Schall Man For Himself

"Man for Himself": On the Ironic Unities of Political Philosophy
The Structure of Political Thought. By Charles N.R. McCoy. (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1983; Reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978).*
B plined thought on the subject, had maintained that the complete

oth Plato and Aristotle, the undisputed founders of any disciunderstanding of political things included a comprehensive treatment by the intellect of both good and evil in human activities. This understanding of political things included the reasons why the distinction between good and evil was not arbitrary, why it was observed or revealed in human actions. Likewise, it treated the rationale for any possible confusion of one with the other, of good for evil, or evil for good, since any possible confusion normally occurred for some intelligible reason. Aquinas was to add to this, moreover, that we do not have a complete or adequate grasp of anything in the speculative or moral spheres unless we know the reasons why something is true, that is, why it is conformed to its appropriate reality. But to know this, we also need to clarify the possible arguments that have been or could be laid against any given truth. Aquinas' Summae and his Quaestiones Disputatae were, thus, astonishing in their uncanny capacity and willingness to state accurately the argument against the truth of an issue, along with the arguments for it. Furthermore, a knowledge of evil, as Plato knew, was not itself an evil, but rather an aspect of the full perfection of intellect as such, including human intellect, which existed in its radical autonomy in each human being. There was no "separate" or "corporate" intellect, as writers like Hegel, von Gierke, or some of the Arab com* A complete bibliography of the essays and reviews of Charles N.R. McCoy is included at the end of this article. Whenever anything from these sources is cited in the text, it will be followed immediately by the short form and the page number. Citations from the Structure of Political Thought will simply be by page number. Other citations will follow the usual form.
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THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
mentators on Aristotle seemed to suppose. Moral truth, the conformity of what we actually do with what we ought to do, indeed, presupposed the unique kind of limited being we were given from nature. Nature, in its intelligibility, was formed by the cause of nature's obviously contingent existence, not by itself as an original cause, nor by the human intellect. All things in nature, then, exist as either this thing or that, or in potentiality to this thing or that. Thus, nature, from the point of view of the human intellect, revealed a definite order, open to human intellect, but only after the human manner of knowing. "To know" something, consequently, did not cause the nature or existence of a thing to be, but indicated a change in the knower for a being capable of knowing. The human intellect did not cause nature to be, though, as we shall see, the effort to make such a causality plausible, is, in large part, what specifically "modern" political philosophy is about. Moral and political evil, to be sure, ought to be "known," but not "done." The facts of what human beings do "do"-that is, cheat, steal, lie, and otherwise frolic-were described with equal accuracy not only by Machiavelli or Hobbes, but also by Augustine, Aristotle, Plato, and Thucydides. Nonetheless, these "facts" of human action, however dire, were proper considerations of knowledge, both in their deformity from what ought to be and in their contingency, in their not "having" to exist except through chosen human agency. An adequate description of ethical and political "fact," therefore, had to include both its element of freedom and its element of norm, of what sort of act it was. Without these, no description of a moral fact would be intelligible for what it is. "Understanding" evil, therefore, was not so much like understanding another "object," evil in its essence, as it were, but rather like understanding what was not there, what was lacking in what normally ought to be there. From this angle, ethical and political activities differed from artistic activities because the good artist was one who could deliberately err, whereas the good man, by deliberately choosing to act against the norm of a human good by selecting yet another good, but not the "right" one, would no longer remain good as a human being, as a whole. Moral man, unlike the artist, did not create the end at which he sought to arrive by his actions, for man was already a certain kind of being, a human being, from nature. Politics does not make man to be man, Aristotle rightly said, but taking him from nature, guides him to be "good" as man. Political philosophy, in one sense, can be looked upon as that area
THE UNITIES OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
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of philosophy in general that justifies the free, rigorous pursuit of

what is by the human intellect, by the philosopher, or by any person
open to reality. That is to say, political philosophy, in its most noble sense, recognizes that what is and what is allowed by the law are only necessarily the same in the best city, when, that is, what is is not determined by the city. The death of Socrates and the death of Christ, thus, remain at the heart of political philosophy.' Reality in some sense, however, needs protection from the power of politics to insist on or impose only laws fashioned by the autonomous human intellect and will. Paradoxically, metaphysics and revelation need political restraint by that very institution legitmately designed to restrain, the polity. Such protection is needed both to know what is and to limit politics, on this very basis, to what it is. The understanding of what is includes the understanding of what politics is. Political philosophy, in this sense, is not the whole of philosophy as such. On the other hand, in intellectual history, political philosophy can and has come to claim for itself, according to certain rational exigencies in the human reflective powers themselves, a complete autonomy, such that it presents itself to the human mind as a complete "metaphysics," a total explanation of all that is. Intellectual history, in fact, must deal with this very political claim if it is to be complete and even fully intelligible. Obviously, such a transcendent claim on the part of an autonomous political philosophy to explain all reality by its own methods would entail an adequate grasp of how political philosophy, in its "unlimited" modern form, can present itself as philosophia ut sic. Also, for a complete understanding of this result, we would require an explanation of how revelation is likewise related to a political metaphysics that is untempered by speculative rectitude based on what is, on what does not itself derive from political will. The significance of this latter relation of political philosophy and revelation in our era has been heightened considerably when it is recognized that the terms and movements in which representatives of revelation often present themselves turn out to be, on analysis, nothing but other forms of what Leo Strauss called "the modern project," the project of political metaphysics. Politcal philosophy itself needs to pay considerably more attention to this curious phenomenon, to the politicization of theology, par1. See James V. Schall, The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval and Modern Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 21-38.
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ticularly Christian theology.' Originally, revelation was conceived as a light or truth of the Divine Intellect, itself responsible for the determinate order, for the actual order not made by man, but directed to the human intellect in its proper freedom. More and more, however, often because of a failure of theology to grasp the importance of political philosophy, the content of revelation and metaphysics has become theoretically socialized or politicized through use of a political philosophy which has, supposedly, "overcome" the given norms and limits of what classical metaphysics and religion called the transcendent, the original order or source of what is. 3 To find adequate guidance through this intellectual history is difficult enough. Certainly, we have an Eric Voegelin, or Leo Strauss, or Hannah Arendt, or Sheldon Wolin, or Jacques Maritain, or Josef Pieper. We have too the classical authors themselves-Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Heidegger. We have, likewise, in addition to any original experience of our own, the lived records of actual politics. These latter are found, in part, in the historians who sought to account for their overall meaning-Gibbon, von Ranke, Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin, Cassirer, Christopher Dawson, Herbert Butterfield. We experience, moreover, little difficulty in designating some actual regimes, at least, as "better" or "worse" than others. Nor is it anything but sobering to see peaceful changes or violent revolutions in given regimes, undertaken for the highest motives, no doubt, end actually in something approaching the worst regimes by any meaningful standards of the political philosophers. We have seen, furthermore, if not the "worst" regimes imaginable, at least some that must be remarkably close, come into being in the twentieth century, regimes that manage often to persist in power quite well and even actually to attract devoted followers, often from the highest intellectual ranks. This alone has caused us to question the very notion of
2. See James V. Schall, Liberation Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982). 3. See Ernest Fortin, "Rational Theologians and Irrational Philosophers: A Straussian Perspective," Interpretation 12 (May-September, 1984), 349-56; Dante Germino, Political Philosophy and the Open Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); John Hallowell, "Christianity and the Social Order," in Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (New York: Holt, 1954), 651-95; George Carey and James V. Schall (eds.), Essays in Christianity and Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984).
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"progress" as well as the final "purpose" of men and regimes in this world. The description of the best, the worst, the tolerable, the feasible, and the better regimes is the central function of political philosophy in its own order, together with at least some awareness that some questions that legitimately arise in ethical or political experience do not receive their adequate answers in politics. Moreover, this accurate description is by no means an easy or indifferent task. Indeed, it is often a dangerous one. The exercise of calling the "worst" regime the "best," an effort whose plausibility is already in the First Book of The Republic, remains a reality of contemporary national and international politics and literature. Contrariwise, an accurate accounting of the steps in intellectual history whereby the worst regimes could, with some justification, be called the "best" regimes, is the first defense of liveable regimes, of limited regimes. Ideas and institutions, however much grounded in real being in their origins and activities, can be thought and thought about. The range of human intellect is not such that its apparent vagaries and disorders are impossible to account for, at least in some fundamental sense. No book is more helpful and insightful in this understanding of political philosophy, its origins, directions, and implications, its relation to metaphysics and revelation, than Charles N.R. McCoy's Structure
of Political Thought. The Structure of Political Thought is a spare, careful guide
through and, at the same time, critical argument about "what is political philosophy?" The book was first published in 1963, though separate chapters appeared in journal form from 1940, mainly in Laval Theologique et Philosophique and the American Political Science Review. (See bibliography). Perhaps because of its range and implications, the Structure of Political Thought was not particularly well attended to when it first appeared. Practically everything McCoy wrote, including his essays on American politics and his oftentimes trenchant book reviews in the Modern Schoolman and the Catholic Historical Review, centered, in one way or another, on the unity and intelligibility through time of political philosophy, not only its direction, but why it went the way it did. For McCoy, there existed a definite body of thought, understood by actually rethinking it, from the Greeks, which wrestled with certain basic questions and responses to them, questions about the place of man in reality and the relation of man's ethical and political life to this place.
