Politics, Innocence, and the Limits of Goodness by Peter Johnson (review)

110Rocky Mountain Review should stimulate further exploration of the ideological ends which contemporary philological practices serve. Her analysis attests to the complexity of textual production and transmission and to the necessity of developing literary critical methodologies which embrace and attempt to account for—rather than efface—such complexity. This work will be valuable not only to specialists in the field of Renaissance Italian studies, but also to paleographers, philologists, feminists, and literary critics interested in examining methodological and theoretical issues embedded in critical practice. LAURIE J. CHURCHILL Ohio Wesleyan University PETER JOHNSON. Politics, Innocence, and the Limits of Goodness. New York: Routledge, 1988. 283 p. In his Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce definespolitics as a "strife ofinterests masquerading as a contest ofprinciples. The conduct ofpublic affairs for private advantage," thus implying that there are no innocent practitioners ofpolitics. Nietzsche, as quoted by Peter Johnson, thought that political moralists are like nasty insects: "those who call themselves 'the good' I found to be the most poisonous flies: they bite in all innocence, they lie in all innocence; how could they be just to me?" (257). Johnson's purpose is not to satirize politics or castigate its practitioners, but rather to examine "the place of moral innocence in politics," to "analyze its nature, and to explain why it is that it may threaten politics" (1). In ten chapters and a conclusion, he deals with the paradoxical thesis that such innocence may well be incompatible with politics and do harm to a society, because the political innocent may be incapable oftaking morally questionable actions for the greater good of society. Arguing that moral innocence can be active as well as passive, Johnson asserts that the loss of such a virtue may harm not only the person who possesses it but also have a wider influence, either negative or positive, on society. As Johnson says, "It is impossible to act politically and retain virtue uncompromised" (28). He illustrates his thesis in four literary case studies which deal with the problem of moral innocence operating in critical political circumstances'. Shakespeare's Cor?oL·nus and Henry VI, Part Three, Melville's Billy Budd, and Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Johnson cites Coriolanus as a politician whose pride will not allow him to compromise his ideals. Although he is brave and self-sacrificing, he is totally unfit for the political arena: "he represents a deadly subversion ofthe political realm, but not simply because he is tactically inept. He is dangerous because of his absolute refusal to see politics in terms of history and stratagem" (95). His innocence results in "the abolition of trust, the lynch-pin of the relation between morality and politics; the destruction of moral agreement, with the stability and certainties it implies; and the consequent multiplication of political crime" (186). When the crisis demands political assertiveness, hardheaded policy, and decisive action, Henry VI can offer only fuzzy-minded Book Reviews111 self-reflection and, as a result, inflicts his kingdom with a paralysis which his enemies quickly exploit to their own advantage. Unlike Coriolanus and Henry VI, Melville's Billy Budd is ignorant ofboth the world and politics. Even though he represents no special political interest or viewpoint, he nevertheless poses a moral problem for Captain Vere, whose "virtue appropriate to politics . . . has to bear the burden of the clash between goodness and evil" (199). Totally unaware of the existence of evil, Billy is unprepared for Claggart's villainy, and when he kills his antagonist, he places Vere in the dilemma ofhaving to make an inadequate choice between goodness and evil, between Billy's appearance of guilt and Claggart's semblance of innocence. Greene's The Quiet American, according to Johnson, shows how a nation like the United States, "certain in the purity of its motives, convinced of its pity for the suffering and inadequate existence of others, and determined in its power and capacity to remove them, can ensnare itself in its moral innocence" so blindly that it makes victims ofthe very people it tries to help (217). The "quiet American" PyIe, a political innocent in the American foreign service in Vietnam, obtusely uses a corrupt tribal chieftain and violence to bring...