding to Obama, the idea of Social Darwinism as fabricated by Richard Hofstadter is contradicted by the writings of Charles Darwin and Darwinian evolutionary psychologists.  In Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought, he never proves that Darwin himself was a Social Darwinist.  Hofstadter comes close to admitting this when he says that "Darwin himself was not an unequivocal social Darwinist" (238).  Hofstadter offers direct quotations from Darwin's Descent  on only two pages of the book (91-92).  Those quotations suggest that Darwin could not have been a Social Darwinist of the sort portrayed by Hofstadter, because they show Darwin stressing the natural sociality of human beings and their natural moral sense based on sympathy for the needs of their fellow human beings.  "Selfish and contentious people will not cohere," Darwin declared, "and without coherence nothing can be effected."  If Social Darwinism is all about selfish competition, as Hofstadter and Obama would say, then Darwin was not a Social Darwinist.

As Brooks indicates in his article, evolutionary psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have confirmed and deepened Darwin's insight about the evolutionary roots of our natural sociality and morality, which shows that the thinking of Trump and his advisers is based on an error about evolved human nature.  Brooks writes: "The error is that it misunderstands what drives human action.  Of course, people are driven by selfish motivations--for individual status, wealth and power.  But they are also motivated by another set of drives--for solidarity, love and moral fulfillment--that are equally and sometimes more powerful."

Brooks also observes: "Good leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Reagan understand the selfish elements that drive human behavior, but they have another foot in the realm of the moral motivations.  They seek to inspire faithfulness by showing good character.  They try to motivate action by pointing toward great ideals."  Trump and his advisers dismiss this moral realm as a veneer of hypocrisy that hides the reality of life as nothing more than a competitive fight for selfish advantage.  And Trump's bad character--his lack of any moral or intellectual virtues--shows what someone becomes when he believes this.

It is especially troubling, therefore, that Trump has been supported by the Claremont Straussians, who revere the good character of statesmen like Lincoln, Churchill, and Reagan (and perhaps Teddy Roosevelt!).

Nevertheless, the shame that most Americans feel because of the disgusting character that Trump projects to the world and the dishonor that this brings to America is itself a manifestation of that moral sense of our evolved human nature.

I have written a series of posts on the evolutionary moral psychology of Jonathan Haidt (here, here, here, and here). and David Brooks (here, here, and here).

Machiavelli's Aristotelian Liberal Republic

As I indicated in my May 19th post, Frans de Waal could not understand the political maneuvering of chimpanzees until he studied them with the help of Machiavelli's book The Prince.  In particular, de Waal saw in chimpanzee politics a democratic or republican structure of egalitarian dominance with a balance of three orders--the one, the few, and the many--the "prince," who is number one, the "great ones," who are high-ranking individuals with ambition to rule, and "the people," who are the great majority of individuals in a society with no ambition to rule, but who do not want to be oppressed by the "prince" or the "great ones," because they want to live their private lives in security and peace.  Machiavelli thought that a stable and peaceful republic would have to balance these three orders in a manner that would satisfy the appetites of all three without anyone having the power to tyrannize over others.  De Waal saw a similar structure of political psychology among chimpanzees: the alpha male chimp is the "prince," the high-ranking adult males are the "great ones," and the adult females and children are the "people."  Among chimps, there can be something like a Machiavellian republican government with consent of the governed and a balance of power between these three orders.

But in Chimpanzee Politics, de Waal also identified Aristotle as a political philosopher who might have understood that as "political animals" human beings share an evolutionary heritage with other political animals such as chimpanzees (1982, 211-212).  Then, in his book The Ape and the Sushi Master (2001), de Waal indicated that in my writing, "Darwin and Aristotle have begun to blend into a single person, perhaps to be called Darwistotle," and he endorsed the "Darwistotelian view" of human politics and morality as showing an evolved political nature shared with chimpanzees and other political animals (81, 349, 359).