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"The genesis and exact nature of the ethically neutral but not value-free stance of avant-garde Behaviorists," McCoy wrote in the
Western Political Quarterly, may be best understood, I believe, by noting the underlying direction of all political theory in modern times . . . . All of the great modern theories of politics reveal a growing lack of interest in the contingent and difficult thing that political liberty is, and a growing preoccupation with the kind of causality and kind of being that are absolute and universal in efficacy. Marx's first principle of socialism-"Socialism takes its departure from the theoretically and practically sensible conscience of man, in nature, considered as being"-is the paradigm of many notable efforts in the history of political thought to find a "system" and a "method" that would allow us to surmount the contrarities of existence by imposing itself as the sufficient reason for all that happens in the world. ("Value-Free," 62)
The great thinkers, even those who finally ended in the complete reversal or perfect deformity of classical human dignity, did so because they knew and built upon positions that had a direct linkage back to Plato and Aristotle. McCoy, then, held that it was both possible and necessary to think like the great philosophers but this could only take place against the status and validity of thought itself. The enterprise of political philosophy was not merely a commentary on the political philosophers but an actual coming to grips 'with their positions as arguments, as true. Political philosophy was not its history. McCoy's ability himself to think through a famous position of a great thinker-say, a Grotius on natural law (191-94), or Hume on causality (224-35), was both profound and respectful to the position itself. In this latter sense of himself thinking through each position and argument of the great thinkers, McCoy was an original philosopher who tested the nature and validity of thought in the great thinkers against philosophy itself, something he held was open to each human intellect and behind which we could not go. This position did not deny the great divergencies in human talent and virtue, both of which, in the nature of things, were pertinent to the status of political philosophy itself, which retained necessarily an intelligibility openly granted in its wholeness to but a few, as the classics had realized. Thus, this approach did require thought as such, not just the history of what philosophers held with no judgement about what they held and why.
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Charles N.R. McCoy (1911-84) was born in Brooklyn. He was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, then completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under Jerome Kerwin-The Law Relating to Public Inland Waters (1940).' In 1951, under Charles de Koninck, he received a second doctoral degree in philosophy at Laval University in Quebec. McCoy was a Roman Catholic priest, taught successively at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, St. Louis University, the Catholic University of America, and the University of Santa Clara. With few exceptions, McCoy's closely reasoned essays-mostly written between 1940-70-concentrated on what he himself called in his Preface to the Structure of Political Thought, the "mystery story"-a term he took from Albert Einstein regarding scientific method-of political philosophy. (v) The clues of what was happening in political philosophy, which resulted, on their obverse side, in the doctrine of "man for himself"-a phrase McCoy often cited from Eric Fromm (257, 282, 312)-were to be discovered in thinking through political philosophy itself. "Man for himself," in its intellectual roots, stood for exactly the opposite notion of the being of man from those held about human worth in the Aristotelian and revelational traditions. McCoy's abiding concern, then, was the overall intelligibility of political philosophy as a unique, proper intellectual discipline, one that of its very essence demanded a knowledge of logic, metaphysics, natural science, revelation, and psychology, if any sense was to be made of what had happened within its domains and, more importantly, what this record meant when adequately elaborated. McCoy's short book reviews were likewise most illuminating to his argument. (See bibliography, Section III). He had little patience with writers who failed to see the whole, but cited again and again those who illuminated for him the essence of political philosophy as such. Examples of his annoyance were his comments on Professors Murray, Le Boutillier, Merriam, and Ullmann. Reviewing A.R.N. Murray's An Introduction to Political Philosophy, McCoy amusingly wrote, "This compact little book is a compact declaration of intellectual bankruptcy." (Murray, 359) Of Cornelia Greer Le Boutillier's American Democracy and Natural Law, he sighed, "It is difficult to review a book which is utterly wanting in an understanding of the subject with which it purports to deal. (Le Boutillier, 202)
4. McCoy wrote his dissertation in Constitutional Law at Chicago rather than in political philosophy, evidently, because he did not feel the department at that time was open to the kind of theorizing he contemplated.
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"After many years of shrewd if not exactly serious thinking," McCoy wrote of Systematic Politics, "Professor (Charles E.) Merriam has reached a conclusion that is less obvious to a certain type of intellectual than it is to the man in the street. The conclusion is simply that politics is a practical affair and not a speculative affair." (Merriam, 480) Finally, commenting on Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, McCoy observed that "Professor Ullmann has made an unfortunate excursion into the field of political philosophy. No amount of legal and historical documentation can take the place, in the history of political ideas, of the elemental intelligence concerning the concepts that must be handled." (Ullmann, 429-30) On the other side, McCoy's reviews of Lerner and Mahdi's Medieval Political Philosophy, Ewart Lewis's Medieval Political Ideas, Arnold Brecht's Political Theory, Alan Gewirth's Marsilius of Padua, or Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian Realism and Political Problems, while often sharply circumspect, recognized each author's coming to grips with essential issues of political philosophy. But McCoy could still delightedly wonder about Christopher Morris's Western Political Thought: Plato to Augustine, "The immense erudition in this book is at the service of two working principles-first, of an urbane and delightful humor, and secondly, of an attitude of ambivalence toward the whole question of the possibility of political philosophy. Indeed, to write a history of western political philosophy with the latter mentioned principle underlying the presentation argues by itself to an exceptional sense of humor." (Morris, 695) Yet, from Charles Howard Mcllwain's Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern, he learned that "It was the Roman law and lawyers which prepared the way for this progress toward political liberty-a thesis which Professor Mcllwain persuasively argues against the generally current theory that the source of modern absolutism is to be found in the doctrines of Roman law. The Middle Ages, which preserved and fostered the tradition of constitutional liberty, contributed a further significant principle of the notion of constitutionalism, namely, the distinctions between jurisdictio and gubernaculum, in the latter of which alone the king had a plenitudo potestatis." (Mcilwain, 263) Special note ought to be taken also of McCoy's two essays in the " New Catholic Encyclopedia on "political philosophy and on the "history of political thought." These are undoubtedly the two most condensed and precise statements of the nature of his overall thought. Likewise, attention should be given to McCoy's two essays
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in the First Edition of the Strauss-Cropsey History of Political Philosophy on "St. Augustine" and "St. Thomas Aquinas." (See bibliography) These two essays were replaced in the Second Edition of the History of Political Philosophy by the excellent essays of Ernest Fortin on Augustine and Aquinas. Whatever the reason for this change, the two McCoy essays are extremely important ones for his conception of political philosophy and its relation to revelation, an issue, of course, itself vital to the whole Straussian enterprise. McCoy wrote tightly, though clearly. He demanded much of his reader, so he did not make many concessions to those unfamiliar with the core philosophic terms and problems, together with their history, how they arose both in experience and in the literature. He assumed that anyone seriously interested in political philosophy as such would know or learn the concepts of discourse. However, McCoy repeated his basic themes and ideas again and again, so that he constantly refined his argument while familiarizing his reader with those ideas needed to grasp his intent. Further, he placed each theme or argument within the whole "structure," as he called it, of political thought. This "structure" is revealed by "the thread of " " tradition in political philosophy. (8) It comprises a relation of order between logic and reality, between theoretic science and practical science, between art and prudence." (v) These are, of course, terms from the classical writers, especially from Aristotle. Each term demands careful attention both to itself and to its relation to the whole. Clearly, McCoy did not hold that serious reflection on political things was either chaotic or haphazard in itself. He held rather that when thought through, which is what he undertook to do, political philosophy revealed issues and themes that could be articulated and elaborated in terms of what went before and in terms of actively thinking out political philosophy itself. McCoy insisted, however, and this was his great strength, that a knowledge of political philosophy in isolation from philosophy and revelation, no matter how apparently thorough, was not adequate to understand the what is of political reality. The great scientific, religious, and metaphysical systems were themselves presupposed to any adequate grasp of what was actually being argued by the great political philosophers or what, through them, took place in the political order, in history. McCoy, thus, was most influenced by those writers in whom he sensed, however imperfectly, an attention to the unified enterprise of political philosophy. Ernst Cassirer was of particular importance to McCoy, as were de Koninck, Sheldon
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Wolin, and Bertrand de Jouvenel. Too, McCoy was careful to elaborate and emphasize the drift of argument in Lionel Trilling, Eric Fromm, Learned Hand, David Riesman, and others, who, in McCoy's view, furthered the trend of thought that, in one way or another, articulated a political philosophy leading to an autonomy of man ungrounded in given being. In his 1956 essay on "The Doctrine of Judicial Review and Natural Law," for example, McCoy pointed out that,
Professor Carl Brent Swisher, a very distinguished authority in the field of constitutional law, in speaking of those portions of (Chief Justice John) Marshall's decisions which rest on natural law principles, uses the terms "fictions," "assumptions," and "devices," and observes that we find in Marshall "an intermingling of conceptions of law as emanating from government and of law as emanating from a source superior to earthly government which effectively closed the channels of thought and reasoning." This view expresses what is by no means an uncommon contemporary appreciation of Marshall. Professor Swisher's position leads directly to the abandonment of the distinction between government and jurisdiction: the only law that counts is what the government says. ("Doctrine, " 101-102; see Mcllwain review, 263)
McCoy stated here the positivist conclusion in its starkest terms. But what interested him was the particular intellectual history of how such a positivist conclusion-itself going back theoretically to the Sophists, as he traced the problem ("Turning," 678-88)-could achieve metaphysical standing in the very name of freedom and intelligence, indeed, in the very name of Marshall and the classic natural law tradition. McCoy found the roots of this view primarily in post-Aristotelian thought, and its revivals in the Renaissance. (73-87, 187-221) This curious influence was why he paid so much attention to George Sabine, George Catlin, the Carlyles, and W.W. Tarn, who had claimed to see, with Marx, the origins of specifically "modern" democratic theory in Epicurus, the Stoics, and the Cynics, in the denial of the basic Aristotelian notion of the primacy of speculative to practical intellect, in the notion that man achieves his perfection by "withdrawing" from the polis. (73-87) McCoy, of course, was steeped in Aristotle and understood Thomas Aquinas to be his correct interpreter and developer. Though he never addressed himself formally to the book of Harry Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism, which in part sought to show a divergence between Aristotle and Thomas, McCoy's pupil, Professor
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John Schrems at Villanova University, did his Master's Thesis on this topic under McCoy. 5 Moreover, unlike a Strauss or a Voegelin, McCoy was deeply critical of Plato's influence in political philosophy and interpreted Plato as Aristotle did, with none of the paradoxical anti-utopian view of Plato found in Strauss, Bloom, Pangle, and others. This is important both with regard to McCoy's more positive view of Augustine and to his understanding of the implications of Platonic thought in general in the outcome of the modern project. On the other hand, the anti-utopian interpretation of Plato corresponds in result, at least, very much with McCoy's insistence that politics is a practical science. McCoy had, indeed, an uncanny knack for relating basic positions in the political philosophers to the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas. The inspiration of the Structure of Political Thought consists, in large part, in how this relationship was carried out, its "thread" of unity. (7) Marx, in particular, had a central position in what might be called the reverse side of political philosophy, a side that, as McCoy argued, came to be the dominant position in the modern era, while the classical and revelational views were largely relegated to an almost underground status, particularly in the intellectual orders. In this sense, McCoy considered Marx to be a kind of "antiAristotelian" Aristotelian genius, if it can be put that way, since Marx's final positions were indeed logical, persuasive developments of what must happen, intellectually, when certain key positions in Aristotle, however subtly, are denied or reversed in the course of thought. McCoy's analyses of the relation of Feuerbach to Marx (269-84, 291-94) and of Feuerbach's relation to Aquinas (284-90) were nothing short of remarkable. Perhaps the best place to begin considering McCoy's thought is with his long review of Ernst Cassirer's Myth of the State (1948), itself a remarkable book, while the best place to end it is with his critique of Leo Strauss in the Review of Politics, "On the Revival of Classical Political Philosophy." (1973) In passing, it should be noted that McCoy never referred to Eric Voegelin or to Hannah Arendt,
5. John J. Schrems, "An Analysis of Harry V. Jaffa's Study of the Aristotelian and Thomistic Principles of Natural Law, " ( M.A. Thesis, Catholic University, 1960). Professor Schrems, now at Villanova University, likewise did his Ph.D. dissertation under Charles N.R. McCoy, "The Political Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Study in Modern Liberal Political Thought," (Catholic University, 1965). Professor Schrems's book, Principles of Politics: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), should be noted here.
