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"Man for Himself": On the IronicUnities of Political Philosophy

The Structure of Political Thought. By Charles N.R. McCoy. (NewYork: McGraw-Hill, 1983; Reprint, Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 1978).*

Both Plato and Aristotle, the undisputed founders of any disci-plined thought on the subject, had maintained that the complete

understanding of political things included a comprehensive treat-ment by the intellect of both good and evil in human activities. Thisunderstanding of political things included the reasons why thedistinction between good and evil was not arbitrary, why it was

observed or revealed in human actions. Likewise, it treated the ra-tionale for any possible confusion of one with the other, of good forevil, or evil for good, since any possible confusion normally occurredfor some intelligible reason. Aquinas was to add to this, moreover,that we do not have a complete or adequate grasp of anything in thespeculative or moral spheres unless we know the reasons whysomething is true, that is, why it is conformed to its appropriatereality. But to know this, we also need to clarify the possible

arguments that have been or could be laid against any given truth.Aquinas' Summae and his Quaestiones Disputatae were, thus,astonishing in their uncanny capacity and willingness to state ac-curately the argument against the truth of an issue, along with thearguments for it.

Furthermore, a knowledge of evil, as Plato knew, was not itself anevil, but rather an aspect of the full perfection of intellect as such,including human intellect, which existed in its radical autonomy ineach human being. There was no "separate" or "corporate" in-tellect, as writers like Hegel, von Gierke, or some of the Arab com-

* A complete bibliography of the essays and reviews of Charles N.R. McCoy is in-cluded at the end of this article. Whenever anything from these sources is cited in the

text, it will be followed immediately by the short form and the page number. Citationsfrom the Structure of Political Thought will simply be by page number. Other cita-tions will follow the usual form.



68 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

mentators on Aristotle seemed to suppose. Moral truth, the conform-

ity of what we actually do with what we ought to do, indeed,presupposed the unique kind of limited being we were given fromnature. Nature, in its intelligibility, was formed by the cause of nature's obviously contingent existence, not by itself as an originalcause, nor by the human intellect. All things in nature, then, exist aseither this thing or that, or in potentiality to this thing or that. Thus,nature, from the point of view of the human intellect, revealed adefinite order, open to human intellect, but only after the human

manner of knowing. "To know" something, consequently, did notcause the nature or existence of a thing to be, but indicated a changein the knower for a being capable of knowing. The human intellectdid not cause nature to be, though, as we shall see, the effort tomake such a causality plausible, is, in large part, what specifically"modern" political philosophy is about.

Moral and political evil, to be sure, ought to be "known," but not"done." The facts of what human beings do "do"-that is, cheat,

steal, lie, and otherwise frolic-were described with equal accuracynot only by Machiavelli or Hobbes, but also by Augustine, Aristotle,Plato, and Thucydides. Nonetheless, these "facts" of human action,however dire, were proper considerations of knowledge, both intheir deformity from what ought to be and in their contingency, intheir not "having" to exist except through chosen human agency. Anadequate description of ethical and political "fact," therefore, hadto include both its element of freedom and its element of norm, of what sort of act it was. Without these, no description of a moral fact

would be intelligible for what it is. "Understanding" evil, therefore,was not so much like understanding another "object," evil in itsessence, as it were, but rather like understanding what was notthere, what was lacking in what normally ought to be there. Fromthis angle, ethical and political activities differed from artistic ac-tivities because the good artist was one who could deliberately err,whereas the good man, by deliberately choosing to act against thenorm of a human good by selecting yet another good, but not the

"right" one, would no longer remain good as a human being, as awhole. Moral man, unlike the artist, did not create the end at whichhe sought to arrive by his actions, for man was already a certainkind of being, a human being, from nature. Politics does not makeman to be man, Aristotle rightly said, but taking him from nature,guides him to be "good" as man.

Political philosophy, in one sense, can be looked upon as that area



THE UNITIES OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 69

of philosophy in general that justifies the free, rigorous pursuit of what is by the human intellect, by the philosopher, or by any personopen to reality. That is to say, political philosophy, in its most noblesense, recognizes that what is and what is allowed by the law are on-ly necessarily the same in the best city, when, that is, what is is notdetermined by the city. The death of Socrates and the death of Christ, thus, remain at the heart of political philosophy.' Reality insome sense, however, needs protection from the power of politics toinsist on or impose only laws fashioned by the autonomous human

intellect and will. Paradoxically, metaphysics and revelation needpolitical restraint by that very institution legitmately designed torestrain, the polity. Such protection is needed both to know what isand to limit politics, on this very basis, to what it is. Theunderstanding of what is includes the understanding of what politicsis. Political philosophy, in this sense, is not the whole of philosophyas such. On the other hand, in intellectual history, politicalphilosophy can and has come to claim for itself, according to certain

rational exigencies in the human reflective powers themselves, acomplete autonomy, such that it presents itself to the human mindas a complete "metaphysics," a total explanation of all that is. In-tellectual history, in fact, must deal with this very political claim if it is to be complete and even fully intelligible.

Obviously, such a transcendent claim on the part of anautonomous political philosophy to explain all reality by its ownmethods would entail an adequate grasp of how politicalphilosophy, in its "unlimited" modern form, can present itself as

philosophia ut sic. Also, for a complete understanding of this result,we would require an explanation of how revelation is likewiserelated to a political metaphysics that is untempered by speculativerectitude based on what is, on what does not itself derive frompolitical will. The significance of this latter relation of politicalphilosophy and revelation in our era has been heightened con-siderably when it is recognized that the terms and movements inwhich representatives of revelation often present themselves turn

out to be, on analysis, nothing but other forms of what Leo Strausscalled "the modern project," the project of political metaphysics.Politcal philosophy itself needs to pay considerably more attentionto this curious phenomenon, to the politicization of theology, par-

1. See James V. Schall, The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes fromClassical, Medieval and Modern Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD: University Pressof America, 1984), 21-38.




ticularly Christian theology.' Originally, revelation was conceived

as a light or truth of the Divine Intellect, itself responsible for thedeterminate order, for the actual order not made by man, butdirected to the human intellect in its proper freedom. More andmore, however, often because of a failure of theology to grasp theimportance of political philosophy, the content of revelation andmetaphysics has become theoretically socialized or politicizedthrough use of a political philosophy which has, supposedly, "over-come" the given norms and limits of what classical metaphysics and

religion called the transcendent, the original order or source of what is.

3

To find adequate guidance through this intellectual history is dif-ficult enough. Certainly, we have an Eric Voegelin, or Leo Strauss,or Hannah Arendt, or Sheldon Wolin, or Jacques Maritain, or Josef Pieper. We have too the classical authors themselves-Thucydides,Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes,Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Dostoyev-sky, and Heidegger. We have, likewise, in addition to any originalexperience of our own, the lived records of actual politics. These lat-ter are found, in part, in the historians who sought to account fortheir overall meaning-Gibbon, von Ranke, Spengler, Toynbee,Sorokin, Cassirer, Christopher Dawson, Herbert Butterfield. We ex-perience, moreover, little difficulty in designating some actualregimes, at least, as "better" or "worse" than others. Nor is itanything but sobering to see peaceful changes or violent revolutionsin given regimes, undertaken for the highest motives, no doubt, end

actually in something approaching the worst regimes by any mean-ingful standards of the political philosophers. We have seen, fur-thermore, if not the "worst" regimes imaginable, at least some thatmust be remarkably close, come into being in the twentieth century,regimes that manage often to persist in power quite well and evenactually to attract devoted followers, often from the highest intellec-tual ranks. This alone has caused us to question the very notion of

2. See James V. Schall, Liberation Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982).3. See Ernest Fortin, "Rational Theologians and Irrational Philosophers: A Straussian

Perspective," Interpretation 12 (May-September, 1984), 349-56; Dante Germino,

Political Philosophy and the Open Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); John Hallowell, "Christianity and the Social Order," in Main Currents in

Modern Political Thought (New York: Holt, 1954), 651-95; George Carey and James V. Schall (eds.), Essays in Christianity and Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD:

University Press of America, 1984).




"progress" as well as the final "purpose" of men and regimes in this

world.The description of the best, the worst, the tolerable, the feasible,

and the better regimes is the central function of political philosophyin its own order, together with at least some awareness that somequestions that legitimately arise in ethical or political experience donot receive their adequate answers in politics. Moreover, this ac-curate description is by no means an easy or indifferent task. Indeed,it is often a dangerous one. The exercise of calling the "worst"

regime the "best," an effort whose plausibility is already in the FirstBook of The Republic, remains a reality of contemporary nationaland international politics and literature. Contrariwise, an accurateaccounting of the steps in intellectual history whereby the worstregimes could, with some justification, be called the "best" regimes,is the first defense of liveable regimes, of limited regimes. Ideas andinstitutions, however much grounded in real being in their originsand activities, can be thought and thought about. The range of

human intellect is not such that its apparent vagaries and disordersare impossible to account for, at least in some fundamental sense. Nobook is more helpful and insightful in this understanding of politicalphilosophy, its origins, directions, and implications, its relation tometaphysics and revelation, than Charles N.R. McCoy's Structure

of Political Thought.

The Structure of Political Thought is a spare, careful guidethrough and, at the same time, critical argument about "what ispolitical philosophy?" The book was first published in 1963, though

separate chapters appeared in journal form from 1940, mainly in Laval Theologique et Philosophique and the American Political

Science Review. (See bibliography). Perhaps because of its rangeand implications, the Structure of Political Thought was not par-

ticularly well attended to when it first appeared. Practicallyeverything McCoy wrote, including his essays on American politicsand his oftentimes trenchant book reviews in the Modern Schoolman

and the Catholic Historical Review, centered, in one way or

another, on the unity and intelligibility through time of politicalphilosophy, not only its direction, but why it went the way it did.For McCoy, there existed a definite body of thought, understood byactually rethinking it, from the Greeks, which wrestled with certainbasic questions and responses to them, questions about the place of man in reality and the relation of man's ethical and political life tothis place.



"The genesis and exact nature of the ethically neutral but notvalue-free stance of avant-garde Behaviorists," McCoy wrote in theWestern Political Quarterly,

may be best understood, I believe, by noting the underlying directionof all political theory in modern times . . . . All of the great moderntheories of politics reveal a growing lack of interest in the contingentand difficult thing that political liberty is, and a growing preoccupa-tion with the kind of causality and kind of being that are absolute and

universal in efficacy. Marx's first principle of socialism-"Socialismtakes its departure from the theoretically and practically sensible con-

science of man, in nature, considered as being"-is the paradigm of many notable efforts in the history of political thought to find a"system" and a "method" that would allow us to surmount the con-trarities of existence by imposing itself as the sufficient reason for allthat happens in the world. ("Value-Free," 62)

The great thinkers, even those who finally ended in the complete

reversal or perfect deformity of classical human dignity, did sobecause they knew and built upon positions that had a direct linkageback to Plato and Aristotle.

