Circumstances of Courage1

Andrew SablVisiting Associate ProfessorHarvard UniversityDepartment of Government1737 Cambridge St., N-410Cambridge, MA 02138(617) 496-0234asabl@gov.harvard.edu(Permanent Affiliation: Public Policy and Political Science, UCLAsabl@ucla.edu)

Draft prepared for the Brown University Political Theory Workshop, 12 October 2006. This is a very rough and preliminary draft; comments of any length are therefore very welcome but please do not cite without permission.

1 I would like to thank Chenelle Idehen for research assistance.

My topic is political courage: specifically, the extent to which

courage is a civic virtue in a liberal democracy. The question is both

whether certain kinds of courage are necessary for ordinary citizens

of a liberal democracy and whether certain kinds of courage (the

same, or others) are even compatible with it. That certain specialized

political offices call for something called political courage I do not

doubt, but my subject is whether liberal democracy requires such a

thing of ordinary citizens and if so what shape it might take.

I assume at the start an instrumental view of political virtue: a

political virtue is one that benefits the polity or the values it ought to

embody rather than (necessarily) the person who holds the virtue.

Thus many ancient discussions of virtue, as well as contemporary

“virtue ethics” to the extent that tit builds on these discussions,” will

be either irrelevant or relevant in accidental and unintended ways.

For instance, in discussing true courage, which “chooses and stands

firm because that is fine or because anything else is shameful,”

Aristotle says that “it is quite possible for brave people not to be the

best soldiers”—for instance, those who have nothing to lose might

fight more fiercely than those with the proper motivational structure.2

If that is the case, the place to look for politically useful military

courage is clear: it is those with nothing to lose who most have it, not

2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985): 1116a10-13, 1117b17-20.

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those who are so well constituted that they think more about what is

shameful than about fighting.

In previous work,3 I have put forth a framework on political virtue

that is meant to make sense of these questions. I distinguished

between core virtues, those which are really necessary for most

members of a liberal democracy to possess most of the time if the

polity is to continue functioning, and ideal virtues, those conducive to

one vision among many of how a liberal democracy ought to progress

or flourish. I also claimed that most virtues are pluralistic and

episodic: it is legitimate for some citizens to specialize in some, others

in others; and many virtues are called for only in certain

circumstances, useless or harmful in others. The same article

asserted, briefly, that a certain radical and world-changing conception

of courage fit the last category: it is useful in times of radical crisis

when liberals must dare to act before liberalism’s enemies do, but “a

danger to the polity” when this is not the case and existing

institutions demand our qualified support.

A similar conclusion has long been associated with liberal theory

but has always lacked intuitive appeal. Hannah Arendt wrote that

“courage is one of the cardinal political virtues”—and that “we” all

hold this “as a matter of course” even though our theories of politics

give little reason for doing so.4 Both parts of her claim still have 3 Andrew Sabl, “Virtue for Pluralists,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 2, No. 2 (July 2005): 207-235.4 Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future, 156.

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force. The Rawlsian liberalism that serves as political theorists’

default assumption now seems to have no more room for courage than

did the more pluralistic liberalism that reigned when Arendt wrote.5

The first virtue of social institutions is of course justice. And to avoid

an incoherent destabilizing clash between private and political duties,

our private morality must (roughly speaking) put justice first as well.

The primary “natural duty” is one of justice, “to support and to

further” arrangements that satisfy the principles of justice.6 Other

duties considered necessary for the just society’s stability include

civility and mutual aid—but not courage. Later Rawls, which focuses

more on reasonable pluralism, still stresses other values, and other

virtues,7 but not courage. In a well-ordered society based on an

overlapping consensus rather than on agreement regarding

comprehensive doctrines, “a normally effective sense of justice” is

essential (the purely political conception that cements the polity is

still a “political conception of justice”8) but courage is not: the “very

great virtues” “that make a constitutional regime possible” are “the

virtues of political cooperation” (tolerance, “being ready to meet

5 The word “courage” does not appear in the index of John Rawls’ major works: A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1971); Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993); Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Belknap, 2001).6 Theory of Justice, §51, p. 335.7 I do not mean to suggest a one-to-one correspondence, nor indeed any necessary correspondence, between values and virtues, least of all between their names. To use the most obvious example, a peaceful society may require aggressiveness in the soldiers defending it.8 ibid., 44

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others halfway,” reasonableness, fairness)—not the virtue of courage.9

To be sure, courage might be praised or valued within a particular

comprehensive conception, but politics, it seems, can do without it as

it cannot do without fairness, toleration, or a sense of justice.

This seems both intuitively wrong and theoretically correct. A

nation of political cowards sounds like a candidate for liberal failure—

for instability and injustice—let alone for ignobility. On the other

hand, there seem good reasons for the internal processes of liberal

democracy, where it is hoped law and peaceful dispute resolution

reign, to downplay the role of courage, whose paradigmatic sphere of

operation is war.10 In this essay I shall sketch a defense of both our

intuitive attachment to political courage and the reasons for liberal

theory to reject the claim that it is central to political life. Courage is

a political virtue in certain circumstances, but not those Arendt

envisioned and not for the reasons she had in mind. There is nothing

in general wrong with liberal democracy’s aspiring to make many

kinds of courage obsolete—to make democracy as safe for cowards as

for the rest of us who are imperfect in other ways. The form of

courage that has the best claim to be enduringly necessary and more

of a help to liberal democracy than a hindrance is neither the martial

courage of the ancients nor the existential courage of Arendt and her

followers but what the Germans call civil courage: and it too must, if it 9 Political Liberalism 35, 44 (emphasis added), 157.10 As noted by Holloway Sparks, “Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage, and Activist Women,” Hypatia 12, No. 4 (Fall 1997): 74-110 at 92.

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is to be tamed for democratic purposes, play a more limited role than

many think. For the qualities that make it so attractive as a

counterweight to political evil also represent a threat to political

justice. Thus civil courage will be arguably a liberal-democratic core

virtue—but the fact that its presence in the core is arguable means

that it must either grudgingly take its place among “ideal” virtues or

stand with those who question altogether the worth of liberal

democracy or the way we think about it.

I. Red herrings: preservationist courage and military valor.

Courage can mean many things; political courage, almost as many.

A matrix combining all the possible ways of defining the virtue of

courage (not having a certain kind of fear, or overcoming it? If

overcoming: by means of feelings of solidarity, rational knowledge of

the good, patriotism, animal spirit, or does it not matter?) with all the

possible definitions of political goods worth being courageous for,

would have a great many boxes. Since no claim is made here about

permissible “ideal” virtues or goals—everyone is entitled to praise all

sorts of motivations for standing fast in pursuit of all kinds of potential

goods in the face of all kinds of temptations—I shall start by talking

about two kinds of courage that might seem both fundamental to

liberal democracy and related to each other, but (I shall claim) are

neither.

