unassertive, and selfless, she neither rep-resents the virtues of local custom, likePickwick, nor strains toward universalityof value, like Myshkin. She is a figure atrest, in a setting where everything else isturbulent and false; she is sufficient untoherself, harmonious in nature, unquali-fiedly responsive to others. She has noneed to think about, nor in respondingto her do we feel obliged to invoke, theCategorical Imperative, or any universal-ization of Christian values. Her goodnessis a quality of being without any pres-sure to invoke whatever might be "high-er" than or "beyond" goodness. Theimaginative realization of this figure isso pure and lucid, mere ideas fade away.

Little Dorrit is not innocent, and rare-ly, if ever, sentimental. No one who hasgrown up in the Marshaisea prison couldbe innocent; no one who has had to putup with aii those wretched Dorrits couldlong be sentimental. She knows quiteenough about the varieties of selfish-ness; that's why Dickens has providedher with the family she has, to educateher in the ways of the world. Andthough she exists entirely within theworld, she has no designs upon it, nei-ther to transform nor to transcend it. Shehas no designs of any kind; she is simplya possibility, very rare, of our existence.

What seems to have inspired the cre-ation of Little Dorrit was Dickens's re-sidual sentiment of Christianity, a senseor memory of a faith unalloyed by dog-ma, aggression, or institution. This is a"religion," if religion at all, of affection,or an ethic without prescription or for-mula. Dickens himself, as he knew quitewell, was far from embodying anythingof the sort; but his imagination cherishedthe possibility, arousing in him the sortof upwelling emotions that the vision ofBilly Budd must have aroused in Mel-ville. Tlie religious experience had large-ly been lost to Dickens, except insofar asit might leave a sediment of purity.

Little Dorrit is not at all a "Christ fig-ure." She does not ask anyone to aban-don the world's goods and follow her;she could not drive the money changersfrom the temple; nor can one imagineher on a cross, though she might beamong those mourning near it. Nothingeven requires that we see her as a dis-tinctively Christian figure, though noth-ing prevents us either. The great demandupon the reader of Little Dorrit—it canbring on a virtual moral crisis—is to seeher quite as she is, unhaloed, not at all"symbolic," perhaps sublime but in noway transcendent. She makes no de-

mands upon anyone, nor does she try todistinguish herself in any respect. Herbehavior is geared entirely to the needsand feelings of those who are near her.She is a great comforter, which may beall that goodness can be in this world.No one could possibly say of Little Dor-rit, as Aglaya says of Prince Myshkin,that she lacks tenderness and "has noth-ing but the truth." What can truth be toher, who lives by the grace of dailyobligation?

Little Dorrit is an astonishing concep-tion, perhaps the sole entirely persuasivefigure of "positive goodness" in modernfiction. As against Dostoyevsky's pre-scription, she is drawn neither in thecomic mode nor as an innocent. Formodem readers she constitutes a severeproblem. Some dismiss her as insipid,others find it difficult to credit her reali-ty, and perhaps difficult to live with thatreality if they do credit it. Finally, aswith all literary judgments, we reach apoint where exegesis, persuasion, and el-oquence break down, and fundamentaldifferences of perception have to be ac-knowledged. 1 feel myself that a failureto respond to the shy magnificence ofwhat Dickens has done here signifies adepletion of life.

How does he manage? I wish therewere some great clinching formula, but Ido not believe there is—a part of criticalwisdom is to recognize the limits of criti-cal reach. Part of the answer, a fairly

small part, may be due to what somecritics have seen as Dickens's limitation:his inability to conceptualize in a stylepersuasive to modern readers, or stillmore to the point, his lack of interest intrying to conceptualize. Dickens makesno claim for Little Dorrit, he fits her intono theological or theoretical system, hecares little if at all about her symbolicresonance. He simply sees her, a gleam ofimagination. He trusts to the sufficiencyof his depiction, a feat of discipline by awriter not always disciplined.

