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The Politics of Moral Capital
John Kane
published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge
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cambridge university press
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© John Kane 2001
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2001
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
Typeface Plantin 10/12pt System Poltype®[vn]
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Kane, John.
The politics of moral capital / John Kane.
p. cm. – (Contemporary political theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
is bn 0 521 66336 9 –i sb n 0 521 66357 1 (pb.)
1. Legitimacy of governments. 2. Political leadership – Moral and ethical
aspects. 3. Political stability. 4. Trust. I. Title. II. Series.
JC328.2.K36 2001
320'.01'1–dc21 00-066693
is bn 0 521 66336 9 hardback
is bn 0 521 66357 1 paperback
Contents
Acknowledgments page viii
Introduction 1
Part I Moral capital 5
1Moral capital and politics 10
2Moral capital and leadership 27
Part II Moral capital in times of crisis 45
3Abraham Lincoln: the long-purposed man 50
4Charles De Gaulle: the man of storms 83
Part III Moral capital and dissident politics 113
5Nelson Mandela: the moral phenomenon 118
6Aung San Suu Kyi: her father’s daughter 147
Part IV Moral capital and the American presidency 173
7Kennedy and American virtue 180
8Crisis 200
9Aftermath 218
10 Denouement 235
Epilogue 255
Bibliography 261
Index 270
vii
1 Moral capital and politics
Friendships that are acquired by a price and not by greatness and
nobility of spirit are bought but not owned, and at the proper moment
they cannot be spent. Machiavelli, The Prince
Politics is about power, and power has attractions and uses independent
of its necessity for achieving legitimate social goals. It is not surprising,
then, that one often encounters in the political realm acts of selWsh
ambition, venality, mendacity and betrayal. What is more, even the
best-intentioned players are often forced from the straight and true path
by the cruel exigencies of politics, so that ordinary standards of decent
conduct are oft more honored in the breach than the observance. Yet the
Machiavellian game must be seen to be about something larger than gain,
ambition and survival. Political agents and institutions must be seen to
serve and to stand for something apart from themselves, to achieve some-
thing beyond merely private ends. They must, in other words, establish a
moral grounding. This they do by avowing their service to some set of
fundamental values, principles and goals that Wnd a resonant response in
signiWcant numbers of people. When such people judge the agent or
institution to be both faithful and eVective in serving those values and
goals, they are likely to bestow some quantum of respect and approval
that is of great political beneWt to the receiver. This quantum is the agent’s
moral capital.
Since moral capital thus depends on people’s speciWcally moral apprai-
sals and judgments about political agents and institutions, it must be
distinguished from mere popularity. Popularity may, indeed, be based in
part on moral appraisals but is very often based on quite other sources of
attraction. It is possible to be popular while lacking moral capital, or to
possess moral capital while not being particularly popular. Moreover
popularity, it is usually assumed, may be bought, while moral capital may
not. Like popularity, however, moral capital has genuine political eVects.
It is a resource that can be employed for legitimating some persons,
positions and oYces and for delegitimating others, for mobilizing support
10
and for disarming opposition, for creating and exploiting political oppor-
tunities that otherwise would not exist.
It is not, of course, the only resource that can be so used. In the
constantly contested arena of politics, political leverage and political
ascendancy can be gained by a variety of means –an eYcient electoral
machine, a surety of numbers in the party or legislature, the support of
key players, occupation of a political oYce and consequent access to
institutionalized levers of power, the possession of timely intelligence, a
superior organization capable of coherent action, powers of patronage, an
incompetent or divided opposition, a record of success, a booming econ-
omy. Such factors make up the stock of what we usually call an agent’s
political capital. They are the things to which we ordinarily look when we
seek to understand political processes and outcomes. Moral capital dis-
places none of them but is usually entangled with each of them, for it
generally undergirds all the systems, processes and negotiations of politi-
cal life. Often, its crucial supportive role is not clearly seen until it is lost
and individuals or institutions face consequent crises of legitimacy and
political survival.
This book, then, uses the concept of moral capital to investigate one
aspect of the real force and movement of moral judgment in political life.
Its theoretical premise is (to reiterate) that politics seeks a necessary
grounding in values and ends, and that people’s moral judgments of
political agents and institutions with respect to such values and ends have
important political eVects. It thus rejects overly cynical views, both popu-
lar and academic, that typically suppose politics to be an inherently
amoral realm. In such views, moral judgments in politics are thought to
be at best naıve and irrelevant, at worst hypocritical and pernicious. Or if
moral judgments are relevant at all, they are understood to be formed
beyond the realm of politics itself and applied to it – forced on it, as it were
– from the outside. The action of politics is conceived to be, in this
respect, akin to the action of markets, whose sole internal principle is the
amoral law of supply and demand. If eVective demand exists for slaves,
drugs or child pornography, suppliers will invariably arise to meet it.
When people judge such forms of traYcking immoral or evil, they adopt
an ethical vantage point outside of the market itself; to prevent the trade
they must impose external controls on market forces. But politics, I
argue, is not like the market in this respect. Moral judgment is neither
exterior to nor irrelevant to politics, but intrinsic to it and in principle
inescapable.