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Holloway Sparks has described the “classical” portrait of political

courage as the “warrior courage of soldiers and heroes” that “enables

the warrior to gain personal glory while defending the existing

community from external harm.” We might note at least four distinct

propositions involved in this “classical” or epic view: courage is (1)

the special province of soldiers and heroes; (2) oriented towards

glory; (3) what might be called preservationist or conservative,

involving steadiness in defense of the existing order; and (4)

addressed towards external enemies. Sparks notes that Plato’s “civic”

(or “political”) courage in the Republic is a version of courage in this

sense (we might add, without the glory but with more immediate, i.e.

romantic, compensations): it is preservationist, and the quality above

all of the Guardians.11

Considered as a specialized or else episodic virtue, this seems,

once more, unexceptionable. Surely every liberal democracy

sometimes faces military threats, and surely some people some of the

time must be able to brave danger in repelling them. The extent of

those threats, and therefore the frequency and scope in which warrior

virtue must operate, is a persistent partisan dispute between

conservatives and liberals, one which theory can hardly illuminate

11 Sparks, 93, citing Plato, Republic 429. Sparks does not mention Socrates’ explicit refusal (430) to identify this preservationist, warrior courage with courage simply. To be sure, Allan Bloom’s claim (in his translation of the Republic [New York: Basic Books, 1968], 456n16) that “[c]ourage, simply, without the qualification political,…consists precisely in the willingness to question opinions, even the most authoritative ones” may be admirable but seems without warrant in the text.

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reliably. One thing the theorist can do is point out how the claims

made for warrior courage typically metastasize in ways that make no

logical but keen political and psychological sense.

Put simply, the four above qualities have little logical connection to

one another, and none has any logical connection to a willingness to

repress domestic dissenters who lack alliance with foreign enemies.

The tendency to conflate the two, accidentally or as a deliberate

evasion, is of course very ancient. Even Plato’s own treatment, which

he carefully limits to specialized, political courage in the hypothetical

ideal city, engages in such slippage. Courage is sought in the warrior

class because it seems the quintessential quality of warriors (429b)—

but then is inconsistently asserted to serve a more generalized

political end. The guardians’ steadfastness in the face of external

threats is conflated with their refusal to tolerate any changes in the

politeia (430b). The very quality with which the guardians were first

identified—the ability to distinguish enemies to be attacked from

friends to be treated kindly—is quickly forgotten: the response to

domestic innovation is placed in the portfolio of those entrusted with

ruthlessness towards foreign threats.

It is hardly new to note that times of war present the danger of

domestic conformity and political repression, but not always

recognized that it often does so through appeals to political courage

—identified with this narrow or military ideal. The soldier’s values of

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obedience, patriotism, and steadfastness in the face of death come to

be conflated with civic virtues that ought in many cases to be

opposites of these; veterans are assumed to be preferred candidates

for office, as if physical bravery entailed general civic devotion or

selflessness; the contentment with the status quo that is a good thing

in the professional soldier (it prevents coups) is made a virtue of the

whole citizenry, precisely the body entrusted with making and

evaluating demands for change;

The link between valuing soldiers and punishing dissenters is so

strong largely because the slide between very different claims about

courage is so easy. While an extreme version of the military-civic

slide—that career soldiers are best suited to monopolize political

power—is restricted to military dictatorships, subtler versions can be

found across the political spectrum. On the (non-authoritarian) Right,

it is common to assert or at least imply that domestic dissenters are

allied with foreign enemies precisely because the former often refuse

the demand to heap plaudits on those who attack the latter—appear,

that is, insufficiently appreciative of military courage, thus cowards by

association.12 In the republican or “civil liberal” center, preference for

a draftee over a professional army is sometimes linked to unrelated

values like social mixing or fair distribution of military risk but just as

12 An extreme example is the physical violence practiced and promoted by the American Legion against a religious sect that refused the flag salute as idolatrous. Shawn Francis Peters, Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution (Lawrence, KS: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2000).

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often to the idea that the military virtues or their civilian analogue

make for more steadfast citizens. But there is no a priori reason to

suppose this. Even habits of cooperation and sacrifice common in

civilian service projects might be double-edged if they (as alleged)

spill over into civic life. As Richard Posner has pointed out, the “GI

generation’s” ethos of service and sacrifice made them poor critics of

government misbehavior precisely because they were

particularly good at keeping secrets and at lying for the greater good, tactics of solidarity which boomeranged when the [Vietnam] war turned sour. Their whimpy [sic] successors, the ‘Silent Generation,’ turned out to have deeper insights into the war.13

But perhaps most interesting is a recent claim from a leading left-

liberal that turns out to be a version of this argument. In attacking

what he sees as dangerous talk of “balancing” security and liberty,

restricting the latter in the face of threats to the former, Jeremy

Waldron writes:

Of course, it is possible that we could make the adjustment in the other direction. Instead of beginning with an idea of the maximum risk…we were prepared to bear as a result of people’s liberty, we might begin with an idea of the minimum liberty…we were prepared to accept. The recalculation after September 11 would then require us not to accept less liberty but to brave a higher risk for the sake of the liberty we cherish. The appropriate changes in public policy, then, would be calls to greater courage, rather than diminutions of liberty.14

13 David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000) at 8 [confirmation of source tk: my notes are unclear.]14 Jeremy Waldron, “Security and Liberty: The Image of Balance,” Journal of Political Philosophy 11, No. 2 (2003): 191-210 at 194.

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Leaving aside that “calls to greater courage” seems not quite a public

policy (any more than calls to tighten one’s belt are a social policy),

the question is who is being called to greater courage, and greater

than what. The idea seems to be that we must all display something

like warrior courage, since terrorists intend to make all of civilian

society a battlefield.15 But the word “greater” is problematic here, as

the amount of warrior courage normally expected of, say, four-year

old children is normally zero. To accept even a small but pervasive

degree of violent insecurity is to display the kind of virtues that liberal

governments are supposed to render obsolete for most people and

required only in a few. Waldron resists talk of “balancing” liberty

against security partly because such talk is too casually

consequentialist whereas liberty is supposed to be at least quasi-

absolute.16 But perhaps virtues, or their absence, are tacitly regarded

as quasi-absolute as well. One way of reformulating the goal of a

liberal society is that of making the truly necessary civic virtues as

few as possible and their necessary level as close to zero as possible.