Straussian scholars would dismiss all of this as ridiculous.  First, Aristotle does not really believe that human beings are by nature political animals like chimpanzees, they argue, because he sees that human political order depends on the culturally constructive activity of political founders and lawmakers, and human politics as culturally learned transcends animal politics as naturally instinctive.  This argument can be found in Wayne Ambler's 1985 article in The Review of Politics.

Second, the Straussians would say, even if de Waal were right to see a republican balance of three orders among chimpanzees comparable to what Machiavelli recommends, Machiavelli's modern liberal republicanism departs radically from Aristotle's ancient classical republicanism.  In their Introduction to their translation of Machiavelli's Discourses, Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov assert that Machiavelli and Aristotle differ in how they characterize the few and the many in politics (p. xxviii).  For Aristotle, the oligarchic few and the democratic many make conflicting claims to rule, and thus a republican mixed regime would have to allow both classes to participate in political rule.  But for Machiavelli, only the few are ambitious to rule, while the many only wish not to be ruled by an oppressive few.  This is the Machiavellian political psychology underlying modern liberal republicanism: those few who seek the glory of ruling can satisfy their desire, but with checks on their power so that they cannot oppress the many, and thus the many are secure in their private liberty to live as they please, so long as they do not injure others.

The first point--that human politics is socially learned rather than naturally instinctive--assumes that nature and instinct are necessarily antithetical to artifice and learning, so that social order cannot be natural or instinctive if it depends in any way on artificial or socially learned activity.  But as Aristotle indicated in his biological works, he thought that many animals acted not just by unlearned instinct but also by individual and social learning, and that the political animals had instincts for learning that sustained social order.  Much of the learning necessary for the social life of animals comes from parents teaching their young.  But much is also learned from the competition and cooperation of individuals in the wider community.  Recent studies of animal behavior confirm this by showing that many animals--including chimpanzees--have cultural traditions that distinguish one political community from another.  I have written many posts on this--for example, here and here.

On the second point, Mansfield and Tarcov are mistaken in their assertion of the radical contrast between Aristotle and Machiavelli on the political psychology of republicanism.  Contrary to what Mansfield and Tarcov say, there is a remarkable agreement between Aristotle and Machiavelli in their biopolitical science of republicanism as based on a balance of the one, the few, and the many, in which the few can satisfy their desire for the public glory of ruling, and the many can satisfy their desire for the private security of not being ruled oppressively by the few.  Both see this balanced order of the republican mixed regime as the liberal solution to the problem of faction.

According to Aristotle, some animals are naturally solitary and others gregarious.  Of the gregarious animals, some are political.  The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for collective goods, for some common work or function (koinon ergon).  Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense (HA, 488a7-14).  Some political animals distinguish between leaders (hegemones) and followers (HA, 553a26-554b26, 614b19-26, 623b26-29a30).  Leaders can help an animal community by directing it to its common ends, but leaders can also harm a community when they lead factions that divide a community (HA, 553b15-19, 615b17-18, 625a1-26b15).

Although Aristotle did not specifically identify chimpanzees as political animals, he believed that apes belonged to intermediate species close to human beings, in that they "share in the nature of both man and the quadrupeds" (HA, 502a16).  From his anatomical comparisons, which included dissections of monkeys and apes, he concluded that in their feet, legs, hands, face, teeth, and internal parts, the apes are manlike (HA, 502a17-b27; PA, 689b1-35).

Aristotle sees that like other political animals, human beings face the problem of factional disorder (stasis) that arises from the conflict between those few individuals who want the glory of ruling over others and those many individuals who don't want to be ruled exploitatively by the ambitious few: the few desire political honor, the many desire economic security.  Aristotle's solution to the problem is a republican mixed regime in which the desires of both the few and the many might be satisfied.  The ambitious few can win the glory of holding public offices, but they will be constrained by the rule of law and by being elected by the many, who will win security in their private lives and property, protected from exploitative dominance by the many.  Both the few who care for honor (time) and the many who care for gain (kerdos) will be satisfied.  It is important to have a strong middle class to moderate the conflict between the very rich and the very poor, so that there is a balancing of the higher class, the middle class, and the lower class.  A republic of this sort is the most stable and enduring regime because no class of citizens desires to overturn the regime: the few do not need to overturn the regime to satisfy their ambition for glorious rule, and the many do not need to overturn the regime because of their fear of being exploited by the ruling class (Pol., 1295b1-40, 1297b5-28, 1302a33-1304b19, 1308a1-15, 1308b30-1309a15, 1318b17-1319a6). 