McCoy, then, held that it was both possible and necessary to think like the great philosophers but this could only take place against thestatus and validity of thought itself. The enterprise of politicalphilosophy was not merely a commentary on the politicalphilosophers but an actual coming to grips 'with their positions asarguments, as true. Political philosophy was not its history. McCoy'sability himself to think through a famous position of a greatthinker-say, a Grotius on natural law (191-94), or Hume on

causality (224-35), was both profound and respectful to the positionitself. In this latter sense of himself thinking through each positionand argument of the great thinkers, McCoy was an originalphilosopher who tested the nature and validity of thought in thegreat thinkers against philosophy itself, something he held was opento each human intellect and behind which we could not go. This

position did not deny the great divergencies in human talent and vir-tue, both of which, in the nature of things, were pertinent to thestatus of political philosophy itself, which retained necessarily an in-telligibility openly granted in its wholeness to but a few, as theclassics had realized. Thus, this approach did require thought assuch, not just the history of what philosophers held with no judge-ment about what they held and why.





Charles N.R. McCoy (1911-84) was born in Brooklyn. He was an

undergraduate at Dartmouth, then completed his Ph.D. at theUniversity of Chicago under Jerome Kerwin-The Law Relating to

Public Inland Waters (1940).' In 1951, under Charles de Koninck,he received a second doctoral degree in philosophy at Laval Univer-sity in Quebec. McCoy was a Roman Catholic priest, taught suc-cessively at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, St. Louis Universi-ty, the Catholic University of America, and the University of SantaClara. With few exceptions, McCoy's closely reasoned essays-most-

ly written between 1940-70-concentrated on what he himself called in his Preface to the Structure of Political Thought, the"mystery story"-a term he took from Albert Einstein regardingscientific method-of political philosophy. (v) The clues of whatwas happening in political philosophy, which resulted, on theirobverse side, in the doctrine of "man for himself"-a phrase McCoyoften cited from Eric Fromm (257, 282, 312)-were to be discoveredin thinking through political philosophy itself. "Man for himself," inits intellectual roots, stood for exactly the opposite notion of the be-

ing of man from those held about human worth in the Aristotelianand revelational traditions. McCoy's abiding concern, then, was theoverall intelligibility of political philosophy as a unique, proper in-tellectual discipline, one that of its very essence demanded aknowledge of logic, metaphysics, natural science, revelation, andpsychology, if any sense was to be made of what had happenedwithin its domains and, more importantly, what this record meantwhen adequately elaborated.

McCoy's short book reviews were likewise most illuminating to hisargument. (See bibliography, Section III). He had little patiencewith writers who failed to see the whole, but cited again and againthose who illuminated for him the essence of political philosophy assuch. Examples of his annoyance were his comments on ProfessorsMurray, Le Boutillier, Merriam, and Ullmann. Reviewing A.R.N.Murray's An Introduction to Political Philosophy, McCoy amusinglywrote, "This compact little book is a compact declaration of in-

tellectual bankruptcy." (Murray, 359) Of Cornelia Greer LeBoutillier's American Democracy and Natural Law, he sighed, "It isdifficult to review a book which is utterly wanting in an understand-ing of the subject with which it purports to deal. (Le Boutillier, 202)

4. McCoy wrote his dissertation in Constitutional Law at Chicago rather than inpolitical philosophy, evidently, because he did not feel the department at that time

was open to the kind of theorizing he contemplated.




"After many years of shrewd if not exactly serious thinking," McCoy

wrote of Systematic Politics, "Professor (Charles E.) Merriam hasreached a conclusion that is less obvious to a certain type of intellec-tual than it is to the man in the street. The conclusion is simply thatpolitics is a practical affair and not a speculative affair." (Merriam,480) Finally, commenting on Principles of Government and Politics

in the Middle Ages, McCoy observed that "Professor Ullmann hasmade an unfortunate excursion into the field of political philosophy.No amount of legal and historical documentation can take the place,

in the history of political ideas, of the elemental intelligenceconcerning the concepts that must be handled." (Ullmann, 429-30)

On the other side, McCoy's reviews of Lerner and Mahdi's

Medieval Political Philosophy, Ewart Lewis's Medieval Political

Ideas, Arnold Brecht's Political Theory, Alan Gewirth's Marsilius of

Padua, or Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian Realism and Political Prob-

lems, while often sharply circumspect, recognized each author'scoming to grips with essential issues of political philosophy. But Mc-Coy could still delightedly wonder about Christopher Morris'sWestern Political Thought: Plato to Augustine, "The immense

erudition in this book is at the service of two working prin-ciples-first, of an urbane and delightful humor, and secondly, of an attitude of ambivalence toward the whole question of thepossibility of political philosophy. Indeed, to write a history of western political philosophy with the latter mentioned principleunderlying the presentation argues by itself to an exceptional sense

of humor." (Morris, 695) Yet, from Charles Howard Mcllwain's

Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern, he learned that "It was theRoman law and lawyers which prepared the way for this progresstoward political liberty-a thesis which Professor Mcllwain per-suasively argues against the generally current theory that the sourceof modern absolutism is to be found in the doctrines of Roman law.The Middle Ages, which preserved and fostered the tradition of con-

stitutional liberty, contributed a further significant principle of thenotion of constitutionalism, namely, the distinctions between

jurisdictio and gubernaculum, in the latter of which alone the kinghad a plenitudo potestatis." (Mcilwain, 263)

Special note ought to be taken also of McCoy's two essays in the

New Catholic Encyclopedia on "political philosophy" and on the

"history of political thought." These are undoubtedly the two mostcondensed and precise statements of the nature of his overallthought. Likewise, attention should be given to McCoy's two essays




in the First Edition of the Strauss-Cropsey History of Political

Philosophy on "St. Augustine" and "St. Thomas Aquinas." (Seebibliography) These two essays were replaced in the Second Edition

of the History of Political Philosophy by the excellent essays of

Ernest Fortin on Augustine and Aquinas. Whatever the reason forthis change, the two McCoy essays are extremely important ones for

his conception of political philosophy and its relation to revelation,an issue, of course, itself vital to the whole Straussian enterprise.

McCoy wrote tightly, though clearly. He demanded much of his

reader, so he did not make many concessions to those unfamiliarwith the core philosophic terms and problems, together with theirhistory, how they arose both in experience and in the literature. Heassumed that anyone seriously interested in political philosophy assuch would know or learn the concepts of discourse. However, Mc-

Coy repeated his basic themes and ideas again and again, so that heconstantly refined his argument while familiarizing his reader withthose ideas needed to grasp his intent. Further, he placed each

theme or argument within the whole "structure," as he called it, of political thought. This "structure" is revealed by "the thread of

tradition in political philosophy."

(8) It comprises"a relation of

order between logic and reality, between theoretic science and prac-tical science, between art and prudence." (v) These are, of course,terms from the classical writers, especially from Aristotle. Each termdemands careful attention both to itself and to its relation to the

whole. Clearly, McCoy did not hold that serious reflection onpolitical things was either chaotic or haphazard in itself. He held

rather that when thought through, which is what he undertook todo, political philosophy revealed issues and themes that could be ar-ticulated and elaborated in terms of what went before and in termsof actively thinking out political philosophy itself.

McCoy insisted, however, and this was his great strength, that aknowledge of political philosophy in isolation from philosophy andrevelation, no matter how apparently thorough, was not adequateto understand the what is of political reality. The great scientific,

religious, and metaphysical systems were themselves presupposed toany adequate grasp of what was actually being argued by the great

political philosophers or what, through them, took place in thepolitical order, in history. McCoy, thus, was most influenced bythose writers in whom he sensed, however imperfectly, an attentionto the unified enterprise of political philosophy. Ernst Cassirer wasof particular importance to McCoy, as were de Koninck, Sheldon




Wolin, and Bertrand de Jouvenel. Too, McCoy was careful to

elaborate and emphasize the drift of argument in Lionel Trilling,Eric Fromm, Learned Hand, David Riesman, and others, who, inMcCoy's view, furthered the trend of thought that, in one way oranother, articulated a political philosophy leading to an autonomy

of man ungrounded in given being.In his 1956 essay on "The Doctrine of Judicial Review and Natural

Law," for example, McCoy pointed out that,

Professor Carl Brent Swisher, a very distinguished authority in thefield of constitutional law, in speaking of those portions of (Chief Justice John) Marshall's decisions which rest on natural la w principles,uses the terms "fictions," "assumptions," and "devices," and observesthat we find in Marshall "an intermingling of conceptions of law asemanating from government and of law as emanating from a source

superior to earthly government which effectively closed the channels of

thought and reasoning." This view expresses what is by no means anuncommon contemporary appreciation of Marshall. Professor

Swisher's position leads directly to the abandonment of the distinctionbetween government and jurisdiction: the only law that counts is whatthe government says. ("Doctrine, "101-102; see Mcllwain review, 263)

McCoy stated here the positivist conclusion in its starkest terms. Butwhat interested him was the particular intellectual history of howsuch a positivist conclusion-itself going back theoretically to theSophists, as he traced the problem ("Turning," 678-88)-couldachieve metaphysical standing in the very name of freedom and in-

telligence, indeed, in the very name of Marshall and the classicnatural law tradition. McCoy found the roots of this view primarilyin post-Aristotelian thought, and its revivals in the Renaissance.(73-87, 187-221) This curious influence was why he paid so much at-tention to George Sabine, George Catlin, the Carlyles, and W.W.Tarn, who had claimed to see, with Marx, the origins of specifically"modern" democratic theory in Epicurus, the Stoics, and the

Cynics, in the denial of the basic Aristotelian notion of the primacy

of speculative to practical intellect, in the notion that man achieveshis perfection by "withdrawing" from the polis. (73-87)McCoy, of course, was steeped in Aristotle and understood

Thomas Aquinas to be his correct interpreter and developer.Though he never addressed himself formally to the book of Harry

Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism, which in part sought to show adivergence between Aristotle and Thomas, McCoy's pupil, Professor



TH E UN IT IE S O F PO LIT IC AL PH IL O SO PH Y 77

John Schrems at Villanova University, did his Master's Thesis on this

topic under McCoy. 5 Moreover, unlike a Strauss or a Voegelin, Mc-Coy was deeply critical of Plato's influence in political philosophyand interpreted Plato as Aristotle did, with none of the paradoxicalanti-utopian view of Plato found in Strauss, Bloom, Pangle, andothers. This is important both with regard to McCoy's more positiveview of Augustine and to his understanding of the implications of Platonic thought in general in the outcome of the modern project.On the other hand, the anti-utopian interpretation of Plato cor-

responds in result, at least, very much with McCoy's insistence thatpolitics is a practical science.

