Cambridge.University.Press.The.Politics.of.Moral.Capital.Sep.2001.pdf

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The Politics of Moral Capital

It is often said that politics is an amoral realm of power and interest in

which moral judgment is irrelevant. In this book, by contrast, John Kane

argues that people’s positive moral judgments of political actors and

institutions provide leaders with an important resource, which he

christens ‘‘moral capital.’’ Negative judgments cause a loss of moral

capital which jeopardizes legitimacy and political survival. Studies of

several historical and contemporary leaders – Lincoln, de Gaulle, Man￾dela, Aung San Suu Kyi – illustrate the signiWcance of moral capital for

political legitimation, mobilizing support, and the creation of strategic

opportunities. In the book’s Wnal section, Kane applies his arguments to

the American presidency from Kennedy to Clinton. He argues that a

moral crisis has aZicted the nation at its mythical heart and has been

refracted through and enacted within its central institutions, eroding the

moral capital of government and people and undermining the nation’s

morale.

john kane is the Head of the School of Politics and Public Policy at

GriYth University, Queensland. He has published articles in such jour￾nals as Political Theory, NOMOS and Telos, and is also co-editor of

Rethinking Australian Citizenship (2000).

Contemporary Political Theory

Series Editor

Ian Shapiro

Editorial Board

Russell Hardin Stephen Holmes JeVrey Isaac

John Keane Elizabeth Kiss Susan Okin

Phillipe Van Parijs Philip Pettit

As the twenty-Wrst century begins, major new political challenges have arisen at

the same time as some of the most enduring dilemmas of political association

remain unresolved. The collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War

reXect a victory for democratic and liberal values, yet in many of the Western

countries that nurtured those values there are severe problems of urban decay,

class and racial conXict, and failing political legitimacy. Enduring global injustice

and inequality seem compounded by environmental problems, disease, the op￾pression of women, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, and the relentless

growth of the world’s population. In such circumstances, the need for creative

thinking about the fundamentals of human political association is manifest. This

new series in contemporary political theory is needed to foster such systematic

normative reXection.

The series proceeds in the belief that the time is ripe for a reassertion of the

importance of problem-driven political theory. It is concerned, that is, with works

that are motivated by the impulse to understand, think critically about, and

address the problems in the world, rather than issues that are thrown up primarily

in academic debate. Books in the series may be interdisciplinary in character,

ranging over issues conventionally dealt with in philosophy, law, history and the

human sciences. The range of materials and the methods of proceeding should be

dictated by the problem at hand, not the conventional debates or disciplinary

divisions of academia.

Other books in the series

Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordo´ n (eds.)

Democracy’s Value

Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordo´ n (eds.)

Democracy’s Edges

Brooke A. Ackerly

Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism

Clarissa Rile Hayward

De-Facing Power

The Politics of Moral Capital

John Kane

         

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain

Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

First published in printed format

ISBN 0-521-66336-9 hardback

ISBN 0-521-66357-1 paperback

ISBN 0-511-03398-2 eBook

John Kane 2004

2001

(Adobe Reader)

©

For Kay

A man has only one death. That death may be as weighty as Mount

T’ai or it may be as light as a goose feather. It all depends on the

way he uses it. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, Han shu

Contents

Acknowledgments page viii

Introduction 1

Part I Moral capital 5

1 Moral capital and politics 10

2 Moral capital and leadership 27

Part II Moral capital in times of crisis 45

3 Abraham Lincoln: the long-purposed man 50

4 Charles De Gaulle: the man of storms 83

Part III Moral capital and dissident politics 113

5 Nelson Mandela: the moral phenomenon 118

6 Aung San Suu Kyi: her father’s daughter 147

Part IV Moral capital and the American presidency 173

7 Kennedy and American virtue 180

8 Crisis 200

9 Aftermath 218

10 Denouement 235

Epilogue 255

Bibliography 261

Index 270

vii

Acknowledgments

This book had its genesis in an undergraduate class I convened as

Olmsted Visiting Professor to the Department of Political Science, Yale

University in 1996–97. The Olmsteds were benefactors who had funded

an Ethics, Politics and Economics program in the department as a means

of addressing their concern about an apparent decline in the moral

sensibility of national leaders. Their hope was that such a program would

stimulate serious reXection on ethics and politics among undergraduates

who might one day play signiWcant roles on the political stage. Given the

task of devising a suitable course, I thought long and hard about how I

might approach the topic in a way that took the moral factor in political

life seriously while avoiding naivete or fruitless moralizing.