Quite deliberately Dickens shrinksLittle Dorrit in size, voice, will, and ges-ture. Though clearly an adult, she seemsalmost childlike. She loves Arthur Clen-nam, the thoughtful, melancholy manworn down by failure. They marry, notin a rush of sensuality but as a pact of"making do," two people bruised intotenderness. Other writers seeking to val-idate goodness have fixed upon theircharacters revealing flaws in order to re-tain some plausibility. Dickens, howev-er, presents a goodness not through thepersuasiveness of a flaw, but throughthe realism of a price. The price of LittleDorrit's goodness, as of her marriage toClennam, is a sadly reduced sexuality—an equivalent, perhaps, to Billy Budd'sstammer. It is as if Dickens had an un-spoken belief that a precondition forgoodness is the removal of that aggres-sion which may well be intrinsic to thesexual life.

LOSING MORE GROUNDIn Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Governmentby Charles Murray{Simon and Schuster, 341 pp., $19.95)

If happiness lies only in "justified satis-faction," as Charles Murray tells us inhis new book, the pursuit of happinesscan easily turn into a pursuit of justifica-tion. A pig seems happy when merelysatisfied; but the happiness of a humanbeing, or an entire society, uniquely re-quires that its satisfaction be justified.Fortunately, justifications are not diffi-cult to find, especially since intellectuals,among others, are ever ready to contrivethem. Intellectuals specialize in supply-ing the highest justifications, affordingthe deepest and most lasting satisfac-tions, and thereby contributing, in a

modest way, to the happiness of thespecies.

Though difficult to measure, the con-tribution of conservative intellectuals tohuman happiness must surely be thelargest. I do not wish to disparage thework of liberals, but it only seems fair torecognize that conservative intellectualshave supplied justifications more reli-ably and to larger numbers of the satis-fied. Some might think that the jobwould have been finished by now, but infact it requires constant effort and end-less ingenuity. Ever since the '60sbrought satisfaction under suspicion,

32 THE NEW REPUBLIC

and even more so when satisfactionmade a comeback in the '70s and '80s,the tasks of conservative justificationhave had a special urgency. Conservativeintellectuals have not been satisfied,moreover, merely to justify reductionsalready made in obligations to the poor.They have gone one step better, showingthat because all public efforts backfire,we could do much less, perhaps nothingat all, and still be justified in our satis-factions. No one has done this work onbehalf of human happiness better thanCharles Murray.

Murray shows in his new volume that,if anything, we underestimated from hislast book. Losing Ground, the scale of hisphilosophical and political ambitions.There he argued that anti-poverty ef-forts were a failure, and modestly pro-posed to scrap "the entire federal wel-fare and income support structure forworking-aged persons, including AFDC,Medicaid, Food Stamps, UnemploymentInsurance, Worker's Compensation, sub-sidized housing, disability insurance,and all the rest." Not a man to hesitatewhen the logic of his argument leadshim into the abyss, he now invites us todismantle the whole framework of themodern state, to return to what he de-scribes, mistakenly, as a Jeffersonian vi-sion of democracy.

T'HE AMBITION of the new book isevident from its structure. Its first,

rather brief part proposes that the trueend of government is individual happi-ness, defined as "lasting and justifiedsatisfaction with one's life as a whole."(What counts as adequate justificationMurray declines to say, but there mustbe some.) In the middle portion, Murrayexplores four basic human needs—mate-rial resources, safety, self-respect, enjoy-ment—which he says must be minimallysatisfied to enable people to pursue hap-piness. The final section, concerningMurray's philosophy of government,concludes that government should with-draw from its domestic functions, otherthan maintaining order, to "permit com-munities to be communities" and toleave people alone to "take trouble" overtheir own lives.

Many readers who find themselvesengaged, if not convinced, by the firsttwo parts of the book will find it hard toaccompany Murray as he jumps to thethird, Murray himself admits that hisdiscussion of human needs could beused to argue for "socialist states or capi-talist ones, communitarian states or lib-

ertarian ones." The first two parts, inother words, do not exactly lay a logicalfoundation for Murray's politics. Theyare, rather, a kind of psychological prep-aration for the political views that Mur-ray anticipates most of his readers willnot readily accept. Several times Murraycalls upon the reader to relax, play withideas, undertake little "thought experi-ments," contemplate basic questions.What is happiness, after all? Does mon-ey really matter? Is material povertysuch a bad thing? Readers disarmed bythese ruminations will only later findtheir wallets missing.