Some readers of Aristotle's Politics see it as suggesting that a mixed regime leaning towards a moderate democracy is the best regime that is practically achievable, which is the argument of Clifford Bates in Aristotle's "Best Regime": Kingship, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (LSU Press, 2003).

Machiavelli proposes a republic very similar to Aristotle's.  Like Aristotle, Machiavelli sees the problem of faction (fazione) arising from the conflict between the ambitious few ("the great"), who want to command and oppress the people, and the popular multitude, who do not want to rule, but who want not to be commanded and oppressed by the great (The Prince, chaps. 9, 19; Discourses, I.2, I.4, I.5, I.16.3-5, II.21.2, III.5).  A prince who wishes to rule as the one head over all must mediate this conflict.

Machiavelli presents a historical cycle of the six types of government based on the history of the ancient regimes (particularly, Sparta, Athens, and Rome), drawing from Plutarch and Polybius,  and Lucretius's evolutionary history of human society from primitive times (On the Nature of Things, esp. 5.931-945, 5.1019-1025, 5.1120-1161).

In the beginning of the human world, the original ancestors of the human species lived dispersed like beasts (D, I.2.3).  Then, as the human population increased,

"they gathered together, and to be able to defend themselves better, they began to look to whoever among them was more robust and of greater heart, and they made him a head, as it were, and obeyed him.  From this arose the knowledge of things honest and good, differing from the pernicious and bad. For, seeing that if one individual hurt his benefactor, hatred and compassion among men came from it, and as they blamed the ungrateful and honored those who were grateful, and thought too that those same injuries could be done to them, to escape like evil, they were reduced to making laws and ordering punishments for whoever acted against them, hence came the knowledge of justice."

Remarkably, it seems, this original "knowledge of justice" arises not from any knowledge of a divine or cosmic law of right and wrong but from the experience of human injuries, the hatred of human aggressors, the compassion for their victims, and the knowledge that those injuries could be done to oneself; and from this arose the human inclination to blame those who injured others and praise those who were cooperative.  Human beings organized themselves into bands for defense of the group--perhaps as a defense against wild animals or as a defense against other human groups. To help in that defense of their group, human beings chose those who were more robust and spirited among them to be their head, to lead them in defending the group against attack.  To enforce customary norms of praiseworthy and blameworthy conduct, they established laws and punishments.  As is suggested by Lucretius, this is a description of human hunter-gatherer bands before the establishment of agriculture and agrarian settlements.

Much of this has been confirmed by research in the evolutionary anthropology of hunter-gatherer bands, which has been the subject of many of my posts.  Human ancestors evolved to punish cheaters who harm others, and thus violate the customary rules of good conduct that arose spontaneously in primitive human societies as a defense against human aggressors.  These rules were enforced by reputational mechanisms--people praising the good and blaming the bad--and by punishing offenders through the retaliation of their victims or the victim's family or the larger group.  Thus, as the Epicureans argued, moral order originally arose as a kind of social contract through a largely spontaneous order in which autonomous individuals agreed to those customary norms that protected them from injury.  There is here the seed of liberal morality and politics: people are free to live as they please, so long as they refrain from injuring others; but when they do injure others, they will be punished by those who feel threatened by them.

Although the foraging band was an egalitarian society in which all adults were autonomous, some individuals respected for their talents in mediating disputes and leading the group could become leaders, but their leadership depended on the voluntary agreement of everyone in the group, and any leader who became a bully provoked resistance and retaliation that had a leveling effect.  So there was a natural tendency for a few people to seek dominance over the others, but this natural dominance drive of the ambitious few was checked by the resistance of the many who refused to be exploited by a dominant few.