The idea of moral capital was my solution to the problem, and I

proposed it to the class as a concept to be collectively explored rather than

as an indicator of knowledge to be mastered. All leapt on it with an energy

and intelligence that quite overwhelmed me, and in the process provided

me with one of the best teaching experiences of my life. It is to the

twenty-two members of that class of ’96, then, that I owe my Wrst debt of

acknowledgment. It was their boundless enthusiasm, more than anything

else, that caused me to believe there might be suYcient interest in the

topic to make an extended study worthwhile. It would be invidious to

name individual names, but I hope that all will remember with as much

pleasure as myself the semester in which we Wrst tested the concept of

moral capital on a range of political leaders past and present.

I must also thank colleagues and post-graduate students at Yale for

many stimulating discussions in which I was Wrst forced to defend and

clarify the notion of moral capital. In particular, I would like to mention

Leonard Wantchekon, Eric Patashnik, Rogers Smith, Don Green, Steven

Smith, Norma Thompson, Casiano Hacker-Cordo´n and Courtney

Jung. Above all, I must thank Ian Shapiro for his unfailing encourage￾ment and always useful commentary. Back home in Australia, I received

further valuable critique from a number of colleagues: Elizabeth van

Acker, Patrick Bishop, and especially Haig Patapan, whose generous

viii

readings of various drafts and long discussions on the nature of the topic

have contributed more to the Wnal shape of this book than any other

inXuence. The responses of Carol Bois, both positive and negative, were

also a very signiWcant aid in my attempts to clarify the nature of my

authorial task. And I must thank two anonymous Cambridge readers

whose penetrating comments improved my appreciation of the problems

involved. Whatever virtues the book possesses is due in large part to these

people. Its shortcomings are, of course, entirely my own.

A further special debt is owed to GeoV Stokes, without whose unstint￾ing, often selXess encouragement and support over many years this book

would never have been written. Finally, I must thank wholeheartedly my

beloved wife, Kay, whose belief is constantly nourishing and whose

patience has been fortunately endless, and my dear children, Matthew

and Philippa, who were amazed it could take me so long to write a single

book.

Acknowledgments ix

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Introduction

During the historic Wrst visit by a US head of state to the new South Africa

in March 1998, President Bill Clinton listened to President Nelson Man￾dela boldly defend an idiosyncratic foreign policy that countenanced

friendly relations with Cuba, Libya and Iran, states regarded by the

Americans as ‘‘pariahs.’’ The US president chuckled indulgently and

blandly agreed to disagree on such matters. Clinton, according to

Washington Post correspondent John Harris, was less interested in foreign

policy diVerences than in basking in the ‘‘aura of moral authority that had

made Mandela so revered.’’ Clinton went so far as to draw lessons from

the Mandela myth for his own critics back home. The South African

leader’s odyssey from political prisoner to president was, he said, a lesson

‘‘in how fundamental goodness and courage and largeness of spirit can

prevail over power lust, division and obsessive smallness in politics.’’ The

clear reference to the sexual scandals in which Clinton was then currently

and apparently endlessly embroiled was, remarkably, not followed up by

journalists, who declined to raise a subject that they had determinedly

pursued for the previous two months. ‘‘It was as if,’’ commented Harris,

‘‘the luminescent presence of Mandela . . . had brieXy chased away the

usual appetite for controversy.’’1

It was a curious meeting. On one side stood a president whose exalted

moral status lent his country a proWle that its size and struggling, mar￾ginal economy scarcely warranted; on the other, a president whose mor￾ality was something of an international joke but whose position as the

executive head of the United States of America commanded necessary

respect. If Mandela’s moral standing enabled him to relate (as he insis￾ted) on equal terms with Clinton, and to assert a genuine independence,

it was nevertheless clearly gratifying to the South African to be so cor￾dially embraced by the chief of the most powerful nation on earth. And if

Clinton, for his part, enjoyed the prestige that preponderant power be￾stowed, he was nevertheless glad to bask for a while in the cleansing light

… Washington Post, 28 March 1998, p. A01.

1

of Mandela’s moral halo (and on many a later occasion he would re￾kindle this glow by referring to the valuable life-lessons he had learned

from Mandela). In short, Mandela, despite his saintly status, was not,

and could not be, indiVerent to the facts of power, while Clinton, for all

his power, could not be indiVerent to public perceptions of his moral

inWrmity.

