“Of all the towering figures of the twentieth century, both good and evil, Winston Churchill was the most valuable to humanity, and also the most likable…No man did more to preserve freedom and democracy and the values that we hold dear in the West…How did one man do so much, for so long, so effectively?” Paul Johnson, Churchill 2009
The cynics:
Harry S. Truman: ”A politician is a man who understands government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead for 15 years.”
Milton Friedman: “One man’s opportunism is another man’s statesmanship.”
The true believers:
Aristotle: “What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.”
James Freeman Clarke: “A politician thinks about the next elections – the statesman thinks about the next generations.”
Mikhail Gorbachev: “What is the difference between a statesman and a politician? A statesman does what he believes is best for his country, a politician does what bests gets him reelected.”
This topic was drawn to my attention a few days ago while discussing with Howard Wu, one of my doctoral students, the final chapter of his dissertation. After reviewing the public choice obstacles to Howard’s list of policy recommendations to achieve efficiency in the utilization of coal as an energy source, Howard reflected: ”I know that this sounds bizarre from the perspective of public choice, but what we truly need is a statesman to help us to overcome the public choice obstacles to welfare-enhancing reform.”
So, here you have a bizarre situation in which Charles Rowley, a public choice scholar, reflects on the characteristics required for a politician to ignore or to downplay the incentives of the political market place and to pursue successfully what he perceives to be best for mankind. Well, actually, I am going to ask you, dear readers, to assist me in this reflection as I think my way through this paradox.
Let me open the discussion by suggesting that statesmen are the exception, not the norm of any political system. That has to be the case because politicians who proceed by holding perversely to positions that are deeply unpopular, while they strive to change such positions by convincing argument and sound evidence, typically fall by the wayside; removed from office via elections under conditions of democracy, or by coups d’etat under conditions of autocracy, long before they can shift political opinion in their favor. So those who survive and succeed represent a miniscule proportion of those who set out to achieve unpopular objectives.
Let me proceed by listing a number of politicians that I consider to be true statesmen in the sense above defined. I shall keep my list short, and ideologically even-handed, to avoid falling into Milton Friedman’s trap, though I am sure that any list will provoke a degree of dissent given the heterogeneity of human tastes and objectives.
Churchill in my judgment surely was a statesman, a politician who held on throughout the Wilderness Years of the 1930s, when he was a much derided figure, viewed as a warmonger for focusing attention on the militarization of Hitler’s Germany; yet a great war-leader whose oratory and strategic skills united a battered nation as that nation and its empire, fought alone, until December 1941, for the preservation of Western civilization; a visionary who saw before all other politicians, the rising threat from the Soviet Empire; and a peacetime prime minister who, in 1951, burned the ration books and restored his country to free markets.
George Washington equally clearly was a statesman, an unwilling politician whose largely silent chairmanship of the Philadelphia Convention was essential to the framing of the Constitution; an unwilling president whose two terms – and two terms only – demonstrated to a skeptical population that a president need not be a king; a visionary who defined a unique role as a bastion of liberty for an exceptional nation during deeply-troubled times.
Abraham Lincoln equally clearly was a statesman, a small-town lawyer vaulted into high office only because of a split in the Democratic Party, confronted with the imminent division of the nation, who chose instead the path of war to hold the nation together, who held firm to his vision even as Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson repeatedly trounced his much better endowed forces, who emancipated the slaves, and who ultimately achieved his vision of a united nation, even though that victory led to his violent and premature death.
William Wilberforce equally clearly was a statesman, a politician who endured years of insults and calumny as he fought, ultimately successfully, to overwhelm the powerful special interests whose wealth was based on the slave trade and to persuade a deeply skeptical Westminster Parliament to vote all but unanimously for the abolition of that trade.
Sir Robert Peel equally clearly was a statesman, a Conservative Prime Minister who successfully introduced legislation to repeal the Corn Laws, laws that protected the wealth of the large landowners who represented the heartland of his Party. Peel’s success led to his early removal from the Party leadership, but to immortality as a beacon of free trade and ecnomic prosperity.
Nelson Mandela is a statesman, a rebel against apartheid, who spent half his life in a wretched prison for standing by his principles; yet a leader of a fearful nation, following the collapse of White Rule, who healed rather than divided his people, irrespective of color, as he strove to forge a true nation by ignoring the evil that he had personally suffered at the hands of a small minority of that nation’s population.