McCoy had, indeed, an uncanny knack for relating basic positions

in the political philosophers to the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas.The inspiration of the Structure of Political Thought consists, in

large part, in how this relationship was carried out, its "thread" of

unity. (7) Marx, in particular, had a central position in what mightbe called the reverse side of political philosophy, a side that, as Mc-Coy argued, came to be the dominant position in the modern era,while the classical and revelational views were largely relegated toan almost underground status, particularly in the intellectualorders. In this sense, McCoy considered Marx to be a kind of "anti-Aristotelian" Aristotelian genius, if it can be put that way, sinceMarx's final positions were indeed logical, persuasive developmentsof what must happen, intellectually, when certain key positions inAristotle, however subtly, are denied or reversed in the course of

thought. McCoy's analyses of the relation of Feuerbach to Marx

(269-84, 291-94) and of Feuerbach's relation to Aquinas (284-90)were nothing short of remarkable.

Perhaps the best place to begin considering McCoy's thought is

with his long review of Ernst Cassirer's Myth of the State (1948),

itself a remarkable book, while the best place to end it is with his

critique of Leo Strauss in the Review of Politics, "On the Revival of

Classical Political Philosophy." (1973) In passing, it should be noted

that McCoy never referred to Eric Voegelin or to Hannah Arendt,

5. John J. Schrems, "An Analysis of Harry V. Jaffa's Study of the Aristotelian and

Thomistic Principles of Natural Law," ( M.A. Thesis, Catholic University, 1960). Pro-

fessor Schrems, now at Villanova University, likewise did his Ph.D. dissertation underCharles N.R. McCoy, "The Political Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Study in Modern

Liberal Political Thought," (Catholic University, 1965). Professor Schrems's book,

Principles of Politics: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985),

should be noted here.



78 T H E P O L I T IC A L S C I E N C E R E V I E W E R

with whom he might have been expected to have certain basic things

in common, while the only books of Strauss he cited in the Structureof Political Thought were Natural Right and History and What Is

Political Philosophy? He also cited City and Man, published in 1964,in the Review of Politics article. Though the key essay in the Struc-

ture of Political Thought on Machiavelli was originally published inthe American Political Science Review in 1943 ("Place," 626-41),

hence before Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), McCoy did

not refer to Thoughts on Machiavelli in the 1963 Structure of

Political Thought, nor to Strauss's Political Philosophy of Hobbes(1936, 1952). This is, in a way, unfortunate for both, for the McCoythesis on Machiavelli and that of Strauss were, I think, in substantialagreement. McCoy, in fact, agreed with much of what Cassirer saidon Machiavelli. (173-92)

What attracted McCoy to Cassirer, however, even on the issue of Machiavelli, was Cassirer's remark in An Essay on Man, the firstchapter of which McCoy considered something of a classic, concern-ing the reason why, ultimately, Stoicism and Christianity could notagree, namely, because the highest virtue for the Stoic was thegreatest vice for the Christian. (84-86) Cassirer had noted how manhad lost his "intellectual center," that the appearance of myth andmagic in twentieth century political experience seemed somehowconnected to this loss of an intellectual center, while the peculiarRoman virtue of "humanitas" (humanism) seemed to point in thedirection of the meaning of this loss.° Again and again, Cassirer, inMcCoy's view, touched on the heart of the matter, of the "wonder-

ful and terrifying truth" about modern political philosophy, a truththat was, ironically, "quite hidden from Professor Cassirer" himself.(Cassirer, 271) McCoy, in fact, though he never refers to it, recallsthe notion of "secret writing" in Strauss's Persecution and the Art of

Writing (1952), though, fqr McCoy, it was not so much "persecu-tion" that obscured the main issues of political philosophy but ratherthe nature of the human condition and more especially the nature of

6. In this connection, the following passage from Eric Voegelin is of interest: "Most of what we usually call `ideologies' are magic operations, in the same sense thatMalinowski uses `magic' of the Trobriand Islanders . . . . Magic means the attempt torealize a desired end which cannot be realized if one takes into account the structure of reality. You cannot by magic operations jump out the window and fly up-even if youso desire. If you try such things-for instance: producing a change in the nature of man

by the dictatorship of the proletariat-you are engaged in a magical operation." Con-

versations with Eric Voegelin, ed. Eric O ' Connor (Toronto: St. Thomas More InstitutePapers, 1976), 149-50.




the philosophic enterprise itself. The relation of nature and grace

had more to do with it than political persecution.McCoy's statement of what he was about in his philosophic

analysis of political things, then, deserves special consideration andattention:

"But," as Cassirer wisely pointed out, "our wealth of facts is notnecessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight in-to the general character of human culture ... (An Essay on Man,

22) The clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, I suggest, is a

scrupulous care for the thread of tradition in political philosophy. Wemust assume, to begin with, that the great writers in the field had acertain competence in handling the terms proper to it. In politics fun-damental concepts are employed which serve as a basis for explorationinto specialized fields of investigation. The acknowledgement of theneed for basic concepts does not require an a priori acceptance of any principle of truth; but it does require a scrupulous fidelity to the factor

of tradition in the history of political thought. By the factor of tradi-tion is meant nothing more than is necessarily implied in any intellec-tual history. Concepts, principles, judgments are either retained orlost, altered or added to. The acknowledgment of the factor of tradi-tion is of primary importance, and from that acknowledgment followsthe obligation to understand (not necessarily to accept) the construc-tion of political thought at its beginnings. Only then can a more nearly genuine reading of history of political thought be hoped for. And thisreading will, I suggest, show the central reason for the central fact of

our time: which is, as Cassirer has observed, that in the twentieth cen-tury, the age of man's highest technical competence, the elements of magic and myth have for the first time taken possession of the purely secular sphere. (7)

What is to be noted here is not only the appearance of a final in-tellectual "product"-Cassirer's "elements of myth and magic" (orStrauss's "modern project," or Voegelin's "Gnosticism")-but alsoMcCoy's careful, even "scrupulous," as he calls it, endeavor to ex-

plain how this result came about within the human thinking processitself. And the intelligibility of this result depends on understandingthe very structure of human thought, itself open to a reality it didnot make. The intellectual grasp of the reality man did not make,but what he can to some extent understand, is alone what makes in-telligible a "reality" constructed by man out of his own autonomousforces and thence shoved into "reality."




In McCoy's analysis of the Myth of the State, Cassirer's exact posi-

tion is followed since Cassirer understood the issue at stake. Cassirerhad written the essay on "Rationalism" in the 18th Volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, McCoy recalled, wherein the term "ra-tionalism," for which Cassirer, meant reason's capacity "torecognize completely only that which it can produce according to itsown design." (Cassirer, 272) It is to be noted that what is excludedfrom "reason" in such a definition is something existing but not pro-duced by man's own design and any speculative consideration of what

is, even if capable of being used by man's design. "Myth," con-sequently, meant "the symbolic expression of the irrational, and theirrational is understood as comprising whatever may be above aswell as below human reason." (Cassirer, 272) What puzzledCassirer, however, was not the knowledge status of what is above orbelow human reason, but that the "irrational" seemed to appear asthe logical political form of the twentieth century because reason,defined as what man could know by himself as formed by him, wasin fact scrupulously pursued by the great thinkers over and over in

modern times against the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas.Cassirer had endeavored to make Aquinas an ally in this historical,rationalist process, so that by distinguishing reason and revelation,he could relegate revelation beyond the pale of reason.

This understanding of reason, of course, was not, as McCoypointed out, what Aquinas had set down. Cassirer thus madeAquinas into a "kind of Averroist himself, setting the human reason` free to create a world of its own. ' " (Cassirer, 273) Again returning

to Aristotle himself, McCoy recalled that Aquinas in understandinghim did not understand the human intellect to be a power thatought to "create" a world of its own as its primary function, butrather to be one that opened the human intellect to what is,whatever its source, the discovery of which was the main or specialfunction of the finite intelligence. The key question, then, waswhether human dignity was to be understood as something given(and intelligible) or as something man must give himself such thatall being, including nature and especially human nature, is per-ceived only in human terms, terms man gives to himself alone.(Cassirer, 275) This result also explained why McCoy, following alead in Cassirer, was so much at pains to emphasize that the Romanabstract word "humanitas" or humanism could and did come tomean man presupposed to nothing but his own self-imposed ends.Ultimately, it is from this sort of background that the true ab-




solutism of the modern state, the state, even democratic state, which

presupposes nothing but itself to its own actions. (Cassirer, 82-87)For Aristotle and Aquinas, however, as McCoy put it, the nature

and dignity of the human intellect did not consist exclusively orprimarily in giving itself its own being, though it did have artisticcapacities which allowed it to cause new things to come to be. Thehuman intellect did have prudential and artistic capacities, then,about some contingent variables, but these depended on a priortheoretic capacity to know what is and the different kinds of beings.

The "mystery" for the modern rationalist was how could magic, interms of polity-construction and absolute rule, come into twentiethcentury political philosophy? What Cassirer ought to have seen, inMcCoy's view, was that the myths of the twentieth century werenecessarily and logically consequent on rationalism itself taken aspresupposing nothing but the human intellect. McCoy saw this con-sequence worked out particularly in Feuerbach, who stated thegrounds for the thesis that man created himself and thus the groundsfor any construction of man.

Feuerbach goes on to say, however, that it is precisely man's con-sciousness of himself as a universal that makes him capable of science. This is what he calls "consciousness in the strict sense." We must notethe meaning that Feuerbach gives to what he calls "consciousness inthe strict sense" by referring to the etymology. What he says of theGerman is also true of the Latin. Cum and scientiacompose the word.Now, if he takes scientia in the strict sense, it does of course require in-tellect and the capacity for reflection. And so we may say that Feuer-bach speaks of intellectual consciousness, something the brutes do nothave. But when Feuerbach goes on to say that the brute does not haveits own species for an object, whereas man is conscious of himself as aspecies, the ambiguity of the term "species" is exploited here, along

with the ambiguity of the term "consciousness" to suggest that man isconscious of himself as a universal in concretion. The ambiguity of the

proposition that the brute does not have its own species for an object(and that man does) may be made clear from the following considera-tion: No man identifies himself with the human species. What he may

well know is that he is a man, but not that he is man. It is true that thespecies has no existence except in individuals, in Socrates, or in Platoetc. But Socrates is not the species (any more than is dog the speciesbrute); he belongs to the species, he is of the species. (276-77)

It is from this sort of intellectual analysis which results in the temp-tation of man to see "himself as a universal" (277), that gives the il-




lusion of man as a self-created being and hence one that can fashion

himself in any way that his freedom directs. This is the origin of "magic" in modern political philosophy. McCoy, then, rightly ques-tioned Cassirer's placing of Aquinas on the list of those contributingto modern rationalism precisely because "creating man's ownworld

"was the very opposite of the metaphysics of Aquinas. On the

other hand, McCoy agreed that the effort to remove the order of nature and nature's cause from reality was the intent and directionof modern political philosophy.