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with whom he might have been expected to have certain basic things in common, while the only books of Strauss he cited in the Structure of Political Thought were Natural Right and History and What Is Political Philosophy? He also cited City and Man, published in 1964, in the Review of Politics article. Though the key essay in the Structure of Political Thought on Machiavelli was originally published in the American Political Science Review in 1943 ("Place," 626-41), hence before Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), McCoy did not refer to Thoughts on Machiavelli in the 1963 Structure of Political Thought, nor to Strauss's Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1936, 1952). This is, in a way, unfortunate for both, for the McCoy thesis on Machiavelli and that of Strauss were, I think, in substantial agreement. McCoy, in fact, agreed with much of what Cassirer said on Machiavelli. (173-92) What attracted McCoy to Cassirer, however, even on the issue of Machiavelli, was Cassirer's remark in An Essay on Man, the first chapter of which McCoy considered something of a classic, concerning the reason why, ultimately, Stoicism and Christianity could not agree, namely, because the highest virtue for the Stoic was the greatest vice for the Christian. (84-86) Cassirer had noted how man had lost his "intellectual center," that the appearance of myth and magic in twentieth century political experience seemed somehow connected to this loss of an intellectual center, while the peculiar Roman virtue of "humanitas" (humanism) seemed to point in the direction of the meaning of this loss. Again and again, Cassirer, in McCoy's view, touched on the heart of the matter, of the "wonderful and terrifying truth" about modern political philosophy, a truth that was, ironically, "quite hidden from Professor Cassirer" himself. (Cassirer, 271) McCoy, in fact, though he never refers to it, recalls the notion of "secret writing" in Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), though, fqr McCoy, it was not so much "persecution" that obscured the main issues of political philosophy but rather the nature of the human condition and more especially the nature of
6. In this connection, the following passage from Eric Voegelin is of interest: "Most of what we usually call `ideologies' are magic operations, in the same sense that Malinowski uses `magic' of the Trobriand Islanders . . . . Magic means the attempt to realize a desired end which cannot be realized if one takes into account the structure of reality. You cannot by magic operations jump out the window and fly up-even if you so desire. If you try such things-for instance: producing a change in the nature of man by the dictatorship of the proletariat-you are engaged in a magical operation." Con' versations with Eric Voegelin, ed. Eric O Connor (Toronto: St. Thomas More Institute Papers, 1976), 149-50.
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the philosophic enterprise itself. The relation of nature and grace had more to do with it than political persecution. McCoy's statement of what he was about in his philosophic analysis of political things, then, deserves special consideration and attention:
"But," as Cassirer wisely pointed out, "our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture ... (An Essay on Man, 22) The clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, I suggest, is a scrupulous care for the thread of tradition in political philosophy. We must assume, to begin with, that the great writers in the field had a certain competence in handling the terms proper to it. In politics fundamental concepts are employed which serve as a basis for exploration into specialized fields of investigation. The acknowledgement of the need for basic concepts does not require an a priori acceptance of any principle of truth; but it does require a scrupulous fidelity to the factor of tradition in the history of political thought. By the factor of tradition is meant nothing more than is necessarily implied in any intellectual history. Concepts, principles, judgments are either retained or lost, altered or added to. The acknowledgment of the factor of tradition is of primary importance, and from that acknowledgment follows the obligation to understand (not necessarily to accept) the construction of political thought at its beginnings. Only then can a more nearly genuine reading of history of political thought be hoped for. And this reading will, I suggest, show the central reason for the central fact of our time: which is, as Cassirer has observed, that in the twentieth century, the age of man's highest technical competence, the elements of magic and myth have for the first time taken possession of the purely secular sphere. (7)
What is to be noted here is not only the appearance of a final intellectual "product"-Cassirer's "elements of myth and magic" (or Strauss's "modern project," or Voegelin's "Gnosticism")-but also McCoy's careful, even "scrupulous," as he calls it, endeavor to explain how this result came about within the human thinking process itself. And the intelligibility of this result depends on understanding the very structure of human thought, itself open to a reality it did not make. The intellectual grasp of the reality man did not make, but what he can to some extent understand, is alone what makes intelligible a "reality" constructed by man out of his own autonomous forces and thence shoved into "reality."
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In McCoy's analysis of the Myth of the State, Cassirer's exact position is followed since Cassirer understood the issue at stake. Cassirer had written the essay on "Rationalism" in the 18th Volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, McCoy recalled, wherein the term "rationalism," for which Cassirer, meant reason's capacity "to recognize completely only that which it can produce according to its own design." (Cassirer, 272) It is to be noted that what is excluded from "reason" in such a definition is something existing but not produced by man's own design and any speculative consideration of what is, even if capable of being used by man's design. "Myth," consequently, meant "the symbolic expression of the irrational, and the irrational is understood as comprising whatever may be above as well as below human reason." (Cassirer, 272) What puzzled Cassirer, however, was not the knowledge status of what is above or below human reason, but that the "irrational" seemed to appear as the logical political form of the twentieth century because reason, defined as what man could know by himself as formed by him, was in fact scrupulously pursued by the great thinkers over and over in modern times against the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas. Cassirer had endeavored to make Aquinas an ally in this historical, rationalist process, so that by distinguishing reason and revelation, he could relegate revelation beyond the pale of reason. This understanding of reason, of course, was not, as McCoy pointed out, what Aquinas had set down. Cassirer thus made Aquinas into a "kind of Averroist himself, setting the human reason ` free to create a world of its own. ' " (Cassirer, 273) Again returning to Aristotle himself, McCoy recalled that Aquinas in understanding him did not understand the human intellect to be a power that ought to "create" a world of its own as its primary function, but rather to be one that opened the human intellect to what is, whatever its source, the discovery of which was the main or special function of the finite intelligence. The key question, then, was whether human dignity was to be understood as something given (and intelligible) or as something man must give himself such that all being, including nature and especially human nature, is perceived only in human terms, terms man gives to himself alone. (Cassirer, 275) This result also explained why McCoy, following a lead in Cassirer, was so much at pains to emphasize that the Roman abstract word "humanitas" or humanism could and did come to mean man presupposed to nothing but his own self-imposed ends. Ultimately, it is from this sort of background that the true ab-
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solutism of the modern state, the state, even democratic state, which presupposes nothing but itself to its own actions. (Cassirer, 82-87) For Aristotle and Aquinas, however, as McCoy put it, the nature and dignity of the human intellect did not consist exclusively or primarily in giving itself its own being, though it did have artistic capacities which allowed it to cause new things to come to be. The human intellect did have prudential and artistic capacities, then, about some contingent variables, but these depended on a prior theoretic capacity to know what is and the different kinds of beings. The "mystery" for the modern rationalist was how could magic, in terms of polity-construction and absolute rule, come into twentieth century political philosophy? What Cassirer ought to have seen, in McCoy's view, was that the myths of the twentieth century were necessarily and logically consequent on rationalism itself taken as presupposing nothing but the human intellect. McCoy saw this consequence worked out particularly in Feuerbach, who stated the grounds for the thesis that man created himself and thus the grounds for any construction of man.
