or Democracy versus Judaism

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

As Leo Strauss, the greatest political philosopher of 20^th-century discerned, every political philosopher in the Western world scorned democracy until Machiavelli.  The great Florentine is not only the founder of modern political science, but also the father of modernity.

Machiavelli rejected the Great Tradition, the tradition generated by Jerusalem and Athens. This tradition was exalted by Winston Churchill, a scholar-statesman who extolled Jerusalem and Athens as the two paradigmatic cities of Western Civilization, the two cities that regarded the cultivation of wisdom and virtue as the pinnacle of political life.

Wisdom and virtue are not exalted as the supreme ends of democracy, which invariably worships freedom and equality. Wisdom and virtue are not common, and their role in political life is exceptional and unpredictable. But Machiavelli wanted to establish a new political science, a political science basis on solid grounds, therefore on what is commonplace and predictable. He therefore constructed a political science whose foundational and driving principle is egoism, a constant and universal motive of men and nations. This is what makes him the founder of modern political science as well the father of democracy and modernity.

What is more, and as I have shown in A Jewish Philosophy of History, Machiavelli is not only the father of democracy, but also of Capitalism, Socialism, and Fascism, for despite their differences all are motivated primarily by egoism, whether individual or disguised as collective. These diverse ideologies have nothing to say of the moral and intellectual virtues exalted by Athens and Jerusalem. Those virtues are discussed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. (I leave aside the Ethics of the Fathers encapsulated in the Mishna and in the prayer books of Jews young and old. Discussion of Aristotle is sufficient for the purpose of this article.)

Aristotle, the greatest encyclopedic philosopher is reported to have written treatises on the constitutions of 150 Greek city-states, of which treatises, unfortunately, only fragments of the Athenian are extant. Leo Strauss does not exaggerate in saying that what Machiavelli knew about politics could be put on a postage stamp compared to Aristotle’s colossal knowledge. In addition to his works on politics and ethics, there is also the first book on Rhetoric of which Aristotle is the author.

(The Rhetoric was avidly studied by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the major authors of The Federalist Papers, arguably the greatest compilation of essays on the basic institutions of government, which means that Aristotle’s Rhetoric facilitated the adoption of the American Constitution!

Aristotle’s voluminous writings dominated the universities and learned opinion in the West for 2,000 years. Machiavelli’s monumental ambition was to relegate Aristotle to the dust heap by creating a new dispensation for mankind based on philosophical materialism spearheaded by a political science rooted in egoism.

The centrality of egoism couched in Machiavelli’s political science has dominated the social sciences, which explain the higher – our moral and religious values – in terms of the lower. For example, psychology explains love in terms of the libido or self-gratification. Similarly, politics is nothing but an egoistic struggle for power.

Remarkably, in Machiavelli’s two seminal books, The Prince and The Discourses, though published in Catholic Italy, there is not a single reference to two of the most significant concepts of his epoch, the “soul” and “conscience”! What is it, then, that distinguishes the human from the sub-human? The answer is this: Machiavelli created a new conception of man. Machiavellian man is a human being devoid of a conscience and a soul. (This, the reader may be shocked to learn, is comparable to the efforts of political Zionists who sought to create a new kind of Jew, a Jew devoid of the Torah,)

To create a new kind of man, Machiavelli had to de-humanize pre-Machiavellian man. He had to reduce what previous philosophers deemed distinctively human to what was not distinctively human.  He had to reduce the soul from its tripartite division and hierarchy of reason, spiritedness, and desire to its lowest element, desire. The soul thus becomes nothing more than an ensemble or a democracy of desires, the most powerful of which is the desire for power.

What is distinctively human in the soul of Machiavellian man has been erased, has no expression or has lost its voice. It’s as if we were to say that “A Beethoven string-quartet is nothing more than a scraping of horses’ tails on cats’ bowels” – to paraphrase the witticism of William James. 

This dehumanizing of what is human – if any comparison is appropriate –  may be likened to the pronouncements of Israeli politicians and judges who discern no contradiction between the leveling egalitarianism of democracy and Judaism – Judaism, the noblest religion of mankind, the religion that liberated humanity from paganism, the religion rightly known as the pristine source of ethical and intellectual monotheism.☼