The Economist of final week opinions the most recent e book of Henry Kissinger who, at 99, doesn’t appear to have modified intellectually (“The Imaginative and prescient Factor: Henry Kissinger Explains What He Thinks Makes Nice Management,” July 21, 2022):
In his newest e book, Mr Kissinger, an unofficial adviser and good friend to many presidents and prime ministers, considers how six leaders from the second half of the twentieth century reoriented their nations and made a long-lasting impression on the world.
These leaders are Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon (of whom Kissinger was Secretary of state), Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher. I’d say it’s not clear what most of of them, if any, did in addition to “reorienting their nations” or “their societies,” because the Economist writes, which implies bossing individuals round. It’s not clear how these leaders have contributed to advancing the freedom and dignity of people. Maybe Margaret Thatcher is the exception, however we could have doubts that the world could be a lot completely different or worse if she had by no means existed. One can argue that these statocrats no less than prevented worse individuals for getting in energy, however that does look like Kissinger’s argument.
It appears that evidently, for Kissinger, historical past is and ought to be the product of the actions of excellent and unhealthy leaders. We are able to hope that God will give us good ones. Since I haven’t learn the e book, I’m open to surprises, however this impression, as conveyed by the Economist’s reviewer, appears to be like in keeping with what an off-the-cuff observer of Kissinger’s profession and occasional reader of his newspaper articles can collect.
The reviewer ends by quoting what he says is the e book’s warning:
No society can stay nice if it loses religion in itself or if it systematically impugns its self-perception.
What does that imply? How can society lose religion in itself? How may it first get hold of religion in itself? How can society impugn something? The place does one discover society’s self-perception? Does she reveals it by our collective mouth? Whom does she converse to? I think that Kissinger’s reply to the final bit is: to the good chief (flectamus genua), who, he writes on (because of Amazon’s “Look Inside”!), represents “the generosity of public spirit which conjures up sacrifice and repair.” Like, say, Nixon ordering a break-in into the Watergate constructing? A lot of Kissinger’s half-dozen idols, if not Nixon himself, have seemingly achieved even worse.
I think that Dr. Kissinger has no data of the welfare-economics and social-choice literature which have thrown substantial doubts on the usefulness and even the mathematical chance of viewing society as one thing like an enormous particular person of which we’re the cells and the chief is the mind.
This line of reflection, I feel, factors out to the elemental distinction between, on the one hand, the socialist and the conservative, who each favor collective selections over particular person selections; and, however, the classical liberal and the libertarian, who (1) understands that we are able to solely analyze society by methodological individualism, and (2) accepts that, from a normative viewpoint, solely human people in the end rely and that they rely equally.