Feuerbach goes on to say, however, that it is precisely man's consciousness of himself as a universal that makes him capable of science. This is what he calls "consciousness in the strict sense." We must note the meaning that Feuerbach gives to what he calls "consciousness in the strict sense" by referring to the etymology. What he says of the German is also true of the Latin. Cum and scientia compose the word. Now, if he takes scientia in the strict sense, it does of course require intellect and the capacity for reflection. And so we may say that Feuerbach speaks of intellectual consciousness, something the brutes do not have. But when Feuerbach goes on to say that the brute does not have its own species for an object, whereas man is conscious of himself as a species, the ambiguity of the term "species" is exploited here, along with the ambiguity of the term "consciousness" to suggest that man is conscious of himself as a universal in concretion. The ambiguity of the proposition that the brute does not have its own species for an object (and that man does) may be made clear from the following consideration: No man identifies himself with the human species. What he may well know is that he is a man, but not that he is man. It is true that the species has no existence except in individuals, in Socrates, or in Plato etc. But Socrates is not the species (any more than is dog the species brute); he belongs to the species, he is of the species. (276-77)
It is from this sort of intellectual analysis which results in the temptation of man to see "himself as a universal" (277), that gives the il-
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lusion of man as a self-created being and hence one that can fashion himself in any way that his freedom directs. This is the origin of "magic" in modern political philosophy. McCoy, then, rightly questioned Cassirer's placing of Aquinas on the list of those contributing to modern rationalism precisely because "creating man's own world " was the very opposite of the metaphysics of Aquinas. On the other hand, McCoy agreed that the effort to remove the order of nature and nature's cause from reality was the intent and direction of modern political philosophy. The Structure of Political Thought, in its own right, it appears, is a carefully reasoned, sustained argument designed to explain the intelligible steps whereby the classical and revelational views of man, themselves fully clarified and understood, were deliberately and logically replaced by a conception of man that presupposed nothing but man "for himself" as the explanation of all that is. In this context, moreover, it was no accident that in this said process, "political philosophy" should come to be identified with "philosophy" itself. Thus, the relative autonomy given to politics in Aristotle as the highest of the "practical sciences" was expanded. Politics became a metaphysics to explain how man as a "social being" by a radical act of will and a revolutionary political movement replaced, or endeavored to replace, at least, everything in man's given being and in the institutions ordered to it, things that fell under what was called the jus gentium, particularly family, property, and polity. (89-96) What replaced the "metaphysical order" given in nature and nature's cause was man's own "being" constructed by his own ends, ends which by definition rejected step by step those structures of reality seen in classical political philosophy. McCoy's essential argument, then, ran as follows: 1) The relation of Plato to Aristotle, the confusion of the logical with the real orders and the implications of this confusion, articulated the origins of the problem of political philosophy. The purpose of this discussion of the logical and real orders was to explain how the abstractions of logic-"man," "humanity," "genus," "species"-could come to replace real men-Plato, Socrates, and Mary. (Chapter I) McCoy was not concerned to deny the perfectly valid usages of logic as an explanation and instrument of human understanding. Rather he needed to explain how logical abstractions, necessary in the process of intellection, came to be seen as superior to individual beings. This could happen, he realized, and did happen in the history of thought, because of the evident clarity and permanence of logical abstrac-
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tions-"man is the state writ large," as Plato asked us to consider. At the same time, McCoy showed from Aristotle the relational nature of actual states and the primacy in being of particular individuals to " any " corporate" or abstract being. (Chapter II) In locating the being" of the polity not in some abstract form transcending actual states, but in an order of parts which had their own functions and substance, Aristotle was able to limit the polity and leave the "parts," the individuals open to what transcended the polity. In this sense, the metaphysics of Aristotle was necessary to protect the practical limitations of any active polity. This was something particularly developed by Aquinas and medieval constitutionalism. (Chapter V) Nevertheless, Aristotle did hint at man's temptation to rebel against his status as the lowest of the intelligent beings, a temptation that could, ultimately, only be resisted by right philosophy, not virtue alone or right constitutions. (35) 2) Aristotle's discussion of the order of the sciences and in particular the nature of "experimental" science, in the light of modern science, was of particular interest because of its connection with how modern politics and modern science were related. McCoy was constantly fascinated with the idea that experimental science, unlike ethical or practical science in the Aristotelian sense, strove to understand being as it was formed in this or that particular way. And since no finite being caused itself, so that it did not reveal of itself the sufficient reason why it was this way rather than that, the pursuit of experimental science as "formable" rather than as "formed" led the human intellect into a vacuum which tempted it to i mpose its own "cause" on things. This meant, of course, that at a certain point, science would lose contact with that which was actually formed, with what actually was in this way or that. Science became interested primarily in what could be formed, not what was, though existence in natural things protected the scientist in a way that practical existence in ethics and politics did not protect mankind. (160-66, 232-34) In a sense, then, experimental science approached the mind of the creator, that is, it approached the possibility, not the actuality of things formed. McCoy always found Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur Eddington, Einstein, and other scientists (1-2, 164-65, 252-54) to be carrying on a paradigm, perhaps valid in the physical sciences because reality remained largely what it is, but invalid for ethical and political sciences because the ends of ethical sciences, though given in nature, had to be understood and freely chosen to remain
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what they are and are intended to be. McCoy, in this regard, constantly repeated the principle that first principles in ethics and politics were like hypotheses in mathematics, not like the ends in physical nature. (165) By this he meant to protect the human order from a speculative-practical intellect which claimed the right to impose its own ends and hence order on human life and through it on all reality, rather than to accept the one given through what formed "formed" nature. The reason why man was as he was, with his own internal "order" to be this particular kind of thing, this particular human being, was the result of a divine decision-man did not always exist-a decision the intellect received in man but did not make. This "reason" was open to the human intellect in some sense-grace did not contradict nature-but the human intellect was not the "cause" of what it is to be man, or what it is to be any other natural being or its cause, just as mathematical principles are what they are. Nature, however, might have been "otherwise" since it did not "have" to be this or that particular way. The first attack upon the human good, then, was the one that conceived human nature, and indeed all nature, as "formable" and not as formed, even though it was a perfection to seek, on the part of human intellect, the reasons why formed beings might have been "otherwise." 3) The analysis of post-Aristotelian philosophy, a most original discussion and a subject on which Marx did a brilliant dissertation, led to the conclusion that the order of practical and speculative reason were reversed from their place in Aristotle. The philosophies of "withdrawal" seemed, at first sight, anti-political. They separated man from his connection with the transcendent so that philosophy became a function of man's highest worldly purposes. These philosophies became in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries the foundations of modern political theory as a speculative-practical enterprise. In this form, bypassing both classical and medieval reflections, man's political being was emptied of nature, so that he had to "construct" his political and, ultimately, human being. This was, in part because of post-Aristotelian background, presupposed to no speculative given order that indicated what this initial being was. (Chapters III and VII) 4) McCoy's understanding of Augustine was very different from the "political realist" school of Augustinian interpretation and closer to the manner in which Aquinas referred to Augustine. Under the influence of revelation, McCoy, analyzing Augustine in terms of Aristotelian practicality, saw in Augustine an effort to understand
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man's final end as not political, hence located outside of any possible "worldly" political order.' This left the political and social orders free to do what was in fact both right and practical, not deduced but learned in terms of what man actually was and was for.
For St. Augustine, then, social justice should receive its initial movement from the most final of causes, eternal beatitude, the just distribution of temporal goods making us proportionately like God, "the most just Disposer . . . of all the adjuncts of (temporal peace)-the visible light, the breathable air, the potable water, and all the other necessaries of meat, drink, and clothing." This is the root of Christian social justice. Far from eliminating the State by referring its temporal peace to eternal peace, St. Augustine's thought rather would reestablish the State's integrity both in the mode of its operation (which is free) and in the order to its end (which is the temporal common good). And if it is to St. Augustine "more than (to) any other individual (that) we owe the characteristically western ideal of the Church as a dynamic social power," (Christopher Dawson), it is by this very same ideal that St. Augustine seeks to preserve the State from the inordinateness of that "variable impiety" by which it aims at something more than "the coherence of men's wills in honest morality." (114)
This reflection, of course, suggests why Augustine stands at the heart of all anti-utopian thought because he denies to the state any locus of final beatitude. But this very theoretical position, the location of final beatitude in the City of God, neither obscured nor deflected man from loyalty and work in actual cities because it was now possible to see them for what they were. Aquinas was for McCoy the philosopher who clarified and completed the basic principles of political philosophy found already in Aristotle, but ones he was unable fully to complete because either of human perversity-the Fall-or because the human mind itself by itself could not figure out the proper directions to take on many issues legitimately occurring in ethical and political experience-those of friendship, reward and punishment, immortality, the interior motivations for virtue, and the final object of beatitude. But Aquinas was also able, in McCoy's view, to pose
7. See Ernest Fortin, Political Idealism and Christianity in the Thought of St. Augustine (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1972); Herbert Deane, Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956); Schall, Politics of Heaven and Hell, 39-66.
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properly the solution to the best theoretical state and the reasons for it in terms of political philosophy itself and therefore limited to it. The mixed form of rule and its relation to problems of consent, possibility, and freedom with participation of all, however, did not pretend, as it could in post-Aristotelian or modern political theories, to substitute for man's highest end as such, which was the essential vision of God, not for a "collectivity" but for each actual human person. (138-48) Aquinas was able to solve the speculative problem of the best form of regime because the unanswered questions of political philosophy, questions which left unanswered always seemed to turn on all actual polities to subvert them, were addressed, at least indirectly, by revelation, itself a form not of "irrationality," as Cassirer had thought, but of knowledge. The revelational answers freed the philosophical intellect to see in the question of the best form of regime not the answer to happiness as such, but happiness limited to, but not confined in, this life. Aristotle's distinction between two forms of happiness in books One and Ten of The Ethics, thus, received intellectual justification. 5) Modern political philosophy, beginning with Marsilius of Padua (127-31), was an effort within thought and experience itself to be free of the notion that reason and revelation were in fact harmonious. It would be a mistake to think Machiavelli or Hobbes was not addressing himself, in a sense, to the core issues of western philosophy, and hence to the human mind as such wherever and whenever it occurred. In the technical sense, Machiavelli reversed, within the practical order, the relation of art and prudence. (Chapter VI) The prior reversal of theoretical and practical sciences in the post-Aristotelians meant that now the Prince or any republic operating on the same principles presupposed nothing but its own truth as the norm of "justice" in a polity, whatever its form. If the form of polity conformed to the will of the prince or republic, then the polity was "good" or "successful," no matter what it looked like in terms of the classical nomenclature of regimes. Machiavelli, therefore, along with, perhaps more profoundly, Hobbes, began his construction of political philosophy precisely on these reversals of the Aristotelian position. Modern "natural right" is, consequently, the very opposite of what classical natural law meant. Without prudential and speculative principles to guide it, the intellect must seek those principles of passion and power which are left after their direction in given reason is intellectually removed. In "freeing" man from what he "ought" to do in favor of
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what he does "do," modern political philosophy was enabled to construct, indeed was left with no choice but to construct any sort of polity it wished so that the classical distinctions between good and evil regimes were eliminated. A "successful" regime was merely a regime that stayed in power no matter what. "Machiavelli could praise God that He had arranged the passions and powers of man's nature in such a fashion that they were not presupposed to any proper end; and hence the ends of human life are brought within the sphere of human art which operates in man's original indetermination to good and evil as upon unformed and homogeneous matter."
