Democratic Tendency Research Articles

What's the Big Deal about Racial Preferences?

Let me begin by thanking Jim for organizing this symposium. He is a very good-spirited opponent on a difficult topic. Over the last year and half, my understanding has broadened considerably as a result of the several discussions we have had. I look forward to continuing this conversation. In broad outline and in many of its details, Jim’s paper reinforces the main thesis of my paper. Both of us call attention to the same feature of modern democratic life, namely, the temptation of institutions constantly to dispense with formal rules in order to get results that they deem desirable for one reason or another. In these comments, I want to note our very different responses to this feature of political life. And I’ll briefly restate the primary reason why I think my approach to this problem is superior to Jim’s, at least in the area of racial preferences. Along the way, I’ll mention one way that Jim’s paper seems to mischaracterize the approach I’m suggesting. Both Jim and I agree that modern democracies constantly are tempted to shortcut formal decision making. Partly this is democratic temperament: we want to get immediately to the end or goal that we deem desirable. Formal restraints, rules, and procedures that impede our ability to get the results we want frustrate us, and we often set them aside. Thus while as a general matter, we elevate the importance of criminal due process and observance of legal technicalities, we think it appropriate to jettison those constitutional forms if they do not achieve their end. The judgment to dispense with constitutional forms can be exercised constitutionally, by an executive, when there is no time for due process in an emergency. Or it can be exercised legitimately by a people fed up with tyranny. Or finally, it can be exercised illegitimately by institutions that proceed directly to implement one or more favored agendas or policy prescriptions. The democratic tendency to set aside rules reflects the ambiguous status of formalities in modern democracies: we do not view following rules as an end in itself, but rather a means to certain natural rights, like life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. So even as we sometimes elevate the importance of following the correct procedures, we see these procedures as themselves means to another, greater end. And we’ll readily dispense with them when we don’t think they’re achieving that end. My paper discusses one such example, namely, the practice of colleges like the University of Michigan of setting aside their rules to get a certain racial result. Jim’s paper provides more examples in which the university seems willing to dispense with formal rules in order to create special exceptions designed to achieve a certain results in the most efficient way possible.

Compassion and the Softening of Mores

Compassion and the Softening of Mores Clifford Orwin (bio) In Volume II, Book III of Democracy in America, 1 Tocqueville contemplates the the homogenization of society (which he presents as synonymous with its democratization) and its consequences for mores (moeurs). As men become equal, they become the same; the French word égal conveys the sense of “sameness” as well as “equality.” These chapters thus invite us to consider, with the benefit of the hindsight denied Tocqueville, whether democracy is in fact a oneway street leading to increasingly universal sameness, and more generally, whether its effect on mores has been as Tocqueville predicted. In Chapter 1, Tocqueville makes the striking claim that democracy in and of itself necessarily acts to soften mores. He illustrates this point in a powerful passage in which he quotes from the letters of Mme. de Sévigné. Throughout Democracy in America Tocqueville speaks of aristocracy not only as democracy’s predecessor but as its foil, as the great (if obsolete) contrasting alternative. Yet this is the only place where he presents an aristocrat speaking in her own voice. Here alone can we eavesdrop on aristocrats talking among themselves. Mme. de Sévigné, he tells us, was a kind and loving woman. Yet along with much affectionate chitchat, her letters, written from the country to a grown daughter, recount the miseries imposed upon the local peasants by a ruinous tax increase and describe with satisfaction the atrocious punishments inflicted on those who resisted it. She even jests at the expense of the wretched victims. Thus Tocqueville compels us to feel the difference democracy makes. For it is almost unthinkable, [End Page 142] he notes, that any of his readers a century and a half further along the road to democracy would respond so callously to human suffering, and simply unthinkable that any who did would so openly express it: “The mores of society at large would forbid it” (II, 165). Mme. de Sévigné, Tocqueville insists, simply did not regard peasants as members of the same species. She saw them as servants, as responsibilities, or as threats, but not as human beings. Her compassion, like her loyalties, was immured within the walls of class. She lacked all humanity in the strict sense of that term; her fellow feeling was not available to human beings as such. With the coming of democracy, by contrast, the tight bonds of caste and of feudal obligation stemming from it have fallen away; we respond to one another directly as human beings. Where all are more or less the same and equal, people readily identify with one another, and with one another’s misfortunes. The Americans, says Tocqueville, are the readiest of all people to succor their fellows, at least in cases involving no great inconvenience to themselves (ch. 4). This qualification is significant. Aristocracy, not democracy, is the home of heroic, self-sacrificing virtues. The obverse of compassion is individualism, and Tocqueville stresses that there is no contradiction between the two (ch. 4, also see ch. 13). As men become more equal and alike, they also become more isolated and more preoccupied with their own affairs. Compassion is the sole force that naturally tends to unite human beings whom almost everything else in democracy conspires to dissociate. By beginning his account of the influence of democracy on mores with compassion, Tocqueville puts democracy’s best foot forward. Yet we might also conclude that compassionate urges—despite, or perhaps because, they are so impeccably democratic—pose a threat to liberty. In Tocqueville’s time, Americans practiced organized compassion through their voluntary associations. Since then, however, the general democratic tendency toward concentrating power in the hands of the central government has led to a situation in which compassion has been institutionalized in vast state-financed bureaucracies of caring. In fact, the main argument used to justify the “mild despotism” of which Tocqueville warned (II, iv, chs. 6–7) is that it is more compassionate. Today the man fallen among thieves will not be left to huddle in a ditch pending the mercies of a Samaritan who may not be making his rounds that week. But the price he will pay for the greater...