Even so, it can scarcely be denied that what might be termed ‘‘realist’’
or Machiavellian views of politics have considerable force, for they seem
so often to provide convincing descriptions of the way politics actually
11Moral capital and politics
works. For it is true that the political environment, even at its mildest, is
tough and unforgiving of weakness or excessive scrupulousness. Ac-
knowledging this, I must begin my essay by describing more fully how the
Weld of politics can be understood in such a way as to allow the concept of
moral capital genuine purchase.
Politics and legitimacy
Politics is the pursuit of ends. It is about what is to be done, how it is to be
done, by whom it is to be done, and with what means it is to be done. It is,
in other words, about policy –the making of socially directive decisions
and the allocation of the resources and instruments necessary to carry
them out. The ultimate aim of political competition –inter-personal,
inter-party or inter-national –is therefore the control of policy. Political
power is the power to determine policy and thus to dispose of social and
material resources (including human beings) in certain ways and for
certain ends rather than in others. It is also the power to distribute
political resources –honors, oYces, authority –in particular ways rather
than in others. The Wrst end of politically engaged people is therefore to
gain command of (or access to) political power in order to control (or
inXuence) the decisions that are made. This involves, on one level, a
struggle for personal position among allies and rivals sharing essential
aims, and, on another, a contest for political advantage among people
with opposed objectives. These political objectives may be either narrow-
ly speciWc or broadly general. At their broadest, they may aim at the
preservation of existing social, political and distributive arrangements, or
at their reform and restructuring, or even at their complete dismantle-
ment and replacement (to cover the traditional spectrum from conserva-
tism to revolutionism).
While politics aims at ends, the political process is endless, for life is
endless and the possibility of change and challenge always present.
Change may be exceedingly slow, permitting islands of historical stability,
or it may be very rapid, throwing even long-prevailing social and political
relations into Xux. Though political action generally strives for stable
ends, it necessarily occupies uncertain ground between the existently real
and the conceivably possible. Its aim may be preservation of the already
existent or, alternatively, its alteration. Thus political ends may embody
present interests or may envisage the annihilation of such interests and
the creation of altogether new ones (and there is nothing to stop a
nihilistic politics from pursuing the extermination of all human interests
whatsoever).
Political ends and interests are seldom uncontested, and champions of
12 Moral capital
opposing ends and interests must be either accommodated, neutralized
or defeated. Though compromise is possible –and indeed sometimes
lauded as a central political virtue –the game is generally played to be
won, particular outcomes being determined by the Xuctuating balance of
political power and the relative exercise of political skill. Compromise –
the settling for less than all one wanted –marks an acceptance that
opposing forces are too strong to be utterly defeated and too weak to be
utterly victorious. Politics is contestation, and contests are about winning
and losing, even if wins and losses may often be only partial. This
emphasis on competitive action toward ends makes eVectiveness a key
political value. As the good hammer is the one that eYciently drives in
nails, the good politician is the one that achieves some reasonable propor-
tion of the ends that he or she intends, promises or deems necessary. But
if winning is all, or almost all, in politics then those who are excessively
squeamish about means surely do not belong in the game. Losers may cry
‘‘foul’’ when rough means are employed, but once the Wnal whistle has
sounded the result will generally stand, leaving outright losers nowhere.
In vicious forms of politics, they may be physically annihilated and thus
not even live to Wght another day. Even in liberal democracies, where
consensually accepted, institutionalized limits on political practice
usually prevent such vicious outcomes, the principles of end-driven poli-
tics remain constant within these constraints.
The basically vulgar emphasis on winning and losing inevitably has a
somewhat vulgarizing eVect on anything touched by politics. If eVective-
ness is key, then it follows that everything will tend to be assessed in terms
of its value as political capital (capital being, by deWnition, a resource for
the achievement of further ends). Thus moral standing, because it can be
as useful a resource as any other, invariably assumes the form of moral
capital in politics. In any human enterprise where sound character and
dedication are deemed necessary for the eVective achievement of
common goals, it is natural that moral standing will tend to take the form
of moral capital. Problems arise, however, if moral standing starts to be
treated as primarily a means to further ends. In ordinary life we presume
that moral character is a value-in-itself, something that governs both the
ends we choose and the means we think it proper to adopt in pursuit of
them. Moral character equates with self-respect, and moral standing with
public respect, either of which are put at risk when treated mainly as a
currency for acquiring other things. We devalue character by commodify-
ing it, and generally deem it a cause for shame and regret to attain some
desired end at the expense of our good name. ‘‘What proWteth it a man if
he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’’
Yet the political version of Jesus’question is surely ‘‘What proWteth it a
13Moral capital and politics
politician if he keep his purity and lose his advantage?’’ Everything in
politics –including moral reputation –is liable to be assessed for its
potential as a means for securing political advantage. Political practice,
that is, tends to invert the usual order, causing moral characteristics to be
judged for their utility rather than for their intrinsic signiWcance. Extreme
forms of politics, in which the political realm attempts to swallow up
social and private spheres, go even further and deny any intrinsic signiW-
cance to moral character independently of political action and commit-
ment.