(179)
6) What McCoy called the "second phase of the modern theory of politics" (179) sought to identify man's liberty with his power. For modern theory, unlike classical or Christian theory, nature had appeared as a restriction on liberty, rather than its guide and meaning. In a subtle but brilliant insight, McCoy noted the reappearance of the concept of "being" over "action" in political philosophy. (180) "Being" replaced the more classical notion in political philosophy that "action" following "formed nature" was the source of human good. Since, unlike the situation in classical psychology, man now "understood" nature in understanding his own mind-for Aristotle, man understood himself only indirectly in first comprehending nature, or better a single thing-there was no reason why external reality ought not to correspond to his thought, itself now released from final causes in nature. The Reformation, and its tendency to understand religious reality as primarily the subjective experience of the believer, paralleled the scientific and political principles of modernity which found no guide in given being. (183-84) Speaking of Bodin, McCoy wrote of the purpose of :.iodernity: "What had to be overcome was the whole traditional notion of an end to be pursued for the perfection of man, and the substitution of an idea of human perfection ontologically rather than morally considered," (188) Human perfection ontologically considered meant that modern political philosophy endeavored to achieve a reality, in essence, solely produced by the human intellect, whose complete intelligibility was contained in that new being, new Leviathan, however designated.
Where Machiavelli had begun with man's nature as not presupposed to any given ends, and where Aristotle had said that the state does not make man, but taking him from nature makes him good, Hobbes makes the formation of man specifically human co-eval with the
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founding of political society. It is the production of man himself that is the concern of political science modeling itself on the new physics whose concern is with the material and efficient principle by which the cosmos is made. In practice the substitution of the desire to be for the desire to be good means that the avoidance of death at any cost takes the place of telos, of the good in human life. We must carefully observe the implications of this first principle. Since the good is simply now convertible with being, the desire to be is the desire to be that being whose being is identified with its goodness (the Divine Being). Therefore, "self-preservation" in itself is directed toward acquiring a new substantial being lacking to man in the state of nature: The new political science, the heir of the old theology and metaphysics, must erect what Hobbes called "the mortal god ...." (199)
This is, no doubt, a passage of remarkable perceptivity in light particularly of recent philosophical and religious discussions of nuclear war and economic theory in which, by a subtle twist not often clearly recognized, the basic principle of modern political philosophy-to be alive at any cost-has come to replace the idea of political being and ethical action found in Aristotelian and Thomistic theory.' This is the path by which, it seems, modern political philosophy and its premises have been subsumed into theology. McCoy was correct to see that the consequences of this position must lead to the creation of some sort of "new being" presupposed to none of the actual exigencies of real essences given in nature. 7) McCoy considered Grotius and Hume to be of particular importance in this process of replacing moral action following given being with the formation of "new being" defined only in terms of
8. It seems worth noting that almost the only American bishop during the discussions of the pastoral on war who seemed to relate to these more profound issues of political philosophy was Archbishop Oscar H. Lipscomb, who had been a student of Charles N.R. McCoy at one point: Lipscomb remarked, "We speak of the ` existence of our planet' almost as an absolute, and our very concept of peace can easily be equated with the merely temporal order. We seem to assign the human species itself a right to eternity. This is certainly not the `biblical vision of the world at the heart of our religious heritage.' The worst evil that can befall us is not the loss of our life, or of all human life. It is sin and the consequent loss of that life in the Father through Christ by means of the Spirit that we rightly call life everlasting. Should this world and our species remain in such a way that such life in the Father is not possible to generations that follow then we have threatened not the sovereignty of God over the world, but the victory of Christ over sin and death." New York Times, November 19, 1982. See the French and German bishops on this point, in James V. Schall, ed., Out of Justice, Peace (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983).
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itself, so that there was, in principle, no question of any conflict between what is and what ought to be, a conclusion Hegel would properly draw from the premises of modernity. Grotius' dictum-"the natural law would be the natural law even on the supposition that God did not exist" (191-97)-and Hume's observation that "the contrary of every matter of fact was possible" (224-35), were the two key intellectual instruments by which the order of nature as directed to an intelligible end, rationally so in the case of human beings, was severed from the Divine Intellect. This implied that the order of nature had no source other than that imposed on it ultimately from the autonomous human intellect, the only source left by virtue of the hypothesis. McCoy frequently referred to the Aristotelian-Thomistic notion of nature as a "substitute intelligence" to describe the fact that nature does reveal an evident order-from toads come toads-but that this order is not sufficiently explained by what is so ordered in its own being. 9 Nature reveals an order, and therefore an intelligence, it did not itself "cause." The Grotian-Humean attack on final causality, however, had the result of tempting man to substitute his own intellect as the cause of any order. In this sense, man sought a "common good" but one based on no other order except the one identifying his understanding with his corporate and species being. Thus, no reality could exist that was not "chosen" by all (Rousseau), that was not identified with all that is. (212-22)
The purely natural and the purely animal "love" of the common good implies a profound participation of nature in intelligence: for it involves a movement toward a universal end. Now universal forms cannot be received by nonrational nature. This is why in the Commentary on Aristotle's Physics St. Thomas defines nature as a "ratio indita rebus"-a reason put into things by the Divine Art so that they may act for an end. . . . The natural law is in irrational nature only by way of similitude: Nature is a "substitute intelligence." We are now in a position to see the profound implications of the principle of the autonomy of nature: If nature is conceived as the original formative principle of all that is, then, since non-rational creatures cannot receive universal forms, the notion of a common end in which all share is removed from
9. See E.B.F. Midgley, "On `Substitute Intelligences' in the Formation of Atheistic Ideology, " Laval theologique et philosophique 37 (October, 1980), 239-53. McCoy's influence on Midgley should also be noted, see especially Midgley's "Concerning the Modernist Subversion of Political Philosophy," New Scholasticism 53 (Spring, 1979), 168-90.
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nature. The common good for which all of nature indeed acts will henceforth be conceived as sufficiently accounted for in the action of creatures for their singular good, and further, this "common" good will itself not be distinct from the substantial being of things conceived as radically independent wholes. This will be the central doctrine, however differently explained, of the political philosophy of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Man moves toward the condition of creator by moving toward the condition of substitute intelligence which is nature: Man will be one with nature in not explicitly ordering himself to the common good, and he will distinguish himself in nature (and thus become specifically "human") by ordering the common good of his species in its material and efficient principles to maximize his individual being. The identification of the individual with the species will be done politically, i.e., man's nature as specifically human will be coeval with the forming of political society by contract .... (197)
Moreover, McCoy saw in Rousseau in particular the architect who located the active creative will in the universal human species taken as a kind of Platonic or logical indistinction, so that "the individual life and the general life must be made identical." (221) This project, of course, remained abstract at the civil level in Rousseau. But the resultant "being" of society had to encompass the providential order which in Aristotelian-Thomistic terms allowed differences in real individuals and natural species, because nature did not create them.
"The hidden purpose of the historical process is thus revealed." In the place of the inequalities and distinctions that civil society has historically produced for the good of the few and the ruin of the species, a true public right must effect the union of each with all so that each individual may consciously, on the human plane, refer himself to himself as to a kind of universal. There must be a return to the state of nature, but a "return to the future," on the human plane. (217)
This emphasis on "future," on man referring himself to himself (not God) as a kind of universal (Plato) begins the final stages of this analysis that leads via Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Heidegger to the establishment in being, not merely in abstract thought, of a totally autonomous species-man wherein nothing exists but man taken universally, having positively rejected everything which could be considered "from nature," everything not originally formed by man. 8) In the Conversations with Eric Voegelin, there is a passage that
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serves to illuminate what McCoy was about, though, as I mentioned, McCoy did not seem to know Voegelin and probably would have disagreed with his observation that Aristotle, at least, did not anticipate the idea of cosmic revolt. McCoy, indeed, often referred to the Aristotelian passage in the Metaphysics about human nature being in bondage with a tendency to revolt from its given condition in which there was a contrariety of sense and reason. (3-5, 85) Voegelin remarked: In classic philosophy and Christianity, the solution to the sorrows of man-death and life and so on-are answered through turning toward God, the periagoge in the Platonic sense, the turning around. Deformations occur if you refuse to turn around and persist in a state of alienation. Explicit persistence in the state of alienation (characteristic of gnosis) is possible only after Christianity had differentiated the problem of existence-a relation of man to the unknown God who is not intercosmic (as the polytheistic type is) but extra-cosmic. Then only,-when that has been differentiated-can there arise the conception of an extra-cosmic existence of man in revolt .... The problem "what is the decisive difference that appears with Christianity" is needed for explaining also the revolutionary deformations which are our present concern. The type of revolution that appears after Christianity is not present in the cultural environment of Plato and Aristotle ... . Revolution would always destroy, but giving revolution the foundation of an existential theory-that man in his alienation is the ultimate entity-that is new.' The "ultimate entity" means that man in the deformation of his condition replaces God. The Structure of Political Thought was written precisely to define the nature of this "extra-cosmic existence of man in revolt," to define the ontological status of the fact "that man in his alienation is the ultimate entity." McCoy would have argued, however, that Christianity, because of the doctrines of the incarnation of the Word and resurrection of the body, forced man in "intellectual revolt," "man for himself," to turn on the given world and remove those traces of order and meaning to be derived from the use of intellect as not a cause of being, but merely a "knower" or contemplator of being. German philosophy from Kant to Marx and Heidegger was the instrument whereby this development was completed. McCoy seems also to justify Voegelin's notion that by understanding what did hap10. Voegelin, 80, 83.
