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INTRODUCTION

THE terms of kinship are written on the gates which guard the mysteries of politics. Modern analysts, content to hawk their wares outside those gates, have assured us that not kin, but the group, is the basis of politics. The existence of a group, however, depends on some sense of being alike, of being "akin." Knowledge of the nature of kinship must logically precede knowledge of the nature of groups, for the sense of kinship is prior both in time and in what the ancients called the "order of nature." Our strongest descriptions of relations between men are analogies to kinship, as when an older benefactor is described as "like a father," or two inseparables as "like brothers." When human relations have meaning to men, we judge them to be at least akin to kinship.

Kinship does more than describe group feeling. It introduces men to hierarchy, authority, and command. The terms of kinship are characterized by implied obligation and subtle gradation, and modern theorists reaffirm that the child's image of authority is shaped in the family. 1 When political theorists seek to account for the origin of political authority and institutions, they are driven back to the nature of kinship. Locke's theory, so important to America, begins with a dissent from Filmer on the nature of patriarchal authority. Among moderns, Freud's Ur-father and De Jouvenel's elders are part of a tradition of thought as old as Romulus and Remus or Israel and his sons. Even Plato, who scorned such historical ventures, introduces Socrates in the Euthyphro, a dialogue which centers on the duties men owe to their fathers and to the gods. 2

Of all the terms of kinship, none has had so enduring an appeal and so firm a place in political symbolism as fraternity. Fraternity is a cry that survives the ages. Men speak in the tongues of Babel, but fraternity sounds sweet to their ears. The Hebrew prophet astonished by God's glory, and the eighteenth-century philosopher who sought

1 F. I. Greenstein, "The Benevolent Leader: Children's Images of Political Authority," APSR, LIV ( 1960 ), pp. 934--943· to slay Him, the medieval knight and the small-town businessman, Martin Luther King and the Dragon of the Klan-all have spoken of fraternity as high, if not highest, among the relations of men.

2 For a discussion of the Euthyphro, see Romano Guardini, The Death of Socrates (New York: Meridian Books, 1962 ).

Liberty and equality, honor and obligation: fraternity forms an easy combination with all terms and has a place in the vocabulary of political aspiration, whether ancient or modern. The dream of the revolutionary and the bastion of the reactionary, it is a word to conjure with at all times and by all fires. It may in fact be a proof of human kinship that all men find a need to claim the word as a talisman. Yet the perenniality of the word must raise doubts in the mind of any concerned with its meaning. Men and gods are like Proteus, changing their appearance and remaining the same. But a word which does not change, like an old law in new times, may change its meaning: science may come to mean what men once meant by religion, freedom may mean rank, and the rhetoric of classlessness may give birth to class hierarchy. The word's form becomes a limiting ritual; by refusing to be Protean it becomes Procrustean, forcing men and relationships into the mold of the word, at whatever violence to meaning or to themselves.

Such doubt has a strong foundation when dealing with fraternity. The problem is made still more difficult by the circumstance that definitions of brotherhood and studies of fraternity are almost entirely lacking. The dictionary proceeds like a rudderless ship, in everwidening circularity: "Fraternity: a . relation of brotherhood, the status of being a brother, an organization based on fraternal relations between members." Nor is the definition of "brother" more helpful. We begin clearly enough, with a reference to the male offspring of one's parents. That clarity is immediately dispelled by a transitive verb, "to brother," surely difficult enough genetically. What characterizes the relation of brothers made and brothers born that makes them alike, gives them their quality?

The 'dictionary replies that it is an "exceptionally close" relation, but even in this day of operational definitions, social scientists may balk at calling a husband and wife "brothers," though their relationship is surely "exceptionally close." What among the unusually close relations of men characterizes fraternity? On this the dictionary maintains an oracular silence.8 ·

8 Funk and Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary (Chicago: Willcox and Follett, 1943 ).

It is of course not the task of dictionaries to define philosophic and political ideals and concepts. Intellectual historians, though, have done little better. Kingsley Martin's French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century 4 refers to fraternity in its first chapter, as any work dealing with the creed of 1 789 must. The terms discussed throughout the book, however, are liberty and equality, not fraternity -and in this respect Martin is typical.