The call for everyone to get used to needing warrior courage is much

more radical than it seems.17

15 That everyone must now display civil courage rather than shrinking from small but important contributions to a common effort would be an interesting claim. Camus’ Plague presents something like this case, but I do not think Waldron intends it.16 Ibid.17 That the level of warrior courage required of citizens ought to be zero does not imply that it is. After September 11, one sometimes heard it said that middle-class White Americans were now experiencing the kind of violent insecurity that minorities in crime-ridden neighborhoods felt every day. But no one claims that the existence of violent crime should be met by a call for greater courage among its

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To sum up: That warrior courage translates particularly well into

the courage necessary for domestic political life is a claim that can

certainly be made. But it is an ideological claim: it presents a certain

story about what ails politics, a claim that must stand on its specific

causal arguments and cannot claim to rest on anything inherent in the

logic of either courage or liberal democracy. That is: it is no more

plausible to suppose that military or preservationist courage is related

to the (nebulous) courage appropriate to citizens than to suppose it is

related to anything else: generosity, or courtesy, or drunkenness, or

skill at pole vaulting.

II. Arendtian Courage: Radical Virtue for Dark Times.

Arendt’s claim that courage is crucial to politics is very specific and

surprisingly hard to gloss. She endorses the claim attributed to

Churchill that courage is the first of all human qualities” because it

“guarantees all others.”18 This could on the surface mean many things,

for instance a point about weakness of will, but in citing it Arendt

means very specifically the courage necessary to leave the private

realm and engage in public action.

In her discussion of political freedom Arendt writes that courage

usual victims.18Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Compass ed., 1968; reprint, Penguin, 1987), 156. I have been unable to far to find the original source of the Churchill quotation (not cited by Arendt) and would be interested in its original context or even its genuineness.

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Does not gratify our individual sense of vitality but is demanded of us by the very nature of the public realm. For this world of ours, because it existed before us and is meant to outlast our lives in it, simply cannot afford to give primary concern to individual lives and the interests connected with them; as such the public realm stands in the sharpest possible contrast to our private domain, where, in the protection of family and home, everything serves and must serve the security of the life process. It requires courage to leave the protective security of our four walls and enter the public realm, not because of particular dangers which may lie in wait for us, but because we have arrived in a realm where the concern for life has lost its validity. Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world. Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake (emphasis added)”19

The degree of actual danger or threat to our persons is not, it seems,

even relevant; military courage is not at issue. (In another passage

Arendt says, yet more vividly, that even cowards can be heroes and

that being a coward may even increase the courage displayed by

leaving one’s “private hiding place.”20) It takes courage to face not so

much physical danger but the insecurity specific to politics, in which

how our private lives go is not of concern. But it remains unclear why

politics should be insecure at all, why it should seem threatening to

leave home and engage with others, why “the public realm” in general

and politics in particular (a word that Arendt uses sparingly) should

involve such risk. A common answer given by Arendt scholars

involves the uncertainties and vagaries of risking one’s private

identity in the world of public perception, an answer that focuses on 19 Ibid. Just before the text quotation, Arendt explicitly stresses the contrast between this sort of courage and the physical courage of the one who seeks “the daring of adventure.”20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958): 186-7.

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authority rather than identity seems more convincing and harder to

claim as universally valid.

Arendt’s work was born in what she (following Brecht) called “dark

times”: specifically the “first half of the twentieth century,”21 which

saw two world wars, Depression, Holocaust, and the unprecedented

political structure that Arendt would analyze as Totalitarianism.

Arendt took for granted that as a result of these experiences (and only

these experiences) “the thread of tradition finally broke”: “the gap

between past and future,” once a construct of intellectuals who can

stop time notionally, in thought, is now “a tangible reality” and has

“political relevance.”22 The vigor and brilliance of Arendt’s attempts

to make sense of such times resonated with an entire postwar

generation with personal or familial memories of these catastrophes

and of the multiples losses of certainty, hope, and identity that went

with them.23 Arendt’s self-consciously literary, baroque, evocative 21 Hannah Arendt, “Preface” to Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968): vii.22 Hannah Arendt, “Preface” to Between Past and Future, 14. Compare “Tradition and the Modern Age,” in ibid., 26: “Totalitarian domination as an established fact, which in its unprecedentedness cannot be comprehended through the usual categories of political thought, and whose ‘crimes’ cannot be judged by traditional moral standards or punished within the legal framework of our civilization, has broken the continuity of Occidental history. The break in our tradition is now an accomplished fact. It is neither the result of anyone’s deliberate choice nor subject to further decision,” and “What is Authority?” in ibid., 91, which starts from the bald premise that “authority has vanished from the modern world.” [More citations tk: Origins of Totalitarianism, Men in Dark Times, others. Also chase down in secondary literature the link to Benjamin and to Zionist thought; a start is Eyal Chowers, “Time in Zionism: The Life and Afterlife of a Temporal Revolution,” Political Theory 26, No. 5 (October 1998): 652-685.

23 There were specifically dark places, not just dark times. Those who grew up in interwar Central Europe, laid low by defeat, hunger, the loss of “imperial” political identities, and hot (Germany) or cold (Austria) civil wars among dueling revolutionary and counterrevolutionary factions could well believe that taking any political role was a

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rather than careful words and arguments, praised as a new way of

doing political theory by Arendt’s Continental or postmodern followers

and often so infuriating to Anglo-American critics,24 track more closely

than either group recognizes a particular set of political experiences.

Arendt’s method, akin to Socrates’ (tentative, original, prone to use

everyday metaphors, non-systematic) makes sense if and only if one

thinks that there is no alternative to starting anew, that the world no

longer contains solid premises from which to reason and make

systematic progress through logic alone. Considering “all our

experiences in this century, which has constantly confronted us with

the totally unexpected,” optimistic doctrines of continuity and

risk. “I spent my childhood in the impoverished capital of a great empire, attached, after the empire’s collapse, to a smallish provincial republic of great beauty [Austria, in both cases], which did not believe it ought to exist,” writes Eric Hobsbawm, born eleven years after Arendt. And of his own communism: “It was easy enough in Europe during and between the world wars to conclude that only revolution could give the world a future. The old world was in any case doomed.” Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002): 8, 137. Compare Michael Frayn’s Heisenberg, whose life is framed by the sight of starving children and rotting corpses, and the experience of having bought his own life from a jumpy fellow-German soldier for a pack of (American) cigarettes: when it is suggested that his actions might stand up well “if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities,” “then we should need,” replies Heisenberg, “a strange new quantum ethics” (Michael Frayn, Copenhagen [New York: Anchor Books, 2000]: Act Two, 92). (Arendt herself stresses that even the greatest crises of authority need not lead to revolution if the regime in question is lucky enough to avoid defeat in war—Crises of the Republic [cite tk; near the quotation below about De Gaulle.] The despair and vertigo that Arendt takes for granted as the starting points of honest “modern” thought were the taken-for granted childhood experiences of Hobsbawm and Heisenberg; of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (rich, conservative) brother, who shot himself on Austria’s Eastern Front after his Slavic troops deserted. Not to overstress autobiography, they were also my father’s, and I can attest to the relevance of Judith Shklar’s statement that the difference between her work and Michael Walzer’s was “the difference between a refugee and a citizen” [cite tk].24 As noted by Elizabeth Young-Bruel in Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World [cite tk], citing Stuart Hampshire.