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pen in political philosophy, there will be possible no more ideologies, since they are exhaustingly analyzed and have already covered all the possible avenues that could give grounds for any alternate being." 9) What McCoy found in Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, however, was the manner whereby the alternate being to Divine Being could be plausibly presented. McCoy's fascination with the young Marx is both evident and justified in terms of intellectual history. Marx's impatience with the philosophers who-correctly, he thought-located man's being in thought, led him to the incarnational principle, from Aquinas through Feuerbach, of establishing the "thought" of what is into concrete being, to change the world, as he put it. The "revolutionary idea," as McCoy called it, was a logical step for man in revolt and alienated from his true being. The "logic" of this idea was a political logic in the Aristotelian sense that, upon the supposition that man was the highest being, politics would be the highest science. But the "new science of politics" was freed from the ontological moorings of the speculative intellect rooted in given being, so that the intellect's natural autonomy, on the supposition that nothing was "formed" in nature, could be fully shown only by positively removing from being all the signs of the causes of nature, particularly human nature. Nothing could "be" but what men choose in revolt from the alienation of metaphysics and revelation, which were rooted in given being. This was the origin of the "violence" of revolutionary philosophies in the modern era. What remained, then, was the identification of each with all, so that there could be no diversity between what was one individual and another, even in his individuality. There was no "higher" cause that could allow real diversity in being. When Marx said that everywhere he looked, the eye would be a human eye, the ear a human ear, he intended to identify man with the species. (262) He could do this by denying any other source of intelligibility but the human intellect in revolt. 10) In this process, McCoy did not see modern liberalism or conservatism as an "alternative" to the development of political metaphysics, but rather as necessary contributors to it. (Chapter VIII) One can, perhaps, argue with McCoy 's interpretation of Burke especially on factual grounds. It is possible to understand Burke, contrary to McCoy's position on him, as being connected directly
11. Voegelin, 148.
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with Aristotle's practical intellect. McCoy, on the other hand, saw Burke rather as the obverse side of modern liberalism which, itself bereft of any roots in being, identified freedom as opposition to what most people did most of the time. The liberal, thus, was someone who, to identify his existence, did not do what most people did. Obviously, in McCoy ' s view, this would eventually justify anything in principle, which is pretty much what it has done, while failing to account for the universality and communality of being that was discovered by all as given. Burke, however, while more moderate, embraced the same principle in that the good was identified with what most people did, a good principle except " in principle. " Since the mores and customs of the people-themselves necessary for human beings-could embody anything, this meant that modern conservatism shared with modern liberalism any lack of speculative rectitude about what ought to be derived from some source other than mere political will. In this sense, McCoy saw the development of modern ideological totalitarianism not as an exception or pure aberration but as a natural evolution of both liberalism and conservatism. The theoretical "malleability" of man in modern political theory with regard to what man is encompassed equally conservatism and liberalism to lead to totalitarianism, in McCoy's view. (5-8) The central thesis that McCoy argued, then, was that it was possible to trace accurately the history and content of political theory so that the interconnection between thinkers is clarified. In this sense, McCoy insisted that the "truth" of the metaphysical premises or their drawn conclusions was not directly at issue, however important. (7) Here, he was not a value relativist, but a follower of Aquinas who felt the obligation, as we have seen, to understand why and how alternative positions were put forth. Yet, this endeavor was itself, as McCoy wrote in the biting review of A.R.M. Murray's Introduction to Political Philosophy "extremely difficult." (Murray, 360) Further, this effort in political philosophy did require taking a position on the validity of truth itself, since contradictory views on human and cosmic being could not be equally and indifferently held. Thus, McCoy was prepared to defend a central line of truth or reason by following how deviations from this line were possible and what form they took. What McCoy recognized was that truth and freedom could not be defined or defended in just any old way. (7) The elements of myth and magic in the secular sphere are, of course, finally those political ideologies appearing in the twentieth century,
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including forms of liberalism and conservatism as well as Marxism and fascism, which are imposed on reality as its very order and being, with no source other than man himself in revolt against the things that are. In a passage reminiscent of Strauss's remark in City and Man that the history of political philosophy has replaced political philosophy itself so that what we have is not an account of truth but a record of more or less "brilliant" errors, McCoy recalled the character of modern autonomous political philosophy by suggesting its deviation from reason and revelation in terms of Aquinas. It was because of defective reason, St. Thomas says, that some, realizing that the Divine Being is also called the Being to which nothing is added, supposed the Divine Being to be the common being of all things, not perceiving that being-in-general cannot be without some addition. Those who were guilty of thi9 error "gave the incommunicable name, i.e., God, to wood and stones." (Aquinas) But Feuerbach, appreciating the fact that the Divine Being is common not by predication but as a real "one toward many," whose causality extends to all that is and to whatever anything is, gives the incommunicable name to Man. (288) This result can come about because the being first apprehended by the human intellect, indeterminate and confused, is made into man's own object of himself. For Feuerbach-as for Marx-the generic being of man as manifesting itself in the generic conscience is `being thinking for itself.' . The pure potentiality of the most imperfect of intellectual natures (i.e., man's) may be regarded as the "theoretical form" of the most indeterminate and confused universal-the being of common predication. (289) The intelligibility of the "revolutionary idea," then, cannot be understood unless it is seen to be derived from human intellection. In his study of political philosophy, McCoy sought to preserve the rational foundations of humane living through man's intellectual ability to defend himself by knowing what he was. Speculative philosophy's formal "uselessness," in Aristotle's sense, turned out to be the very thing that could protect human life. The project McCoy followed was, no doubt, "extremely difficult," but he recognized that the failure in the order of thought to account for how men reflected on their meaning could lead formally and logically to a
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revolutionary metaphysics which sought to replace revelation and ontology, indeed, to replace any order not a product of the practical human intellect deprived of theoretical rectitude.
Man is the least among intelligent beings. The contrariety of sense and reason in man makes it extremely difficult for him to achieve the freedom of which he is basically capable. And this condition of inferiority as compared with higher intellectual natures produces in man a tendency to revolt against his condition, against the "givenness" of things. This is the reason why, throughout the history of political thought and political practice, we observe a twofold effort toward the conquest of liberty: one, a genuine effort springing from man's generic and unique capacity for self-government; but the second is a specious effort, often insinuating itself into the first, confusing itself with it and expressing itself as an "emancipation" from the basic human condition, indeed, from basic natural right. (5)
The Structure of Political Thought is, then, the account of these two notions of freedom and their relationships. McCoy's position with regard to both Augustine and Aquinas, in this context, needs to be further attended to as the drift of much Christian theory since his time has been in the direction of the ideologies that replaced the metaphysical and revelational analysis of the Christian tradition. Strauss's modern project and Voegelin's gnosticism have taken on theological form so that the very function of revelation and reason in the classical sense is jeopardized. The only formal book in so-called "Christian Marxism" which McCoy reviewed was Joseph Petulla's Christian Political Theology: A Marxian Guide, one of the last things McCoy wrote. Interestingly, McCoy made three points: 1) that by endeavoring to use Marx as a tool to recover interest in the world, a task presumably obscured by reason and revelation in their classical forms, Christian thinkers "deprecate . . . the roots of Marxist concepts and their own revolutionary meaning." (Petulla, 624) McCoy understood that the modern thinkers were not merely concerned with tactical improvements in man's condition but sought a complete system to replace religion itself. Christians who did not understand the scope and meaning of this effort were not only innocent of intellectual history but not clear about their own faith and its intent. 2) Such thinkers also deprecate "the political revolutionary quality of Christian theology itself." That is, the solution to basic realist questions arising in reason did require, as Aquinas noted in his theory of law, certain incentives from revelation. 3) Any theory that
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strives to incite men to construct a better world on the grounds that Christian theology as such has no impulse to do so is not factually correct. (Petulla, 625) Both Augustine and Aquinas argued that 'Christianity would work to improve the world, in its own order, but only if it, that is the faith, attended first to what it is. Curiously, this has been the precise line of argument John Paul II has taken against the ideological theologians who so often dominate these discussions. 12 This was why, moreover, a failure to grasp what Marx was really about in intellectual history also failed to grasp what Christianity was about. The former is essentially, in the order of being, a denial of the other as to what constitutes reality. Ironically, as McCoy understood, against the aberrations of the so-called Christian Marxists, it is necessary to protect Marx in order to protect Christianity from those who have lost the meaning of the western intellectual tradition. Behind McCoy's defense of political philosophy was his recognition that revelation, as a contributor to political philosophy in its own order, itself depended on the legitimacy of reason. Aristotle, in this sense, is no secondary figure, as Aquinas realized. In a remarkable brief review of Alan Gewirth's Marsilius of Padua, McCoy was concerned with Gewirth's steady refusal to say "whether the Marsilian revolution was good or bad, right or wrong." (Gewirth, 146) But McCoy was even more concerned about the attempt, pioneered by Marsilius, to make Aristotle into a totalitarian by denying to his thought any teleology. McCoy saw in certain neoThomists an acceptance of this version of Aristotle, which led to the "Marsilian design of ruining the rational foundations of the faith," the product of a form of Latin Averroism, the "two truths" in which faith and reason could be equally true. This would result in a religion not dependent on reason and a reason denied of theoretical rectitude. McCoy concluded:
Is it not interesting that the most telling blow against the Church's claim to interference in the temporal order is struck not against Boniface, not against St. Thomas, not against the New Testament, but against Aristotle? How did Marsilius so astutely pick his target? Was it merely a tactical consideration that dictated this choice? Or was it not rather the perception that the destruction of final causes and of specific natures in the natural orders would alone bring to nought the claims of
12. See James V. Schall, Church, State, and Society in the Thought of John Paul II (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1982).
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the Church to lead men toward an end and to a life above the natural? (Gewirth, 143) 13
McCoy had consistently argued that revelation is defended when reason is defended, the Thomist principle, that grace builds on nature and completes it. 14 Unless the legitimate questions of philosophy and political philosophy, however, arise and are articulated, man cannot know as man, that is, with his intelligence, whether anything is addressed to him on these very questions. The defense of political philosophy, in this sense, is the defense of revelation. When this is lacking, which seems to be the conclusion of more recent experience, theology itself tends to take up the ideologies based upon the human construction of being against anything but what man forms.
