Passion,Power,and Political Conflict

Passions and Conflict

It is useful to begin here with an examination of the views that were expressed by Trenchard and Gordon or Cato, as I shall refer to them from here on, concerning human nature. In looking at the writings of Cato, as well as those of other Whig opposition writers, some historians have discerned within them what they see as a classical republican or a civic humanist view of human nature, a rather optimistic view of human nature that dates back to classical antiquity. Gordon Wood (1993), for example, has opined that these opposition writers saw man, “by nature,” as a “political being,” as “a citizen who achieved his greatest moral fulfillment by participating in a self-governing republic” and that they expected individuals “to suppress their private wants and interests and develop . . . civic virtue” (p. 104). However, in reading Cato’s Letters, notwithstanding the admittedly frequent references that are made to ancient Roman and Greek history, what emerges far more strikingly is Cato’s view of the dominance, not of classical republican civic virtue but, rather, of powerful human passions as the driving force in human action. To use Vickie Sullivan’s (2004) words, contrary to classical republican thought, Cato saw “human beings as being thoroughly controlled by their passions” and would “not accept exhortations to virtue as the solution to the promotion of good behavior in politics” (p. 231). In this regard, Cato’s view of human nature seems often much more like that of Thomas Hobbes than that of any classical republican. In fact, Cato appears almost to channel Hobbes, when discussing the Ancient Athenians, he notes how “the mind of man is restless” and “cannot stand still, nor set bounds to its pursuits” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 90).

Also, very much like Hobbes, for Cato, it is our passion for self-love rather than any public spirit that really drives our actions. “Of all the passions, which belong to human nature,” he sees “self-love” as the “strongest and root of all the rest” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 222). Furthermore, far from exhorting us all to engage in virtuous action in government, as a classical republican might be expected to do, Cato is, in fact, deeply suspicious of anyone who would claim to act for the public good particularly those working in government. As he sees it, “generosity, self-denial, and private and personal virtues, are in politicks but mere names, or rather cant-words, that go for nothing with wise men though they may cheat the vulgar” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 92).

In light of the importance that Cato attributes to our selfish human passions, it is hardly surprising that he is not especially optimistic in regard to the role that reason or the pursuit of truth or of the good might play in human affairs. He observes, for example, how “little power that reason and truth have over the passions of men, when they run high” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 55) and how

human judgment . . . is so liable to be corrupted and weighed down by the biases that passion, delusion, and interest hang upon it, that we ought never to trust, without caution and examination, either to our own or that of others. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 315)

Because of the power of these passions, Cato sees conflict or tumult rather than consensus or harmony as the normal pattern of human events. He does not expect “that men disagreeing in interest, will ever agree in judgment” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 317). To the contrary when people are engaged in argument with one another, one must expect that “wrong, with advantages attending it, will be turned into right, falsehood into truth; and, as often as reason is against a man, a man will be against reason” (p. 317). Emphasizing the quarrelsome aspect of human nature, Cato observes here how “men, when they differ in any thing considerable, or which they think considerable, will be apt to differ in almost every thing else. Their differences beget contradiction, contradiction begets heat, heat quickly rises into resentment, rage, and ill-will” (p. 317).

In stressing the powerful role that our passions play in driving our actions and in provoking conflict among us, Cato, then, sounds distinctly Hobbesian. However, quite unlike Hobbes and much more like Machiavelli, Cato has little interest at all in attempting to quell or suppress our passions, and he constantly points to what he sees, in fact, as the often-beneficent effects of these passions, particularly when directed against governmental abuses of power. He notes, for example, how “the Roman republic” was “beholden for the long preservation of its liberty” to a “spirit of jealousy and revenge” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 41). While conceding it “both prudent and religious in private persons to stifle the notions of revenge,” he argues that “jealousy and revenge, in a whole people, when they are abused, are laudable and politick virtues; without which they will never thrive, never be esteemed” (p. 41). Furthermore, although alert to the dangers of ambition, Cato observes, nonetheless, that “the ambition of excelling in every station by honest means, is not only lawful but laudable, and produces great good to society” (p. 295) and that, therefore, “the passion of one man to be equal or excel another” is a passion that “ought to be encouraged” (p. 296).