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Progress (here Marxist, but Arendt blames liberal ones just as much)

represent “a comfortable, speculative or pseudo-scientific refuge from

reality.”25

Both those who want to claim Arendt’s insights are undoubtedly

true and those who want to dismiss them as undoubtedly nonsense

should recognize that Arendt explicitly links her theoretical claims to

specific kinds of experiences and political conditions.26 “Anglo-

American” theory sounds very different from Arendt because it is

written by Britons and Americans who have no reason to believe the

claim that modernity has catastrophically disrupted political and

cultural life: whose traditions never stopped working. Where

constitutional traditions persist, even grow stronger over time,

Arendt’s answers can still fascinate but they seem the mere

intellectual games that Arendt granted they would have been absent

the experience of Dark Times:

“the disorder and the hunger, the massacres and the slaughterers, the outrage over injustice and the despair ‘when there was only wrong and no outrage,’ the legitimate hatred that makes you ugly nevertheless, the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse. All this was real enough as it took place in public; there was nothing secret or mysterious about it.”27

25 Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 130.26 “My assumption is that thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.” “Preface” to Between Past and Future, 14.27 Arendt, “Preface” to Men in Dark Times: viii. Compare the “Walter Benjamin” essay in ibid., 191-2, especially on Benjamin’s reaction to Scholem’s advice not to abandon “the most fruitful and most genuine traditions of a Hamann and a Humboldt.” Benjamin started from the assumption that these traditions were no longer of any use.

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But it is mysterious now: her experience, not ours. Arendt’s

apparently obscure political categories—power vs. authority vs.

strength vs. violence; courage is the central political virtue but

toleration is not—are often seen by both her partisans and enemies as

resting on abstract theses about the human condition when they could

be read as attempts to make sense of political circumstances.

This has clear implications for courage and explains why courage is

so important and so central to Arendt’s politics. Arendt sees

revolutions as a matter of power’s slow disintegration followed by a

contest of initiative:

Disintegration often becomes manifest only in direct confrontation; and even then, when power is already in the street, some group of men prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume responsibility.28

Arendt’s example of this is France in 1968, where the students were

not ready to pick up the power lying in the street—but de Gaulle

was.29 Arendt’s metaphors, like Socrates’, should be taken very

seriously as attempts to create new premises when old ones are inapt.

If revolution means a rush to pick up power, and if power in most

modern societies is so fragile that it is often lying there to be picked

up—this is what a crisis of authority means—then politics is like a

game of Australian Rules football. The ball is propelled forwards

28 Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic, 148.29 Ibid., 149.

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through rough kicks and fist-socks: it typically lands close to players

on both sides (more like soccer than like a U.S. football pass) and

whoever gets it first wins possession. Many players running hard and

trying to scoop up the ball in their hands means that head-on

collisions are very common and are more serious the harder the

players are competing. Now make the prize for getting the ball not a

possession but the right to write the constitution and dominate the

political system. This is no longer a game in which toleration could

possibly be more important than courage.30 Even an agreement not to

play, to let the ball lie there, would only entail that someone else,

perhaps a great enemy, could break the deal and pick it up without

effort—much as fascism in fact seemed in the eyes of a generation

that ten or twenty years before saw no reason to doubt that liberalism

would survive forever only to see it die utterly, defended by no one.

This is not our game. There is simply no good reason to believe

that authority in liberal democracies is now fragile, that alternative

claimants to power fail mostly or even partly because they fail to take

initiative Arendt’s defense of courage is not “wrong” but describes

political circumstances that simply are less relevant here and now

than they did in her day and her birthplace. (It is no accident that the

30 Now consider soccer, otherwise very similar except that one may not use one’s hands. This is like liberalism: infuriating to those who want to see the full extension of our human capacities, rational to those who care more about players’ being able to walk away. Baseball is more liberal still: the least “republican” of sports, the most individualistic and quantifiably meritocratic, the least amenable to genius and innovation in tactics and strategy, the one in which boldness and initiative count for least and practice and routine for most, easily the dullest, easily the safest.

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active politicians most influenced by Arendt mostly grew up in

Eastern Europe, or Iraq.) Short of portraying our times so

pessimistically that we forget the profound difference between the

problems of the U.S. today and those of interwar Germany or Austria,

31 we cannot easily claim that politics today requires the courage

Arendt described. We can now enter politics without risking either

life or security and without expecting the “miracles” that Arendt saw

in the political realm.32 And we can fail to enter politics without

leaving politics to fascists and communists: in a stable liberal

democracy, a moderate preference for our private shelters simply

does not do the polity fundamental harm.

31 For examples of this see Dianna Taylor, “Hannah Arendt on Judgment: Thinking for Politics,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10, No. 2 (2002): 151-169 at 156-159 and, on a much more sophisticated level, Jeffrey C. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998). 32 “What is Freedom?” 168. To be sure, the politics of the civil rights era did require both crisis-type courage and belief in something like a miracle in social relations; see the reflections on Ella Baker and other Civil Rights leaders in Sparks, passim. I merely question whether direct analogies can still be drawn to such situations. Sparks’ assimilation of the concrete physical and economic risks posed by Civil Rights activism to the more rarified “risk, uncertainty” of forming coalitions and challenging one’s comfortable social assumptions in feminist meetings and similar fora (97, with citations to several feminist theorists) seems too quick. In particular, one wonders whether the feigned confidence known as “stage presence” would not solve the latter problem more simply than appeals to radical courage do. Cultivating the appearance of courage rather than speculating about its reality would respect as well Arendt’s desire to leave political personae masks in place, to avoid the politics of hypocrisy and (alleged) authenticity, to acknowledge that “in politics, more than anywhere else, we have no possibility of distinguishing between being and appearance” (Arendt, On Revolution, Viking Compass edition [New York: Viking, 1965], 98). There are practical implications as well: while feminists were engaged in consciousness-raising, aiming at a deep and conscious political awareness and close understandings among women of different backgrounds, anti-feminist groups that concentrated on training nervous traditionalist homemakers in the practical skill of looking and sounding good on television. gained a certain advantage. Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA, (University of Chicago Press, 1986). [This deserves further exploration; it probably needs to be a separate article.]