The ‘‘all’s fair’’ tendency of competitive political life often evokes
cynicism that creates diYculties for any politician seeking moral capital.
The politician who attempts to establish a moral reputation for the sake of
its capital value faces a diYculty akin to that of the salesman. Salesmen
seek our trust in order to sell us something, but their need to sell us
something undermines trust; politicians seek our respect in order to
further their political ends, but their need to further their political ends
provokes suspicion and forestalls respect. The honor of politicians having
so often proved as hollow as their promises, their reputation as a class has
frequently tended to fall, like the salesman’s, to the level of the scoundrel
or the hypocrite. ‘‘Get thee glass eyes,’’ cries Lear, ‘‘and like a scurvy
politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.’’ The suspicion arises that
the entire realm of political action is one where honeyed words and
high-sounding phrases cloak raw self-interest, its real driving force.
Raw self-interest may be conceived in terms of power understood as an
end-in-itself, as though all politicians were, covertly, megalomaniacal Dr.
Dooms bent ludicrously on world domination –and indeed, given the
centrality of power to politics this is a possible pathology into which it may
fall.1Alternatively, the notorious tendency of power to corrupt may lead
to the presumption that all who seek power are interested only in feather-
ing their own nests –and certainly cases of institutionalized corruption,
occasionally on a spectacular scale, are easy enough to Wnd. More gen-
erally, a dominant strand of Western political thought (often labelled
‘‘realism’’ or, latterly, ‘‘rational choice theory’’) is characterized by what
might be termed methodological cynicism, for it purports to explain all
political phenomena by reducing them to the amoral, quasi-mechanical
clash and adjustment of rationally pursued, but essentially selWsh inter-
ests –and who would deny that interests, both individual and collective,
are often selWshly asserted and defended in politics?
Were any of these forms of cynicism universally and sincerely adopted,
…See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, Andre´Deutsch, 1986), pp.
124–133.
14 Moral capital
it would be impossible that moral capital could play any genuine role in
political life. Yet it does, and not because people are too weak-minded to
be constant in either their cynicism or their rational self-interest, or so
liable to be misguided by passion that they foolishly fall into indulging
hope, trust and a desire for justice. It is merely because no human action
and set of human arrangements can ever be placed in principle beyond the
reach of the moral question –beyond, that is, the demand for justiWcation
in general terms. Political action always presumes such justiWcation.
Every claim and counterclaim, charge and countercharge of political
debate attests the inescapability of the moral question in politics. The
language of political argument is always and inevitably highly moralized
(though not necessarily ‘‘moralizing’’). This is not because politicians are
hypocrites, but because the ends of politics must always present them-
selves as morally justiWed according to some set of standards or other.
Even where politics becomes pathological or corrupt, those seeking
power face an urgent political need to justify themselves in general terms.
‘‘The strongest man,’’ wrote Rousseau, ‘‘is never strong enough to be
master all the time, unless he transforms force into right and obedience
into duty.’’2Political power can never merely assert itself, but must
establish its moral legitimacy and thus, at the same time, the non-
legitimacy of actual or potential challengers. The same necessity con-
fronts all interests that assert themselves in the political arena: they must
Wrst constitute themselves, at the very least in the eyes of their supporters,
as legitimate interests, arguing not just the contingent existence of their
desires but the rightness and justness of their claims and demands.
This is not a morality that is either prior to or external to an amoral
political realm and imposed upon it from without. It is a morality intrinsic
to the very idea of politics, for politics must always deal with questions of
legitimacy.3If politics is the eternal pursuit of ends, it is also the eternal
pursuit of legitimacy. When a regime proclaims its legitimacy, it argues
that existing structures of society and government, their manner of dis-
tributing power, the general ends and interests they encompass, are
morally and practically justiWed. The more generally these claims are
accepted (or at least acquiesced in) by the governed, the more stable is the
regime.
Yet in the end-driven processes of politics, there is a perpetual tension
between the implicit demand for justiWcatory reasons and the permanent
temptation to use any means at hand, including coercive power, to
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968), Book I,
chapter 3,p.52.
ÀThis is the essential point made by Bernard Williams in ‘‘Realism and Moralism in
Political Theory,’’ paper delivered to Law Society, Yale University, May 1997.
15Moral capital and politics
achieve designated ends. Power’s ideal is no doubt to have its existing
form accepted as unchangeably given by God and Nature, to have legit-
imacy built in, so to speak, to the very fabric of social and political
relations. This has hardly been possible in the West since early modern
times, when religious and political dissent, economic expansion and the
forces of the Enlightenment cracked the medieval citadel of uniWed faith.
Indeed, as Pratap Mehta has pointed out, it is now hardly possible
anywhere, since dissent and demands for reasonable justiWcations are no
longer peculiar to the West but ubiquitous around the world.4
Faced with this necessity, power has seldom felt conWdent enough to
rely solely on the strength of rational argument and unforced consent.