From Cato’s perspective, it is our passions, in fact, that make us human, and they are “all alike good or all alike evil, according as they are applied” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 273). In his view, “for men to act independently of their passions” would be a “contradiction” because “their passions enter into all they do, and are the source of it” (p. 275). He concedes that

the best actions which men perform, often arise from fear, vanity, shame, and the like causes. When the passions of men do good to others, it is called virtue and publick spirit; and when they do hurt to others, it is called selfishness, dishonesty, lust, and other names of infamy. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 280)

Not surprisingly, therefore, Cato ridicules those who have seen the “summum bonum or chief happiness” in terms of an “absence of all passions and desires,” noting that such an absence “can be only a state of death or stupidity, whilst we are alive” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 816).

Furthermore, Cato warns against the motives of those who, particularly, in the name of religion, would seek to have us tamp down or repress our passions so that they might more easily control us. He observes how

we have, all of us, heard much of the duty of subduing our appetites and extinguishing our passions, from men, who by these phrases, shewed at once their ignorance of human nature, and yet that they aimed at an absolute domination over it. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 273)

For Cato,

Though the mortifying of the appetites be a very plausible phrase, and, in a restrained sense, a laudable thing; yet he who recommends it to you does often mean nothing but this. Make your passions tame, that I may ride them. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 276)

What is required, in Cato’s view, therefore, is not the subduing or suppression of our passions. Rather, it is the proper balancing and management of them. For Cato, “The exercise . . . of reason is nothing else, but the indulging or controlling of the passions, with an impartial hand, and giving them all fair play” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 275). As he sees it, “every one of the leading passions is as necessary as another,” and “all the difficulty is to keep them well marshalled: They are only terrible by breaking out of their ranks, and when they do, they are all alike terrible” (p. 275). For Cato, there is, then, within the inner souls of human beings, a conflict created by different human passions, a conflict that must be properly managed and that mirrors the conflict that exists and must also be managed within the society in which they live.

Passions, Power, and Government

Where human passions, from Cato’s perspective, can become dangerous is where they are allied with the exercise of unrestrained power. As Cato sees it, “The world is governed by men, and, men by their passions; which, being boundless and insatiable are always terrible when they are not controuled” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 238). He observes here the aggressive character of power, its tendency to expand beyond its legitimate boundaries. In his view, “power is naturally active, vigilant, and distrustful” and these

qualities in it push it upon all means and expedients to fortify itself, and upon destroying all opposition, and even all seeds of opposition, and make it restless as long as any thing stands in its way. It would do what it pleases and have no check. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 239)

Cato also recognizes the tendency of unrestrained power to corrupt those who would wield it. As he sees it, there is

something so wanton and monstrous in lawless power, that there scarce ever was a human spirit that could bear it; and the mind of man, which is weak and limited, ought never to be trusted with a power that is boundless. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 180)

Because of its aggressive and corrupting character, in Cato’s view, when power is unchecked, misery and destruction are, therefore, sure to follow. Such unchecked power, to his mind, had “made greater havoc in human nature, and thinned mankind, more than all the beasts of prey and all the plagues and earthquakes that ever were” (p. 185). Cato does not deny here, of course, that power can be exercised for the common good especially by governments that are founded on mutual consent but, even here, power must always be checked because, as he puts it, “Power is like fire; it warms, scorches, or destroys, according as it is watched, provoked, or increased” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 186).

With respect to public administration, it should be noted that Cato was concerned with the abuse of power not only by unrestrained government leaders but also by those government officials who exercised power on their behalf. He observed that a “single and absolute monarchy . . . or the ruling of all by the will of one is nonsense and a contradiction: it is rather a multiplication of monarchs, and in fact the worst kind of oligarchy” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 528). Cato sees authoritarian rulers and their officials as equally dangerous and as assisting each other to exercise their own tyranny over citizens. In his view, “An absolute prince and his deputy-tyrants are only the instruments of one another. By their hands, he executes his lust, avarice, and rage; by his authority they execute their own. He is their dupe: they are his tools” (p. 531).

But exactly how, then, should we check governmental power? An approach traditionally favored by liberals going back to John Locke is through the application of the rule of law. Cato certainly appears sympathetic to a legal approach for checking power as when he argues, for example, that laws are “checks upon the unruly and partial appetites of men” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 293) and that “men and societies have no possible human security but certain and express laws, setting express bounds to the power of their magistrates” (p. 528). However, while in no way dismissing the importance of the rule of law, Cato also recognizes there are limits to the efficacy of law as a check on power. He reminds us how “the best laws give no security if they are not executed” and that good laws “never will be executed unless those who are entrusted with the execution of them have an interest in their execution” (p. 504). Also, he recognizes that, unlike natural law, man-made laws “are not always the measure of right and wrong” (p. 290).