To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 by Roger L. Geiger

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 499 ments, particularly as evidenced by their organization of the Sierra Club in 1892. Smith concludes his monograph with a discussion of the PanamaPacific Exposition of 1916 that celebrated the industrial progress of the Pacific Coast and dramatized the enormous changes that tech­ nology had brought to California’s pristine landscape in little more than half a century. This is a well written and interesting volume that focuses on the human dimensions of the broad changes that swept California. Much of the material presented here is quite familiar to specialists in the Held, but Smith has placed it in a suggestive context. And he raises major questions that invite further exploration in the future. To what degree were science and technology as practiced in California differ­ ent from developments in the East? Historians interested in the effect of technology on the environment of the West will find this a most stimulating work. Gerald D. Nash Dr. Nash is Presidential Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. His books include State Government and Economic Development: California, ¡850—1933 (Berke­ ley, 1964) and The American West in the Twentieth Century (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973). His next book, to be published bv the University of Nebraska Press, is World War H and the Wes/: Reshaping the Economy. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth ofAmerican Research Universities, 1900— 1940. By Roger L. Geiger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. x + 325; tables, notes, appendixes, index. $29.95. The subtitle of this book is to be taken literally. In precise terms, this is a history of the changing sources for support that spurred the growth of research inside America’s leading universities during the early 20th century. It is not a comprehensive history of American higher education, or even of those leading universities, during that span of time. Such a broader book still has not been written. The sources for support of research included the budgets of the universities themselves and also those of private foundations—in these years the Rockefeller and Carnegie institutes were the most impor­ tant—as well as private businesses and the federal government. The book therefore jumps back and forth between the internal histories of the leading research universities and the histories of these other institutions, but always with its single-minded question in view: what made for more (or less) spending on research based in universities at a given moment in time? Another important bias affects the book: it is clearly friendly toward pure science and toward a so-called best science policy in the granting 500 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of funds, and it is cool toward applied science, or a more democratic tendency within research. Sixteen universities, including MIT and Caltech, are seen to have been dominant throughout the period, and the focus is exclusively on them. At times the author fosters the impression that these sixteen institutions were the only universities in America that mattered. The inclusion among them of such tail-end campuses as the Universities of Minnesota and Illinois raises the ques­ tion of whether exactly sixteen institutions can be so confidently set apart from all the others, especially since in the mid-1930s they con­ tained only 48 percent of the “distinguished” scientists in America (see p. 262). Within these sixteen universities, everything is seen from the point of view of what promoted unfettered research in pure science; all else, including both teaching duties and research earmarked for ap­ plied science, is regarded as an enervating distraction. Thus MIT’s tendency to let business-sponsored contracts for industrial research dominate the scene in the 1920s is viewed as a temporary deviation from higher goals that threatened the welfare of the institution. Sim­ ilarly, the historic function of the federal government in sponsoring research into such practical fields as geology and agriculture is re­ garded as making the government a major provider of research funds in formal terms only before World War II, as its funds did not go into areas of “real” importance. Research is valued in this book always according to how big a splash it made in the world of theoretical learning...