Indeed, one can oVer a generalization that reliance on moral persuasion
declines in proportion as a political order succeeds in accruing power and
has, consequently, more and diVerent means available for consolidating
itself. Power has many traditional ways of maintaining and enlarging itself
that do not depend on moral reason but rather on the arousal of motives
such as fear, suspicion, envy or greed –for example, military subjection,
rigid organization, techniques of divide and rule, the judicious employ-
ment of terror, the use of patronage or pork-barreling bribery. Regimes
and movements may also try to bind subjects by emotional rather than
rational means, for example by fostering love or awe for nation, monarch
or party leader.
As for reasonable justiWcation, power frequently acknowledges the
need for that in a negative manner, by attempting to control the processes
of consent formation and by constraining the ability of the governed to
question and criticize. Bureaucratic rule by decree (of the kind
anatomized by Kafka), for example, evades justiWcation by creating an
atmosphere of absurdity in which people feel themselves the helpless
playthings of an arbitrary fate that robs reason of meaning and therefore
of political purchase. Totalitarian governments combine ruthless sup-
pression of opposing opinion with indoctrination and the use of terror
while building isolating walls round the community to prevent contami-
nation from outside. And even in ‘‘open,’’ liberal democratic regimes
where ‘‘the people’’ are expected freely to consent to policy and to help
choose their governors, and where critical opinion and debate is not just
tolerated but in principle encouraged –even here the resources of power
are frequently used to monitor, manipulate and channel public opinion so
as to manufacture consent.5
ÃPratap B. Mehta, ‘‘Pluralism after Liberalism?,’’ Critical Review 11 (1997), pp. 503–518.
ÕSee, for example, an interesting analysis of the manipulation of ‘‘public opinion’’ in Amy
Fried, MuZed Echoes: Oliver North and the Politics of Public Opinion (New York, Columbia
University Press, 1997).
16 Moral capital
Yet all the crude or ingenious techniques and strategies that attempt to
elude or manipulate consent and foster acquiescence attest to the central
signiWcance of legitimacy in political life. The problem of legitimacy may
be met by oVering rationalized justiWcations or by the manipulative use of
power or (usually) some combination of these, but it must be met.
Ideology and moral choice
As well as the perennial tension between justiWcation and coercion, we
must note a further signiWcant tension within the notion of political
justiWcation itself. This is a tension between the demand for moral cer-
tainty and the existence of pervasive rational doubt. The end-driven
practice of politics demands conviction and commitment, at least among
an activist core, but moral reason cannot, according to modern thinking,
provide the level of certainty that such conviction demands. In a world no
longer squarely anchored in universally recognized ultimate foundations,
any attempted legitimation is always potentially vulnerable to someone
else’s delegitimation, one’s own certainties are always challenged by the
incompatible certainties of others. The temptation is to claim that one’s
political commitments are somehow uniquely, objectively grounded in
reality, therefore undeniable, not a matter of moral choice at all but of
mere rationality. This stratagem lends a certain repressive, totalitarian air
to even ‘‘moderate’’ political discourse.
It is a tendency that can be most clearly seen in the ideologies which, in
self-conscious modern times, have been the principal vehicles for political
end-values. Ideologies can be described as structures of argument and
explanation that assert a set of political values, principles, programs and
strategies allegedly deduced from arguments about religion, metaphysics,
history, sociology, humanity, economics or justice. Though ideologies
thus typically oVer responses to philosophical, theological and social-
scientiWc questions, ideological thought does not constitute a form of
pure rational inquiry. Its descriptive claims are never disinterested. How-
ever elaborately ideologies may be supported by rational argument, they
generally present their prescriptions as dogmas, political articles of faith,
rather than invitations to further examination. This is precisely because
political practice requires not dispassionate inquiry but sincere, usually
passionate commitment. Ideology is, in other words, a vehicle of value
more than of knowledge, geared not to contemplation but to an eVective
practice that must feel itself suYciently assured of its own rightness. It
must provide the moral force of legitimation without which political
practice founders in a puzzlement of will. It demands a Wnality and
certainty that is foreign to the kind of inquiry in which questions of fact
17Moral capital and politics
and value may always be reopened for rational scrutiny (where, indeed,
certainty about both, or about the possibility of deriving unquestionable
values from facts, is taken to be intrinsically problematical). It is not
endless doubt and openness that an ideology needs in order to be eVec-
tive, but conviction and closure.