The Structure of Political Thought, in its own right, it appears, isa carefully reasoned, sustained argument designed to explain the in-telligible steps whereby the classical and revelational views of man,themselves fully clarified and understood, were deliberately andlogically replaced by a conception of man that presupposed nothingbut man "for himself" as the explanation of all that is. In this con-text, moreover, it was no accident that in this said process, "politicalphilosophy" should come to be identified with "philosophy" itself.

Thus, the relative autonomy given to politics in Aristotle as thehighest of the "practical sciences" was expanded. Politics became ametaphysics to explain how man as a "social being" by a radical actof will and a revolutionary political movement replaced, orendeavored to replace, at least, everything in man's given being andin the institutions ordered to it, things that fell under what wascalled the jus gentium, particularly family, property, and polity.(89-96)What replaced the "metaphysical order" given in nature andnature's cause was man's own "being" constructed by his own ends,

ends which by definition rejected step by step those structures of reality seen in classical political philosophy.

McCoy's essential argument, then, ran as follows: 1) The relationof Plato to Aristotle, the confusion of the logical with the real ordersand the implications of this confusion, articulated the origins of theproblem of political philosophy. The purpose of this discussion of

the logical and real orders was to explain how the abstractions of logic-"man," "humanity," "genus," "species"-could come to

replace real men-Plato, Socrates, and Mary. (Chapter I) McCoywas not concerned to deny the perfectly valid usages of logic as anexplanation and instrument of human understanding. Rather heneeded to explain how logical abstractions, necessary in the processof intellection, came to be seen as superior to individual beings. Thiscould happen, he realized, and did happen in the history of thought,because of the evident clarity and permanence of logical abstrac-



TH E UNIT IE S O F PO LIT IC AL PH IL O SO PH Y 83

tions-"man is the state writ large," as Plato asked us to consider. Atthe same time, McCoy showed from Aristotle the relational natureof actual states and the primacy in being of particular individuals to

any "corporate" or abstract being. (Chapter II) In locating the"be-

ing" of the polity not in some abstract form transcending actual

states, but in an order of parts which had their own functions andsubstance, Aristotle was able to limit the polity and leave the"parts," the individuals open to what transcended the polity. In thissense, the metaphysics of Aristotle was necessary to protect the prac-

tical limitations of any active polity. This was something particular-ly developed by Aquinas and medieval constitutionalism. (ChapterV) Nevertheless, Aristotle did hint at man's temptation to rebelagainst his status as the lowest of the intelligent beings, a temptationthat could, ultimately, only be resisted by right philosophy, not vir-tue alone or right constitutions. (35)

2 ) Aristotle's discussion of the order of the sciences and in par-ticular the nature of "experimental" science, in the light of modern

science, was of particular interest because of its connection withhow modern politics and modern science were related. McCoy wasconstantly fascinated with the idea that experimental science, unlikeethical or practical science in the Aristotelian sense, strove tounderstand being as it was formed in this or that particular way.And since no finite being caused itself, so that it did not reveal of itself the sufficient reason why it was this way rather than that, thepursuit of experimental science as "formable" rather than as"formed" led the human intellect into a vacuum which tempted it to

i mpose its own "cause" on things. This meant, of course, that at acertain point, science would lose contact with that which was ac-tually formed, with what actually was in this way or that. Sciencebecame interested primarily in what could be formed, not whatwas, though existence in natural things protected the scientist in away that practical existence in ethics and politics did not protect

mankind. (160-66, 232-34)In a sense, then, experimental science approached the mind of the

creator, that is, it approached the possibility, not the actuality of things formed. McCoy always found Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur Ed-dington, Einstein, and other scientists (1-2, 164-65, 252-54) to be

carrying on a paradigm, perhaps valid in the physical sciencesbecause reality remained largely what it is, but invalid for ethicaland political sciences because the ends of ethical sciences, thoughgiven in nature, had to be understood and freely chosen to remain




what they are and are intended to be. McCoy, in this regard, con-

stantly repeated the principle that first principles in ethics andpolitics were like hypotheses in mathematics, not like the ends inphysical nature. (165) By this he meant to protect the human orderfrom a speculative-practical intellect which claimed the right to im-pose its own ends and hence order on human life and through it onall reality, rather than to accept the one given through what formed"formed" nature. The reason why man was as he was, with his owninternal "order" to be this particular kind of thing, this particular

human being, was the result of a divine decision-man did notalways exist-a decision the intellect received in man but did notmake. This "reason" was open to the human intellect in somesense-grace did not contradict nature-but the human intellectwas not the "cause" of what it is to be man, or what it is to be anyother natural being or its cause, just as mathematical principles arewhat they are. Nature, however, might have been "otherwise" sinceit did not "have" to be this or that particular way. The first attack upon the human good, then, was the one that conceived humannature, and indeed all nature, as "formable" and not as formed,even though it was a perfection to seek, on the part of human in-tellect, the reasons why formed beings might have been "otherwise."

3) The analysis of post-Aristotelian philosophy, a most originaldiscussion and a subject on which Marx did a brilliant dissertation,led to the conclusion that the order of practical and speculativereason were reversed from their place in Aristotle. The philosophiesof "withdrawal" seemed, at first sight, anti-political. They

separated man from his connection with the transcendent so thatphilosophy became a function of man's highest worldly purposes.These philosophies became in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuriesthe foundations of modern political theory as a speculative-practicalenterprise. In this form, bypassing both classical and medievalreflections, man's political being was emptied of nature, so that hehad to "construct" his political and, ultimately, human being. Thiswas, in part because of post-Aristotelian background, presupposed

to no speculative given order that indicated what this initial beingwas. (Chapters III and VII)4) McCoy's understanding of Augustine was very different from

the "political realist" school of Augustinian interpretation and closerto the manner in which Aquinas referred to Augustine. Under theinfluence of revelation, McCoy, analyzing Augustine in terms of Aristotelian practicality, saw in Augustine an effort to understand




man's final end as not political, hence located outside of any possible

"worldly" political order.' This left the political and social ordersfree to do what was in fact both right and practical, not deduced butlearned in terms of what man actually was and was for.

For St. Augustine, then, social justice should receive its initial move-ment from the most final of causes, eternal beatitude, the just distribu-tion of temporal goods making us proportionately like God, "the mostjust Disposer . . . of all the adjuncts of (temporal peace)-the visiblelight, the breathable air, the potable water, and all the othernecessaries of meat, drink, and clothing." This is the root of Christian

social justice.Far from eliminating the State by referring its temporal peace to

eternal peace, St. Augustine's thought rather would reestablish theState's integrity both in the mode of its operation (which is free) and inthe order to its end (which is the temporal common good). And if it isto St. Augustine "more than (to) any other individual (that) we owethe characteristically western ideal of the Church as a dynamic socialpower," (Christopher Dawson), it is by this very same ideal that St.

Augustine seeks to preserve the State from the inordinateness of that"variable impiety" by which it aims at something more than "thecoherence of men's wills in honest morality." (114)

This reflection, of course, suggests why Augustine stands at the heartof all anti-utopian thought because he denies to the state any locus of final beatitude. But this very theoretical position, the location of final beatitude in the City of God, neither obscured nor deflected

man from loyalty and work inactual cities because it was now possi-

ble to see them for what they were.Aquinas was for McCoy the philosopher who clarified and com-

pleted the basic principles of political philosophy found already inAristotle, but ones he was unable fully to complete because either of human perversity-the Fall-or because the human mind itself byitself could not figure out the proper directions to take on manyissues legitimately occurring in ethical and political ex-perience-those of friendship, reward and punishment, immortali-

ty, the interior motivations for virtue, and the final object of beatitude. But Aquinas was also able, in McCoy's view, to pose

7. See Ernest Fortin, Political Idealism and Christianity in the Thought of St.

Augustine (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1972); Herbert Deane, Political and

Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956); Schall,Politics of Heaven and Hell, 39-66.




properly the solution to the best theoretical state and the reasons for

it in terms of political philosophy itself and therefore limited to it.The mixed form of rule and its relation to problems of consent,possibility, and freedom with participation of all, however, did notpretend, as it could in post-Aristotelian or modern political theories,to substitute for man's highest end as such, which was the essentialvision of God, not for a "collectivity" but for each actual humanperson. (138-48) Aquinas was able to solve the speculative problemof the best form of regime because the unanswered questions of

political philosophy, questions which left unanswered alwaysseemed to turn on all actual polities to subvert them, were ad-dressed, at least indirectly, by revelation, itself a form not of "irra-tionality," as Cassirer had thought, but of knowledge. The revela-tional answers freed the philosophical intellect to see in the questionof the best form of regime not the answer to happiness as such, buthappiness limited to, but not confined in, this life. Aristotle's distinc-tion between two forms of happiness in books One and Ten of The

Ethics,thus, received intellectual justification.5 ) Modern political philosophy, beginning with Marsilius of

Padua (127-31), was an effort within thought and experience itself to be free of the notion that reason and revelation were in fact har-monious. It would be a mistake to think Machiavelli or Hobbes wasnot addressing himself, in a sense, to the core issues of westernphilosophy, and hence to the human mind as such wherever andwhenever it occurred. In the technical sense, Machiavelli reversed,within the practical order, the relation of art and prudence.

(Chapter VI) The prior reversal of theoretical and practical sciencesin the post-Aristotelians meant that now the Prince or any republicoperating on the same principles presupposed nothing but its owntruth as the norm of "justice" in a polity, whatever its form. If theform of polity conformed to the will of the prince or republic, thenthe polity was "good" or "successful," no matter what it looked likein terms of the classical nomenclature of regimes.