From the beginning, then, there has been a kind of government by the consent of the governed, in that those few who rule must win the support, or at least acquiescence, of the many, because rulers who are hated by the people provoke the violent resistance of the multitude who do not want to be exploited by their rulers.

This resistance of the multitude to injuries by the ruling elite runs through Machiavelli's history of governments.  The three good forms of government--principality, aristocracy, and popular government--promote the common good rather than the merely private good of the rulers, and thus the people will accept such governments.  But each of these three good forms are inclined to decline into bad forms as the first generation of rulers is replaced by succeeding generations--principality declining into tyranny, aristocracy declining into oligarchy, and popular government declining into the license of mob-rule, and thus these three good forms are unstable.  Each of the bad forms will be overthrown by the multitude when they see that the government is not promoting their peace and security (D, I.2.3).

Those who prudently order the laws, Machiavelli believes, will create the most stable and enduring republic by forming a mixed regime that combines all three of the good regimes: "for the one guards the other, since in one and the same city, there are the principality, the aristocrats, and the popular government" (D, I.2.5).  In such a republic, a prince can govern "by way of freedom" rather than "by way of principality."  The princely desire for power and the popular desire for freedom can be combined.  The popular desire for freedom is expressed in two ways: a small part of the people (perhaps only 40 or 50 people) want to be free to command, but most of the people want to be free to live a secure private life.  A "well-ordered republic" with a prince elected by the people and public offices for the ambitious few under the rule of law so as to protect the private liberty of most people satisfies all three classes of human beings--the one, the few, and the many (D, I.16, I.20).  Such republics also need princes "to make their men military" by training them for military service in a citizens' militia, so that the republic does not depend on foreign mercenaries for its military defense and offense (D, I.21).

This is the liberal republicanism that would be later elaborated by people like John Locke and John Adams.  And yet this Machiavellian liberal republicanism also has roots in Aristotle's mixed regime, as Machiavelli himself suggested in his Discourse on Florentine Things After the Death of Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, sometimes entitled A Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence or Reforming the State of Florence Done at the Instance of Pope Leo X, which can be found online.

Florence had officially been identified as a republic for hundreds of years.  But the Medici family had ruled unofficially, without any legal authority, over the city through most of the fifteenth century.  When Lorenzo de Medici ("Lorenzo the Magnificent") died in 1492, his son Piero was unable to maintain the family's power, and he was forced into exile in 1494.  Then, a new republican constitution was established for Florence under the influence of a charismatic Dominican monk, Girolama Savonarola, who used his popular public sermons to persuade the people to turn Florence into a Christian republic that would become the center of Christian renewal for the whole world.  After almost four years of power, Savonarola was defeated by his opponents, including the Pope, and he was hanged and burned in 1498.

After the death of Savonarola, Machiavelli was elected in 1498 to his first public posts--Second Chancellor of the Republic, replacing a deposed follower of Savonarola, and Secretary of the Ten of War.  For fourteen years, from the ages of 29 to 43, Machiavelli was an important public official for the Florentine republic in its diplomatic service and military security, including organizing a citizen militia.

In 1502, Florence was threatened by the advance of Cesare Borgia's armies.  Florentines began to debate a change in their constitution.  The Gonfalonier (standard-bearer) of Justice had always been elected for two-month terms, which deprived the republic of strong leadership in war and diplomacy.  In Venice, the head of the government, called the Doge, was elected for life.  At the end of August, a vote passed in the Great Council (a widely inclusive popular assembly) declaring that henceforth the Gonfalonier will be appointed for life. 

On September 21, Piero Soderini was elected Gonfalonier for life.  He became the most powerful fully legal head of government  in Florence's republican history. He was in effect the chief executive of Florence.  He defended the Great Council, and he mediated conflicts between the city's popular and oligarchic factions.  Machiavelli was a friend and supporter of Soderini, and most of Machiavelli's positions in the government depended on Soderini's patronage.  Because Machiavelli's father was a tax debtor, Machiavelli was ineligible for Florence's chief magistracies.