In the course of these preliminaries.

Murray slips in assumptions that beginpreparing the ground for his laissez-faireconclusions. He says that since govern-ment can only enable people to pursuehappiness, not achieve it for them, gov-ernment can attempt to meet humanneeds only by creating certain minimumenabling conditions. "Minimalism," ac-cording to Murray, is "intrinsic." Hisnext move is to stand on its head thehierarchy of human needs originally de-veloped by Abraham Maslow, Materialwealth, we all know, does not guaranteehappiness, and poverty does not pre-clude it. Hence, under Murray's happi-ness standard for public policy, we need

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not regard poverty as an obstacle thatmust first be overcome before meetingthe non-material needs. Indeed, Murraysuggests, we should be wiiiing to imposehardship, if by doing so we can bettersatisfy other human needs such as self-respect and enjoyment (which he viev^sas individual and internal capacities).This is the conservative equivalent ofgranola: money doesn't matter, whatcounts is in your heart. Except that in-stead of justifying retreat into oneself,the anti-materialist ethic now becomes aprescription {of poverty) for others,

IIBERAL-MINDED readers may firstJ think that the basic framework of

Murray's argument assumes that govern-ment has some responsibility for meetingthe whole hierarchy of human needs.Quite the contrary, Murray's point is thatgovernment meets its social responsibil-ities best by not purporting to meet any.For whatever government does, it dilutesthe sense of individual responsibility,which Murray believes must be total. Atone point, for example, he slides fromtalking about the responsibility peopleought to feel "for their actions" into talk-ing about the responsibility they ought tofeel "for their lives." But surely our livesare not the outcome solely of our own ac-tions. It should bo possible to insist thatpeople are responsible for their actionswhile acknowledging a public responsi-bility for circumstances of life that are be-yond any individual's control.

After conceding that human needs soconceived could justify a variety of re-gimes, Murray lays all the weight of hispolitical argument on what he calls "anidea of man," This idea is that humannature is divided in two: "man acting inhis private capacity—if restrained fromthe use of force—is resourceful and be-nign; while man acting as a public andpolitical creature is resourceful and dan-gerous, inherently destructive of therights and freedoms of his fellow men,"No evidence for this notion is adduced.Here, as so often in the book, Murrayappeals to the reader's intuition, andfalsely calls upon the Founding Fathersin support of his view.

The public man/private man distinc-tion will simply not take the weight thatMurray puts upon It. It is hard to be-lieve, for example, that differences in thebehavior of governments and privatecorporations are best explained by a gap-ing split in human nature. Large organi-zations of all kinds diffuse the sense ofindividual responsibility; private corpo-

rations are no exception. Not even therosy glow of conservative illusion, more-over, can obscure all the many petty tyr-annies and deep cruelties in the historyof families and insular communities.That Murray should consider men actingprivately to be generally benign is evi-dence of his frame of mind, but it doesnot qualify as an argument.

Nor should we take seriously hisstatement that men acting politically are"inherently destructive" of rights andfreedoms. First of all, we would not haveany rights and freedoms if people didnot act politically. Politics is what se-cures freedom. A nation made of "menacting privately" is sure to lose it. Sec-ond, it is a presumption of democraticgovernment that the very process ofpublic deliberation can lead "privatemen" to see interests broader than theirown, to arrive at policies that separatelythey might not have understood orimagined.