We should not be surprised, therefore, that Cato looks to other means of checking power beyond the rule of law. In particular, Cato argues for a mixed and decentralized form of government in which there are strong checks and balances so that the different parts of the government can act as a check on each other. He observes approvingly, for example, how

the power and sovereignty of magistrates in free countries was so qualified, and so divided into different channels, and committed to the direction of so many men, with different interests and views, that the majority of them could never find their account in betraying their trust in fundamental instances. Their emulation, envy, fear, or interest, always made them spies and checks upon each other. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 417)

Consistent with the emphasis that he places on human passions, Cato’s approach to constitutional design here is not to suppress conflict among these passions but, rather, to use such conflict itself as a means of checking power. In his view, the key to good government is always “to make the several parts of it control and counterpoise one another and so keep all within their proper bounds” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 504). Taking what seems an explicitly Machiavellian approach to conflict, he writes,

Whilst men are men, ambition, avarice, and vanity, and the other passions, will govern their actions; in spite of all equity and reason, they will be ever usurping, or attempting to usurp, upon the liberties and fortunes of one another, and all men will be striving to increase their own. Dominion will always desire increase, and property always to preserve itself; and these opposite views and interests will be causing a struggle: But by this struggle liberty is preserved, as water is kept sweet by motion. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 504)

Cato, therefore, sees disagreement and conflict as not only inevitable but also desirable features of politics in that such disagreement and conflict can serve itself as a means to protect freedom. For Cato, politics “necessitates tumults” and “such tumult is all to the good” (Sullivan, 2004, p. 251).

Consistent with this Machivellian embrace of social conflict, Cato vigorously opposed any notion that unity and harmony within a society could be achieved by means of a uniformity of opinions because such uniformity, in his view, “could never signify the presence of liberty, but only its opposite—tyranny” (Greven, 1977, p. 280). He attacks those who would “force or frighten, or deceive the people into [a] uniformity of thoughts” and argues that, “in a well-governed free state, diversity of speculations is so far from clogging the publick good, that it evidently promotes the same” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 276). From his perspective, “to attempt to reduce all men to one standard of thinking, is absurd in philosophy, impious in religion, and faction in the state” (p. 276).

As part of the conflict and struggle of politics, Cato recognizes the need for citizen involvement in the political process, at least to the extent of keeping a watchful eye over the activities of their rulers. According to Cato, “Every private man has a concern in [government], because in it is . . . nearly and immediately concerned his virtue, his property, and the security of his person” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 269). He observes critically that

he who says that private men have no concern with government, does wisely and modestly tell us, that men have no concern in that which concerns them most; it is saying that people ought not to concern themselves whether they be naked or clothed, fed or starved, deceived or instructed, and whether they be protected or destroyed. (pp. 271-272)

In encouraging the broader involvement of citizens in their government, Cato’s aim here is not to suppress but instead to harness the interests and passions of citizens in checking abuses of power by government officials. From Cato’s perspective, it was “ordinary men and women” who could

be counted on to keep a democratic government faithful to its constitutional principles and just and efficient in its operations—not because they harbor any profound loyalty to a public morality or political ideal but because a well-functioning democratic government is most responsive to their personal desires for liberty, security, and material comfort. (Burtt, 1993, p. 365)

In this respect, Cato’s aim was to “ground civic virtue in the citizens’ pursuit of their self-interest” (Burtt, 1993, p. 365).

To this end, Cato calls for a “rotation of magistracy” by which he means “frequent fresh elections of the people’s deputies” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 422). Such “rotation,” as Cato sees it, is necessary because

the only way to put [those who hold elective office] in mind of their former condition, and consequently the condition of other people, is to reduce them to it; and to let others of equal capacities share of power in their turn. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 423)

Without such rotation in office, he warns that legislators will “see themselves in magnifying glasses, grow, in conceit, a different species from their fellow subjects” and “by too sudden degrees become insolent, rapacious and tyrannical, ready to catch at all means, often the vilest and most oppressive, to raise their fortunes as high as their imaginary greatness” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 423).