Machiavelli, therefore, along with, perhaps more profoundly,

Hobbes, began his construction of political philosophy precisely onthese reversals of the Aristotelian position. Modern "natural right"is, consequently, the very opposite of what classical natural lawmeant. Without prudential and speculative principles to guide it,the intellect must seek those principles of passion and power whichare left after their direction in given reason is intellectually re-moved. In "freeing" man from what he "ought" to do in favor of



T H E U N I T I E S O F P O L I T I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y 87

what he does "do," modern political philosophy was enabled to con-

struct, indeed was left with no choice but to construct any sort of polity it wished so that the classical distinctions between good andevil regimes were eliminated. A "successful" regime was merely aregime that stayed in power no matter what. "Machiavelli couldpraise God that He had arranged the passions and powers of man'snature in such a fashion that they were not presupposed to any pro-per end; and hence the ends of human life are brought within thesphere of human art which operates in man's original indetermina-

tion to good and evil as upon unformed and homogeneous matter."(179)6 ) What McCoy called the "second phase of the modern theory of

politics" (179) sought to identify man's liberty with his power. Formodern theory, unlike classical or Christian theory, nature had ap-peared as a restriction on liberty, rather than its guide and meaning.In a subtle but brilliant insight, McCoy noted the reappearance of the concept of "being" over "action

" in political philosophy. (180)"Being" replaced the more classical notion in political philosophy

that "action" following "formed nature" was the source of humangood. Since, unlike the situation in classical psychology, man now"understood" nature in understanding his own mind-for Aristotle,man understood himself only indirectly in first comprehendingnature, or better a single thing-there was no reason why externalreality ought not to correspond to his thought, itself now releasedfrom final causes in nature. The Reformation, and its tendency tounderstand religious reality as primarily the subjective experience of

the believer, paralleled the scientific and political principles of modernity which found no guide in given being. (183-84)

Speaking of Bodin, McCoy wrote of the purpose of :.iodernity:"What had to be overcome was the whole traditional notion of anend to be pursued for the perfection of man, and the substitution of an idea of human perfection ontologically rather than morally con-sidered," (188) Human perfection ontologically considered meantthat modern political philosophy endeavored to achieve a reality, inessence, solely produced by the human intellect, whose complete in-telligibility was contained in that new being, new Leviathan,however designated.

Where Machiavelli had begun with man's nature as not presupposed toany given ends, and where Aristotle had said that the state does notmake man, but taking him from nature makes him good, Hobbesmakes the formation of man specifically human co-eval with the




founding of political society. It is the production of man himself that is

the concern of political science modeling itself on the new physics whose concern is with the material and efficient principle by which thecosmos is made. In practice the substitution of the desire to be for thedesire to be good means that the avoidance of death at any cost takesthe place of telos, of the good in human life. We must carefully observethe implications of this first principle. Since the good is simply now convertible with being, the desire to be is the desire to be that being whose being is identified with its goodness (the Divine Being). Therefore, "self-preservation" in itself is directed toward acquiring a

new substantial being lacking to man in the state of nature: The new political science, the heir of the old theology and metaphysics, musterect what Hobbes called "the mortal god ...." (199)

This is, no doubt, a passage of remarkable perceptivity in light par-ticularly of recent philosophical and religious discussions of nuclearwar and economic theory in which, by a subtle twist not often clear-ly recognized, the basic principle of modern political philo-sophy-to be alive at any cost-has come to replace the idea of

political being and ethical action found in Aristotelian andThomistic theory.' This is the path by which, it seems, modernpolitical philosophy and its premises have been subsumed intotheology. McCoy was correct to see that the consequences of thisposition must lead to the creation of some sort of "new being"presupposed to none of the actual exigencies of real essences given innature.

7) McCoy considered Grotius and Hume to be of particular im-

portance in this process of replacing moral action following givenbeing with the formation of "new being" defined only in terms of

8. It seems worth noting that almost the only American bishop during the discussionsof the pastoral on war who seemed to relate to these more profound issues of politicalphilosophy was Archbishop Oscar H. Lipscomb, who had been a student of CharlesN.R. McCoy at one point: Lipscomb remarked, " We speak of the `

existence of ourplanet' almost as an absolute, and our very concept of peace can easily be equated withthe merely temporal order. We seem to assign the human species itself a right to eterni-ty. This is certainly not the `biblical vision of the world at the heart of our religiousheritage.' The worst evil that can befall us is not the loss of our life, or of all humanlife. It is sin and the consequent loss of that life in the Father through Christ by meansof the Spirit that we rightly call life everlasting. Should this world and our species re-main in such a way that such life in the Father is not possible to generations that follow then we have threatened not the sovereignty of God over the world, but the victory of Christ over sin and death." New York Times, November 19, 1982. See the French andGerman bishops on this point, in James V. Schall, ed., Out of Justice, Peace (San Fran-cisco: Ignatius Press, 1983).




itself, so that there was, in principle, no question of any conflict be-

tween what is and what ought to be, a conclusion Hegel wouldproperly draw from the premises of modernity. Grotius'dictum-"the natural law would be the natural law even on the sup-position that God did not exist" (191-97)-and Hume's observationthat "the contrary of every matter of fact was possible" (224-35),were the two key intellectual instruments by which the order of nature as directed to an intelligible end, rationally so in the case of human beings, was severed from the Divine Intellect. This implied

that the order of nature had no source other than that imposed on itultimately from the autonomous human intellect, the only sourceleft by virtue of the hypothesis. McCoy frequently referred to theAristotelian-Thomistic notion of nature as a "substitute intelligence"to describe the fact that nature does reveal an evident order-fromtoads come toads-but that this order is not sufficiently explained bywhat is so ordered in its own being.

9 Nature reveals an order, andtherefore an intelligence, it did not itself "cause." The Gro-tian-Humean attack on final causality, however, had the result of

tempting man to substitute his own intellect as the cause of anyorder. In this sense, man sought a "common good" but one based onno other order except the one identifying his understanding with hiscorporate and species being. Thus, no reality could exist that wasnot "chosen" by all (Rousseau), that was not identified with all thatis. (212-22)

The purely natural and the purely animal "love" of the common good

implies a profound participation of nature in intelligence: for it in-

volves a movement toward a universal end. Now universal forms can-

not be received by nonrational nature. This is why in the Commentaryon Aristotle's Physics St. Thomas defines nature as a "ratio indita

rebus"-a reason put into things by the Divine Art so that they may act

for an end. . . . The natural law is in irrational nature only by way of

similitude: Nature is a "substitute intelligence." We are now in a posi-

tion to see the profound implications of the principle of the autonomy

of nature: If nature is conceived as the original formative principle of

all that is, then, since non-rational creatures cannot receive universal

forms, the notion of a common end in which all share is removed from

9. See E.B.F. Midgley, "On `Substitute Intelligences' in the Formation of AtheisticIdeology,"

Laval theologique et philosophique 37 (October, 1980), 239-53. McCoy'sinfluence on Midgley should also be noted, see especially Midgley's "Concerning theModernist Subversion of Political Philosophy," New Scholasticism 53 (Spring, 1979),168-90.




nature. The common good for which all of nature indeed acts willhenceforth be conceived as sufficiently accounted for in the action of creatures for their singular good, and further, this "common" good

will itself not be distinct from the substantial being of things conceivedas radically independent wholes. This will be the central doctrine,however differently explained, of the political philosophy of Hobbes,

Locke, and Rousseau. Man moves toward the condition of creator bymoving toward the condition of substitute intelligence which is nature:Man will be one with nature in not explicitly ordering himself to the

common good, and he will distinguish himself in nature (and thusbecome specifically "human") by ordering the common good of hisspecies in its material and efficient principles to maximize his in-dividual being. The identification of the individual with the species

will be done politically, i.e., man's nature as specifically human willbe coeval with the forming of political society by contract .... (197)

Moreover, McCoy saw in Rousseau in particular the architectwho located the active creative will in the universal human species

taken as a kind of Platonic or logical indistinction, so that "the in-dividual life and the general life must be made identical." (221) Thisproject, of course, remained abstract at the civil level in Rousseau.But the resultant "being" of society had to encompass the providen-tial order which in Aristotelian-Thomistic terms allowed differencesin real individuals and natural species, because nature did not createthem.

"The hidden purpose of the historical process is thus revealed." In theplace of the inequalities and distinctions that civil society hashistorically produced for the good of the few and the ruin of thespecies, a true public right must effect the union of each with all so thateach individual may consciously, on the human plane, refer himself tohimself a s to a kind of universal. There must be a return to the state of nature, but a "return to the future," on the human plane. (217)

This emphasis on "future," on man referring himself to himself (not

God) as a kind of universal (Plato) begins the final stages of thisanalysis that leads via Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Heideg-ger to the establishment in being, not merely in abstract thought, of a totally autonomous species-man wherein nothing exists but mantaken universally, having positively rejected everything which couldbe considered "from nature," everything not originally formed byman.

8) In the Conversations with Eric Voegelin, there is a passage that




serves to illuminate what McCoy was about, though, as I men-

tioned, McCoy did not seem to know Voegelin and probably wouldhave disagreed with his observation that Aristotle, at least, did notanticipate the idea of cosmic revolt. McCoy, indeed, often referredto the Aristotelian passage in the Metaphysics about human naturebeing in bondage with a tendency to revolt from its given conditionin which there was a contrariety of sense and reason. (3-5, 85)Voegelin remarked:

In classic philosophy and Christianity, the solution to the sorrows of

man-death and life and so on-are answered through turning towardGod, the periagoge in the Platonic sense, the turning around. Defor-mations occur if you refuse to turn around and persist in a state of alienation. Explicit persistence in the state of alienation (ch aracteristicof gnosis) is possible only after Christianity had differentiated theproblem of existence-a relation of man to the unknown God who isnot intercosmic (as the polytheistic type is) but extra-cosmic. Then o n-ly,-when that has been differentiated-can there arise the conceptionof an extra-cosmic existence of man in revolt .... The problem "what

is the decisive difference that appears with Christianity" is needed forexplaining also the revolutionary deformations which are our presentconcern. The type of revolution that appears after Christianity is notpresent in the cultural environment of Plato and Aristotle ... .Revolution would always destroy, but giving revolution the founda-tion of an existential theory-that man in his alienation is the ultimateentity-that is new.'°

The "ultimate entity" means that man in the deformation of his con-

dition replaces God.The Structure of Political Thought was written precisely to define

the nature of this "extra-cosmic existence of man in revolt," to definethe ontological status of the fact "that man in his alienation is theultimate entity." McCoy would have argued, however, that Chris-tianity, because of the doctrines of the incarnation of the Word andresurrection of the body, forced man in "intellectual revolt," "manfor himself," to turn on the given world and remove those traces of

order and meaning to be derived from the use of intellect as not acause of being, but merely a "knower" or contemplator of being.German philosophy from Kant to Marx and Heidegger was the in-strument whereby this development was completed. McCoy seemsalso to justify Voegelin's notion that by understanding what did hap-

10. Voegelin, 80, 83.




pen in political philosophy, there will be possible no moreideologies, since they are exhaustingly analyzed and have alreadycovered all the possible avenues that could give grounds for anyalternate being."