Liberal ideologies might seem to be the exception here, for they tend to
emphasize principles that are congruent with those of pure intellectual
inquiry –toleration of variety of opinion, freedom of speech, and suspen-
sion of judgement in value matters. Yet the ‘‘ifs,’’ ‘‘buts’’ and ‘‘on the
other hands’’ of intellectual debate simply will not serve to get the vote
out in a liberal democracy. Such a form of government can be seen as
institutionalizing a consensually agreedprinciple superior to all ideologies
and intended to tame and civilize the conXict between them. Democratic
governance and the rule of law put constraints on the contestants and set
limits to acceptable political behavior. The liberal democratic regime
acts, so to speak, as the moral character of the polity, governing the
political means that may be employed and also determining, to some
extent, what may be regarded as acceptable ends (forbidding, for
example, the destruction of democracy and the rule of law). Within this
principled consensus, however, political action still requires certainty of
purpose and commitment. There is always much at stake in a political
contest, and constantly to defer or withhold judgment is to condemn
oneself to political sterility.
Omnipresent doubt combined with the need for certainty causes ideol-
ogies to present their normative prescriptions not as choices to be made in
the light of reasonable argument about values and goals, but as matters of
necessity. The message tends to be that opposition is less a matter of
reasonable disagreement than of downright irrationality. In fact, there is a
strong tendency for political positions making the necessity argument to
claim that they are not ideological at all, the label ‘‘ideology’’ being
reserved for opposing views that somehow fail to see the objective necess-
ity indicated. Here the term ideology, in addition to implying a politically
ordered program, is freighted with the pejorative meaning of ‘‘false con-
sciousness’’ given it by Marx. Opposing arguments are refuted by relativ-
izing them, that is, by alleging that they are not a product of reason but of
deterministic social and historical forces –thus conservative values ex-
press the social conditioning of an aristocratic class, liberal values the
particular interests of a mercantile order, and so on. The contrasting
objective ‘‘necessity’’ of one’s own position may be founded on any of
several bases –‘‘scientiWc’’ rationality, an inexorable historical progress,
the irresistible force of nature, inevitable economic development, or plain
‘‘common sense.’’ Such arguments may come, what is more, from the
18 Moral capital
economistic Right, the technocratic Center or the revolutionary Left.
Marxism may, for example, spring most immediately to mind when
historical necessity is mentioned, but the doctrine is equally evident in
neo-liberal responses to the globalizing market. It was Margaret
Thatcher, after all, who coined the acronym TINA (‘‘there is no alterna-
tive’’) as the motto of her reforming New Right government. It was a
dogma that received theoretical expression in the liberal triumphalism of
Francis Fukuyama when he proclaimed that the fall of communism
marked the ‘‘end of history.’’ Fukuyama argued that the market was the
most ‘‘natural’’ form of economic organization and that ‘‘the logic of
modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the
direction of capitalism.’’ The only opposition he could conceive to a
univerally triumphant, ‘‘rational’’ capitalist order was the irrational oppo-
sition of history’s‘‘last men’’ (a concept borrowed from Nietzsche) who,
bored with material plenty and peace, would want to drag the world back
into history, warfare and squabbling.6
Such rhetorical tactics, as well as a means of disarming opposition, are
an attempt to evade modern doubts about the possibility of deriving any
certain moral position from any set of asserted ‘‘facts’’ – that is to say, of
getting an objectively prescriptive ‘‘ought’’ out of an objectively descrip-
tive ‘‘is.’’ The tendency has been to collapse the two categories together
and regard imperatives for action as somehow inscribed in the very fabric
of descriptive reality.7If ‘‘is’’ and ‘‘ought’’ are indistinguishable, then
action will follow automatically from a correct understanding of reality
and obviate the need for moral deliberation and choice. This was the idea
at the heart of Marx’s famous unity of theory and practice,8but it can also
be found in the conservative philosophy of Michael Oakeshott who
argued that, in intelligent, unselfconscious practice within a living politi-
cal tradition, ‘‘there is, strictly speaking, no such experience as moral
choice.’’9
Mutually contradictory necessities tend, of course, to cancel each other
out and raise suspicion about all such assertions. Claims that political
consent and commitment follow automatically and unproblematically
from ‘‘correct’’ understandings of reality beg too many questions to be
taken seriously. Since I assume that the possibility of moral capital is
ŒFrancis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, Hamish Hamilton,
1992), pp. xv and 312.
œFor an excellent analysis on these lines, see Bernard Susser, The Grammar of Modern
Ideology (London, Routledge, 1988).
–See my ‘‘The End of Morality? Theory, Practice, and the ‘Realistic Outlook’of Karl
Marx,’’ NOMOS XXXVII: Theory and Practice (New York University Press, 1995), pp.
403–439.
—Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 79.
19Moral capital and politics
based on the reality of moral judgment and moral commitment and
therefore the possibility of moral choice, it is important to stress the falsity
of all necessitarian arguments. The real nature of political commitment is
always moral –a moral commitment to particular ends believed legit-
imate or valuable and inevitably also to other people with whom one
shares such beliefs. The free moral character of political-ideological com-
mitment is evident from the behavior even of determined ideologues who
deny altogether the authenticity of moral language and thought, and also
from their treatment of colleagues who have strayed from their allegian-
ces. Consider the typically contrasting consequences of a change in pure
intellectual belief, say in science, and of a corresponding shift in political
allegiance. It is no doubt painful for a researcher if a long-cherished
scientiWc theory is authoritatively overturned by new evidence, for it may
have been at the core of a whole structure of belief, not to mention of a
career. But the morally culpable course here would be to resist, for
exterior motives, the adjustment of one’s beliefs. A corresponding shift in
political allegiance following a sincere alteration of belief, on the other
hand, inevitably courts accusations of treachery.