At the same time, however, Cato makes very clear that he does not wish to grant even elected legislatures an unlimited power over citizens. Noting explicitly the need to check power even when exercised by an elected majority, he argues that

it is a mistaken notion in government, that the interest of the majority is only to be consulted, since in society every man has a right to every man’s assistance in the enjoyment and defence of his private property; otherwise the greater number may sell the lesser number, and divide their estates among themselves; and so, instead of a society, where all peaceable men are protected, become a conspiracy of the many against the minority. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 427)

Obviously, Cato here is talking about the potential threat to property rights posed by an elected majority, but, as he also makes quite evident, he is equally concerned about elected representatives meddling in matters of religion. A staunch defender of religious liberty, he sees “temporal felicity” as “the whole end of government” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 104). According to Cato,

it is as foolish to say, that government is concerned to meddle with the private thoughts and actions of men, while they injure neither the society, nor any of its members, . . . neither has the magistrate a right to direct the private behaviour of men; nor has the magistrate, or any body else, any manner of power to model people’s speculations, no more than their dreams. Government being intended to protect men from the injuries of one another, and not to direct them in their own affairs, in which no one is interested but themselves; it is plain that their thoughts and domestick concerns are exempted entirely from its jurisdiction. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 428)

Cato here clearly, therefore, does not embrace the type of robust role for government in the moral education of its citizens that is so often envisaged by classical republicans. To the contrary, as he puts it,

whilst men have their five senses, I cannot see what the magistrate has to do with actions by which the society cannot be affected; and where he meddles with such, he meddles impertinently and tyrannically. Must the magistrate tie up every man’s legs, because some men fall into ditches? Or, must he put out their eyes, because with them they see lying vanities? Or would it become the wisdom and care of governors … to endow a fraternity of physician and surgeons all over the nation, to take care of their subjects’ health, without being consulted; and to vomit, bleed, purge, and scarify them at pleasure. … Let people alone, and they will take care of themselves, and do it best. (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 428)

Furthermore, from Cato’s perspective, to keep government within its proper bounds, freedom of speech and the press are absolutely essential. For him, freedom of speech is “inseparable from publick liberty” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 116). It is “the great bulwark of liberty” and “the terror of traitors and oppressors, and a barrier against them” (p. 114). In Cato’s view, freedom of speech and of the press is necessary if the people are to check the abuses of power by their government. As he puts it, “It is the part and the business of the people, for those whose sake alone all publick matters are, or ought to be, transacted, to see whether they be well or ill transacted” and “so it is the interest, and ought to be the ambition, of all magistrates, to have their deeds openly examined, and publickly scanned” (p. 111). Cato warns here how “whoever would overthrow the liberty of the nation, must begin by subduing the freedom of speech” (p. 110) and that “all ministers . . . who were oppressors, or intended to be oppressors, have been loud in their complaints against freedom of speech, and the license of the press, and always restrained, or endeavoured to restrain, both” (p. 115).

Finally, like Locke before him, Cato asserts, as a check on power of last resort, the right of people to resist their government when it becomes tyrannical. In opposing those who would deny this right, he observes it “a most wicked and absurd position, to say, that a whole people” cannot have a “right to defend and preserve themselves, when there is no other power in being to protect and defend them” or “that they must not oppose a tyrant, a traitor, an universal robber, who, by violence, rapine, infinite murders and devastations, has deprived them of their legal protection” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 370). Furthermore, according to Cato, we have not only a right but also a duty to our fellow citizens to resist a tyrannical government because “if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our property and fortunes, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom” (p. 292). As to the difficult question as to when such a right to resistance may be asserted, Cato, following Locke’s guidance, concedes that “neither magistrates, nor they who complain of magistrates, and are aggrieved by them, have a right to determine decisively, the one for the other” and that “every man interested in the success of the contest, must act according to the light and dictates of his conscience, and inform it as well as he can” (p. 402). In other words, in the final analysis, citizens must determine for themselves, on the basis of their consciences, whether resistance is justifiable or not.

Cato’s Agonistic Politics and the American Constitution

In summary, from Cato’s perspective, because men and women are driven by their passions, governmental power is always potentially dangerous, and this power must constantly be checked by a system of mixed government in which these passions act as a check on each other and in which legislators are held accountable to the people through frequent elections. Furthermore, governmental power should be limited to the function of mutual protection and should not include attempts to impose religious beliefs or particularistic conceptions of the good on citizens. Necessary also to limiting abuses of power are freedom of speech and, in the final analysis, the right of citizens to resist power even where this entails the use of force. Although, in many respects, Cato’s views here might appear simply to mirror those of many liberal writers, there is also a seemingly agonistic quality to Cato’s view of politics. For Cato, politics is not so much, as Jurgen Habermas (1998) would have us believe, a “cooperative pursuit of the truth” (p. 228) but rather an ongoing contest among conflicting passions and interests. In recognizing the corrupting aspects of power and the constructive role that human passions and political conflict can play in checking power, Cato’s embrace of political conflict, as noted above, is distinctly Machiavellian and it draws on Machiavelli’s accounts of Ancient Rome, where, to use Machiavelli’s (1950) own words, “the disunion of the Senate and the people” rendered “the republic of Rome powerful and free” (p. 118). This embrace of political conflict as a necessary and healthy component of political order, while by no means universally shared, was not uncommon among 17th- and 18th-century political thinkers, and it can be discerned, for instance, in the writings of Algernon Sidney and Thomas Moyle and also those of Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson (Geuna, 2002).