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III. Civil courage: antipolitical society vs. rational publicity.

If any kind of courage seems suited for liberal democracy, it is

what the French and (especially) Germans call civil courage. The

term is ubiquitous in civics lessons and newspaper commentary but

mostly ignored by philosophers: one must therefore start with origins

and definitions.

Zivilcourage in its origins is diametrically opposed to warrior or

military courage, originating in a complaint by Bismarck that

“courage on the battlefield” was a common Prussian quality, but

“Zivilcourage” (i.e. here civilian courage) less so.33 If the original

context opposed “civil” courage to “military,” the current meaning is

clearly closer to civil or civic: the courage appropriate to ordinary

citizens is meant.34 Beyond this, however, agreement on what this

term entails and even what it basically refers to (on conception as well

as concept, in Rawlsian terms) becomes elusive. One foundation that

gives prizes for civil courage defines it as “steadfast resistance to evil

33 The universally cited sentence is “Mut auf dem Schlachtfeld is bei uns Gemeingut, aber Sie werden nicht selten finden, daß es ganz achtbaren Leuten an Zivilcourage fehlt.” (“Courage on the battlefield is common property among us, but you will not seldom find that quite respectable people lack civil courage.”) Unfortunately, the source is elusive and one of the few attempts at scholarly citation cites a page where no such sentence appears. Till Bastian, Zivilcourage: Von der Banalität des Guten (Hamburg: Rotbuch Verlag, 1996): 38. citing (spuriously) Felix Max Robert von Keudell, Fürst und Fürstin Bismarck (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1901; Bastian’s citation gives no publisher but there is no other edition). I continue to search.34 In German as (more or less) in English, “Zivil-“ attached to a noun has meant since the nineteenth century (1) “civil” in the sense of “pertaining to a citizen” (as in Zivilkrieg = Bürgerkrieg civil war), or (2) “civilian,” not military, or (3) civil as opposed to canon law, or (4) a civil as opposed to a criminal lawsuit. Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, 32 volumes (Leipzig: S. Hirzel 1854-1960): volume 31, pp. 1727-31. Bismarck meant the second sense; modern commentators, clearly the first.

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at great personal risk.”35 In this context, civil courage is regularly

ascribed to anti-Nazi martyrs like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote

some famous (though brief and cryptic) remarks on civil courage36 and

won that prize posthumously. Civil courage in this heroic sense is

certainly admirable but will be of limited use in functioning liberal

democracies, in which standing up against injustice, almost by

definition, entails no such danger. On the other hand, civil courage is

very often spoken of in the context of the ability to take actions that

entail no risk, except perhaps embarrassment: in the case of Kitty

Genovese, whose neighbors would have risked little or nothing by

calling the police, or foreign equivalents thereof. Even a soccer star’s

choice to found a charity is said to demonstrate Zivilcourage.37 These

things involve (some) altruism, or perhaps mere helpfulness—the

“willingness to do small favors” lauded by Kant and Rawls—but their

connection to courage is doubtful; they seem related to the Nazi

rescuer case only in the sense that both may serve as very different

antonyms for apathy.

35 The Northcote Parkinson Prize. http://www.civilcourageprize.org/about-prize.htm As many people have received the prize posthumously (including Bonhoeffer) as when still alive.36 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Civil Courage?” in “Letters and Papers from Prison,” ed. Eberhard Bethge (London: S.C.M. Press, 1967): 5-6.37 Bastian, chapter 1, who rightly uses “Altruismus” as a synonym for this sense. His subtitle, “of the banality of good,” is unintentionally comical in some of his contexts, though of course (p. 20) he intends to explore how we can avoid following Arendt’s Eichmann in the banality of evil.

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Between these heroic and petty definitions lie the idea that

Zivilcourage involves “courage of one’s convictions,”38 which implies

attachment to moral values and some disregard for possible

consequences for oneself, but not necessarily that those consequences

be dire. A risk to one’s job, for instance, might be sufficient. Also

consistent is John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (whose heroes lost

elections but no more) was rendered as Zivilcourage in German.39

And sociologist Richard Swedberg’s treatment of the concept, which

focuses on Knut Wicksell, a sort of Bertrand Russell figure in Sweden

—like Russell, greatly influenced by J.S. Mill—who faced social and

academic disapproval and a brief stay in jail for his anti-nationalist,

pro-contraception and freethinking views but certainly no grave

physical risks (he did not even lose his tenure).40 This might be called

the social conception of civil courage, or perhaps the antisocial, since

it involves risking social approval and economic position rather than

letting civil society serve as an instrument of fear.41 Not the courage

but the risks faced are social in character. The ends may either be

social, even private—here versions of subway muggings where the

38 The rendering in the Oxford-Duden Concise dictionary.39 I have checked this and it is true but [cite tk] for where I first read it.40 Richard Swedberg, “Civil Courage (‘Zivilcourage’): The Case of Knut Wicksell,” Theory and Society 28, No. 4 (August 1999): 501-528. Wicksell’s jail term does not alter the assessment: it was relatively brief and very comfortable—he got lots of writing done—as well as accidental: Wicksell thought his position meant he would not be arrested for blasphemy.41 For a somewhat overheated treatment of the latter tendency, see Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford Trade, 2004).

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rescuers face some risk might qualify,42 as would some anti-Nazi

rescuers of Jews—or we could require that they be, as with Wicksell

or with Kennedy’s senators, political. This corresponds to the two

senses of Zivil- or Bürger-/bürgerlich- in German (both mean either

“pertaining to bourgeois, ordinary people in civil society” or

“pertaining to citizens”) and roughly to the distinction in English

between “civil” duties, which can have a social or private character,

and “civic” ones, which involve political citizenship.43

Such courage might seem dangerously ineffable and, precisely

because it is so praiseworthy, antidemocratic. The egalitarian moral

psychology characteristic of most contemporary political thought

supposes that everyone, by nature or more likely socialization, has

values and can act on them: justice is no specialized skill. It seems

difficult simultaneously to praise civil courage and to rescue such a

moral psychology. Put differently, either civil courage is superogatory

—which would place it outside the core and make it much less fun to

lament its absence—or it is a crucial citizen virtue for all of us but one

that most lack. Or, finally, civil courage could be crucial in some

repressive regimes—those in which defying an official order or

suggestion endangers one’s career or position but not one’s life—but

not so much in ours. Absent blasphemy laws or even economically

42 As per Gesine Schwan, “Civil Courage and Human Dignity: How to Regain Respect for the Fundamental Values of Western Democracy,” Social Research 71, No. 1 (Spring 2004): 115.43 I owe the last distinction to forthcoming work by Ben Berger.

