Glass Houses

It’s pretty easy to mock the French government right now. Sébastien Lecornu was prime minister for barely a month. By the time he named all the members of his cabinet, it collapsed fourteen hours later and broke another record of shortest-lived French governments.

Lecornu’s immediate predecessor had lost a confidence vote over his budget proposals and the “Block Everything” social movement that opposed them. Lecornu fared no better. He was just the latest in line—eighth to be exact—of prime ministers under President Emmanuel Macron whose legitimacy is disappearing as quickly as members of his party. Then parliament had a sense of déjà vu when Macron promptly reappointed Lecornu as prime minister. How long the Lecornu II government will last is anyone’s guess.

The American press is right to call it political chaos, crisis, deadlock, disarray, impasse, turmoil, so on and so on. Yet never has the expression about people in glass houses throwing stones been more appropriate. Members of the Congress have shut the United States government down once again.  

While both the French and American political circumstances stem from fights over the national budget in their respective legislatures, only the US government actually shut down. This curtails services provided by Federal agencies as well as the pay of their employees. Members of Congress, ironically, still get paid even when they don’t work toward a compromise or anything else.

In France, however, the government continues to operate and public employees still get paid for their work while political battles play out. That doesn’t mean France can continue to ignore its budget approval process. But the country’s public service and citizens are not hostage to any party’s political scores. Meanwhile the US is on its eleventh government shutdown in history, the last three of which have been under Donald Trump. And like the situation in France, the end of the US government shutdown is anyone’s guess.

Americans can blame the shutdown on whomever they want but it might help instead to look to how other countries face a budgetary crisis. The French government is definitely in one, but at least it’s still open. And though Americans don't have a parliamentary system, they could still demand the impeachment—a vote of no confidence of sorts—of any president or lawmaker willing to shut the US government down. In the very least, they shouldn’t think their political leaders are somehow more righteous than French ones.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with publishing a variation of “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” The origins of the adage trace back even further to the 14th century to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Written in Middle English, the poem uses the word of French origin for glass, verre, since it rhymed with werre, also from Old French meaning war or conflict: “And for-thy, who that hath an heed of verre, Fro cast of stones war him in the werre!” Flash forward to the 20th century, Billy Joel released an album titled Glass Houses whose cover featured the singer about to throw a stone at a glass house, his own in fact. (The album also features a song in French, C’était toi.) The original message about hypocrisy may have given way to one about real danger.

Indeed, throwing proverbial stones has already gotten Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, into enough serious trouble. Perhaps it’s time for them to build a more solid house than one made of glass.

Laissez-nous faire?

Recently, I read “The Science of Society,” in Richie Robertson’s opus, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790. It was enlightening for a sociologist to be reminded that “the study of society required the concept of society.” From the French, société evoked a “network or system with an internal hierarchy, certainly, but not confined to any one political form.”

It’s easy to take it for granted today, but society was a novel concept like the polity or the economy. These would become hallmark categories of the social sciences by the turn of the 20th century. College students major in them and entire careers are built on these concepts.

Robertson draws on the baron de Montesquieu, French nobleman and lawyer and, by some accounts, the founder of political sociology. His Spirit of the Laws is less a treatise on law itself, and rather an explanation of how a country’s cultural and political “spirit” takes hold and how laws can and cannot change this. Montesquieu is perhaps better known for developing the notion of separation of powers into the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. His idea would influence reforms in the French government as well as the Framers of the United States Constitution. For inspiration, Montesquieu looked to Britain as having a government that withstood change while avoiding despotism. Can the same be said of the United States today?

For Montesquieu, government requires virtue. In a democracy, the representatives of the people must be civic-minded and put the public’s interest before their own. Worried primarily about aristocrats perpetuating their wealth at the expense of others, Montesquieu argued that an oligarchy could become entrenched in a republic and undermine it. Though not an original idea—Montesquieu was steeped in the classics—it was based on patterns of political behavior he observed over time. History now seems to be repeating itself.

Meanwhile, the Enlightenment also witnessed the growth of a business class that was independent of the church or king. Robertson points to Adam Smith who coined the term commercial society, which he deemed even more virtuous than the class of nobility seeking favors in a king’s court. When Louis XIV’s finance minister, Colbert, met with businessmen to hear their advice for how he could support them, the resounding answer was “laissez-nous faire.” In other words, leave us to do it without the government’s interference.

Robertson notes that Benjamin Franklin took this lesson from France. However, he did not interpret the idea to mean that no government was necessary, just not too much by selfishly pursuing trade policies on its own. Franklin had grown convinced that Britain was doing just that with its American colonies by limiting their trade to the home nation. Robertson further points out that Franklin agreed with the French businessmen’s perspective provided they “conduct trade responsibly, with an eye to the general good, not just to their selfish and short-term interests.”

Businessmen, like lawmakers, have to be virtuous. The problem, as Adam Smith argues in The Wealth of Nations, is that they rarely are. Government needs to be independent of business and allow it to flourish while curbing their excesses and monopolizing interests. As Robertson infers from Smith, “businessmen are unfit to govern.” Yet that is exactly who governs the United States now. The country has championed unfettered capitalism, often by misconstruing both the original context of laissez-faire as well as Smith’s arguments.

If we are to believe Montesquieu’s theory, once a country’s spirit is established, it is hard to undo. Compounding that is another point Robertson highlights: “A democratic republic is fragile because political virtue is difficult to sustain.” Indeed. By explaining how governments become corrupted, The Spirit of the Laws makes for an enlightening read these days.