During the summer of 1864, with America more than three years into a civil war that had killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of citizens, President Abraham Lincoln was under enormous pressure to cancel the looming presidential election.
Lincoln expected to lose his bid for a second term, and some in his party urged him to postpone the elections, using the rebellion as justification. Lincoln refused.
“Suspending elections was wrong in principle, even in the midst of a civil war, even if the election would have resulted in Lincoln’s defeat and imperiled the cause of emancipation in which he so deeply believed,” writes Yale political scientist and philosopher Steven B. Smith in his new book, “On Statesmanship” (Yale University Press). “To his infinite credit, Lincoln realized that free elections should not, even in principle, be sacrificed.”
This example of selfless ethical restraint, Smith says, illustrates one of the key qualities of a true statesman. These oft-heroic figures live up to an ideal of public service that goes beyond the ordinary requirements of political office, commit to protecting one’s country during times of peril, and fight for what is right, even if not popular, Smith says.
Steven Smith reads an excerpt from ‘On Statesmanship’
Steven Smith reads an excerpt from ‘On Statesmanship’
The book traces the term’s meaning from ancient to modern times, and dissects the qualities of true statesmen, as demonstrated by courageous figures throughout history. Smith also considers why there has been a decline in statesmanship, relative to past eras, and suggests that one remedy would be a broad revival of civic education. With much of the world in upheaval, “the need for statesmanship has never been more urgent,” he writes.
Smith is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science and professor of philosophy in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He is also co-director of Yale’s Center for the Study of Representative Institutions.
Smith sat down with Yale News to talk about what distinguishes statesmen from other political figures, the most impressive statesmen of his lifetime, and the dangers of our disinformation age. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
Why a whole book on statesmanship, and why now?
Steven Smith: The statesman is an ancient concept. You can find it vividly in Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Max Weber — all the great political and social philosophers that I write about in the book. Yet the term has become largely today neglected and misused. My book is trying to revive and rehabilitate an ancient and respected concept, the loss of which I think has something to do with the degradation of our current political culture. That was some of the thinking behind the book.
What sets a statesman apart from other political leaders?
Smith: The core idea of the book — at least the core idea of my conception of the statesman, which I think sets it apart from other treatments of the topic — is that statesmen are educators. The famous poet [Percy Bysshe] Shelley said: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I say, statesmen are the unacknowledged educators of their people. They have a deep knowledge of and immersion in their peoples’ history and civic culture and literature. And they have an ability to transform that language and provide people with a road map for their future, give them the language in which they can conceive and imagine themselves.
Abraham Lincoln is an extraordinary example of this. He was uneducated in the sense of formal schooling, yet even today, when we think of American democracy, we do so in large part through the language that Lincoln gave us. I’ll use an example from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Deeds are almost quickly forgotten unless they’re backed up by words. Words confer immortality on events and deeds. And that’s what the greatest leaders are able to do: put into words what a people stand for, what they believe in, what they aspire to be.
Is that why you say statecraft is an art and not a formula?
Smith: That is exactly the case. It’s one thing to be a philosopher — sure, you can talk to six people. But how do you communicate to a nation? That is an art. You may be a politician with a good policy idea, but only language endures.
In Lincoln’s case, you say the central idea that informed his statecraft was equality. Do you have any thoughts on what sorts of guiding principles might resonate with the populace today, were a statesman to emerge?
Smith: That’s a very hard question to answer. But I think what we have lacked is a galvanizing image of who we are. To use an image from the not-so-recent past, Ronald Reagan repurposed the old Puritan image of the city on the hill. Here was an image of America rooted in our earliest founding, the Puritans who landed in New England and thought of themselves as creating a new Jerusalem, a city on the hill. That’s been repurposed by many presidents over time, but Reagan gave it particular resonance. A great statesman must be able to root an image in a people’s collective historical memory. You have to think big, think of your place in time, your place in history.
Another key point you make about statesmanship is that it’s a matter of balancing ends and purposes, of doing as little harm as possible, while acknowledging that some harm may be done.
Smith: Yes, it’s this kind of statesman’s Hippocratic oath. Do as little harm as possible, knowing that we live in a world of potential violence. The statesmen obviously have at their control the levers to inflict enormous violence. That imposes, from my point of view, a kind of ethical restraint. Just because you have the power to do something doesn’t mean that everything is permitted.
That view comes from a deeper philosophical insight, which is that I’m a moral pluralist. I believe that our values and our moral commitments are multiple and that they conflict with one another and there is no single value that overrides all others. If you believe that there is one good that overrides all others, then the temptation to violence is of course inevitable. A statesman is someone who recognizes that we live in a world of multiple views, that your views will always be contestable and you have to operate with a kind of restraint in the sense of doing as little harm as possible. And just as importantly, be willing to accept responsibility for the harms that you will inevitably inflict.
Who were or are the most impressive statesmen of your lifetime?
Smith: In our current moment, [Ukrainian president] Volodymyr Zelenskyy is as close to being a statesman as anyone on the world stage today. Earlier in my lifetime, I think Reagan and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev deserve eternal credit for bringing a peaceful end to the Cold War. I think John F. Kennedy was a near miss — we’ll never know for sure, tragically, but he had the language and the gift. Then there are people who were statesmen without states. People who for whatever reasons failed to achieve national offices and yet moved their countries and their people in a certain direction. Martin Luther King Jr. would certainly be an example of this kind of statesman, as would Nelson Mandela, who would eventually become head-of-state and was instrumental in ending apartheid in South Africa and bringing the country, though imperfectly, to a stable democratic future.
Has the rise of disinformation, aided largely by the internet and social media, made it harder for statesman-like personas to build an audience?
Smith: Since the rise of modern technologies, there have always been instruments of propaganda. Great totalitarian states even had ministers of propaganda to force their views on a helpless citizenry. We see something like this today with the rise of trolls and conspiracy theorists and others bringing about other forms of disinformation on the internet. They’re not trying to impose their views on other people so much as they’re trying to create a kind of epistemic helplessness. A sense of, “We don’t know what to believe. They say this, and they say that, who do we believe?” The result is a kind of withdrawal and even a kind of nihilism where you’re prepared to believe almost anything. This becomes a seedbed out of which demagogues and tyrants grow. This seems to me to be the danger of contemporary forms of mass communication.
You close the book with a discussion about the need for civic education to rekindle “an appreciation of a decent and principled patriotism.” What do you mean?
Smith: That chapter draws on my previous book, “Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes” (Yale University Press, 2022). All the statesmen I discuss in this book had a deep appreciation for their civic histories, for their literatures, for their public philosophies. [Charles] de Gaulle, [Winston] Churchill, King, these were all great readers of their national traditions. Today, I fear that sense of civic knowledge, which I think is required for statesmanship, has been lost or is being lost. Our high schools, our colleges, our universities are not conveying a decent sense of civic knowledge, a useable framework of history that statesmen of the future can draw on. That was perhaps less necessary in the past because there were these national narratives. They were contested at some level, but at another level, there was a greater consensus over what the national narratives were. Today this has become deeply fractured. And that’s one of the most difficult challenges to producing a statesman of the future — the loss of our great national narrative and the education of young people into this appreciation.