A Senator Looks at Courage

THis essay has two purposes. The first is to call the attention of readers of this journal to a book, Senator John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage,' which might be of some interest to them and which they might not have run across in the ordinary course of events. The second is to reflect a bit on various facets of this interest, and to draw from it a moral or two. Senator Kennedy's concern as an amateur historian is to examine in this volume a peculiar species of courage -that to which political officials in a democratic government are liable when beset by the various pressures of constituents, associates, circumstances, opportunities, obligations, and principles. The subjects whose exposures to these problems are considered here were all at one time or another United States Senators; and, for some eight of them, we are presented in detail with some critical and complicated occasion, or series of occasions, requiring the peculiar courage in question. The figures range from John Quincy Adams to Robert A. Taft, and we see in succession haunted men, many of them most vivid personalities, embroiled at critical points in our history-the pre-Civil War controversies over preservation of the Union, the animosities of Reconstruction, the post-World War hysterias, and so on. In each case, the legislator is faced with a dilemma involving, on one side, his clear convictions concerning right, the demands of the American tradition, and ultimate welfare; and, on the other, responsibilities to constituents, personal ambitions, prevailing public opinion, and even consistency with his own past positions and pronouncements. This is the basic theme, though there are many variations in terms of the weight of the factors, the color of the personality, and the demands of the circumstances. I am not in a position to assess the Senator's historical accuracy and acumen, nor do I consider it important to do so. The important point for most readers is that he has to a fine degree the dramatist's sense for that critical situation on which are focused irreconcilable and variously valid demands, along with the moralist's sense for the potential agonies of human choice. The Senator's prose style is far from being of high order, and it often degenerates to a flat, textbook directness decidedly lacking in precision. Also, his narrative arrangement is sometimes faulty-both deficiencies being doubtless a result of undue dependence on the admonitions of contemporary American journalese. But the account remains vivid, because of a sure sense for peculiarities of character, subtleties of legislative responsibility, and problematic convergence of circumstances. For readers of this journal, there are various particular conflicts implied by the book which raise teasing theoretical puzzles-for example, the possible conflict for the statesman between responsibility to constituents' will and responsibility to their welfare; the tensions between constitutional integrity, preservation of traditional values, and the will of the people in particular instances; or the democratic tendency to pillory men who (though ambitious) would rather be right than President. These tidbits have a wide and fascinating range, and I invite you to savor some of them; but I am concerned here with the more basic problem of food for thought implied in the general presentation of the peculiarities of the situation of political choice. The problem with which the Senator continually presents us here is the critical convergence of two modes of thought: the theoretical concern for ultimate moral principles and political fact, and the practical concern for direct action in actual situa-

Freemanship in Puritan Massachusetts

ARISTOCRACY, oligarchy, theocracy-these are the terms modern writers generally choose to characterize Puritan government in early Massachusetts. It was an undemocratic society, they tell us, from the beginning in I629 until the arbitrary Governor Andros took over in i686. The colony was divided into political classes-the minority who could vote ruled the majority who could not. The minority, the freemen, were those who, since they belonged to the established Puritan church, were eligible to take the oath of freedom and were thus permitted to enjoy all political privileges in the Commonwealth. The freemen, they say, comprised only about one fifth of the adult male population and were in general the most substantial citizens. They were hostile to every democratic tendency, so the story goes, and were jealous of their social position in the class-conscious society of the early Bay Colony.' When we examine these secondary accounts more closely, we find many fundamental inconsistencies and contradictions, both between authorities and within individual interpretations. Such inconsistencies and contradictions cast a strong shadow of doubt on the accuracy of the accepted story. For example, historians disagree on the extent of democracy in one basic part of the political structure-the town meeting. V. L. Parrington declares that Puritan town meetings were not democratic,2 while J. D. Hicks believes the local government was democratic from the very beginning.3 C. M. Andrews does not agree with either of these writers. Although a small body of freemen controlled all political affairs until I648, he says, after that time every man who had taken the oath of fidelity and was twenty-four years old could