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significant blacklists, there is little occasion for ordinary citizens to

display even Wicksell’s or Russell’s courage.

Gesine Schwan, author of possibly the only scholarly treatment of

civil courage from a moral perspective, claims that the case of a

repressive but mostly non-murderous regime, the German Democratic

Republic (in German DDR) teaches wider lessons. She asks why some

people had the civil courage to refuse to cooperate with the Stasi, the

DDR’s secret police. Schwan claims that civil courage involves several

essential aspects:

—we “intuitively associate civil courage with situations in which

people behave in a nonconformist manner, contradicting or acting

counter to a majority of the people who surround them.”

—These individuals “have the courage to follow their own

reflections or consciences” [but…]

—“Whereas courage can be shown and practiced by an isolated

individual, civil courage refers to a social and political frame

regardless of whether it is actually present or only imagined.”

—civil courage involves not mere “querulous” or stubborn

noncooperation for its own sake but involves “reflection,” thinking and

responding to arguments. “To accept the necessity of thinking and

arguing means that we accept the principal realm of arguments and

thus, at least to a certain degree, the equality of the participants who

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are engaged in the argument. We find therein an affinity for a

democratic regime.”44

There is an unresolved tension here between individualism and

social responsibility. Civil courage is by definition (rightly, it seems)

nonconformist: but not too nonconformist. An aristocratic, perhaps

“querulous” defiance of conformity as praised by Tocqueville45 could

certainly ground noncooperation with official injustice—but, being

insufficiently rationalist, it might also threaten noncooperation with

official justice, which Schwan (who seems to follow Habermas on most

things) will not risk. But if a society is as morally and politically

rotten as the DDR was, communication will be too risky: the “social or

political frame” must be notional. One must apparently act on

conscience but be confident, somehow, that if there were a public

sphere, arguments within it would justify one’s conduct.

Schwan’s examples belie her theory: this will to hypothetical,

reflective, and egalitarian justification seems unnecessary for actual

resistance and rarely something resisters think about. Rescuers in

the Nazi era “acted spontaneously” (Schwan notes that this supports

Aristotle’s theory of virtue but fails to note the tension between this

and Habermas); had “personal contacts and friendships” with Jews;

44 Schwan, “Civil Courage and Human Dignity,” 108-110 (emphases added)); extended quotation on 109-110.45 See Delba Winthrop, “Rights: A Point of Honor,” in Ken Masugi, ed., Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991); for an extended treatment see Sharon R. Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Harvard Univ. Press, 2002).

24

got their ideas of human dignity and equality not from argument but

from “mostly personal examples from their youth”; did not reflect

upon possible advantages or disadvantages but simply felt the impulse

to help” (emphasis added); felt “personal strength and they also felt

strong”; had “an intense empathy with and fidelity to their life

principles”; prized the “secondary virtues” like “reliability,

punctuality, and friendliness” rather than obedience.46 Those who

turned down invitations from the Stasi were disproportionately

female; were relatively unimpressed by the promise of power; had a

strong sense of autonomy or independence; and “of course,

belong[ed] to non-Communist ideological groups that abhorred

betrayal.”47

Thus it seems that the roots of civil courage lay in personal

experience, immediate empathy, a feeling of strength, habit, social

ties that were proof against official claims of political duty; and a

tendency to prize private helpfulness over public duty. To this extent,

civil courage seems accidentally well named: it stems from

Tocquevillean roots, from the contingent and differentiated

experiences of civil society, not from the state and still less from the

public sphere of argument. Civil courage, on this preliminary

account, works by virtue of being antipolitical: to the extent that it is

“civic” it defines citizenship in ways that do not require either official

46 Schwan, 114.47 Schwan, 115.

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authority or general agreement. Refusing to join the Stasi is easier if

one is deaf to the claims of faithful DDR citizenship; casting a lone

dissenting vote in the Senate or a faculty meeting is easier if one

doubts that the quintessential exemplars of rational argument and

deliberation have presumptive validity; even intervening to stop a

crime on the subway may be easier if one takes for granted that the

police will never come.

If civil courage is antipolitical, it need not be antisocial. Making

the interesting suggestion that civil courage be viewed as akin to

Robert Merton’s study of nonconformity, Swedberg notes that Merton

saw the nonconformist as far from an a antinomian “deviant”: her or

she appeals rather to a group other than the one he refuses to

conform to. It is with support from this outside reference group that

he is “prepared to accept, if not to welcome, the almost certain and

painful consequences of dissent.”48 Literature on Nazi-era protectors

of Jews often stresses similarly the links between civil courage and

small gestures of resistance rooted in social, corporate, or

bureaucratic rather than universal loyalties: Bonhoeffer smuggled

Jews not for himself but for German military intelligence, which had

traditionalist military but non-Nazi commitments49; one study of a

politically neutral aviation scientist in the Third Reich finds him

48 Swedberg, 517, citing Merton, “Nonconformity as a Type of Reference Group Behavior,” Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1968): 411-422.49 [cite tk: I have a poor source for this but need to check.]

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simultaneously working feverishly for aircraft production and (for that

reason) protesting at risk of the concentration camp and contrary to

very clear Nazi policies against dismissals of Jewish scientists.50 Here

corporate and social loyalties trumped—fortunately!—assertions of

political duty. We must remember that the latter were very strong

and often took the form of exalting duty and the public sphere over

the pettiness of civil society and the squabbling of interest-group

politics.51

Civil courage is in fact often contrasted with outright revolutionary

or militant resistance and associated instead with Resistenz, a term

brought into historians’ debates by historian Martin Broszat, who

means by it a willingness to oppose the Nazis’ policies but not Nazism

itself, “the many ‘small’ forms of civil courage that could be expected

from every contemporary as opposed to the main stream of fearful

adjustment or enthusiastic support for the regime” (emphasis

added).52 One summary of this school, associated with the 50 Helmuth Trischler, “Self-mobilization or resistance? Aeronautical research and National Socialism,” In Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker, eds. Science, Technology and National Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994): 72-87.51 Fritz Stern, “National Socialism as Temptation,” in Dreams and Delusions (New York: Knopf, 1987): 147-91.52 Martin Broszat, “Resistenz und Widerstand: Zwischenbilanz eines Forschungsprojekts,” in Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im Konflikt, vol. 4 of Martin Broszat, Elke, Fröhlich, and Anton Grossmann, eds., Bayern in der NS Zeit (Munich and Vienna, 1981), p. 693, quoted by Michael Geyer, “Resistance as Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, Struggles for Civil Society,” Journal of Modern History 64, Supplement (December 1992): S223-4. Other definitions of Resistenz, include: “morally neutral impenetrability or immunity rather than actively motivated opposition”—Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 15 [full cite tk]; and most concisely “individual acts of opposition coupled with a fundamental loyalty to authority”—Renneberg and Walker, “Scientists, engineers and National Socialism,” in Renneberg and Walker, op. cit., 20. Trischler at 73 notes