9) What McCoy found in Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, however,was the manner whereby the alternate being to Divine Being couldbe plausibly presented. McCoy's fascination with the young Marx isboth evident and justified in terms of intellectual history. Marx's im-patience with the philosophers who-correctly, he

thought-located man's being in thought, led him to the incarna-tional principle, from Aquinas through Feuerbach, of establishingthe "thought" of what is into concrete being, to change the world, ashe put it. The "revolutionary idea," as McCoy called it, was alogical step for man in revolt and alienated from his true being. The"logic" of this idea was a political logic in the Aristotelian sense that,upon the supposition that man was the highest being, politics wouldbe the highest science. But the "new science of politics" was freed

from the ontological moorings of the speculative intellect rooted ingiven being, so that the intellect's natural autonomy, on the supposi-tion that nothing was "formed" in nature, could be fully shown onlyby positively removing from being all the signs of the causes of nature, particularly human nature. Nothing could "be" but whatmen choose in revolt from the alienation of metaphysics and revela-tion, which were rooted in given being. This was the origin of the"violence" of revolutionary philosophies in the modern era. What

remained, then, was the identification of each with all, so that therecould be no diversity between what was one individual and another,even in his individuality. There was no "higher" cause that couldallow real diversity in being. When Marx said that everywhere helooked, the eye would be a human eye, the ear a human ear, he in-tended to identify man with the species. (262) He could do this bydenying any other source of intelligibility but the human intellect inrevolt.

10) In this process, McCoy did not see modern liberalism or con-

servatism as an "alternative" to the development of politicalmetaphysics, but rather as necessary contributors to it. (ChapterVIII) One can, perhaps, argue with McCoy's interpretation of Burkeespecially on factual grounds. It is possible to understand Burke,contrary to McCoy's position on him, as being connected directly

11 . Voegelin, 148.




with Aristotle's practical intellect. McCoy, on the other hand, sawBurke rather as the obverse side of modern liberalism which, itself bereft of any roots in being, identified freedom as opposition to whatmost people did most of the time. The liberal, thus, was someonewho, to identify his existence, did not do what most people did. Ob-viously, in McCoy's view, this would eventually justify anything inprinciple, which is pretty much what it has done, while failing to ac-count for the universality and communality of being that wasdiscovered by all as given. Burke, however, while more moderate,embraced the same principle in that the good was identified with

what most people did, a good principle except "in principle." Sincethe mores and customs of the people-themselves necessary forhuman beings-could embody anything, this meant that modernconservatism shared with modern liberalism any lack of speculative

rectitude about what ought to be derived from some source otherthan mere political will. In this sense, McCoy saw the developmentof modern ideological totalitarianism not as an exception or pureaberration but as a natural evolution of both liberalism and conser-

vatism. The theoretical "malleability" of man in modern politicaltheory with regard to what man is encompassed equally conser-vatism and liberalism to lead to totalitarianism, in McCoy's view.

(5-8)The central thesis that McCoy argued, then, was that it was possi-

ble to trace accurately the history and content of political theory sothat the interconnection between thinkers is clarified. In this sense,McCoy insisted that the "truth" of the metaphysical premises ortheir drawn conclusions was not directly at issue, however impor-

tant. (7) Here, he was not a value relativist, but a follower of Aquinas who felt the obligation, as we have seen, to understand whyand how alternative positions were put forth. Yet, this endeavor wasitself, as McCoy wrote in the biting review of A.R.M. Murray's In-troduction to Political Philosophy "extremely difficult." (Murray,360) Further, this effort in political philosophy did require taking aposition on the validity of truth itself, since contradictory views onhuman and cosmic being could not be equally and indifferently

held. Thus, McCoy was prepared to defend a central line of truth orreason by following how deviations from this line were possible andwhat form they took. What McCoy recognized was that truth andfreedom could not be defined or defended in just any old way. (7)The elements of myth and magic in the secular sphere are, of course,finally those political ideologies appearing in the twentieth century,




including forms of liberalism and conservatism as well as Marxismand fascism, which are imposed on reality as its very order and be-ing, with no source other than man himself in revolt against thethings that are.

In a passage reminiscent of Strauss's remark in City and Man thatthe history of political philosophy has replaced political philosophyitself so that what we have is not an account of truth but a record of more or less "brilliant" errors, McCoy recalled the character of modern autonomous political philosophy by suggesting its deviation

from reason and revelation in terms of Aquinas.

It was because of defective reason, St. Thom as says, that som e, realiz-ing that the Divine Being is also called the Being to which nothing isadded, supposed the Divine Being to be the common being of allthings, not perceiving that being-in-general cannot be without someaddition. Those who were guilty of thi9 error "gave the incom-mu nicable name, i .e. , Go d, to wood and stones." (Aquinas) But Feuer-bach, appreciating the fact that the Divine Being is common not by

predication but as a real "one toward many," whose causality extendsto all that is and to whatever anything is, gives the incommunicablename to M an. (288)

This result can come about because the being first apprehended bythe human intellect, indeterminate and confused, is made intoman's own object of himself.

For Feuerbach-as for Marx-the generic being of man as manifestingitself in the generic conscience is `being thinking for itself.' . Thepure potentiality of the most imperfect of intellectual natures (i.e.,m an's) may be regarded as the "theoretical form" of the m ost indeter-minate and confused universal-the being of common predication.(289)

The intelligibility of the "revolutionary idea," then, cannot beunderstood unless it is seen to be derived from human intellection.

In his study of political philosophy, McCoy sought to preserve therational foundations of humane living through man's intellectualability to defend himself by knowing what he was. Speculativephilosophy's formal "uselessness," in Aristotle's sense, turned out tobe the very thing that could protect human life. The project McCoy followed was, no doubt, "extremely difficult," but he recognizedthat the failure in the order of thought to account for how menreflected on their meaning could lead formally and logically to a




revolutionary metaphysics which sought to replace revelation andontology, indeed, to replace any order not a product of the practicalhuman intellect deprived of theoretical rectitude.

Man is the least among intelligent beings. The contrariety of sense andreason in man makes it extremely difficult for him to achieve thefreedom of which he is basically capable. And this condition of in-feriority as compared with higher intellectual natures produces in mana tendency to revolt against his condition, against the "givenness" of things. This is the reason why, throughout the history of politicalthought and political practice, we observe a twofold effort toward theconquest of liberty: one, a genuine effort springing from man's genericand unique capacity for self-government; but the second is a speciouseffort, often insinuating itself into the first, confusing itself with it andexpressing itself as an "emancipation" from the basic human condition,indeed, from basic natural right. (5)

The Structure of Political Thought is, then, the account of these twonotions of freedom and their relationships.

McCoy's position with regard to both Augustine and Aquinas, inthis context, needs to be further attended to as the drift of muchChristian theory since his time has been in the direction of theideologies that replaced the metaphysical and revelational analysisof the Christian tradition. Strauss's modern project and Voegelin'sgnosticism have taken on theological form so that the very functionof revelation and reason in the classical sense is jeopardized. Theonly formal book in so-called "Christian Marxism" which McCoyreviewed was Joseph Petulla's Christian Political Theology: A Marx-

ian Guide, one of the last things McCoy wrote. Interestingly, Mc-Coy made three points: 1) that by endeavoring to use Marx as a toolto recover interest in the world, a task presumably obscured byreason and revelation in their classical forms, Christian thinkers"deprecate . . . the roots of Marxist concepts and their own revolu-tionary meaning." (Petulla, 624) McCoy understood that themodern thinkers were not merely concerned with tactical im-

provements in man's condition but sought a complete system to

replace religion itself. Christians who did not understand the scopeand meaning of this effort were not only innocent of intellectualhistory but not clear about their own faith and its intent.

2) Such thinkers also deprecate "the political revolutionary quali-ty of Christian theology itself." That is, the solution to basic realistquestions arising in reason did require, as Aquinas noted in histheory of law, certain incentives from revelation. 3) Any theory that




strives to incite men to construct a better world on the grounds thatChristian theology as such has no impulse to do so is not factuallycorrect. (Petulla, 625) Both Augustine and Aquinas argued that'Christianity would work to improve the world, in its own order, butonly if it, that is the faith, attended first to what it is. Curiously, thishas been the precise line of argument John Paul II has taken againstthe ideological theologians who so often dominate thesediscussions.

12This was why, moreover, a failure to grasp what Marx

was really about in intellectual history also failed to grasp whatChristianity was about. The former is essentially, in the order of be-ing, a denial of the other as to what constitutes reality. Ironically, asMcCoy understood, against the aberrations of the so-called Chris-tian Marxists, it is necessary to protect Marx in order to protectChristianity from those who have lost the meaning of the western in-tellectual tradition.

Behind McCoy's defense of political philosophy was his recogni-tion that revelation, as a contributor to political philosophy in its

own order, itself depended on the legitimacy of reason. Aristotle, inthis sense, is no secondary figure, as Aquinas realized. In aremarkable brief review of Alan Gewirth's Marsilius of Padua, Mc-Coy was concerned with Gewirth's steady refusal to say "whetherthe Marsilian revolution was good or bad, right or wrong."(Gewirth, 146) But McCoy was even more concerned about the at-tempt, pioneered by Marsilius, to make Aristotle into a totalitarianby denying to his thought any teleology. McCoy saw in certain neo-

Thomists an acceptance of this version of Aristotle, which led to the"Marsilian design of ruining the rational foundations of the faith,"the product of a form of Latin Averroism, the "two truths" in whichfaith and reason could be equally true. This would result in areligion not dependent on reason and a reason denied of theoreticalrectitude. McCoy concluded:

Is it not interesting that the most telling blow against the Church'sclaim to interference in the temporal order is struck not against

Boniface, not against St. Thomas, not against the New Testament, butagainst Aristotle? How did Marsilius so astutely pick his target? Was itmerely a tactical consideration that dictated this choice? Or was it notrather the perception that the destruction of final causes and of specificnatures in the natural orders would alone bring to nought the claims of

12. See James V. Schall, Church, State, and Society in the Thought of John Paul II

(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1982).




the Church to lead men toward an end and to a life above the natural?(Gewirth, 143)

1 3

McCoy had consistently argued that revelation is defended whenreason is defended, the Thomist principle, that grace builds onnature and completes it. 14 Unless the legitimate questions of philosophy and political philosophy, however, arise and are ar-ticulated, man cannot know as man, that is, with his intelligence,whether anything is addressed to him on these very questions. Thedefense of political philosophy, in this sense, is the defense of revela-

tion. When this is lacking, which seems to be the conclusion of morerecent experience, theology itself tends to take up the ideologiesbased upon the human construction of being against anything but

what man forms.