What factors led these and other statesmen to ignore the incentives and constraints of political markets and to achieve their long-term objectives in the teeth of powerful opposition?
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Tags: leading against majority opinion, politician, statesman, survival
January 15, 2010 at 2:48 pm |
I guess one man’s statesman is another man’s statist.
January 15, 2010 at 5:54 pm |
This is an interesting dilemma (limit?) for some of public choice theory.
While most public choice expositions that I have read over the years always (and reasonably) emphasize that actors in the political arena, just like in the market arena, may have any number of different ends in the their “utility function” that serve as the motive for their actions and choices.
But the focus is almost always on the assumption that the politician, or bureaucrat, or special interest group whose conduct is being analyzed is assumed to be motivated by: “What’s in it for me?”
This is reasonable and seems to be the case most of the time. E.g., the politician wants to be elected or reelected and “sells” other people’s money for campaign contributions and votes from interested parties who can can get him into or staying in political office.
But there are, historically, instances in which the actions of individuals in the political arena are motivated by something else, as Dr. Rowley suggests.
Let’s take an “negative” example. After 1943 and into 1944 it the German war machine was increasingly on the defensive in the war in Europe. Clearly to maintain himself in power, the logical thing for Hitler and those closest around them would have been to throw all possible resources — manpower, war material, transportation facilities — into the war in the East and then after D-Day in the West.
But what was clearly a higher priority for Hitler and those closest around him? Diverting a sizable amount of those resources into the continuing task of hunting down, rounding up, and deporting Jews to concentration camps and death camps. “At the margin,” this was more important to them than more fully “maximizing” the front line war effort.
Why? Because Hitler was, well, a real true-believing Nazi! That is, he placed a higher priority on an ideological goal — the destruction of the Jews, who he believed to be the cause of all of Germany’s (and the world’s) “misfortune.”
Thus, he was willing to run an greater risk of losing the war due to the diverting of these resources to assure the “final solution.”
This does not fit into the usual public choice matrix. Now, I’m not saying that public choice theory cannot incorporate this type of conduct within it’s analysis of political decision-making in different institutional settings.
But it is not how we normally think of the logic of the political decision-maker’s choice.
This applies to “positive” examples, too, such as those to which Dr. Rowley points our attention. Men do bare their chests at the barricades for liberty, and they do so not merely in the hope of getting from less government intervention a fraction of the diffused benefit resulting from a freer market for sugar imports.
It is an interesting area for research as part of the public choice inquiry.
Richard Ebeling
January 16, 2010 at 2:24 am |
Obviously, I’ve been giving this topic some thoughts lately (and I am very flatterred that my conversation with Dr. Rowley prompted this blog entry). I think the existence of statesman can be largely reconciled with the premise of politician-as-self-interest maximizers. Here are some random thoughts:
1. The marginal utility of money for some statesmen is probably low to begin with. Some (e.g. Washington, Jefferson) were pretty wealthy already. I am not suggesting they are not desirous of money income, but as they already accumulated some wealth, the marginal utility of money may be diminishing. As such, other components in their utility function, such as reputation, truth-seeking and securing their legacy will become more important, relatively speaking. Thus, they are still maximizing self-interest, but just not necessarily money income (not money income alone anyway).
2. On legacy: I do not believe “after life utility”, but I do believe people care about how people think of them after they leave this world. Thus, “legacy” can be an important component in one’s utility function. And how do you secure your legacy? You can only do so when you “get it right”. This may explain why statesmen try to do the “right thing” for society.
3. Truth-seeking: I think great thinkers — not necessarily politicians and political philosophers, but thinkers of all disciplines: physics, biology, etc., derive great “utility” from seeking, and finding truth. When I say this, I think of Einstein, Darwin and the like. On the flip side is the disutility of the “untruth”. Some people are really bothered by “untruth”. This could be a driving force for great thinkers. And for politicians and economists, if they really believe something is “right”, doing otherwise may give them great disutility. Again, we must admit that people are different — certainly there are politicians who disregard truth! This probably needs to be considered in combination with point #1 above. It is perhaps no coincidence that many great thinkers in history are from well-to-do background?
4. Then again, we must admit there are the outliers – I think of Ghandi, Mandela and the like, whose utility function probably has very little weight for money, etc. There is a economic literature on altruism which I will not repeat here …
I realize some of these are a bit speculative and it is easy to fall into a tautology with this line of thinking .. but it is an interesting thing to ponder …