On Bergson, Oakeshott, and Foucault on the art of governing great peoples

In a note to the introduction of The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper frankly acknowledges that the distinction between closed and open society is derived from Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion (first published in 1932 as Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion). In that note. Popper also claims they have “a fundamentally different approach to nearly every problem of philosophy;” and nearly every subsequent reference to Bergson in The Open Society is critical. Somewhat sadly, these references also obscure some of the non-trivial commonalities between the two thinkers.

Of course, scholars have not wholly ignored the link between Bergson and Popper. And my interest today is not to compare and contrast their views on the open society. But there is a passage in the last chapter of the book — which is where Bergson articulates the distinction between open and closed societies — that caught my attention.

The passage, which I will quote below in full, is later partially summarized as follows: “since at the basis of our conclusions was a radical distinction between the closed and the open society, since the tendencies of the closed society have, in our opinion, persisted, ineradicable, in the society that is on the way to becoming an open one, since all these instincts of discipline originally converged towards the war-instinct, we are bound to ask to what extent the primitive instinct can be repressed or circumvented…” (p. 277) Open and closed societies are formed (we might say by adopting some of Bergson’s own scholastic terminology) from the same matter. In fact, unlike many other social evolutionary thinkers, for Bergson historical and primitive man is essentially the same as the (purportedly) civilized kind. What the present passage makes clear is that the distinction between a closed and open society is partially conceptual. All actually existing societies are de facto closed in character. But the open society is a powerful regulative (and cosmopolitan) ideal, which sometimes pulls a closed society toward it. The real interest is in Bergson’s explanation how this is so.

But as he sets up the problem, Bergson writes the following. The passage is not especially important to his overall argument, and I can’t prove the impact it had. But I will suggest some significant resonances. Let me first quote:

Let us begin by saying that man was designed for very small societies. And it is generally admitted that primitive communities were small. But we must add that the original state of mind survives, hidden away beneath the habits without which indeed there would be no civilization. Driven inwards, powerless, it yet lives on in the depths of consciousness. If it does not go so far as to determine acts, yet it manifests itself in words. In a great nation certain districts may be administered to the general satisfaction; but where is the government that the governed go so far as to call a good one? [Dans une grande nation, des communes peuvent être administrées à la satisfaction générale; mais quel est le gouvernement que les gouvernés se décideront à déclarer bon?] They think they have praised it quite enough when they say it is not so bad as the others and, in this sense only, the best. Here the disapproval is congenital. In fact, the art of governing a great people is the only one for which there exists no technical training, no effective education, especially when we come to the highest posts. [Remarquons que l'art de gouverner un grand peuple est le seul pour lequel il n'y ait pas de technique préparatoire, pas d'éducation efficace, surtout s'il s'agit des plus hauts emplois.] The extreme scarcity of political leaders of any calibre is owing to the fact that they are called upon to decide at any moment, and in detail, problems which the increased size of societies may well have rendered insoluble. Study the history of the great modem nations: you will find plenty of great scientists, great artists, great soldiers, great specialists in every line-but how many great statesmen? [Étudiez l'histoire des grandes nations modernes: vous y trouverez nombre de grands savants, de grands artistes, de grands soldats, de grands spécialistes en toute matière, - mais combien de grands hommes d’État?]—Translated by R. Ashley Audra & Cloudesley Brereton, pp. 264-265.

I am especially interested in the claim that “the art of governing a great people is the only one for which there exists no technical training, no effective education, especially when we come to the highest posts.” This is in fact, the central axiom of Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics. Oakeshott allows that there are folk who purport to offer such technical training in government, but the best he can say of the best of them is this: “The project of Machiavelli was, then, to provide a crib to politics, a political training in default of a political education, a technique for the ruler who had no tradition.”

On Oakeshott’s reading of Machiavelli, Machiavelli understands himself as offering a technique in the art of governing that is itself second best. And that Oakeshott thinks this technique is doomed to fail despite there being an ongoing demand for it. Oakeshott’s critique of Hayek is precisely that Hayek he offers a simplistic template for dealing with the absence of a technique that works.*

Now we know (see here) that when Oakeshott was younger Bergson was important to him, but I have found no evidence he read “Two Sources of Morality and Religion.” So, this I leave open to future research.

But, Oakeshott would not have agreed with Bergson’s claim that the reason why there is an “extreme scarcity of political leaders of any calibre is owing to the fact that they are called upon to decide at any moment, and in detail, problems which the increased size of societies may well have rendered insoluble.” To be sure, Oakeshott would not disagree with the underlying empirical observation about the absence of great statesmen in recent times (although his diagnosis differs). I also set aside the fact that Oakeshott would reject the very idea that there are technical ‘problems to be solved.’ For Oakeshott an aristocracy of birth — rooted in great families — can cultivate a natural aristocracy of merit among themselves and for recognizing useful newcomers, who can help steer even a great ship of state such that cliffs and reefs are avoided in advance. The problem is that great nations who need great statesmen most have, under pressure from rationalism (and egalitarianism), eliminated the conditions under which they can arise.

Bergson himself, however, thinks the very advanced division of labor and size of modern nation-states is the source of the problem. And so the implication of this stance is that one must hope for a would-be philosopher-king with exceptional ability to arise spontaneously. This is basically Plato’s position (recall my paper) but then restricted to great, modern societies. (My view is that Plato thinks the “extreme scarcity of political leaders of any calibre” is true of all societies.)

However, we know that Foucault read Bergson’s book and even took notes on it (see, for example, here). And you won’t be surprised that I understand Foucault’s 1977-1978 and 1978-1979 (and the first of the 1979-1980 lectures) as devoted to tracing how post Machiavelli west Europeans conceptualized the challenge the of governing a great society. In fact, the Birth of Biopolitics, announces at the start that “I would like to take the theme for this year’s lectures from another, less well-known quotation from someone who, generally speaking at least, is also less well-known, the English Statesman Walpole, who, with reference to his way of governing, said: “Quieta non movere,” “Let sleeping dogs lie.” That is to say, the theme of the lecture series is, in part, to conceptualize how great statesman (Walpole) approach or at least speak about (or appeal to an ideology or a programmatic of) the art of governing great states (e.g., the British empire).

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*Here’s the full passage from Oakeshott:

the informality of English politics (which enabled us to escape, for a long time, putting too high a value on political action and placing too high a hope in political achievement - to escape, in politics at least, the illusion of the evanescence of imperfection), that resistance has now itself been converted into an ideology. This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek's Road to Serfdom - not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine. A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics. And only in a society already deeply infected with Rationalism will the conversion of the traditional resources of resistance to the tyranny of Rationalism into a self-conscious ideology be considered a strengthening of those resources. It seems that now, in order to participate in politics and expect a hearing, it is necessary to have, in the strict sense, a doctrine; not to have a doctrine appears frivolous, even disreputable.