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Alltagsgeschichte (history of the everyday) movement in German

history, notes that

“The many small forms of civil courage” with which historians of everyday life have been so concerned are attributed less to political beliefs than to the pursuit of interest, the strength of local communities, and the defense of cultural autonomy. Politics seem as irrelevant of Resistenz as to daily life. 53

Lest all this seem insufficiently engaged or altruistic, one might note

both that open resistance was utterly futile and guaranteed not to

teach general lessons (due to lack of publicity) and that the Gestapo

were few, and depended on denunciations for the secret police system

to function: mere lack of active cooperation would have been enough

to make the terror system largely inoperable.54

On one level, then civil courage so understood has impeccable

Kantian credentials: if everyone in the Nazi regime or the DDR had

cared enough to take small risks in defiance of the regime for private

reasons, neither regime could have functioned. They would have

become, like Eastern Europe in 1989, would-be or former totalitarian

that Resistenz is precisely not properly translated by English or French “resistance,” résistance. “The concept of ‘Resistenz’ does not include systematic efforts for overcoming the system. It is characterized instead by the rejection of and refusal to support the system, the limitation and the containment of Nazi power and its claims, irrespective of the reigning power or dominant interests involved. [More needs to be researched and said here.]53 Mary Nolan, “The Historikerstriet and Social History,” New German Critique 44, Special Issue (Spring-Summer 1988): 51-80 at 73. I must add that Nolan is quite critical of the Alltagsgeschichte school for overvalorizing everyday life and ignoring the ways in which apathetic private withdrawal actually served the Nazi regime. I have no quarrel with this critique, and would merely note that to the extent that nothing substantial was done to frustrate the regime’s goals and the Nazis were satisfied with the outcome, the moral critic may say that nobody in fact showed civil courage. No one claims that the presence of daily life or civil society is sufficient for civil courage.54 Robert Gellately, “The Gestapo and German Society: Political Denunciation in the Gestapo Case Files,” Journal of Modern History 60 (1988): 693.

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states, but failed ones. (In this context, Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of

the Powerless,” in praise of a shopkeeper’s refusal to post the

required political slogan in his window, fits perfectly with the account

of civil courage given here.55) On another level, civil courage is

radically anti-Kantian, since it relies not on the free public use of

one’s reason but on either an impossibility of appealing to that, or else

a relative lack of concern as to what public reason might conclude.

Private and social sources of judgment are more important. Schwan

claims that civil courage “strengthens the institutions that require

support from the subjective behavior of citizens in order to remain

alive and strong”: one might only add that these institutions need not

be, as Schwan implies, either political or politically approved of.

This raises the question of whether we can call civil courage what

pursues immoral ends. Swedberg considers

the imaginary case of a racist who stands up in front of an audience, which consists of convinced anti-racists, and launches into a violent speech in favor of a race war. Does this represent and [sic] act of civil courage or not?56

Swedberg answers no, justifying this by linking civil courage to the

ideal of civil society (as above) but endorsing a morally demanding

conception of the latter term.57 Schwan makes a very similar appeal:

suicide attacks, however brave, lack civil courage because 55 Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in John Keane, ed., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in East-Central Europe (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985).56 Swedberg, 522.57 Swedberg, 523, citing somewhat out of context Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), xiii.

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[t]he civitas—the civil community—that civil courage is to serve implies as a supreme value the dignity of people, expressed in their right to self-determination; it requires nonconformism and the pondering of arguments; it is used to strengthen the rule of law and thus to find ways of compromise and it seeks to avoid violence.58

But a more honest and less question-begging answer would be that of

course civil courage can be evil, just as military courage can be found

in soldiers fighting a war of conquest. (And of course, in neither do

people regard themselves as evil or non-civil in the first person but on

the contrary see themselves as good and steadfast: we have a speech

by Goebbels praising Hitler for having “the civil courage in the face of

nearly everyone else to express with iron logic what had to be

done.”59) The right response to the presence of each is the same: a

desire to foster greater courage—and, more important, proper tools

and organizations—on the side that is just. We must get used to the

fact that justice is the only personal virtue that tracks the

metaphorical “virtue” of social institutions, as well as the only social

value for which the anthropomorphizing term “virtue” makes much

sense.60

58 Schwan, 116.59 Joseph Goebbels, "Der Führer als Redner," in Adolf Hitler. Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers (Hamburg: Cigaretten/Bilderdienst [sic it seems] Hamburg/Bahrenfeld, 1936, pp. 27-34. Trans. By Randall Bytwerk at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ahspeak.htm; See also Dr. [no first name given] Ellenbeck, Der Offizier als Führer im Kampf gegen die feindliche Propaganda (OKW, January 1943), trans. Bytwerk at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/officer.htm. Both accessed 3 October 2006.60 Institutions may be said to “allocate” and “judge” things—and in doing so their lack of human feelings may be seen as an advantage, as with the Social Security system that churns out checks to all on a list without knowing anything about them.

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IV. Circumstances of courage

Above I mentioned that the specialized and episodic virtue of

warrior courage seems more than episodic from a certain ideological

or partisan perspective, one which stresses the presence of a

dangerous world full of frightening enemies. The question here is one

of assessing risks: necessarily an ideological and partisan question

because the level of risks like this is bound up with controversial

world-views about what human beings can foresee, what is in our

control, what kinds of social actors we trust or distrust, and which

social and political institutions are likely to protect us or threaten us.61

Just as warrior courage seems to conservatives not a peripheral but a

core virtue or something close to it, civil courage can seem the same

thing to certain political radicals. If the regime of the United States

amounts to fascism, the lessons of Bonhoeffer and Wallenberg will be

of daily application. At some point, world-views will differ so greatly

that useful arguments cannot be joined. But theory can still

But this lack of feeling makes courage impossible, since courage is only called for when one feels fear, or does not feeling fear when others might. Nor can institutions face death or physical harm, so even a standard of “objective” fear makes no sense. To the extent that a political institution could be “fear” extinction, the proper response would seem to be rational cowardice, as with the Supreme Court’s New Deal-era “switch in time that saved Nine.”61 For arguments on this point by scholars whose professional training might bias them towards “rational” accounts of risk assessment, see Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture (Univ. of California Press, 1982) and Aaron Wildavsky and Karl Dake, "Theories of Risk Perception: Who Fears What and Why", Daedalus 119 No.4 (Fall 1990): 41-60.