The Founding Fathers were committedto this idea—to government by discus-sion—or else we would not have had arepublic at all. Murray's suggestion thatthe Founding Fathers shared his idea ofman—benign when private, destructivewhen public—is utterly false. In TheFederalist Papers, in a passage thatMurray quotes, Madison observes, "Ifmen were angels, no government wouldbe necessary." In other words, men act-ing in private capacities cannot be as-sumed to be benign. Not that Madisonassumed poiitical men to be benign, ei-ther. The distrust was equal. Defendingthe idea of checks and balances, Madi-son remarks, "This policy of supplying,by opposite and rival interests, the de-fect of better motives, might be tracedthrough the whole system of human af-fairs, private as well as public." Thepoint of building such internal checksinto the federal government was not tocripple it, but to ensure its steady con-trol, just as the designer of a car installsstrong brakes not to guarantee a slowspeed, but to permit a fast one. The au-thors of The Federalist Papers were ar-guing, after all, for a stronger govern-ment, not a weaker one. If Murraywants support for his notion that poli-tics is inherently destructive, he is look-ing in the wrong place,

Murray claims that in thinking aboutpublic policies, we have had thoroughlymistaken standards of evaluation. Inparticular, he proposes to substitute hisstandard of individual happiness for themisguided conception of the public

good. The problem here, it seems, is "ag-gregation." Consider his example. Re-search indicates that the 55 mile per hourspeed limit has saved some 7,466 liveseach year since its enactment, Murraydoes not dispute the figure. He insists,instead, that this is the wrong perspec-tive. No longer should we hold "in ourhead a concept of the aggregate publicgood, nor . , . estimate savings for thenation as a whole." Murray wants us tolook at it purely from an individual view-point. Assuming a 250-mile trip betweenWashington and New York, as Murraydoes, the added safety from the 55 mileper hour speed limit comes to a reductionin the chance of being killed from0.00000006 to 0,00000004, On the otherhand, the result of the speed limit is a lossof time. There is, according to Murray, nobalance to be struck: "The effective valueof the safety variable is zero."

This is an extraordinary view. At asingle stroke, it abolishes the entire fieldof public health, most concerns aboutthe environment, occupational and con-sumer product safety—indeed, any arenaof public policy where the stakes involvesmall probabilities of large harms. AndMurray's central assumption, of course,is not that happiness should be the stan-dard. It is that the rationality of a policycan be tested entirely from a single indi-vidual's ex ante perspective. Murray'sown thinking about risk perfectly illus-trates the short horizons of private judg-ment that pubiic deliberation often helpsto extend—to the great benefit of thosethousands of people whose happiness,we may assume, may be lessened bytheir being killed.

BUT MURRAY is not a pure individ-ualist; he has a tender regard for the

"little platoons" of community life—"lit-tle platoons" being a phrase of EdmundBurke now superseded by George Bush's(or rather, Peggy Noonan's) "thousandpoints of light," Murray has a zero-sumview of the relation between govern-ments and communities. The more ser-vices undertaken by government, themore voluntary community action wilts.Conversely, take away government bene-fits, and communities will regain theirvitality. Unlike Murray's rather idio-syncratic assault on the "aggregatepublic good," this view of governmentsand communities is a pervasive anddeep assumption of much conservativeargument.

But the zero-sum view is wrong ashistory, and it is misleading as a premise

J4 THE NEW REPUBLIC

for policy. Undoubtedly, geographicallydefined communities have lost much oftheir importance. But they have lost thatimportance because they no longermatch the scale of economic organizationor mass communication, not becausegovernment stole vital functions awayfrom them. Voluntary organizationscontinue to play a vit.il role, often inchanneling public benefits; rather thanbeing a substitute for government, theyare, typically, a partner. Many of thosethousand points of light would growdim without public electrification. Toexpect purely voluntary effort to substi-tute for public expenditure is a chimera.While taxes may be detested, they canbe collected at relatively little expense.Anyone familiar with the techniques ofprivate fund-raising (benefits, directmail, door-to-door campaigns) knowsthat the fund-raising itself consumes aLirge portion of what it brings in. Ifthe idea of taxation were forgotten,tired fund-raisers would dream it up allover again,