Moreover, this notion that politics should be about preserving conflict and contestation, in my view, coheres well with ideas advanced in recent years by a number of contemporary political theorists, such as Stuart Hampshire, William Connolly, and Michael Walzer, who, to use Bonnie Honig’s (1993) words, either “celebrate” or at the very least “grudgingly put up with … the perpetuity of contest” (p. 14) that is characteristic of politics. According to Honig, notwithstanding important differences among their approaches, all of these theorists “converge on one point: they are critical of attempts to still the unruly conflicts and contests of democratic politics” (p. 14).

What is particularly relevant from an American perspective is that this positive assessment of political conflict can also be discerned, to a significant degree, in the writings of the founders, many of whom, as noted earlier, were quite familiar with Cato’s writings. Indeed, it can be argued that Madison deliberately sought to inject a strong dose of agonistic political conflict directly into the very heart of the federal government by using a separation of overlapping powers in such a way as to make sure that “those who administer each department” have “the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others” (Wills, 1982, p. 262). His aim in separating power was “to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner” such “that each may be a check on the other” (p. 263). Recognizing as did Cato, the power of the human passion of ambition, Madison’s intent was that “ambition” should “be made to counteract ambition” (p. 262). He did not wish to rely here solely on written words or, as he put it, mere “parchment barriers” to protect citizens against “the encroaching spirit of power” (Wills, 1982, p. 250). Rather, he sought to design a system of government such that “its constituent parts [might], by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper place” (p. 261). As Lawrence Hatab (1995) has argued, what Madison sought here was to provide a structure of government that would “prevent tyranny by multiplying the number of tyrannical units and permitting them to check each other by mutual self-assertion and distrust” (p. 163). For Madison, as Hatab puts it, “Tyranny is avoided not by a principle of harmony but by counterposing elements of strife” (p. 163).

Madison, like Hobbes, saw human beings as driven by their passions and as prone to conflict and factionalism. He noted the “propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, [such] that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts” (Wills, 1982, p. 44). Mankind, in his view, was “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to cooperate for their common good” (p. 44). However, seeming to echo Cato’s insights, Madison’s solution to the problem of political faction was not to suppress it but rather to attempt to create an extended republic in which he believed there would be such a great diversity of interests and opinions that it would be difficult for any one group of citizens to impose their will by force on the rest. As it was impossible to abolish faction without abolishing freedom, free government, according to Madison, would be secured by a “multiplicity of interests” as well as a “multiplicity of sects” (Wills, 1982, p. 264). As Madison puts it,

Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. (p. 48)

Conflict and contest among competing factions was to be used to restrain the tyranny of the majority because a majority faction, if allowed to dominate other factions in government, would, as Madison saw it, “sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest, both the public good and the rights of other citizens” (Wills, 1982, p. 45).

Alexander Hamilton, notwithstanding his well-known belief in strong executive power, also understood the role of political conflict in restraining tyranny. He argued that the advantage of a reasonably “numerous legislature” would be that “the differences of opinion and the jarring of parties” would “promote deliberation and circumspection; and serve to check excesses in the majority” (Wills, 1982, p. 358). Furthermore, while vigorously defending the need for a national army, Hamilton, interestingly, recognized the role that citizen resistance in the states could play in checking the power of any potential federal despotism. Explicitly acknowledging the right of resistance, as did Cato, he argued that “if the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense, which is paramount to all positive forms of government” (p. 136). Indeed, Hamilton believed that, in the type of extended republic, which he and other Federalists favored, “the obstacles to usurpation and the facilities of resistance” would be increased so long as “the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them” (p. 136). He saw state governments as affording “complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority” and as more than able to “unite their common forces for the protection of their common liberty” (p. 137). If the federal government were to threaten the rights of citizens, their state governments could be relied on “to sound the alarm to the citizens and not only to be the VOICE but if necessary the ARM of their discontent” (p. 129).