The connections and divergences between temporal power and moral

standing so oddly Wgured in this meeting mark the central theme of this

book. The idea it introduces and examines is that moral reputation

inevitably represents a resource for political agents and institutions, one

that in combination with other familiar political resources enables politi￾cal processes, supports political contestants and creates political oppor￾tunities. Because politics aims always at political ends, everything about

political agents and institutions – including their moral reputation – is

inevitably tied to the question of political eVectiveness. Virtue, though a

Wne thing in itself, must in the political arena be weighed for its speciW￾cally political value. This political value I explore using the concept of

moral capital.

To gain an intuitive, preliminary grasp of the idea, consider the case of

George Washington. During the American War for Independence

Washington acquired a towering reputation as leader of the victorious

revolutionary army. A man of notable dignity and integrity, he proved

himself capable, brave, enduring and occasionally daring in the danger￾ous Wght for political liberty. At the war’s end he conWrmed his devotion

to republican values by expressly turning his back on personal ambition

and the temptations of tyranny. Exhorted by some to make himself king,

he instead voluntarily disbanded his army (then the only cohesive power

in the land) and retired from public life with a vow never to return. A few

years later, however, Washington re-entered politics to assist in the

founding of the United States, Wrst presiding over the constitutional

convention and then agreeing to become the new nation’s Wrst president.

He had not, however, relinquished his solemn public promise without an

agonizing inner struggle. Even more than most public Wgures of his age,

Washington was fastidiously obsessed with ‘‘reputation,’’ a thing valued

for itself and not for the uses to which it might be put. Thus when called

by anxious delegates in 1787 to lend his desperately needed moral author￾ity to the convention and its products, he hesitated, fearful that going

back on his word might fatally undermine his cherished honor and

reputation. A conWdante, observing his personal Gethsemane, helped

him to his Wnal decision by warning of a deeper danger – that of being

thought a man too concerned with reputation.2

  See Richard Brookhiser, ‘‘A Man on Horseback,’’ Atlantic Monthly (January 1996), pp.

51–64.

2 Introduction

This story captures much of the essence of what I intend by use of the

term moral capital. Washington showed that a high reputation, because it

inclines others toward trust, respect, allegiance, loyalty, or perhaps only

forebearance, can be politically invested to achieve things otherwise

diYcult or even impossible. It is signiWcant, too, that Washington’s

capital was invested to establish Wrst the moral legitimacy of a nation and

later of its primary political oYce, the presidency. It is part of the argu￾ment of this book that there exists a dialectical relationship between the

moral capital of political institutions and that of individuals. In the case of

established regimes that are widely regarded as legitimate, incumbent

individuals generally gain more moral capital from the oYces they occupy

than they bring to them, but the process always works, in principle, both

ways. Loss or gain of personal moral capital will have an eVect on the

institutional moral capital of an oYce, and vice versa.

Washington was mistaken about the eVects of breaking his vow, for the

public could see it was broken for honorable purposes. His fears were not,

however, unreasonable. He ended his second presidential term a deeply

disheartened man, having found that a shining reputation is exceedingly

hard to maintain in the strenuously partisan, bitterly competitive, end￾driven world of politics. If his foundational actions showed the potential

force of moral capital as a political resource, his later experiences revealed

its vulnerability.

All politicians, even the most cynical, become intensely aware during

their careers of both the value and vulnerability of moral capital. Vulner￾ability is a consequence of the fact that moral capital exists only through

people’s moral judgments and appraisals and is thus dependent on the

perceptions available to them. But perceptions may always be wrong or

mistaken and judgments therefore unsound. Furthermore, politicians

have a vested interest in manipulating public perceptions to their own

advantage, which is why, in the modern age, they seek the help of expert

political advisers. They know that to survive the political game they must

strive constantly to maintain or enhance their stock of moral capital, to

reinstate it when it suVers damage, and to undermine their opponents’

supply of it whenever they can. Yet the inevitable gamesmanship involved

in this has, in the long run, the contrary eVect of undermining the

credibility of politicians generally, and arousing public cynicism about

political processes. This is the central irony in the search for moral capital

that raises a question about whether it can actually exist in politics at all,

at least long enough to have any real eVects. Part of the aim of this book is

to show that – and how – it can and does.

Moral criteria form only a single set among the many that people

employ in appraisals that take and retake the measure of human beings

and institutions whose actions and attitudes impinge on their lives,

Introduction 3