Social and psychological scientists are no great improvement, and here it is more astonishing. Freudian analysts have expended almost all their attention on the relations of parents and children; sibling relations have been approached as a secondary question and discussed only in relation to childhood, when they are dealt with at all. 11 American group theorists have made no study of fraternal orders, despite the fact that, until the beginning of this century, fraternal orders were the groups with which Americans were most familiar. The Ency clopedia of the Social Sciences ( 193 1 ed.) contains an essay on fraternal insurance and another on fraternization as a technique of warfare (perhaps the best single commentary on modern images of politics). Beyond that, fraternity surfaces in odd corners like a paragraph of Simmel's, a chapter in a work of popular ideology by T. V. Smith/ and an essay in an encyclopedia of religion which concerns itself largely with fraternal rituals.

7

Recently, Lionel Tiger's Men in GroupSS has provided something of a new departure. Tiger's speculative bio-anthropology, however, is concerned with precisely the question implied by the titlethe solidarity of male groups generally. Though obviously this is a question intimately related to fraternity, it does not deal with the specific qualities of fraternity as a relationship. It may provide a liD. P. Irish, "Sibling Interaction: A Neglected Aspect of Family Life Research," SF, 4:z ( 1964), pp. :Z7!}-:Z8:z. s New York: Random House, 1969. foundation, but it does not complete the structure. And there are ambiguities in even that analysis; Tiger traces male solidarity to the needs of the hunt, and is it accidental that the huntsman's deity in Greece was a woman-and a virgin at that? Or that the Hebraic symbol of the hunter, Nimrod, is a patriarchal figure? The hunt is a mystery, a suggestion of incompleteness, not an answer-and especially not for those who would know the meaning of fraternity.

4 New York: Harper and Row, 1956.

6 The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Wolff (Glencoe: Free Press, 1951), pp. 4:z3-4:Z4; T.V. Smith and E. C. Lindeman, The Democratic Way of Life (New York: New American Library, 195 I). A rather specialized exception to the rule is Benjamin Nelson, The Law of Usury: from Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949).

7 A work not relevant to my purpose, because its concern is with the "theory of organization" rather than fraternity or politics, is William A. Scott, Values and Organizations: A Study of Fraternities and Sororities (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965).

There are no other anchor points for an analysis of the idea of fraternity. Ironically, this is partly the fault of the eighteenth-century theorists who most stridently raised fraternity as a political battlecry. Whatever their motives, their theories were expressed in the individualistic terms of natural right and the "state of nature." To allow kinship terms to enter the discussion would have been to bind "natural man" in a network of social relations. Paternity implies antecedent relations with a woman, present relations with children; fraternity implies relations with brothers presently and parents antecedently. Such terms suggest the "natural sociability" which medieval thought had derived from the empiricism of Aristotle and from the classicists generally. Many social-contract theorists, following the example of Hobbes, devoted themselves to stripping away the mantle of authority that had garbed parents, equating paternal and "despotical" power.

Despite this hostility to ideas of kinship, the eighteenth-century devotees of contractarian theory did appeal to that one significant kinship term, fraternity. It has been argued that they did so because fraternity "implies equality." All kinship terms, however, imply equality within the class of relations involved; all fathers are equal in being fathers, and grandfathers are "grand" only in relation to their children's sons, not to each other. Parental terms do suggest superiority to children outside the class, but for that very reason fraternity implies, not "equality," but common inferiority and obligation to parents. The single kinship term which suggests liberty and equality had already been discovered by the kin-conscious monarchs of Europe: the term is "cousin." All cousins are equal, and none share parents, which leaves each cousin "free" in relation to every other.

The creed of liberty, equality, and fraternity is intelligible only in relation to the idea of a Creator, a Divine "father" who established fraternity among men. Fraternity would emerge when liberty and equality could in some final sense dissolve the lesser fatherhoods and fraternities of men. The men of 1789 were not so blind as to believe that men held fraternal sentiments for all their fellows. They did not appeal to fraternity as a fact or as a method, but as an end in the relations of men; liberty and equality were only means. Without all the faith of those who founded the creed, T. V. Smith still called fraternity "the first objective, ethically ... of the democratic way of life." 9 x. Is a bond based on intense interpersonal affection, and,

The eighteenth-century doctrine can be regarded in many ways. Some have seen in it a moral passion to realize the universal fraternal standards of Christianity in this world rather than the next. With equal force, others have seen it as a nostalgia for, and an effort to recapture, a warmth and social stability which have been increasingly sensed as lost with the advent of modernity. Yet the success or failure of either attempt, and the truth of the creed, depended on the degree to which the theorists who developed the doctrine understood human nature and the character of fraternal relations among men.

A part of the argument in this book is designed to show that the liberal Enlightenment understood men imperfectly at best, and fraternal relations among men little or not at all. Given that misunderstanding, their zeal for fraternity did at least as much to weaken brotherhood as it did to strengthen it. And it is also my purpose to argue that the liberal tradition of the eighteenth century accounts for only a small part of the yearning for fraternity to be found in the history and letters of America.