It is perhaps curious that this very important step of explicating thenature of the political community of freemen was accomplished underthe aegis of a society-the Christian Church, whose aim was the at-tainment of perfect happiness after this life. But indeed, the frustration

of "half-contemplation and half-action" (Marx) of the post-Aristotelian world, its weariness with the human lot, had threatened to ruin thestructure of human knowledge in ethical and political science. Thisfrustration had its roots in the intricate psychological structure of man's nature, reflected in Aristotle's triple alternatives: god, beast, andsocial animal. It had its roots in the impossibility of a satisfactory natural solution to the ultimate political question of human happiness.

A revolution profounder than man was capable of by his own naturalpowers seemed required if the natural wisdom of the ancient world, so

hard won, was to be preserved, if the structure of political philosophy was to be safeguarded. (98)

It is from this point of view that any alliance of religion and ideologycan be seen to deprive men both of philosophy and any human open-ness to what man did not make.

In the beginning, I suggested that the place to begin a considera-tion of McCoy was with his review of Cassirer, while the place toend it is with his consideration of Strauss. 15 The only extensive treat-

13. See Henry Veatch, "The Idea of a Christian Science and Scholarship: Sense orNonsense?" Faith and Philosophy (January, 1984), 89-110; Stanley Jaki, The Road of

Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).14. See Josef Pieper, Scholasticism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).15. See James V. Schall, "Reason, Revelation, and Politics: Catholic Reflections onStrauss," Gregorianum, 63 (#2 and #3, 1981), 349-65, 467-97. See also Michael




ment McCoy made of Strauss-he cited him nine times in the Struc-

ture of Political Thought-was in the 1973 Review of Politics essay,an essay that deserves careful attention since it not only recapitulatesMcCoy's overall position but states why he was concerned about theStraussian influence in political philosophy, in spite of the fact thatboth McCoy and Strauss were concerned with the ideological resultsof specifically modern political philosophy and saw a return totradition as a necessary step to countermand it. Strauss, unlike therationalist philosophers Cassirer pointed to, was concerned to keep

open some plausibility for revelation, particularly that of the OldTestament.16

Yet, for McCoy, the capacity for protecting revelationdepended first on the capacity of reason to know and analyze ac-curately the things of nature that were its objects, things reasonknew but did not make. McCoy, unlike Strauss, never defendedrevelation on the grounds that reason could never know anythingabout it. If something claimed to be "revealed," it was precisely thefundamental function of reason to attempt to understand what hadactually happened and to reflect upon it.

McCoy ' s concern with Strauss-McCoy never reviewed a book of Strauss-centered on Strauss's treatment of modern natural right.McCoy classified Strauss, in spite of Strauss's own efforts todisassociate himself from this school, to be a modern natural rightsthinker because of the manner in which Strauss understood Aristo-tle's notion of natural right. This had cut Strauss off from the kind of reason-revelation relationship characteristic in Augustine andAquinas and led Strauss to prefer Plato to Aristotle as a guide, a step

away from true being in McCoy's view.

The principle of indigenousness and of private ownership that belong to this concept of the nature of the state as a plurality make it necessary, in Strauss' view, to sunder the notion of the best regime asidentical with the perfect moral order. Furthermore, in Aristotle'sphilosophy, the ultimate reasons for things are not found subjectifiedin the things of which the world is composed. This Aristotelian position

Jackson, "Leo Strauss' Teaching: A Study in Thoughts on Machiavelli, " (Ph.D. disser-tation, Georgetown University, 1985).16. See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing ( Westport, CT: GreenwoodPress, 1952); "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy," Independent Jour-

nal of Philosophy 3 (1979), 111-18; "Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflec-tions," in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, Thomas P. Pangle, ed. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1983), 147-73.




prepares the way, of course, for the Thomistic view of natural right,

which is rooted in Aristotelian natural theology and brought to com-pletion by revealed religion. This is a position and a consequence unac-ceptable to Strauss. (

"Revival,

"172)

The reference McCoy gave to this passage is, rightly, to Natural

Right and History (163-64), wherein Strauss attempted to deny thatAquinas was a philosopher on the grounds that certain incentivesfrom revelation incited him to think more clearly on subjects properto philosophy or reason. (See here also "Humanae Vitae," 265-72)

McCoy saw, further, Strauss's Platonism as something which ig-nored "the various levels of beings and not (able to treat) them ontheir own terms.

"("Revival," 178) This deprived the differing levels

of actual beings of their own intelligibility to become instead merely"Platonic forms, empty as logical universals" and "filled by thesubstitute intelligence of the real world of nature." McCoy then sawStrauss implicated in Plato's failure to distinguish levels of actual be-ing. The danger of this was clear, as Strauss himself saw, when the

ideal was either identified with the real or made actual by a move-ment to impose some man-made form from modern politicalmetaphysics. Yet,

"Strauss appears to allow his fear of philosophy's

transforming itself into theology to overcome his profound distastefor a philosophy that disappears into politics." ("Revival," 178) Thelatter, of course, the disappearance of philosophy into politics isStrauss's "modern project." Instead of resolving the question of thebest theoretical regime as Aquinas did in Aristotelian terms of mixed

polity, Strauss adhered to "the Platonic notion of the best regime asidentical with the perfect moral order." ("Revival," 178-79)

Strauss's own solution was, for McCoy, "a quite personal one"

because the achievement of the Aristotelian "inferior polity"-thebest practical state-does not and cannot correspond with its goals,i.e., true virtue. Strauss used the term "nature's grace" to suggesthow wise rulers can in this context, that is, reason separated fromrevelation, "introduce order into the unlimited," which phrase wasAristotle's for the function of the First Mover. McCoy thus conclud-

ed that "This is a touching, even admirable faith; it is also, I believe,a quite desperate one: Strauss drinks wine with Plato and hemlock with Socrates." ("Revival," 179)

What is the exact meaning of this latter cryptic observation of Mc-Coy? The essential meaning seems to be that, for McCoy, Strausswas not an Aristotelian whose system could, by being itself, be opento intelligence addressed to it in terms of its own perceived prob-




lems. By failing to resolve properly the relation of reason and revela-tion, Strauss was unable adequately to prevent politics from absorb-ing philosophy into itself. On the other hand, it could also be arguedthat a theoretical theology not grounded in the realism of an Aristo-tle or an Aquinas rapidly has become the vehicle for carrying out in-to the world precisely the absorption of both philosophy and revela-tion back into a politics now presupposed to no form but thatfashioned by the autonomous intellect. Usually, this appeared in thePlatonic terms of transforming (or eradicating) family, property,

and limited polity, those institutions McCoy saw to guarantee thelimited nature of what man is while in this world, but limited insuch a way as to remain open to the real good of being, includingrevelation. (24-27, 54-61, 140, 296-97)

In his essay on "Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and the Doctrine of St.Thomas," McCoy made one of his many statements about the in-tellectual "end" of modern political philosophy. McCoy meant bythis "end"-and it is to this that the "structure of political thought"

logically leads when it deviates from a grounding in real being-notmerely some utopian dream of a perfect this-worldly society of abstract Platonic "equality and justice," but a dream or myth thatdid present itself, in a kind of perverted genius, as the existingperfection of rationalism and of a practical political philosophywhich really did get rid of final and formal causes in nature by itsown methods, these now presupposed to no speculative norms. Thefinal and formal causes in nature in Aristotle and Aquinas were in

modern theory replaced by what the will of man produced in thispolitical world. Machiavelli's dictum of abandoning what menought to do in favor of what they do "do" ended up by identifyingman V ith all men, generic man, so that w hat is is equated with whatis collectively willed. Man needed to be "emancipated" ("Hegel,"337) from the final and formal causes recognized in nature, par-ticularly human nature, and this emancipation or elimination need-ed to be seen as a proper intellectual and historical understanding of what they were, where and how they might arise. These were

replaced by a positive revolutionary act, drawing on nothing but themind itself, its own "creative" power, as it were, but still defiantlydirected against any suggestion that man did not totally "cause"himself. This meant, it should be noted, that modern revolutionarypolitical philosophy had to know what it did, had to understandlikewise the right order of intellectual history, particularly whatAristotle and Aquinas held.




Moreover, it was not McCoy's understanding of the new

"freedom" of being that such a system could not come about in factby human enterprise. Indeed, he argued, following Cassirer'sastonishment about the appearance of myth and magic in the twen-tieth century, that it was coming about because the thought pro-cesses which made it intelligible were in place by the time of Marx,Nietzsche, and Heidegger. And McCoy's arguments and book reviews indicate that these modern "principles" were almost as wellin place in democratic societies as in totalitarian ones. This meant

that a lack of will or energy to "understand" the essential terms of western metaphysics-(McCoy's dealing with Nehru suggests thatnothing stands outside of this theoretical system [311-14])-madethe "man-in-revolt" or the "man-for-himself" concept of the mean-ing of reality a possible alternative. What McCoy argued was that

this result, which bound all political philosophy in a unified wholebecause it could be understood in its "tradition," could be tracedstep by step beginning with Plato and Aristotle (he does not mentionThucydides) through the history of political philosophy and prac-

tice. These steps, while fortuitous in one sense, were neverthelesslogical and rational, even fascinating, especially when they weremost radically wrong and dangerous in actual being. The"speculative" part of political philosophy, the work that could notbe done by the politicians, or even by the theologians, had to bedone by the philosopher who sought to understand exactly what wasbeing argued and why. This was the real defense of common humanbeings who actually exist, Socrates, Plato, and Mary, what the

philosopher "owed" them.McCoy suggested that there was a correlation between the best

polity and philosophy. Yet, because he recognized that man'shighest aims and goods were not to be resolved in any actual polityas such, even the best, what McCoy obviously meant by the "bestpolity" was a limited, varied, practical city, not a substitute for orreplacement of the Kingdom of God on earth. McCoy's criticism of Strauss on this point ought not to be seen as justifying the latter-day

political or religious utopianism, even in Christian terminology,that has in fact appeared, much to the legitimate concern of aStrauss or a Voegelin, who rightly concerned themselves in theirstudies of political philosophy with these very same mythical andmagical projections that McCoy from Cassirer saw to have gaineddominance in this century.

In conclusion, the Structure of Political Thought brings us




through that body of thought necessary to understand the attractionof man-in-revolt as well as the attraction of the idea of given beingfrom which this revolt could take place. That this "revolt" on itsgrandest scale lies in the sphere of political philosophy is itself logicalsince this alternative to the contemplative, given being with whichAristotle begins his Metaphysics and ends his Ethics, is a world putinto "existence" by man himself as incorporating the whole of what

is but now on the model of man's exclusive choice of its content.Writing of Marcel and Heidegger, McCoy observed that "the sug-

gestion is being made that the bomb is only the terrible external signof that `darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, and thedestruction of the earth' whose prototype is an intensity of defect inthe very heart of man

's being." ("Historical," 219) Heidegger thus

proposed, to save us, "the destruction of the history of ontology."That is to say, if thought brings us to existential impasses, we shouldattend to the origins of this very thought. And this step behindmetaphysics, as it has led to the species-man-in-revolt, is what again

can make possible the actual seeing of the being that is given not byman, but by what is.