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illuminate what is at stake and what is not. If the points above about

Arendtian courage are correct, radical, existential courage will be

relevant only where politics poses threats of a certain kind: threats of

imminent political takeover by the forces of evil, so that political

action and initiative are absolutely imperative. Citizens’ alleged

helplessness in the face of subtler forms of ideological domination

make entry into the public realm not courageous but nonsensical.

Civil courage will clearly be continually relevant if the

government’s principles are thoroughly evil: here almost any form of

resistance grounded in social or private allegiances or values will be

better than doing one’s “political” duty. In other sorts of regimes, the

question is more difficult. If one could smuggle evil into the definition

of civil courage, there would be an easy answer: civil courage would

justify exactly as much resistance as the objective evil demanded by

the regime required, and no more. But if defining civil courage in

terms of its goodness is, as suggested above, a cheat, this answer will

not work. The would-be virtuous Tocquevillean may, as far as a more

rational public judgment is concerned, be a racist or worse.62 That is,

the antipolitical and prerational tendencies that distinguish civil

courage from other phenomena and explain its distinctive role also set

it up in potential conflict with justice.

62 Cf. Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein, “Bad Civil Society,” Political Theory 29, No. 6 (December 2001): 837-865.

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Two responses are possible. The first is that actions based on civil

courage must abjure violence—not because civil courage is inherently

civil in the normative sense, but because it is inherently civil in the

Bismarck sense: civilian, non-military, unofficial. Lacking a claim to

legitimately command the state, such actions cannot presume to

challenge the state’s monopoly on legitimate force.63 The racist at the

meeting may say racist things but he cannot declare a race war

because he lacks the authority to wage any war. Similarly, a suicide

protestor who had civil courage might set himself on fire, but if he

blew up others he would be a murderer, not because killing is always

wrong but because only the state may kill in pursuit of justice.64

We might still hope that the racist not speak at all, regardless of

violence. It would be better if, preferably out of a sense of justice or

equality but if necessary out of conformity or shame, he were to keep

quiet and go along with the prevailing norm against violent racism.

This suggests that civil courage is morally praiseworthy precisely to

the extent that the relevant portion of civil society embodies values

“better” than those of the polity—and much will depend on one’s

assessment, a fundamentally ideological assessment, of how often this

is likely to be the case. Perhaps it is a good thing if a vigorous civil

63 Swedberg, 523, makes this argument as well but without distinguishing it from the one mentioned above that defines the racist speech as non-“civil” by fiat.64 A suicide bomber who attacked only military targets could be claiming to fight a just guerilla war. This might actually be justifiable, but then it would be a form of warrior courage. Of course, all the requirements and caveats of just war theory would apply in such cases, which have moved beyond “civil” conditions.

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society makes it always possible to dissent from public values and to

weather the resulting storm. (Surely the price of racism should not be

a loss of all employment.) But the desirable amount of civil courage,

and of the civil institutions and mores that might support it in

particular cases, will essentially be a mean between too much

conformity and too little respect for values that others after long

debate have found ethically compelling. It is no secret that those who

resisted Hitler often had resisted Weimar as well: the values

embodying their dissent were in both cases aristocratic (or illiberally

Catholic or militaristic), not egalitarian.

Civil courage, on this view, may tend to replicate the usual

questions of the civil society argument and the larger debate on the

private-public distinction. Those who above all fear tyranny, or

Tocqueville’s “despotism,” will want to strengthen civil society and

will fear the power of public opinion to force conformity of moral

views; those who above all fear inequality will be suspicious of civil

society and will welcome a uniform realm of equal rights in polity and

society alike. “Antitotalitarian” theories, often sympathetic to civil

society’s elites and more libertarian than egalitarian, clearly have

greater sympathies with the former position; Rawls, with the latter.65 65 Consider Rawls’ reassuring response to Susan Okin’s feminist critique of his polity-centered justice: “A domain so-called, or a sphere of life, is not…something already given apart from principles of justice. A domain is not a kind of space, or place, but rather is simply the result, or upshot, of how the principles of political justice are applied, directly to the basic structure and indirectly to the associations within it. … So the spheres of the political and the public, and of the not-public and the private, take their shape from the content and application of the conception of justice and its principles. If the so-called private sphere is a space alleged to be

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The assertion that the justice of the state is always radically imperfect

and that one should heed the voices of injustice’s continuing victims66

only has bite if one also accepts the implicit premise that forces in

civil society consistently provide hope for more justice than the state

guarantees, and that unleashing those forces is on balance good even

if voices calling for injustice—believing it just—are also encouraged as

a result. Conversely, the Rawlsian insistence on the difference

between pluralism and reasonable pluralism, only the former

deserving respect and political accommodation,67 implicitly reflects

the opposite assumption: that a sufficiently just public realm of reason

will consistently do better than a politics that encourages action based

on the assumptions of individuals or social groups whose mores and

principles have never passed public tests.

Civil courage will be acknowledged by all as the least bad thing in

truly dark times, when liberal democracy’s legal mechanisms of

opposition and dissent are not available. The extent to which it is a

good thing in times of fairly secure liberty and aspirations to equality

exempt from justice, then there is no such thing” Justice as Fairness, 166 . To define domains in terms of justice rather than the other way around is (quite purposely) to deny to civil society as such any possible critical role as a source of moral action independent of what the society holds as publicly justified. In contrast, Arendt expresses regret that the old elites that once provided conceptual and moral order in Europe can no longer play this role [cite tk], and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America seeks in jealous associations, legal formality, and other mechanisms a substitute for the absence of aristocrats in American democracy.66 Examples in very different modes Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990) and Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993).67 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 36, crediting Joshua Cohen and his “Moral Pluralism and Political Consensus,” in David Copp and Jean Hampton, eds., The Idea of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).

35

will be a controversial and partisan position that divides people with

different elemental concerns and fears within liberal democracy—not

a conviction, grounding a virtue, essential to it.

36