It has sometimes been suggested that in contrast to Madison and Hamilton, their political opponents, the Anti-Federalists, expressed a more optimistic view of human nature and a more communitarian vision of republican politics (McSwite, 1997). However, although the Anti-Federalists were certainly opposed to the designs of Madison and Hamilton, their arguments interestingly echo many of the very same ideas and sentiments. They differed with the Federalists in arguing that the Constitution would not provide adequate checks on power but not at all with regard to the need to check power. In this respect, the Anti-Federalists’ disagreements with the Federalists were, as Herbert Storing (1985) has argued, “not based on different premises about the nature of man or the ends of political life,” but were “the much less sharp and clear-cut differences within the family, as it were” (p. 3). Brutus, for example, sounded very much like the English Cato when he warned that “power lodged in the hands of rulers to be used at discretion, is almost always exercised to the oppression of the people, and the aggrandizement of themselves” (Storing, 1985, p. 132) and that, as a result, “powerful checks” (p. 187) were necessary to prevent the abuse of power. As did Cato, he emphasized the aggressive character of power, observing that those “invested with power, are ever disposed to increase it, and to acquire a superiority over every thing that stands in their way” (pp. 112-113).

Finally, it was Thomas Jefferson, perhaps more than any of the other founders, who understood best and articulated most explicitly the Machiavellian argument that was advanced by Cato in regard to the beneficial effects of political tumult (Rahe, 1995). While conceding the “turbulence” that was engendered by democratic forms of governance, he famously argued that

even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs … a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. (Jefferson, 1984, p. 882)

For Jefferson, “malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem” (Jefferson, 1984, p. 882).

Of course, the views of the founders, whether Federalists or Anti-Federalists, were diverse and these views, in turn, have been subject to a variety of different and conflicting interpretations (Pangle, 1988; Wood, 1972). Indeed, it may reasonably be argued that the founders themselves “gave us a constitutional system that embraces contending principles of good republican governance” (Morgan et al., 2008, p. 56). Nonetheless, Cato’s vision of politics as a passion-driven, agonistic process in which conflicts among competing interests and passions are harnessed to check tyranny appears to be echoed, in significant part, in the writings and designs of the founders. As such, it continues to influence our practice of politics. This influence is evident, for example, nowadays in contentious debates over health care, energy policy, immigration, and budget deficits in which diverse and passionately held views on these issues are expressed through the different branches of government as well as by conflicting interest and citizen groups and the media. In light of this influence, therefore, if we are to root public administration in our constitutional and political traditions, it is relevant to ask what kind of public administration is implied in Cato’s vision of the political process.

Political Conflict and Public Administration

Cato’s agonistic view of politics, while consistent with that of the founders, is somewhat at odds with that advanced in much of our public administration literature. Indeed, far from embracing political conflict, many public administration writers either ignore it or see it as a problem to be overcome. Woodrow Wilson (1887), for example, famously complained about the fact that “the people … have a score of differing opinions” and “can agree upon nothing simple” so that “advance must be made through compromise, by a compounding of differences, by a trimming of plans and a suppression of too straightforward principles” (p. 207). More recently, Kenneth Meier (1997) has opined that that our “electoral branches of government have failed as deliberative institutions” and that their “policy failures . . . are legion,” because they are unable to “resolve goal conflict with informed public policy” (p. 196). As Meier would have it, what public administration and governance needs today is “more bureaucracy and less democracy” (p. 196). Sharply critical of our Madisonian constitutional system of checks and balances, Meier goes so far as to propose an ambitious agenda for constitutional reform, arguing that we need to “redesign our political system to resolve rather than exacerbate conflict” and to examine “the more unified political structures and corporatist processes of many European countries” (p. 197).

Other mainstream writers, following in the Hegelian tradition of Frank Goodnow (1900), have sought to deflect our attention away from political conflict by offering us an instrumentalist view of public administration in which administrators seek to carry out faithfully some type of unified democratic or popular will as expressed through our political institutions. This view is evident, curiously enough, even among some writers who claim to draw on our constitutional traditions for insights into the role of administrators in governance. Antony Bertelli and Laurence Lynn (2006) have recently argued, for example, that “accountability or answerability to the collectively expressed values or will of citizens is . . . a long recognized dimension of responsible public management” (p. 44). Seeking to legitimate public management in our constitutional traditions, they suggest that the job of administrators is “to divine the often cryptic expression of popular will embedded in their mandates” (p. 47).