It is perhaps curious that this very important step of explicating the nature of the political community of freemen was accomplished under the aegis of a society-the Christian Church, whose aim was the attainment of perfect happiness after this life. But indeed, the frustration of "half-contemplation and half-action" (Marx) of the post-Aristotelian world, its weariness with the human lot, had threatened to ruin the structure of human knowledge in ethical and political science. This frustration had its roots in the intricate psychological structure of man's nature, reflected in Aristotle's triple alternatives: god, beast, and social animal. It had its roots in the impossibility of a satisfactory natural solution to the ultimate political question of human happiness. A revolution profounder than man was capable of by his own natural powers seemed required if the natural wisdom of the ancient world, so hard won, was to be preserved, if the structure of political philosophy was to be safeguarded. (98)
It is from this point of view that any alliance of religion and ideology can be seen to deprive men both of philosophy and any human openness to what man did not make. In the beginning, I suggested that the place to begin a consideration of McCoy was with his review of Cassirer, while the place to end it is with his consideration of Strauss. 15 The only extensive treat13. See Henry Veatch, "The Idea of a Christian Science and Scholarship: Sense or Nonsense?" Faith and Philosophy (January, 1984), 89-110; Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 14. See Josef Pieper, Scholasticism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978). 15. See James V. Schall, "Reason, Revelation, and Politics: Catholic Reflections on Strauss," Gregorianum, 63 (#2 and #3, 1981), 349-65, 467-97. See also Michael
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ment McCoy made of Strauss-he cited him nine times in the Structure of Political Thought-was in the 1973 Review of Politics essay, an essay that deserves careful attention since it not only recapitulates McCoy's overall position but states why he was concerned about the Straussian influence in political philosophy, in spite of the fact that both McCoy and Strauss were concerned with the ideological results of specifically modern political philosophy and saw a return to tradition as a necessary step to countermand it. Strauss, unlike the rationalist philosophers Cassirer pointed to, was concerned to keep open some plausibility for revelation, particularly that of the Old Testament. 16 Yet, for McCoy, the capacity for protecting revelation depended first on the capacity of reason to know and analyze accurately the things of nature that were its objects, things reason knew but did not make. McCoy, unlike Strauss, never defended revelation on the grounds that reason could never know anything about it. If something claimed to be "revealed," it was precisely the fundamental function of reason to attempt to understand what had actually happened and to reflect upon it. McCoy' s concern with Strauss-McCoy never reviewed a book of Strauss-centered on Strauss's treatment of modern natural right. McCoy classified Strauss, in spite of Strauss 's own efforts to disassociate himself from this school, to be a modern natural rights thinker because of the manner in which Strauss understood Aristotle's notion of natural right. This had cut Strauss off from the kind of reason-revelation relationship characteristic in Augustine and Aquinas and led Strauss to prefer Plato to Aristotle as a guide, a step away from true being in McCoy's view.
The principle of indigenousness and of private ownership that belong to this concept of the nature of the state as a plurality make it necessary, in Strauss' view, to sunder the notion of the best regime as identical with the perfect moral order. Furthermore, in Aristotle's philosophy, the ultimate reasons for things are not found subjectified in the things of which the world is composed. This Aristotelian position
Jackson, " Leo Strauss' Teaching: A Study in Thoughts on Machiavelli, " (Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, 1985). 16. See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1952); "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy," Independent Journal of Philosophy 3 (1979), 111-18; "Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections," in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, Thomas P. Pangle, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 147-73.
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prepares the way, of course, for the Thomistic view of natural right, which is rooted in Aristotelian natural theology and brought to completion by revealed religion. This is a position and a consequence unacceptable to Strauss. ( " Revival, " 172)
The reference McCoy gave to this passage is, rightly, to Natural Right and History (163-64), wherein Strauss attempted to deny that Aquinas was a philosopher on the grounds that certain incentives from revelation incited him to think more clearly on subjects proper to philosophy or reason. (See here also "Humanae Vitae," 265-72) McCoy saw, further, Strauss's Platonism as something which ignored "the various levels of beings and not (able to treat) them on their own terms. " ("Revival," 178) This deprived the differing levels of actual beings of their own intelligibility to become instead merely "Platonic forms, empty as logical universals" and "filled by the substitute intelligence of the real world of nature." McCoy then saw Strauss implicated in Plato's failure to distinguish levels of actual being. The danger of this was clear, as Strauss himself saw, when the ideal was either identified with the real or made actual by a movement to impose some man-made form from modern political ' metaphysics. Yet, " Strauss appears to allow his fear of philosophy s transforming itself into theology to overcome his profound distaste for a philosophy that disappears into politics." ("Revival," 178) The latter, of course, the disappearance of philosophy into politics is Strauss's "modern project." Instead of resolving the question of the best theoretical regime as Aquinas did in Aristotelian terms of mixed polity, Strauss adhered to "the Platonic notion of the best regime as identical with the perfect moral order." ("Revival," 178-79) Strauss's own solution was, for McCoy, " a quite personal one" because the achievement of the Aristotelian "inferior polity"-the best practical state-does not and cannot correspond with its goals, i.e., true virtue. Strauss used the term "nature's grace" to suggest how wise rulers can in this context, that is, reason separated from revelation, "introduce order into the unlimited," which phrase was Aristotle's for the function of the First Mover. McCoy thus concluded that "This is a touching, even admirable faith; it is also, I believe, a quite desperate one: Strauss drinks wine with Plato and hemlock with Socrates." ("Revival," 179) What is the exact meaning of this latter cryptic observation of McCoy? The essential meaning seems to be that, for McCoy, Strauss was not an Aristotelian whose system could, by being itself, be open to intelligence addressed to it in terms of its own perceived prob-
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lems. By failing to resolve properly the relation of reason and revelation, Strauss was unable adequately to prevent politics from absorbing philosophy into itself. On the other hand, it could also be argued that a theoretical theology not grounded in the realism of an Aristotle or an Aquinas rapidly has become the vehicle for carrying out into the world precisely the absorption of both philosophy and revelation back into a politics now presupposed to no form but that fashioned by the autonomous intellect. Usually, this appeared in the Platonic terms of transforming (or eradicating) family, property, and limited polity, those institutions McCoy saw to guarantee the limited nature of what man is while in this world, but limited in such a way as to remain open to the real good of being, including revelation. (24-27, 54-61, 140, 296-97) In his essay on "Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and the Doctrine of St. Thomas," McCoy made one of his many statements about the intellectual "end" of modern political philosophy. McCoy meant by this "end"-and it is to this that the "structure of political thought" logically leads when it deviates from a grounding in real being-not merely some utopian dream of a perfect this-worldly society of abstract Platonic "equality and justice," but a dream or myth that did present itself, in a kind of perverted genius, as the existing perfection of rationalism and of a practical political philosophy which really did get rid of final and formal causes in nature by its own methods, these now presupposed to no speculative norms. The final and formal causes in nature in Aristotle and Aquinas were in modern theory replaced by what the will of man produced in this political world. Machiavelli's dictum of abandoning what men ought to do in favor of what they do "do" ended up by identifying man V ith all men, generic man, so that what is is equated with what is collectively willed. Man needed to be "emancipated" ("Hegel," 337) from the final and formal causes recognized in nature, particularly human nature, and this emancipation or elimination needed to be seen as a proper intellectual and historical understanding of what they were, where and how they might arise. These were replaced by a positive revolutionary act, drawing on nothing but the mind itself, its own "creative" power, as it were, but still defiantly directed against any suggestion that man did not totally "cause" himself. This meant, it should be noted, that modern revolutionary political philosophy had to know what it did, had to understand likewise the right order of intellectual history, particularly what Aristotle and Aquinas held.
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Moreover, it was not McCoy's understanding of the new "freedom" of being that such a system could not come about in fact by human enterprise. Indeed, he argued, following Cassirer's astonishment about the appearance of myth and magic in the twentieth century, that it was coming about because the thought processes which made it intelligible were in place by the time of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. And McCoy's arguments and book reviews indicate that these modern "principles" were almost as well in place in democratic societies as in totalitarian ones. This meant that a lack of will or energy to "understand" the essential terms of western metaphysics-(McCoy's dealing with Nehru suggests that nothing stands outside of this theoretical system [311-14])-made the "man-in-revolt" or the "man-for-himself" concept of the meaning of reality a possible alternative. What McCoy argued was that this result, which bound all political philosophy in a unified whole because it could be understood in its "tradition," could be traced step by step beginning with Plato and Aristotle (he does not mention Thucydides) through the history of political philosophy and practice. These steps, while fortuitous in one sense, were nevertheless logical and rational, even fascinating, especially when they were most radically wrong and dangerous in actual being. The "speculative" part of political philosophy, the work that could not be done by the politicians, or even by the theologians, had to be done by the philosopher who sought to understand exactly what was being argued and why. This was the real defense of common human beings who actually exist, Socrates, Plato, and Mary, what the philosopher "owed" them. McCoy suggested that there was a correlation between the best polity and philosophy. Yet, because he recognized that man's highest aims and goods were not to be resolved in any actual polity as such, even the best, what McCoy obviously meant by the "best polity" was a limited, varied, practical city, not a substitute for or replacement of the Kingdom of God on earth. McCoy's criticism of Strauss on this point ought not to be seen as justifying the latter-day political or religious utopianism, even in Christian terminology, that has in fact appeared, much to the legitimate concern of a Strauss or a Voegelin, who rightly concerned themselves in their studies of political philosophy with these very same mythical and magical projections that McCoy from Cassirer saw to have gained dominance in this century. In conclusion, the Structure of Political Thought brings us
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through that body of thought necessary to understand the attraction of man-in-revolt as well as the attraction of the idea of given being from which this revolt could take place. That this "revolt" on its grandest scale lies in the sphere of political philosophy is itself logical since this alternative to the contemplative, given being with which Aristotle begins his Metaphysics and ends his Ethics, is a world put into "existence" by man himself as incorporating the whole of what is but now on the model of man's exclusive choice of its content. Writing of Marcel and Heidegger, McCoy observed that "the suggestion is being made that the bomb is only the terrible external sign of that `darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, and the destruction of the earth' whose prototype is an intensity of defect in the very heart of man 's being." ("Historical," 219) Heidegger thus proposed, to save us, "the destruction of the history of ontology." That is to say, if thought brings us to existential impasses, we should attend to the origins of this very thought. And this step behind metaphysics, as it has led to the species-man-in-revolt, is what again can make possible the actual seeing of the being that is given not by man, but by what is. What is significant in McCoy's treatment of Heidegger is the way in which Heidegger's destruction of ontology constructed by manin-revolt leads back to the simple awareness of being as not subject to the power of man-to being given as such.
