This is the third in a series of four reviews of Aurelian Craiutu’s Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals.
Tocqueville 21 Forum on Aurelian Craiutu, Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Review by Tanguy Pasquiet-Briand, Université Paris-Saclay
In a letter to the Duc de Noailles in 1850, François Guizot, as the penman of the Comte de Chambord, confided that he had always been determined to “uphold […] that spirit of moderation and conciliation that suits the cause of order, justice and truth.”[1] This sentence, set against its author’s political commitment, gives substance to one of the lessons of Aurelian Craiutu’s remarkable book on moderation. In fact, Guizot constantly centered his reflection on the practice of political power in such a way as to reconcile the tradition of the monarchical order with the historical movement that favored the development of representative democracy in nineteenth-century France. In this liberal-conservative balancing act, Guizot suggests that moderation constitutes a virtuous mold. As an active attitude, it is the result of courage intended to produce a benchmark of equilibrium and which cannot be reduced to passive waiting or to the mere search for prudent compromise. Moderation makes social peace possible, and this is in itself a fundamental achievement of political liberalism, which Craiutu endeavors to demonstrate, with the support of a profound, detailed and convincing thought. First of all, it is essential to salute the formal originality of the book. Alternating between fictitious dialogical exchanges staging a debate between a woman of the left, a man of the right, and a moderate, according to American standards, and substantial developments in the form of epistolary missives on the issues of moderation, the book, which is well written, generates a differentiated rhythm that is particularly pleasing to the reader. It captures the reader’s attention with its almost musical variety. In terms of content, one of the first impressions that emerges is that of a masterly study on political philosophy, whose immense maturity and perfect mastery are obvious. Craiutu is following in the footsteps of remarkable earlier work on moderation, from the Untraceable Centre of the French Doctrinaires to the theoretical considerations on moderation that are contextualized here, mainly within the framework of American and contemporary political debate. French readers will appreciate the references used throughout this wide-ranging thesis on moderation: Camus, Montaigne, Robespierre (albeit from a critical perspective) and Ionesco, in particular, are cited and skillfully exploited. At the same time, Craiutu’s book is impressive, analyzing moderation from every possible angle, from the contribution of ancient philosophy to one of the ideological conflicts of our time, crudely and reactionarily opposing traditionalist conservatism to the categorical and victimized demands of the wokist constellation.
While the central assertion of the book may attract support, insofar as it envisages moderation as a daring virtue that is constructed negatively by rejecting radical positions and positively by seeking a compromise in the face of the inexhaustible variety of political experience in accordance with the empiricist teaching of David Hume, it raises a number of questions, which is further proof of its evident interest. It is first and foremost the doctrinal perspective that raises questions, from an epistemological point of view. Craiutu clearly situates the political axis of moderation around liberalism and the Western values of pluralism, tolerance, freedom of worship and expression, and respect for the solidarity of communities to name but a few. This is a conscious choice on the part of the author, who may be accused of ethnocentrism, even though Craiutu, with his vast cultural background and command of many languages, perceives these values as universal features of liberal modernity that can be found in many political cultures. It seems possible to object here that any discourse claiming to be moderate may, because of the empirical assessment of the tangibility of the notion, conceal a radical impulse, particularly an authoritarian one. Indeed, the spokesperson for a traditionalist value system may claim moral moderation in order to ward off the influence of cultural liberalism, in its propensity to promote tolerance and the prevalence of individual choice, against the mental and social constructs of any nation or human community when they are appreciated in an exclusive and dogmatic way. The case for moderation is likely to be instrumentalist, unless one considers that there is only one political interpretation of the notion.
It would seem, then and in continuity with the previous point, that Craiutu essentializes moderation from a liberal perspective. However, there is such a thing as socialist moderation and, more specifically, a moderating narrative of social liberalism in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, which in part follows the syncretic method practiced in the Freemason lodges. The syncretic method of the Freemasons aims to overcome aporetic debates by issuing a superior synthesis, the mere opposition of the contradictory terms it confronts and absorbs. The simplistic assimilation of socialism to Marxism, in relation to the Soviet experiments and their totalitarian transformations, tends to obscure the existence of a more balanced and moderate socialism, admitting the hypothesis of socially invested private property, but safeguarded in principle. You only have to look at the pamphlets and writings of the Comte de Saint-Simon and Robert Owen to get the full picture. In France, the tradition of pre-Marxist socialism, from Pierre Leroux to the moral socialism of Benoît Malon, insists on the autonomy of individual judgement and preserves private property when its concentration does not exceed a certain moderation. In France, socialist moderatism probably culminated in the solidarism of Léon Bourgeois, which concealed a social liberalism that made man an obligatory member of society destined to free himself in order to enjoy his property. At the same time, British New Liberalism, an appellation and banner under which we find authors such as Thomas Hill Green and Leonard Hobhouse, places its thoughts in the socializing wake of Stuart Mill’s liberalism (which Craiutu studies and tends to affiliate with his book) in order, to put it simply, to make individual conscience sacrosanct while enshrining human social nature as a basis for state interventionism. Such considerations bring these doctrinal contents closer to the sociology of Durkheim and the legal sociology of Duguit, which focus on the social as a factor in moderating egoistic and dissolving individual impulses in the context of the industrial revolution. It is clear that there are doctrines of socialist moderation, and it may seem simplistic to situate the argument solely in the liberal tradition inherited from Burke, thereby neglecting the social conservatism of the pre-Marxist socialisms invoked. More broadly and in a deliberately radical way—we hope that Craiutu will forgive us this deviation—it seems conceivable to ask whether the contemporary excesses of liberalism, mainly economic and validated by a political doxa at the center, are not at the origin of a political taste for immoderation or even irrationality, like a mirror effect of modern capitalist monopolies? Moderation cannot be purely political: it is ideologically invested, and it seems quite illusory that it could be otherwise, despite Craiutu’s empiricist and prudential recommendations.