However, this notion of a popular will, so prevalent in public administration, would seem in sharp conflict with Cato’s conception of a passion-driven and conflictive political process. Cato never conceived of public opinion as a common or unified force except in a negative sense when directed, often out of a sense of vengeance, against the abuses of government officials. He favored frequent elections not as a means of discerning any popular will but rather because, as noted above, without such elections, government officials “by too sudden degrees become insolent, rapacious and tyrannical” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 423). Moreover, as we have seen, he thought that the desires even of democratically elected majorities should be checked lest government “become a conspiracy of the many against the minority” (p. 427).

Cato’s agonistic view of politics also seems to contrast sharply with the views of those public administration writers, who, despite affirming our constitutional values and traditions, look to some combination of benevolent or public-spirited public administrators and citizen participation to ensure responsible government. Cato, for his part, certainly favored greater citizen involvement in government but primarily as a check on the abuse of power, and one suspects he might have had some problems with George Frederickson’s (1997) almost classical republican view, for example, that citizen participation has the “potential for an enhanced and ennobled public motivated by a shared concern for the common good” (p. 43) and that “it is a responsibility of public administrators to nurture the development of a virtuous citizenry” (p. 46). For Cato, as noted above, because of their conflicting passions and interests, “whilst men are men, … they will be ever usurping, or attempting to usurp, upon the liberties and fortunes of one another” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 504). He was not optimistic “that men disagreeing in interest, will ever agree in judgment.” (p. 317). Furthermore, he saw “temporal felicity” as “the whole end of government” (p. 104) and argued that government should not “meddle with the private thoughts and actions of men” or attempt to “model people’s speculations” or “direct them in their own affairs” (p. 428).

The problem with the foregoing approaches to public administration is that, even where some emphasize the importance of our constitutional ideas, at the same time, they also seek to evade the conflict and contestability that is characteristic of Cato’s view of politics as well as our own constitutional practices of politics. Even John Rohr (1986), despite his insightful and influential analysis of American constitutionalism, arguably seeks to downplay the role of political conflict to some extent when he argues that too much emphasis has been placed on the founders’ fear of the abuse of power and that it is necessary to “neutralize” this aspect of the founders’ argument if “we are to legitimate the administrative state” (p. 7).

However, if we, as public administration writers, wish to draw on our constitutional traditions and practices to support or legitimate our particular visions of administrative practice, we must also learn to understand and even embrace rather than evade or downplay the political conflict or contestability that is part and parcel of these traditions and practices. This means, at the very least, that we must recognize, as did Norton Long (1949) some six decades ago, that because political power is fragmented and dispersed in our constitutional system of governance, public administrators, rather than simply following the directives of any one political leader or group of political leaders, must often negotiate political support for their activities from a diverse and conflicting set of political constituencies and that, as result, public administration is inevitably politicized in the sense that administrative decision making, to be effective, must be responsive to influence from a plurality of different and often conflicting interests and viewpoints within our system of governance. We must learn to accept that, to use Long’s own words, in our constitutional system, there is nothing “akin to Rousseau’s volonté générale in administration to which the errant volonté de tous of the bureaus can and should be made to conform” (Long, 1949, p. 260).

Whether they like it or not, in our particular constitutional form of government, public administrators must recognize, therefore, that they cannot escape political conflict and contestation and that, to use Madison’s words, “the spirit of party and faction” is involved “in the necessary and ordinary functions of Government” (Wills, 1982, p. 44). Given this reality of a politicized public administration, it is obvious that, asRohr (1986) and others have urged, administrators and those who teach them would do well to understand and to respect our political and constitutional traditions of practice and to work within them. Indeed, there is considerable merit in the suggestion of David Rosenbloom, James Carroll, and Jonathan Carroll (2000) that public administrators should acquire “constitutional competence” because “constitutional government cannot function effectively without public management that embraces constitutional values” (p. xvii). In acquiring and executing such constitutional competence, public administrators not only can help themselves to stay out of court but also make it more likely that different groups in society with differing and conflicting interests and values will have an opportunity to have their views heard on administrative actions that affect them.