The frequency of charges of betrayal and ‘‘selling out’’ reminds us that
the point in politics is not just to bind oneself to beliefs about values and
ends, but to bind oneself faithfully. I take this notion of faithful service to
be the main hook to which moral capital attaches. Morality presumes
moral choice, an identiWcation of values argued to be worth defending or
pursuing and directions held to be worth taking. Moral capital is credited
to political agents on the basis of the perceived merits of the values and
ends they serve and of their practical Wdelity in pursuing them. It is only
thus that the breed of ‘‘scurvy politicians’’ is redeemed if it is redeemed at
all. Embarked on an ever-treacherous sea, politicians are forced to tack
and trim and alter course, sometimes to lighten a leaky craft by abandon-
ing a precious cargo of solemn promises, even to deal with the devil
himself if that is the only way to make headway. But if they can keep their
enterprise aXoat and hold some sense of true direction toward the destina-
tion which alone justiWed the risky voyage, they will sometimes be re-
warded with a reputation that enhances their political inXuence and eVect.
Moral capital and moral ends
The end-driven nature of politics means that Wdelity to professed values
and goals must always be tied to eVectiveness or, to put it another way,
that character must be tied to political skill and vice versa.10 Being a saint
…» See Erwin C. Hargrove, The President as Leader: Appealing to the Better Angels of Our
Nature (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 1998), p. 180.
20 Moral capital
in politics is meaningless unless goodness is combined with the skill to
achieve goals that others judge valuable. Even personal integrity, however
Wne in itself, is seldom enough in politics. A reputation for integrity,
absent skill or ungirded by some larger principled commitment, can be
easily destroyed amid the inevitable maneuvers, bargains and discarded
promises of politics. Deviations and compromises are forgivable, even
acceptable, however, where the compromiser is visibly, ably and consist-
ently committed to particular goals and principles. Tactical retreats and
digressions are legitimate if they are clearly for the sake of such larger
ends. Because politics is end-driven practice, it is only in faithful commit-
ment and eVective practice over the long term that political players can
expect to gain the moral credit that will sustain them among their col-
leagues, their followers and even their opponents, and thus solve that
plaguing dilemma of the salesman mentioned above. But what must be
the nature of the ends that thus give rise to moral capital?
‘‘Politics is the pursuit of ends; decent politics is the pursuit of decent
ends,’’ wrote Leo Strauss, adding that ‘‘The responsible and clear dis-
tinction between ends which are decent and ends which are not is in a way
presupposed by politics. It surely transcends politics.’’11 Strauss claimed
that the task of identifying eternally valid ‘‘decent’’ ends belonged to a
small class of classically oriented, great-souled philosophers whose purity
of purpose, largeness of mind and contemplative training placed them
above the conXicting ideological opinions generated by opposed interests
and allowed them to discern deep and enduring philosophical ‘‘truths.’’
Whether such a condescending class exists, and whether it could eVec-
tively inXuence the denizens of the political realm even if it did, are
debatable points. Strauss, at any rate, points to an important question for
a study of moral capital in politics, namely: must the investigator express
or imply a view of what constitutes a properly moral (or ‘‘decent’’)
political end if he or she is to identify genuine instances of the phenom-
enon? It goes without saying that in all political contests each side argues
the rightness of its own position and wins support on this diVerential
basis. The ends to which politics may be put are very numerous and often
incompatible even within a single culture, never mind from culture to
culture.
For one species of ends –the venal –this is scarcely a problem. Though
the rhetoric of politicians generally centers on values and principles, their
practice may descend to the level of selWsh competition and grubby deals
that have nothing to do with the wider goals that found their political
legitimacy. It hardly matters what values are proclaimed and betrayed;
…… Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York, Basic Books, 1968), p. 13.
21Moral capital and politics
hypocrisy is always vulnerable to immanent critique which, by revealing
the disparity between word and action, morally undermines the hyp-
ocrite. Regimes given over to such hypocritical practices forfeit moral
capital and soon begin to lose their legitimacy in the eyes of their own
constituents. Much more serious for the current project than the some-
time ascendancy of selWshness and hypocrisy, however, is the extreme
diversity of political ends that may be asserted and pursued with perfect
moral sincerity. Since moral capital comes into being only through the
judgments of people persuaded that a cause or party or person is morally
right or morally inspired, it will exist wherever people may be so per-
suaded, whatever the content of the moral views. In a world unmoored
from certain, divinely ordained foundations, the greatest danger is there-
fore less the exercise of an amoral, irresponsible freedom than the free-
dom to conceive of any end at all as moral and any means toward it as
right.
