Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More (review)

"Incorrectly Political is not a conventional study of influence and intellectual debts" (p. 232). There is no doubt about that. What is less clear is what it is; still less, what it is for. It is neither an obvious nor an easy book. It offers a powerfully if digressively argued case against interpretations of the writings of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas More that cast them as committed exponents of political engagement with serious hopes for the amelioration of the human lot on earth. Kaufman proposes that such readings reflect the aspirations and preoccupations of modern intellectuals, especially Christian intellectuals, rather than the thinking of Augustine and More. He concedes that for each author, such a case can be made from aspects of their work, but insists that the grain of their thought is in a very different direction—that of a fundamental pessimism about the possibility of justice in social and political relationships and structures.

Kaufman's work is, as ever, clever, learned, and intricately constructed, as well as more than a little puzzling. There are not many scholars who could usefully contribute to discussions on both these writers on the evident basis of familiarity with the relevant secondary literature on both the authors and their contexts. Throughout, the author delivers a torrent of obiter dicta that, while often stimulating and even provocative, flow strangely from the pen of one who chides Quentin Skinner as "overly fond of eye-catching claims" (p. 169). The book, therefore, almost defies review.

Two problems strike the half-informed reader. The first is whether it really does make sense to write a book on Augustine and More that is not arguing for any particular influence of the former on the latter. Kaufman suggests that it does, as they are both reading "from the same page." But are they? The City of God and Utopia are such very different books, late Roman North Africa and early Tudor England such very different contexts, and the battling bishop and the laughing lawyer such very different men, that the claim comes across more as an excuse. True, both men were plagued by similar bugbears. The Protestants of the sixteenth century were far closer than they liked to admit to the Donatists of the fifth. But even that passing similarity fails as a yoke. The Protestants, after all, were willing or at least had the opportunity (as the Donatists were not or had not) to forge a working relationship with the temporal power.

This book, then, is simply two essays on a common theme—political pessimism (or realism, as its exponents would doubtless insist). And this leads to the second problem. If the politically engaged Augustine and More of some twentieth-century readings are simply reflections of twentieth-century progressivism, might Kaufman's pair of pessimists be nothing more than reflections of an intellectual disenchantment that looks on the works of Bush and Blair in despair? Or even of that more widespread erosion of respect for traditional institutions and authorities which afflicts Western society and fuels its increasing tendencies toward romantically rationalized terrorism and random violence?

The third and greatest problem with the argument, however, is that it seems to push its pessimism far beyond that of the authors under consideration.

The hermeneutical key to Kaufman's reading of Augustine is the famous story of the pirate who, hauled up before Alexander the Great, told him that remota iustitia, a great empire was no better than a gang of thieves. Kaufman maintains that the ablative absolute is not, as most readers have taken it, an implicit condition ("if justice is taken away. . ."), but a mere statement of fact. But this is a tendentious reading even apart from the risk taken in ascribing Augustine's own lack of confidence in the very possibility of true justice on earth to the pirate in the story. For if, by Augustine's understanding of justice, states simply are grand larceny, then...