Benji’s Reviews > After Kant: The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought > Status Update

It meant, Tocqueville continued, that the question of how “to establish agreement between the principles of administrative law and political laws, between the needs of government and the necessary existence of centralization with the spirit and rules of representative government, is a subject that awaits a book.” It would, he concluded, “be one of the greatest works that our generation could undertake.”

“Roman law,” Tocqueville wrote in a letter to his godson shortly before he died, “has played a very important part in the history of almost every modern nation. It has done them much good and, in my view, even more harm. It perfected their civil law and perverted their political law.”

Without welfare, life under conditions of economic and social interdependence would produce the same process of social dissolution that it had done to imperial Rome.

“L’état doit à tous les citoyens une subsistance assurée, la nourriture, un vêtement convenable et un genre de vie qui ne soit point contraire à la santé.” Ibid., p. 94, citing Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, bk. 23, ch. 29 (see, for example, the two-volume Paris, 1979, Garnier- Flammarion edition, ed. Victor Goldschmidt, 2:134).

Instead of sociability preceding politics, politics now preceded sociability because politics had become the force driving the range and variety of overlapping allegiances that societies had now come to house. In this sense, the end of history was not, as has sometimes been said, the end of ideology, however much it has sometimes been easy to conflate the two terms.

In another sense, however, it also calls for something broader because, in the last analysis, it is likely that almost any noun or adjective can turn into a word ending in -ism. This, it could be said, was the real message of the concept of unsocial sociability.

Roman law was a product of conflict but had the ability to turn one type of conflict into conflict of a different kind. It could accommodate utilitarianism and idealism just as, for Smith and Kant, it could reconcile legality with morality.

Anyone, in short, could recognize utility. Only a Roman, however, could be a utilitarian.

As with Hegel, the resulting system would have three parts: a state, a civil society, and a government that straddled them both. The binding mechanism, however, had to come from conflict, but from conflict expressed as argument and ideas rather than as real material and physical force.

Usually, romanticism is taken to be a reaction against the Enlightenment. In this broad sense, the assertion is mistaken. But if romanticism is taken to be a reaction against Kant’s philosophy of history, the assertion is more plausible. In this more narrowly contextual interpretation romanticism was, as its authors envisaged, an effort to protect the concept of enlightenment from Kant’s bleak philosophy of history.