The totalitarian movements of the twentieth century constituted a
limiting case that proved conclusively there is no inherent restriction on
what might be adopted as a political end and no necessary limit to the
ruthless means that might be employed in achieving it. They showed that
it was possible to conceive and carry out the destruction not just of a
particular legal and political system, but of the nation state itself, of laws
as such, of whole bureaucratic structures, of whole social classes and
entire categories of people deWned by race, nationality or state of health,
and to eliminate any activity pursued independently for its own sake
(even chess!) that might undermine an individual’s total subjection to
totalizing power.12 And for the most part, the initiators of totalitarian rule
pursued their aims in the name of some grand moral imperative –the
Aryan domination of the sub-human races of the world or the Wnal
establishment of pure socialist equality. There is no doubt that Hitler
regarded the goal of racial domination which produced his murderous
policies towards Jews and other groups as a moral imperative; indeed, he
thought himself a moral hero for undertaking a dirty but necessary task
that few others could stomach.13 A core of Nazi functionaries certainly
regarded the programs of euthanasia, deportation and extermination,
even when these progressed at the expense of the war eVort, as ‘‘ethical’’
necessities.14 There is no doubt, either, that millions of Germans were
responsive to such claims.15 Even the doctrine of destruction which was
… Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,p.322.
…À See Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (London, Hutchinson, 1969), p. 46.
…Ã Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,p.429.
…Õ This appears to be an implication of the controversial book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, Knopf,
1996).
22 Moral capital
such a feature of Nazi ideology had moral appeal for people in 1930s
Germany, who desired nothing more than the destruction of a social-
political regime characterized by hypocrisy and ineVectuality, whose last
shred of legitimacy had been stripped in the crises of the 1920s.
It may thus have been a savage morality that Hitler embodied but it was
formally a morality nonetheless, and insofar as he won approval and
devotion partly on the strength of it he must be taken as showing, in his
terrible way, the potential power of moral capital in politics. Certainly, no
one could fault his fanatical commitment nor his political eVectiveness. It
is also true, of course, that it is impossible, when one is not under the
thralldom either of bitter despair or of totalitarian power, to Wnd Nazi
morality rationally intelligible. Such moralities are able to persuade deep-
ly disgruntled people of the good of evil policies, or rather that doing good
for oneself and one’s kind requires doing great evil to one’s enemies,
however arbitrarily deWned. This is only to make the point that the quality
of our moral judgments about leaders, parties and policies implies at the
same time a judgment on ourselves and the manner in which our own
moral capacities may be aVected by our fears, anxieties, prejudices and
desires. A sometime tendency (notably in America) to distinguish a
populace that is by deWnition virtuous from a political elite that is invari-
ably corrupt, radically falsiWes the reality of the interrelationship between
governors and governed, leaders and led. As Machiavelli noted, it is not
just princes that may be ‘‘corrupt’’ and ‘‘corruptible,’’ but whole popula-
tions.16 The possibility of the demagoguery that shadows democratic
politics attests to the ubiquitous existence of baser impulses that, rather
than what Lincoln called ‘‘the better angels of our nature,’’ may be
tapped by unscrupulous politicians capable of gracing sordid desires with
a mask of seeming virtue. They provide the opportunity for what in
contemporary parlance is called wedge politics, the technique of dividing
electorates by creating scapegoats and hate objects on the basis of cate-
gories such as race, receipt of welfare, religion and so on –human
caricatures that, as Joseph McCarthy (a master of wedge politics) said,
dramatize the diVerence between Them and Us.
It is also true that all political movements of a totalitarian tendency end
up subverting the capacity for free moral judgment that is the essential
condition for the formation of moral capital. Whatever reliance the fa-
mous totalitarian leaders placed on moral appeals on their way to power,
once power was achieved their aim was to paralyze the ability of their
populations to think in properly moral ways at all. This they achieved
through ruthless indoctrination, terror and the consolidation of a social-
…Œ Machiavelli, The Discourses (Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1970), Book I, Discourses 16–18,
pp. 153–164.
23Moral capital and politics
political organization that determined people’seVective reality. The role
of the absolutely obedient individual was neither to understand nor to
judge, but blindly and selXessly to do. All manifestations of individual
initiative or independent thought and action had to be ruthlessly ex-
punged. Even sincere commitment to the regime and its goals became
suspect insofar as it denoted an independent will. The basis of all social
trust between individual and individual was destroyed as each person
(merely by virtue of having a capacity to think and therefore to change his
or her mind) was turned into a potential suspect, every neighbor into a
perpetual spy. The result was the production of morally incapacitated
human beings who would accept the commission of huge evils and even
help to operate the engines of extermination provided evil was routinized
as a duty attached to an ordinary job.