Heidegger proposes the destruction of the history of ontology-an ontology which was brought to perfection by Hegel and was brought down to earth by Marx. Hence, it is not the winning-whether speculatively or practically-of the world of that-which-is that engages Heidegger. Rather, he wishes to go behind both metaphysics and technics to the "origins," to the "poverty of existence " -to lay bare by denuding the world of that-which-is. If with Marx, philosophy passes into practice by transposing to the practical intellect all that Aristotle had reserved to the speculative intellect, Heidegger brings us to a simple contemplation of the nudity of the world that is subject to the total power of man. .... Werner Brock has pointed out the sequence in Heidegger ' s analysis of, "on the one hand, the experience of Nothingness as the ground of being, and, on the other, the resulting genuine meditation on the coming into their own of the things in the world." The evocation of the Book of Genesis by Heidegger's meditation on Nothingness shows the kinship of his position with Kierkegaard's "leap" of faith. Indeed, the Heideggerian experience of Nothingness as a preparation for the coming into their own of the things in the world had its counter-
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part in the individual's Being-toward-Death as awakening him to the formlessness, as it were, of his substantial being by comparison with the accidental being which renders him good in the absolute sense-which being, if we consider the order of things themselves, is what man principally is, and which ... consists ultimately in man's bringing the corporal world back to its first Principle. ("Historical," 229-30) The return of corporal, given being to its first principle, the original function of man both in Aristotle and in Genesis, not merely allows particular beings to be understood in their "is-ness," but allows them to fall within a finality in which their proper being, through man, perfects him, to return at a higher level to the origin of being. This is the final statement of the positive side of classical metaphysics before political reality and revelation: In Classical-Christian tradition, the state, law, morals, science, spirit, were participations of the human intellect in the life of that Prime Intellect upon whose perfect freedom depend the heavens and the world of nature: All human activities, Aristotle had pointed out, are akin to God's activity. The likeness of the speculative intellect, in science and wisdom, was said to be one of "union" and "informing," while that of the practical intellect, in the civilizing arts, was said to be one of "proportion." And of the virtues that pertain to . human affairs-the political virtues-St. Thomas observed that their exemplars must preexist in God, just as in Him preexist the types of all things. The great lacuna in the development of political thought and practice has been the failure to combine the wisdom that knows that here we have no everlasting city, with the wisdom that knows the need to put the political virtues under some degree of pressure as it were, from their exemplars in the Divine Mind . . . . (312-13) It is significant, no doubt, and revealing that McCoy called this a true "liberalism," the source of which he found in Aristotle and Aquinas and Augustine. In other words, the account of the "deformed" side of political philosophy can and should lead, if for no other reason than pure intellectual exhaustion, to the fresh and original understanding of given being with the political philosophy, metaphysics, and revelation it leads to. The Structure of Poltical Thought is demanding and rewarding for those growing few who sense the exhaustion of the ideologies and the danger that revelation itself may, for many, be absorbed into them. Genuine political philosophy is the first defense of freedom, and freedom is the open-
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ness not to what we make by ourselves presupposed only to ourselves, but openness to what is, given not made by our intellects.
Georgetown University
JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J.
Complete bibliography of essays and reviews by Charles N.R. McCoy, 1933-1976 Prepared by Professor John J. Schrems, Villanova University I. Essays * " American Federalism: Theory and Practice, " Review of Politics 2 (January, 1940), 105-17. "American Political Philosophy after 1865," Thought 21 (January, 1946), 249-71. "Democracy and the Rule of Law," Modern Schoolman 25 (November, 1947), 1-10. "The Dilemma of Liberalism," Laval Theologique et Philosophique 16 (#1, 1960), 9-19. "The Doctrine of Judicial Review and the Natural Law," Catholic University of America Law Review 6 (December, 1956), 97-102. "Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and the Doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas," Sapientis Aquinatis (Romae: Officium Libri Catholici, 1955), Vol. I, 328-38. "The Historical Position of Man Himself (on Heidegger)," Melanges a la Memoire de Charles de Koninck (Quebec: Les Presses de 1'Universite Laval, 1968), 219-31. "Hurnanae Vitae: Perspectives and Precisions," New Scholasticism 44 (Spring, 1970), 265-72. "The Law Relating to Public Inland Waters" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), (Ph.D. Abstract). "The Logical and the Real in Political Theory: Plato, Aristotle, and Marx," American Political Science Review 48 (December, 1954), 1058-66. * "Ludwig Feuerbach and the Formation of the Marxian Revolu* An asterisk after an entry indicates that this essay is also to be found in the Structure of Political Thought.
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tionary Idea, " Laval Theologique et Philosophique 7 (#2, 1951), 218-48.* "The Meaning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Structure of Political Theory," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 50 (1956), 50-62.* "Note on the Problem of the Origin of Political Authority," The Thomist 16 (January, 1953), 71-81. "The Place of Machiavelli in the History of Political Thought," American Political Science Review 37 (August, 1943), 626-41. * "On the Revival of Classical Political Philosophy," Review of Politics 35 (April, 1973), 161-79. "Social Justice in Quadragesimo Anno," Social Order 7 (June, 1957), 258-63. "Sociology of Religion," Commonweal 67 (November 8, 1957), 153-54. "St. Augustine, " in History of Political Philosophy, Edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1963), 151-59.* "St. Thomas and Political Science," in Thomistic Principles in a Catholic School, Edited by Theodore Bauer (St. Louis: Herder, 1947), 264-87. "St. Thomas Aquinas," in History of Political Philosophy, Edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1963), 201-26.* "The Turning Point in Political Philosophy," American Political Science Review 44 (September, 1950), 678-88. * "The Value-Free Aristotle and the Behavioral Sciences," Western Political Quarterly 23 (March, 1970), 57-74. II. Entries in New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967) "Bodin, Jean," Vol 2, 630. "Political Philosophy," Vol. 11, 510-16. "Political Thought, History of," Vol. 11, 525-31.
III. Book Reviews Becker, Carl L. Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life. In Catholic Historical Review 32 (April, 1946), 98-100. Brecht, Arnold. Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth Century Political Thought. In Catholic Historical Review 46 (July, 1960), 214-16.
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Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. In Modern Schoolman 25 (May, 1948), 271-78. Ewing, A.C. The Individual, the State, and World Government. In Modern Schoolman 28 (January, 1951), 164-65. Friedrich, Carl Joachim. Inevitable Peace. In Modern Schoolman 26 (May, 1949), 364-66. Gewirth, Alan. Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace. In Modern Schoolman 31 (January, 1954), 146-47. Hermens, F.A. Democracy or Anarchy? In Catholic Historical Review 28 (July, 1942), 293-94. Hillenbrand, Martin J. Power and Morals. In Modern Schoolman 28 (March, 1951), 235. Hockett, Homer C. The Constitutional History of the United States, 1776-1826. In Catholic Historical Review 25 (October, 1939), 398-99. Hockett, Homer C. The Constitutional History of the United States, 1826-76. In Catholic Historical Review 26 (October, 1940), 403-04. Holcombe, Arthur N. The Middle Classes in American Politics. In Commonweal 33 (January 10, 1941), 305. Hudson, Manley O. International Tribunals, Past and Future. In Catholic Historical Review 31 (October, 1945), 368. Jones, S. Shepherd, and Denys P. Meyers (editors). Documents of American Foreign Relations, Vol. III, July, 1940-June, 1941. In Catholic Historical Review 28 (April, 1943), 557. Le Boutillier, Cornelia Greer. American Democracy and Natural Law. In Catholic Historical Review 37 (July, 1951), 202. Lerner, Ralph, and Mushin Mahdi (editors). Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook. In Catholic Historical Review 52 (January, 1967), 593-95. Lewis, Ewart (editor). Medieval Political Ideas. In Catholic Historical Review 42 (October, 1956), 363. Mariana, Juan de. The King and the Education of the King (An English Translation and Criticism by George Albert Moore). In Modern Schoolman 27 (May, 1950), 329. Mcllwain, Charles Howard. Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern. In Catholic Historical Review 27 (July, 1941), 263. Merriam, Charles E. Systematic Politics. In Catholic Historical Review 33 (January, 1948), 480-81. Morris, Christopher. Western Political Thought: Vol. I: Plato to Augustine. In Catholic Historical Review 56 (January, 1971), 695-96.
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Murray, A.R.M. An Introduction to Political Philosophy. In Catholic Historical Review 41 (October, 1955), 359-60. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Christian Realism and Political Problems. In Catholic Historical Review 40 (October, 1954), 318-20. Petulla, Joseph. Christian Political Theology: A Marxian Guide. In The Thomist 27 (July, 1973), 624-25. Powers, Francis J. (editor). Papal Pronouncements on the Political Order. In Catholic Historical Review 39 (April, 1953), 104-05. Ullmann, Walter. Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages. In Catholic Historical Review 49 (October, 1963), 429-31. IV. Notes and Unpublished Materials "Communication on `Tickets for Utopia'," Commonweal 18 (August 4, 1933), 347. "Dialectics of Freedom," Commonweal 22 (October 25, 1935), 626. "A Serious Indictment," Social Justice Review 44 (November, 1951), 236. "Aristotle and the Medieval Tradition," Unpublished Manuscript. "Something for the Counter-Culture: Its Place in the History of Political Thought" (1976), 31 pp. "Liberation Theology." V. Reviews of Structure of Political Thought Klubertanz, George. In Modern Schoolman 42 (March, 1963), 343-44. Mclnerny, Ralph M. In New Scholasticism 39 (July, 1965), 405-07. Schwandt, J.A. In Thought 41 (Spring, 1966), 159-60. Wilson, Francis Graham. In Catholic Historical Review 50 (July, 1964), 239-40.

Schall Man For Himself

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"Man for Himself": On the Ironic Unities of Political Philosophy

The Structure of Political Thought. By Charles N.R. McCoy. (New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1983; Reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978).*

B plined thought on the subject, had maintained that the complete

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

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of philosophy in general that justifies the free, rigorous pursuit of

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