One of the fundamental weaknesses in the Florentine republic identified by Machiavelli was the dependence on foreign mercenary soldiers.  Machiavelli argued for establishing a citizens' militia.  His oligarchic opponents warned that it would be dangerous to arm plebian citizens within the walls of the city.  Machiavelli answered this objection by arguing that dividing the powers over the militia would prevent any one leader from using the militia to subvert the government.  Piero Soderini supported Machiavelli's proposal for a people's militia.  Machiavelli began by recruiting and training peasant people in small towns outside Florence.  In 1508, he organized the militia to fight against Pisa, which was in revolt against Florentine rule.

But in 1512, when the armies of the Church and Spain marched against Florence, the city was still too weak militarily to resist the invasion.  In August of that year, Soderini was forced into exile.  Spanish troops entered Florence.  And the Medici family was allowed to return.  On September 16, the magistrates of the city were forced to reinstate the Medici family.  Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici and Giuliano de' Medici became the rulers of Florence.  Two days later, after this Medici coup, Machiavelli's Florentine militia was abolished, and the Great Council was dissolved.  Piero Soderini's image was removed from all public buildings, and his political service for Florence was discredited. 

Machiavelli composed an unsolicited memorandum to Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici. He warned the Cardinal that those Florentine patricians who were attacking Soderini and claiming to be the friends of the Medici family were not true friends, because they were only maneuvering to become heads of state themselves.  "I should like to make friends for your house, not enemies," Machiavelli wrote.  He advised that the Medici's needed to found their state on the support of the people and not on those deceptive patricians who falsely claimed to be their friends.

If the memorandum was read, it did not win any Medici support for Machiavelli.  On November 7, 1512, he was dismissed from all of his governmental offices.  On February 18, 1513, a plot to kill Giuliano de' Medici and overthrow the government was discovered.  Two leaders of the plot were arrested and then beheaded.  Machiavelli was arrested because his name was on a list of potential collaborators found in the pocket of one of the conspirators.  In prison, he was questioned about the conspiracy and tortured.  The interrogators employed the strappado: a man's arms are tied behind his back with a strap tied to a crane that jerks his whole body off the ground, so that his arms are ripped out of their shoulder sockets.  This was done to Machiavelli six times.  Six times he was asked why his name was on the list.  Each time he denied any knowledge of the conspiracy.

While Machiavelli was imprisoned, Pope Julius II died.  Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici was elected the new pope, taking the name Leo X, becoming the first Florentine pope.  Now the Medici were princes of both Rome and Florence.  The new pope declared a general amnesty for political prisoners in Florence.  Machiavelli was released after 22 days in prison.

By the end of 1513, Machiavelli is spending most of his time at his country house in Sant' Andrea in Percussina, not far outside the walls of Florence, with his wife and children.  He writes The Prince and The Discourses, which are widely circulated but not published until after his death.  His play Mandragola is performed for the first time in 1518, and its success makes him famous around Europe.

Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici became the leader of Florence, the person to whom Machiavelli dedicated The Prince.  In May, 1519, Lorenzo died.  Pope Leo appointed his cousin, Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, to become the new head of Florence's government.  Lorenzo had become hated by the people of Florence, and Leo wanted to consider changes in the Florentine government that might soften some of the popular resistance.  He advised the Cardinal to invite prominent people to propose changes in the government.  Machiavelli was one of the people mentioned.

Now, for the first time since the Medici coup of 1512, Machiavelli had a chance to influence the Medici rule of Florence and to try to bring back to Florence something like a republican government.  In his Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence,  he returned to the theme of his 1512 memorandum to Cardinal Giovanni, who was now the Pope: for the security and glory of Medici rule, the support of the untrustworthy patricians is not enough, because "no stable republic was ever established without satisfying the general public [l'universale]."