Finally, it seems that the political discourse surrounding moderation is not conceivable without a debate on the status of the holders of power. Implicitly, modern representative democracies, institutionally founded on checks and balances designed to prevent the abuse of power following the lessons of Montesquieu, presuppose, particularly in the context of the functioning of political parties, the constitution of an elite, an aristocracy that applies the lessons of moderation. Craiutu judiciously invokes the concepts of constitutional law, in particular the separation of powers, federalism and judicial power, to support his argument in favor of the quest for moderation. It so happens that the reflections produced on the quest for institutional equilibrium, from the end of the eighteenth century to the positivist and democratic turn of the early twentieth century, incorporate the aristocratic factor to drive political and legal instruments with prudence and restraint. We might mention Benjamin Constant’s seminal writings on the theory of the monarch’s neutral power, inherited from the immemorial wisdom of dynastic succession and designed to arbitrate conflicts between the ministry and the lower house in the event of political and institutional conflict. Constant also promoted the existence of a parliamentary elite that tended to merge sociologically with the high bourgeoisie of talent and fortune that the “untraceable center” of the Doctrinaires had, as Craiutu has shown, identified as the driving social class of liberal progress. In this context, Constant wanted to prohibit members of parliament from using written notes to speak in the Chamber. As for Tocqueville, whom Craiutu knows so well, he praises the acceptable elite constituted by the legal community in De la Démocratie en Amérique, because of their technical knowledge and the scrutiny function of the judge in the American conception of political power. It is therefore important to think democratically about the functions and legal regime of the holders of power insofar as they embody a certain elite. European parliamentary systems maintain too great a distance between the representatives and the represented, which frustrates the will of the electoral body. The representative democracies of the Old Continent are not exemplary when it comes to preserving individual freedoms in the name of a given order, a moderation whose scope is sometimes difficult to grasp. At the same time, the evanescence of political responsibility, which is significant in France, allows the political elite to behave in ways that are, to say the least, questionable, calling into question the requirement for probity and morality in the broadest sense that political moderation embodies. It might therefore be suggested that those responsible for moderation are partly to blame for the disenchantment with moderation, precisely because its meaning has been hijacked by an immoderate elite.
In reality, these few developments are no more than comments that have emerged from reading the powerful statements that Craiutu delivers in this paradoxically dense and accessible book. They are also too European-centric. The fact remains that moderation is, as the author brilliantly explains, a “complex and eclectic” virtue, which explains the choices he has had to make and synthesize in order to delimit the theoretical contours of the notion. As Craiutu points out, it expresses the courage to think for oneself, beyond representations and games of influence, to admit otherness and to apply the subtle rules of civility and, from a French perspective, politeness. It harkens back to ancient wisdom, particularly Stoic wisdom—Craiutu quotes Seneca and we are tempted to encourage people to read or reread Epictetus’ Manual—to rely on experience, without ever claiming to understand the unfathomable mystery of the sensible world. Moderation distances us from certainties and dogmas, provided that it includes, in its implementation, a certain humanism, a form of decency that Craiutu rightly points out and that George Orwell masterfully described and prescribed, under the formula of common decency.
Despite the minor criticisms voiced above, this brief review can only conclude with a warm and sincere invitation to read this mature, dynamic, thoughtful and fascinating book. There is no better guide than Craiutu, who clearly and intelligently takes us on a journey of understanding moderation, such an elusive and necessary concept. The reader senses the benevolence of an erudite writer who is open to debate and has an impressive rhetorical and argumentative arsenal at his disposal to convince people that he is a “radical moderate.” His mastery of the subject is edifying, and the book’s evocative power is inexhaustible. Craiutu’s writing could not put into better and more penetrating perspective the singular topicality of the eternal and universal theme of moderation.
[1]François Guizot, Lettres de M. Guizot à sa famille et à ses amis, second edition, Paris, Librairie Hachette, 1884, p. 324.