What is significant in McCoy's treatment of Heidegger is the wayin which Heidegger's destruction of ontology constructed by man-in-revolt leads back to the simple awareness of being as not subjectto the power of man-to being given as such.

Heidegger proposes the destruction of the history of ontology-an on-tology which was brought to perfection by Hegel and was brought

down to earth by Marx. Hence, it is not the winning-whetherspeculatively or practically-of the world of that-which-is that engages Heidegger. Rather, he wishes to go behind both metaphysicsand technics to the "origins," to the "poverty of existence"-to lay bareby denuding the world of that-which-is. If with Marx, philosophy passes into practice by transposing to the practical intellect all that

Aristotle had reserved to the speculative intellect, Heidegger brings usto a simple contemplation of the nudity of the world that is subject tothe total power of man.

.... Werner Brock has pointed out the sequence in Heidegger'

sanalysis of, "on the one hand, the experience of Nothingness as theground of being, and, on the other, the resulting genuine meditationon the coming into their own of the things in the world." The evoca-tion of the Book of Genesis by Heidegger's meditation on Nothingnessshows the kinship of his position with Kierkegaard's "leap" of faith. In-deed, the Heideggerian experience of Nothingness as a preparation forthe coming into their own of the things in the world had its counter-




part in the individual's Being-toward-Death as awakening him to the

formlessness, as it were, of his substantial being by comparison withthe accidental being which renders him good in the absolutesense-which being, if we consider the order of things themselves, iswhat man principally is, and which ... consists ultimately in man'sbringing the corporal world back to its first Principle. ("Historical,"229-30)

The return of corporal, given being to its first principle, the originalfunction of man both in Aristotle and in Genesis, not merely allows

particular beings to be understood in their "is-ness," but allowsthem to fall within a finality in which their proper being, throughman, perfects him, to return at a higher level to the origin of being.

This is the final statement of the positive side of classicalmetaphysics before political reality and revelation:

In Classical-Christian tradition, the state, law, morals, science, spirit,were participations of the human intellect in the life of that Prime In-

tellect upon wh ose perfect freedom depend the heavens and the wo rldof nature: All human activities, Aristotle had pointed out, are akin toG od's activity. The likeness of the specu lative intellect, in science andwisdom, was said to be one of "union" and "informing," while that of the prac tical intellect, in the civilizing arts, wa s said to be on e of "pro -portion." And of the virtues that pertain to . human affairs-thepolitical virtues-St. Thomas observed that their exemplars mustpreexist in God, just as in Him preexist the types of all things. Thegreat lacuna in the development of political thought and practice has

been the failure to combine the wisdom that knows that here we haveno everlasting city, with the wisdom that knows the need to put thepolitical virtues under some degree of pressure as it were, from theirexemplars in the Divine Mind . . . . (312-13)

It is significant, no doubt, and revealing that McCoy called this atrue "liberalism," the source of which he found in Aristotle andAquinas and Augustine. In other words, the account of the "de-formed" side of political philosophy can and should lead, if for no

other reason than pure intellectual exhaustion, to the fresh andoriginal understanding of given being with the political philosophy,metaphysics, and revelation it leads to. The Structure of Poltical

Thought is demanding and rewarding for those growing few whosense the exhaustion of the ideologies and the danger that revelationitself may, for many, be absorbed into them. Genuine politicalphilosophy is the first defense of freedom, and freedom is the open-



104 T H E P O L I T IC A L S C I E N C E R E V I E W E R

ness not to what we make by ourselves presupposed only toourselves, but openness to what is, given not made by our intellects.

Georgetown University JAMES V. SCH ALL , S.J.

Complete bibliography of essays and reviews

by Charles N.R. McCoy, 1933-1976Prepared by

Professor John J. Schrems, Villanova University

I. Essays *"American Federalism: Theory and Practice,

" Review of Politics

2 (January, 1940), 105-17."American Political Philosophy after 1865," Thought 21

(January, 1946), 249-71."Democracy and the Rule of Law," Modern Schoolman 25

(November, 1947), 1-10."The Dilemma of Liberalism," Laval Theologique et Philo-

sophique 16 (#1, 1960), 9-19."The Doctrine of Judicial Review and the Natural Law," Catholic

University of America Law Review 6 (December, 1956), 97-102."Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and the Doctrine of St. Thomas

Aquinas," Sapientis Aquinatis (Romae: Officium Libri Catholici,1955), Vol. I, 328-38.

"The Historical Position of Man Himself (on Heidegger)," Melanges a la Memoire de Charles de Koninck (Quebec: Les Presses

de 1'Universite Laval, 1968), 219-31."Hurnanae Vitae: Perspectives and Precisions," New

Scholasticism 44 (Spring, 1970), 265-72."The Law Relating to Public Inland Waters" (Chicago: Universi-

ty of Chicago Press, 1940), (Ph.D. Abstract).

"The Logical and the Real in Political Theory: Plato, Aristotle,and Marx," American Political Science Review 48 (December,1954), 1058-66. *

"Ludwig Feuerbach and the Formation of the Marxian Revolu-

* An asterisk after an entry indicates that this essay is also to be

found in the Structure of Political Thought.



T H E U N I T IE S O F P O L IT IC A L P H I L O S O P H Y 105

tionary Idea," Laval Theologique et Philosophique 7 (#2, 1951),

218-48.*"The Meaning of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Structure of

Political Theory," Proceedings of the American CatholicPhilosophical Association 50 (1956), 50-62.*

"Note on the Problem of the Origin of Political Authority," The

Thomist 16 (January, 1953), 71-81."The Place of Machiavelli in the History of Political Thought,"

American Political Science Review 37 (August, 1943), 626-41. *

"On the Revival of Classical Political Philosophy," Review of Politics 35 (April, 1973), 161-79."Social Justice in Quadragesimo Anno," Social Order 7 (June,

1957), 258-63."Sociology of Religion," Commonweal 67 (November 8, 1957),

153-54.

"St. Augustine,"

in History of Political Philosophy, Edited by Leo

Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1963),151-59.*

"St. Thomas and Political Science," in Thomistic Principles in aCatholic School, Edited by Theodore Bauer (St. Louis: Herder,1947), 264-87.

"St. Thomas Aquinas," in History of Political Philosophy, Editedby Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1963),201-26.*

"The Turning Point in Political Philosophy," American Political

Science Review 44 (September, 1950), 678-88. *

"The Value-Free Aristotle and the Behavioral Sciences," WesternPolitical Quarterly 23 (March, 1970), 57-74.

II. Entries in New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967)"Bodin, Jean," Vol 2, 630."Political Philosophy," Vol. 11, 510-16."Political Thought, History of," Vol. 11, 525-31.

III. Book ReviewsBecker, Carl L. Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way

of Life. In Catholic Historical Review 32 (April, 1946), 98-100.

Brecht, Arnold. Political Theory: The Foundations of Twentieth

Century Political Thought. In Catholic Historical Review 46 (July,1960), 214-16.




Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. In Modern Schoolman 25

( May, 1948), 271-78.Ewing, A.C. The Individual, the State, and World Government.

In Modern Schoolman 28 (January, 1951), 164-65.Friedrich, Carl Joachim. Inevitable Peace. In Modern Schoolman

26 (May, 1949), 364-66.Gewirth, Alan. Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace. In

Modern Schoolman 31 (January, 1954), 146-47.Hermens, F.A. Democracy or Anarchy? In Catholic Historical

Review 28 (July, 1942), 293-94.Hillenbrand, Martin J. Power and Morals. In Modern Schoolman

28 (March, 1951), 235.Hockett, Homer C. The Constitutional History of the United

States, 1776-1826. In Catholic Historical Review 25 (October,

1939), 398-99.Hockett, Homer C. The Constitutional History of the United

States, 1826-76. In Catholic Historical Review 26 (October, 1940),

403-04.

Holcombe, Arthur N. The Middle Classes in American Politics. InCommonweal 33 (January 10, 1941), 305.

Hudson, Manley O. International Tribunals, Past and Future. In

Catholic Historical Review 31 (October, 1945), 368.Jones, S. Shepherd, and Denys P. Meyers (editors). Documents of

American Foreign Relations, Vol. III, July, 1940-June, 1941. In

Catholic Historical Review 28 (April, 1943), 557.Le Boutillier, Cornelia Greer. American Democracy and Natural

Law. InCatholic Historical Review 37

(July, 1951), 202.Lerner, Ralph, and Mushin Mahdi (editors). Medieval Political

Philosophy: A Sourcebook. In Catholic Historical Review 52

(January, 1967), 593-95.Lewis, Ewart (editor). Medieval Political Ideas. In Catholic

Historical Review 42 (October, 1956), 363.Mariana, Juan de. The King and the Education of the King (An

English Translation and Criticism by George Albert Moore). In Modern Schoolman 27 ( May, 1950), 329.

Mcllwain, Charles Howard. Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern. In Catholic Historical Review 27 (July, 1941), 263.

Merriam, Charles E. Systematic Politics. In Catholic Historical

Review 33 (January, 1948), 480-81.Morris, Christopher. Western Political Thought: Vol. I: Plato to

Augustine. In Catholic Historical Review 56 (January, 1971),695-96.



T H E U N I T IE S O F P O L I T IC A L P H I L O S O P H Y 107

Murray, A.R.M. An Introduction to Political Philosophy.

InCatholic Historical Review 41 (October, 1955), 359-60.Niebuhr, Reinhold. Christian Realism and Political Problems. In

Catholic Historical Review 40 (October, 1954), 318-20.Petulla, Joseph. Christian Political Theology: A Marxian Guide.

In The Thomist 27 (July, 1973), 624-25.Powers, Francis J. (editor). Papal Pronouncements on the

Political Order. In Catholic Historical Review 39 (April, 1953),104-05.

Ullmann, Walter. Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages. In Catholic Historical Review 49 (October, 1963),429-31.

IV. Notes and Unpublished Materials"Communication on `Tickets for Utopia'," Commonweal 18

(August 4, 1933), 347."Dialectics of Freedom," Commonweal 22 (October 25, 1935),

626 ."A Serious Indictment," Social Justice Review 44 (November,1951), 236.

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343-44.Mclnerny, Ralph M. In New Scholasticism 39 (July, 1965),

405-07.Schwandt, J.A. In Thought 41 (Spring, 1966), 159-60.Wilson, Francis Graham. In Catholic Historical Review 50 (July,

1964), 239-40.