On Burnham's mitigated defense of Free Speech
The present post is a kind of companion to last year’s digression on the nature of freedom in James Burnham’s (1943) The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom. In it, I noted that many familiar rights (freedom of speech, political participation, electoral competition, etc.) are useful to secure Machiavellian liberty but are not treated as ends in themselves. In particular, for Burnham internal freedom is an effect of the conflict among different sources of power in society. That is, for Burnham a polarized society is a part of (what we may call) the dynamics of freedom.
Among the means to achieve such a “shifting equilibrium in which no one of [the social] forces can overpower all the rest” is “a press” not “subjected to censorship and…free to discuss and criticize acts of government.” (Part III, chapter 5, pp. 98-99) Of course, such a press is only secure if in society there is such an approximate balance of social powers that are unable to silence all the others.
As I noted last year, in Burnham, unlike among liberals, the familiar rights are not individual (nor characterized as ‘rights’), but rather robust practices that are maintained amidst social conflict (and themselves sources of more conflicts). Burnham does not treat a free press or a clash of opinions as a means to discover truth.*
In fact, while Burnham repeatedly notes that a free press is an important means to secure freedom, he does not subscribe to an absolutist conception of the first amendment. There is an important limit to speech in Machiavellian freedom in Burnham’s analysis. This is made explicit in a closing paragraph in Part III, chapter 3 (“Composition and Character of the Ruling Class”) devoted to Mosca’s views. I quote before I comment.
[t]he integrity of the political formula is essential for the survival of a given social structure. Changes in the formula, if they are not to destroy the society, must be gradual, not abrupt. The formula is indispensable for holding the social structure together. A widespread skepticism about the formula will in time corrode and disintegrate the social order. It is perhaps for this reason, half consciously understood, that all strong and long-lived societies have cherished their "traditions," even when, as is usually the case, these traditions have little relation to fact, and even after they can hardly be believed literally by educated men. Rome, Japan, Venice, all such long-enduring states, have been very slow to change the old formulas, the time-honored ways and stories and rituals; and they have been harsh against rationalists who debunk them. This, after all, was the crime for which Athens put Socrates to death. From the point of view of survival, she was probably right in doing so.
This is the most Oakeshottian passage we can find in Burnham. (It is also somewhat ironic because in “Rationalism in Politics,” Oakeshott repeatedly alludes to Burnham as one of the rationalists he criticizes.)
A political formula is a social glue or what we may call the ideology of a ruling class whereby its power and also the structure of society over which it rules are rationalized and justified. The ideology is an embodied way of life, “time-honored ways and stories and rituals.” I call this a ‘social glue’ because the ruled must pay more than lip-service to them.
Not everyone, however, has to believe in a political formula for it to be effective as a social glue. In fact, Burnham is explicit that among the learned the literal version of a political formula is often not believed. But even they embrace a metaphorical version of the political formula as informative of and even constitutive of the nature of their society.
Such social glues need not be fixed for all time. But they can change only by modest adaptations to changing circumstances. Ideally, even the adaptations appear to be unchanged iterations of the political formula. That mechanism is not so odd as it sounds. In our lifetime our own society embraced gay marriage, in part, by acting as if and then believing that marriage in the time-honored way and their rituals had essentially remained unchanged.
So, Burnham treats Socrates as a debunker of social glues. In fact, he treats Socrates as emblematic of a more general rationalist tendency toward skepticism about the truth of time-honored ways. In so far as such skepticism is constitutive of philosophy, Burnham’s analysis treats forthright philosophy as a potentially dangerous, destabilizing force.
Be that as it may, for our present purposes what matters is that Burnham explicitly recognizes that the absence of censorship that plays a central role in the defense of freedom can also be curtailed in the service of that very freedom. That is, one is permitted to criticize rulers and thereby strengthen Machiavellian freedom, but one ought not criticize the truly central political formulas of society.
Burnham’s idea echoes structurally (recall) an infamous taboo-endorsing passage in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals that “a people should not inquire with any practical aim in view into the origin of the supreme authority to which it is subject.” I use ‘taboo’ to suggest that what secures the political formula is not usually so much an active form of censorship, but rather a more general self-restraint. Socrates’ crime is not that he questioned the political formulae (on Burnham’s account that is to be expected among the educated), but that he was imprudent about the manner in which he did so.
To put Burnham’s position as a slogan: in a free society, the rulers can be criticized and, thereby, freedom prolonged, but the idols of society are off-limits if and only if such a society wishes to preserve itself. And a corollary of this position is that those who advocate the broadest possible free speech as a matter of principle are either fools or revolutionaries (or both).
*In fact, he is notably reserved about the possibility of the public sphere to be constituted by truth. In this respect he is not far from the Platonic skepticism about public life that we also find in strands of liberalism.