THE RETURN to community hasbeen the perpetual romance of all the

prophets of anti-modernism. In its con-servative form, the communitarian mythis particuLirly dangerous because it callsfor reducing the capacities of governmentwithout any corresponding reduction inthe sc.ile or the power of private econom-ic organization. Small government in anation of small-scale production and lo-cal markets is one thing. Small govern-ment in a world of great corporations andinternational markets is another, Murraycasts his vision as a return to Jeffersoni-an democracy, but there will be no re-turn to a world of small producers andlittle island communities dispersed in alargely rural society. The founders ofTHE NEW REPUBLIC saw early in this cen-tury that Jeffersonian ends now had tobe pursued with Hamiltonian means. Ina world where corporations had becomenational, the venue of public delibera-tion had to change, too, Murray and oth-er conservatives have the opposite for-mula: they want to use Jeffersonianmeans both to pursue and to disguiseHamiltonian ends, but it is a formulathat cannot work. In the world we livein, strong capitalist economics withsmall Jeffersonian states make up anempty set.

It is an odd feature of Murray's bookthat he attempts to develop a theory ofgood government without any referenceto economic life. In Murray's world, cor-

porations do not exist, and there arc nobusiness cycles, no depressions, hence noconcern for economic stabilization. Ifmodern government has anything to dowith such instabilities, we would neverknow it from Murray. Indeed, economicreasoning is not exactly his strong suit, ifwe can judge by one section of his bookthat explains why raising teachers' sala-ries will likely lower the quality of peo-ple attracted to teaching, Murray's argu-ment is that if teachers' salaries are keptlow, the only people interested in teach-ing will be people who love to teach andlove children. These will be wonderfulteachers. To be sure, if we raised salariesto $100,000 a year, we would secure first-rate teachers. However, if we give teach-ers more modest and practical raises, wewil! attract the sort of people who teachonly for the money: "the marginal teach-er, the second-rater, the very person wewant to get rid of." These bad teacherswill pollute the whole climate of theschools: "Introducing into such an envi-ronment people who are in it for themoney is like introducing a virus into asystem with no immunity,"

Murray is entirely right that if salariesare low, some peopie who teach will bedoing it more for love than for money.

But why he should assume that he willget enough teachers of this kind is mys-terious. Those who love teaching mayalso love their families and want to pro-vide them with a decent living. It is en-tirely arbitrary for him to assume that araise, even a moderate one, will attractonly second-raters, but that without araise the schools will be able to hireenough teachers without reaching downto the poorly qualified and poorly moti-vated. On the same theory, we ought toimprove the quality of many fields byreducing pay, I should be interested tohear Murray's cure for the current nurs-ing shortage.

But why stop with professions fol-lowed primarily by women? Surely hecannot be implying that only womenwork more for love than for money. Ifwe apply his argument to its logical con-clusion in fields where men predomi-nate, we should achieve the very highestperformance in medicine, law, and in-vestment banking not merely by reduc-ing compensation, but by insisting thatthose who wish to practice these arts payfor the right to do so. This is an inspiringvision. Perhaps In his next book Murraywill extend his theory of reverse incen-tives from teaching to the many other

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fields where its application is even moredesperately needed,

Murray uses the case of teachers' sala-ries to illustrate his more general argu-ment that all social programs fail. Hisview is categorical: "No social program,no matter how ingenious, can anticipateand forestall the myriad ways in whichpeople will seek to get their way andthereby frustrate, with or without intent,its aims." This is conservatism taken toits absurd extreme. The iast successfulpolitical reform that Murray seems ableto recall was the Constitution. But theConstitution was a framework for achanging nation; it would have been acolossal failure if it was the last politi-cal reform to succeed. Murray's faithis quite different from that of theFounders. Madison expresses a confi-dence in the balancing of opposite andrival interests. Murray simply believesrational policy is beyond the capacity ofdemocratic government.