However, embracing political conflict in public administration involves more than simply an acceptance of our political and constitutional traditions of practice. It also means more than simply responding to whatever existing interest groups currently happen, in particular policy arenas, to exercise influence over public policy and administration. In this respect, the approach suggested here involves not simply an acceptance of what some have termed a pluralist or “Madisonian model” of public administration “as interest-group balancing” (Morgan et al., 2008, p. 59). Rather, in my view, embracing political conflict in public administration involves an active encouragement by public administrators of practices of adversarial argument or “hearing the other side” within their agencies. It means exploring ways in which a broader range of contesting political perspectives might be brought to bear on their administrative decision making. One such approach, for example, is to actively recruit staff from a variety of different backgrounds and perspectives so as to encourage consideration of a broader range of points of view and values in administrative deliberations. Another approach would be for administrators to encourage their staff to express their viewpoints within the organization by creating, as Rosemary O’Leary (2006) puts it, an “organizational culture that accepts, welcomes, and encourages candid dialogue and debate” and by cultivating “a questioning attitude by encouraging staff to challenge the assumptions and actions of the organization” (p. 129). Moreover, the foregoing analysis would indicate that there is merit in public administrators doing whatever they can to encourage the active participation in administrative decision making of those groups of citizens who are affected by their decisions, not so as to discern some underlying democratic will nor necessarily to help citizens become better human beings but rather simply to encourage administrators to seek ways of responding to a broader range of contesting interests and values.

All of these approaches can be helpful in getting public administrators to “hear the other side” as they go about their business and, as a result, to pay more attention to the contesting perspectives that are involved in the decisions that they are asked to make. For example, by pursuing these approaches, public administrators seeking economic development in a city are more likely to hear the views of those concerned with protection of environmental values, as well as the protection of traditional cultural values held by different neighborhoods within the city. Public administrators seeking to promote security and order, whether locally or nationally, are more likely to hear the views of those concerned with the protection of privacy, due process, and other individual rights. Of course, we can never guarantee that administrators who are exposed to a broader range of views and values will necessarily give them the weight they merit in their decision making. Nonetheless, such exposure arguably makes it at least more likely that administrators will be sensitive to the conflicts among different interests and different values that are involved in their choices.

Some might argue here, consistent with the views of writers such as Herman Finer (1941) and Theodore Lowi (1979), that public administrators should leave politics to their democratically elected political masters and simply follow the directives that are agreed on by these masters. However, as noted above, following the directives of a single elected leader or group of leaders is simply not an option that is open to administrators within our highly fragmented system of constitutional governance. Frustrating as it sometimes may be, because of the character of our constitutional system, administrators often find themselves having to face multiple and contesting “forums of accountability” (Pesch, 2005). Moreover, even were it possible for administrators to serve as simply an instrument of one particular elected leader or group of elected leaders, this instrumentalist approach to public administration would have the potentially dangerous effect of limiting the political conflict and contestability that Madison, as well as Cato, saw as a desirable feature of free government. In this regard, notwithstanding the long debate in political philosophy about the meaning of democracy, when considering the problem posed in dealing with contesting interests and values, there is much, perhaps, to recommend Hatab’s (1995) unsentimental view that democracy is desirable simply because, “since we cannot trust human beings to be fully knowledgeable or good, we need an ongoing contest of perspectives, temporary, contingent decisions, and an agreement that such decisions be binding” (p. 76). From this perspective, the virtue of democracy is not that it reveals some mythical sovereign will of the people that administrators should faithfully implement. Rather, the virtue of democracy is that it provides a community with government, while permitting “more conflict than other forms of government” (p. 76).

Conclusion

American public administration writers have often looked to our constitutional ideas and practices for guidance as to what role public administration should play in our system of governance. However, at the same time, they have also ignored, or have even been averse to, the political conflict that these ideas and practices have helped to foster. An examination of Cato’s Letters is helpful in reminding us not only of the inevitability of passion-driven political conflict but also of the constructive role that this conflict can play in governance and public administration. It follows that if we truly wish to draw on our constitutional heritage for normative guidance in public administration, then this means not only that public administrators should accept and work within our constitutional traditions of practice but also that they should consider ways to actively encourage processes of adversarial argument or hearing the other side, as they carry out their responsibilities. Embracing conflict and contestation in this way admittedly goes against the grain of much of the public administration literature. However, we would do well to remember that to embrace our constitutional practices is also, to a significant extent, to embrace the political struggle that they encourage, even where this may often be inconvenient for administrators, and to remember here Cato’s valuable insight that it is “by this struggle” that “liberty is preserved, as water is kept sweet by motion” (Trenchard & Gordon, 1995, p. 504).