In more than one sense, my assumptions are "reactionary," for the definition of fraternity that I seek is an essentialistic one. That is, I presume that there is a nature of man, and consequently a nature of fraternity. Fashionable philosophic thought in our times prefers "nature" in quotation marks, for it tends to follow the quest for ultimate particles which requires the dissolving of nature, probing that subatomic chaos which Plato suspected was beneath physical things.

At least, however, fraternity is an organic and not a physical term, belonging to social science because fraternity presumes society.

9 Smith and Lindeman, p. 33· Smith also calls fraternity the "brightest" of the three ideals of 1789 (p. 19 ). Compare Smith and Lindeman with John H. Schaar, Escape from Authority (New York: Basic Books, 1961 ), p. u, and James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (London and New York: Holt and Williams, r875), pp. :zs6-31o.

Equality and liberty have their analogues in physical science, but fraternity does not. Gasses may be free; they cannot be fraternal. Any analysis of the relations between human beings must take into account the primary fact of human, if not of organic, life: the consciousness itself.

An additional school of modern philosophers, the Existentialists, beginning with that consciousness, have regarded it as an ultimate, a psychological monad separated from all other things. This too denies that man and his relations have a nature, order, and form. Man, to this school, is he who imposes order on the chaos of the world by choice and will. Existence, their dictum asserts, is prior to essence, which is "made" by man.

It is a touching faith, and one must sympathize with it. It is an attempt to deny the most painful, most evident, lesson of the times. Man is permeable, not a fortress of adamant; the consciousness is malleable within limits, thought is always subject to control. Inalienable rights have proved only too alienable, and today no social scientist would argue, as did so many following SpiJ:.loza, that the mind, unlike the body, cannot be chained.

Analytic and Existential philosophies share a common aim, if not a strategy. Both seek man's conquest of nature, his emancipation from and lordship over the world of physical things, and deny his status as a part of nature. Both descend from the once unified battalions of the eighteenth century. Analytic philosophy retains the ancient elan, the belief in offensif a l'outrance against nature, with the objective of breaking it up, reducing it to matter in motion subject to man's control. Existentialism fears that the foe is mightier than was believed, and wisely realizes that control of nature by man threatens man with control by man. It seeks, therefore, to fortify the spirit of the individual against that assault, asserting-because it hopes to make it so- · that the consciousness is impregnable.

The military metaphor is intentional. Existentialism grew up among the generation of 1916, who learned in the trenches around V er dun to discard the high optimism of individualism and progress. It is appealing in a time in which only entrenchments seem safe amid the forces let loose by the modern world; but that semblance, tempting though it may be, should have perished in 1940. There is no safe place in our world.

Both Existential and Analytic schools, however, continue to contend that nature is a foe, an enemy separable from man. The quotations around "nature" are the writer's tools of attack, but the conception of humanity is excluded from the assault. The d01ninant usage refers to human "nature," not "human nature," and "human" nature is unheard of and unwritten.

Two facts encourage those who would brave the two great falanges of the army of modern philosophy. First, the portents of man's "conquest" of nature are increasingly grim;10 second, the research of some social scientists begins to suggest that results may be obtained by assuming once again, as the classics did, that man is a part of nature and that human nature is a fact which affects the life of men. Nor is "nature" restricted, as so much modern thought would have it, to biology and the mechanics of inheritance; and "nurture" is not separate from, but a part of, the nature of man. 11 May it not then be possible to consider a nature of the relations of men, a nature of fraternity, even a natural law?

The question is not its own answer. It only implies, for those willing to ask, that it may be fruitful to begin at the beginning, to examine fraternity as it was seen by those who believed it to have a nature because they felt it as an immediate thing. When we have examined fraternity from that traditional perspective, that perspective in turn may be examined in terms of our own observations. And finally, it will then become possible to trace the labyrinthine path of fraternity as an idea in the life of America.

All these examinations have convinced me that the ancients were right in seeing fraternity as a means to the ends of freedom and equality; and correspondingly, that the modern theorists who reversed this relationship were guilty of a serious error. I will argue that fraternity: ;, ..

2. Like all such bonds, is limited in the number of persons and in the social space to which it can be extended; that it

3· Also involves shared values or goals considered more important than "mere life," and lO Konrad Lorenz, "On the Virtue of Humility," in On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966), pp. 220-235.

11 Tiger, Men in Groups, pp. 1-17; James C. Davies, Human Nature in Politics (New York: Wiley, 1963).

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