As a nation we would not have comethis far, and we could go no further,with the total privatization of life and

thought that Murray wants us toadopt. The economic challenges thatconfront us demand public investmentin our common future—investments ineducation, skills, and research that"men acting in their private capacities"will not make. The injustices that con-tinue to mar our world demand a vi-sion of public obligations that menwholly absorbed in their private liveswill not take the trouble to see or tounderstand. No democracy of any kindcould survive if its citizens showedMurray's loathing for public life andpublic action. If Murray's book holdsany interest, it is only as an index ofhow far some conservative thought hasmoved in the direction of pure privat-ism. There is a line between reasonableprudence and policy nihilism. Murrayand those conservatives who followhim have crossed it,

PAUL STARR

Paul Starr is professor of sociology atPrinceton University.

THE DEMOCRAT MALGRE LUITocqueville; A Biographyby Andre Jardin(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 550 pp., $35)

The Two Tocquevilles, Father and Son: Herve and Alexis deTocqueville on the Coming of the French Revolutionby R.R. Palmer(Princeton University Press, 252 pp., S28.50)

The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocquevilleby Roger Boesche(Cornell University Press, 288 pp., $29.95)

On January 31,1793, the young Herve deClerel, comte de Tocqueville, arrived atthe tree-iined estate of Malesherbes, nearOrleans, to visit his betrothed, Louise.She was the daughter of Louis Le Peletierde Rosanbo, president of the Chambredes vacations of the lately abolished Par-lement of Paris; and also the granddaugh-ter of the chateau's proprietor, the re-nowned Lamoignon de Malesherbes,twice royal minister and former presidentof the Paris Cour des Aides. Ten days be-

fore this, Malesherbes, as defense counselfor Louis XVI, had been unable to savehis monarch from the guillotine. Despitethe pall of bitter grief that hung over thechateau, its rhythm of life seemed "gen-tie" to Herve, as spring gave way to sum-mer, and summer turned to autumn.

Yet, as he adds, "the horizon wasgrowing darker and darker." The Sep-tember terror was "on the agenda," InOctober, France was submitted to revo-lutionary government. On the morning

of December 19, rabid sectionaries burstinto Malesherbes to arrest its householdand transport its members to sentencing,and then to prison, in Paris, Several ofthe family were executed in April 1784,including the doughty old magistratehimself, who expressed no regret at sac-rificing his life for his king and his liber-al principles. The young Tocquevillecouple miraculously survived, thoughHerve's hair turned white in prison, Adecade later, in still cramped but lessominous Napoleonic times, their thirdson, Alexis, was born.

He would display, in his way, thegreatness of his forebears. Through hismaternal connection, Alexis de Tocque-ville had a prominent cousin who wouldhelp him in his literary debuts: Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand. On his father'sside, he was descended from Normanvassals of William the Conqueror. Hehad kinsmen in some of the wealthiestparts of French nobility. Equally en-dowed by descent and intellect, he wasdestined to become the Montesquieu ofthe 19th century. Liberalism—whichAlexis de Tocqueville understood pri-marily as independence against every-thing despotic or debasing, self-involvedor mean-spirited, be it monarchical orrepublican—coursed in his blood. It wascounterbalanced by a love of order, ltdid not have to be inculcated by socialenvy, or learned from abstract manifes-tos of the Enlightenment. It was a liber-alism that had nothing to do with "hu-man rights," or an investment portfolio,or "making it," or the self.

Tocqueville's singular merit was hisaristocratic or qualitative understandingof the predicament of "democratic ages,"combined with his conviction that theywere inevitable. The experience of hisancestors supplied the anxiety and thesecurity, the rigor and the suppleness,needed to conceive a "new science ofpolitics" for modem times. He had thecapacity to absorb himself in tradition(his closest friends were mostly men ofhis own breeding) and yet to abandon itin his thinking: to travel, to observe, totake notes, alt the while framing his cu-riosity with propositions about differentsocieties that were substantial and edify-ing. His style was his own, though hismaitres de pensee were Pascal, Montes-quieu, Rousseau.

He wrote in a new way. His was sure-ty not any ordinary kind of history(which is what Guizot or Thiers, or evenMichelet or Quinet, were writing); norwas it sociotogy (as conceived by its

36 THE NKW REPUBLIC