The suVocating leader worship characteristic of totalitarian masses,
intentionally fostered by the ‘‘cult of personality,’’ is a manifestation and
function of this curtailment of moral freedom and moral sensibility. It
cannot be identiWed with the free grant of moral capital which it is the
intention of this book to analyze. For moral capital to be a political
phenomenon worthy of study, we must assume that people are capable of
making relatively unforced judgments about the worth and rightness of
political values and goals, as well as of the Wdelity, sincerity and eVective-
ness of political actors and organizations who embody and pursue these
goals; and, further, these judgments must be deemed capable of political
eVect insofar as they underpin allegiance, loyalty and service to persons,
causes and parties. One might say, indeed, that moral capital operates in a
political system in inverse proportion to that system’s use of extrinsic
power to engineer submission, loyalty and belief.
No hard and fast line can be drawn here, however, and one may rather
assume a spectrum of possibilities. On the one end, even totalitarian
regimes (which can be cultural-religious as well as political) preserve
some overarching moral ideal that serves to legitimate the domination
they practice; on the other, even the most open and democratic systems
use power, as we have noted, to inXuence belief in more or less subtle
ways. Many contemporary writers rely on such a principle to argue that
power produces its own reality in our liberal democracies just as surely as
in totalitarian regimes, so that the apparently free assent of individuals to
their own domination is explicable in terms of social coercion.17 (Bernard
…œ For example, Michel Foucault’s claim that ‘‘truth’’ is an eVect of systems of power:
‘‘Truth and Power,’’ in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1984), pp. 51–75. See also Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory
of the State (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 237:‘‘The force
underpins the legitimacy as the legitimacy conceals the force.’’ This is a form of critique
traceable to Marx, of course, but beyond him to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, in the Social
24 Moral capital
Williams has formulated the general type of this argument as a ‘‘critical
theory principle,’’ which states that ‘‘the acceptance of a justiWcation does
not count if the acceptance itself is produced by the coercive power which
is supposedly being justiWed.’’)18 It is also true, on a more mundane level,
that all political systems need to instill their values in the populace, and
what we in Western countries call ‘‘civics’’ or ‘‘political education’’ can
seldom be wholly distinguished from indoctrination. Moreover, the
legions of propagandists, spin doctors and vested interests reveal the
power of money and technique to manipulate the opinion of a populace
who often tend anyway to ‘‘like not with their judgment, but their eyes.’’
We need not assume, therefore, that we can always simply diVerentiate in
practice values irrationally inculcated and values rationally adopted.
Despite this, it would be foolish to deny the reality and importance of
choice. In non-totalitarian environments there is generally a fairly wide
range of moral positions actively competing for attention and allegiance
as well as a permanent battle engaged for the enlargement of the sphere of
genuine deliberation. We must take seriously the existence of leaders and
would-be leaders, parties, causes and movements who cannot simply
command obedience but must win and maintain support, at least in part
on the strength of their expression of and service to principled goals and
commitments. If moral capital is a genuine political resource then it is one
based more on an attractive than on a compulsive power. Therefore,
though it is impossible to put a limit on what people may be persuaded are
moral ends worth struggling for, I intend to limit my inquiry here to
values and ends that can be broadly characterized as ‘‘decent.’’ By this I
mean ends capable in principle of dispassionate assessment and aYrm-
ation (even if one does not in fact aYrm them), whose general acceptance
is explicable in terms of intrinsic moral appeal rather than dependent on a
sociological-psychological analysis of the acceptor.
Having introduced this element of ‘‘bias’’ into my study, it does not
follow that it is either possible or necessary to provide a deWnitive list of
decent ends and values that alone may form a proper basis for moral
capital. That would be absurd, since even decent ends non-coercively
chosen are inWnitely contestable and liable to conXict. Think, for
example, of the inherent tension between the values of freedom and order
which diVerent people try, in good faith, and sometimes in quite diVerent
circumstances, to resolve in quite diVerent ways. More than that, moral
argument in politics is very often about the proper means to ends rather
than about ‘‘decent ends’’ as such, and evil can be done as readily in the
Contract (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), pp. 51–52, explains the slave’s acceptance of
the rightness of slavery in such terms.
…– Bernard Williams, ‘‘Realism and Moralism in Political Theory,’’ p. 10.
25Moral capital and politics
name of genuine good as in the name of a perverted goal. Indeed, the
tragedy is more poignant when zealotry subverts decent aims. ‘‘The
ardour of undisciplined benevolence seduces us into malignity,’’ as
Coleridge said, writing of Robespierre, leading us into ‘‘the dangerous
and gigantic error of making certain evil the means to contingent good.’’19
Yet there can often be genuine doubt in this matter that is not easily
settled. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King both sought the liberation of
black Americans, but one argued the necessity of violent resistance and
separation, the other of peaceful protest and integration. Both attracted
adherents who believed the superior argument lay with their own move-
ment.
As Max Weber put it, ‘‘the ultimately possible attitudes toward life are
irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a Wnal
conclusion. Thus it is necessary to make a decisive choice.’’20 The play of
moral capital in politics is most clearly seen in the contest between
alternative and conXicting choices.
…— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Introductory Address, Addresses to the People (London, no
publisher named, 1938), p. 32.
» Max Weber, ‘‘Science as a Vocation,’’ in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From
Max Weber (London, Routledge, 1970), p. 152.
26 Moral capital