Machiavelli argues that no state can be stable unless it is either a true principality or a true republic.  All other forms of government that are situated between these two are unstable.  A prince cannot rule by himself, because he needs a coalition of supporters, most commonly a nobility.  In a true principality or monarchy, the noble gentlemen make themselves lords over the people, and the prince is lord over the nobles.  This cannot be done in Florence, because it does not have a well-established landed nobility, and so there is great equality in Florence.

But although Florence has no nobility, there will always be three different classes in every city--the elite (primi), the middle (mezzani) , and the lowest (ultimi). Even with the rough equality of citizens in Florence, some of the citizens will have "elevated spirits" (animo elevato), and they will think that they merit being elevated above others.  The Florentine republic under Soderini was unstable because it failed to satisfy the desire of these ambitious few for public offices of high honor, and consequently the state was ruined.  Since there are by nature three ranks of men in every society, a well-ordered republic must satisfy the desires of these three classes.  Machiavelli lays out a constitution that would allocate power between these three ranks.  This would include the appointment of a Gonfalonier of Justice for a term of two or three years, or perhaps for life.  Machiavelli saw this as a "perfect republic."

Machiavelli's reasoning here seems to assume what Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and others have called the "theory of minimum winning coalitions."  In politics, rule by one person is impossible, because even the most autocratic dictator needs some supporters.  The difference between dictatorship and democracy is that the dictator rules with the support of a very small coalition of supporters, which corresponds to Machiavelli's principality, while the democratic leader rules with the support of a large coalition of supporters, which corresponds to Machiavelli's republic.  I have written a post on this.

Alternatively, one could identify Machiavelli's principality as corresponding to what Douglass North and his colleagues called the "limited access order," and Machiavelli's republic could be identified as corresponding to the "open access order."  I have a post on this.

In another post, I have written about ancient Athens as one of the few open access or liberal orders in the premodern world.  One can see in Athens a social order that approximates some of the features of modern liberal republicanism, which was seen by Aristotle.  I have written three series of posts on Aristotle's Darwinian liberalism that begin here, here, and here.

Actually, Machiavelli himself points to Aristotle in his Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence.  First, Machiavelli echoes the language of Aristotle (see the Politics, 1302a32-33) in his last sentence: "Nor is there another way of avoiding these evils than to reorganize that city so that it may in itself be firm; and it will always be firm when every one has a part in it and knows what he has to do, and in whom to confide, and that no class of citizen has to desire innovation, either through fear for himself or through ambition."

Second, Machiavelli brings up Aristotle's name as a philosopher who wrote about how to reform republics:

"I believe that the greatest honor that men can have is that which is willingly given them by their country, and I believe that the greatest good that is done, and the most pleasing to God, is that which is done for your country.  In addition to this, no man is exalted as much in any of his actions, as are those who have reformed republics and kingdoms with laws and institutions.  These are, after those who have been Gods, the highest praised: and as there have been few who have had opportunity to do so, and still fewer those who have known how to do it, the number of those who have done it is small; and this glory has been esteemed so much by men who have known nothing but glory, that not being able to establish a republic in fact, have established it in writing; for Aristotle, Plato, and many others have wanted to show the world, that if they had not been able to found a republic as Solon and Lycurgus did, they did not fail from ignorance but from being powerless to put it into effect."

Remarkably, Machiavelli here implicitly compares himself with Aristotle, Plato, and other philosophers who established republics in their writing, even when they could not establish them in fact.  As far as I know, Machiavelli's only other references to Aristotle and Plato in his writing is in The Discourses--one reference to Aristotle (III.26.2) and one reference to Plato (III.6.16).

John Adams quoted this passage from Machiavelli to explain his love of honor from writing constitutions for America.  Adams wrote the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which is the oldest written constitution still in force in the world.  In that constitution, Adams followed the principle that he had learned from Machiavelli--balancing the one, the few, and the many--by separating and balancing the powers of an executive and of an upper legislative chamber for aristocrats and a lower legislative chamber representing the people.  This Massachusetts constitution had great influence in the drafting of the United States Constitution of 1787, particularly Article II on the presidency, which can be seen as establishing a republican prince.