George Armstrong Kelly (1932-1987)Author(s): Patrick RileySource: Political Theory, Vol. 16, No. 2 (May, 1988), pp. 179-185Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191704 .

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GEORGE ARMSTRONG KELLY (1932-1987)

PA TRICK RILEY University of Wisconsin-Madison

The sudden death of George Armstrong Kelly on December 23, 1987, was not completely unexpected; two heart-attacks and (during this past summer) a battle against throat cancer reminded one painfully of his mortality. But as recently as August 1987, he could come home from cancer therapy and give a party for 20 friends that completely belied his condition-at two in the morning he was fresh and sparkling, telling his charming, graceful stories, studded with Enlightenment bons mots, as if time were endless. It was a triumph of Geist over Phanomena-suitably enough, in so great a Hegel scholar.

Can it be sheer chance that made mortality itself the linking theme of all his final works- Victims, Authority and Terror: The Parallel Deaths of d'Orleans, Custine, Bailly and Malesherbes (1982), Politics and Religious Consciousness in America (1984), Mortal Politics in 18th- Century France (1986)? Not that there was any morbidity in this: His own deep faith in (Christian) immortality was merely hinted at with tactful reserve ("To Faith and to Loyalty in a time when they are made difficult but not impossible," one of his book dedications urged); and in his very last work, Mortal Politics, he treated death itself with characteristic insouciance and Gallic wit. Deep conviction and death- defying (verbal!) bravado, reverence, and irreverence-why should they not come together, as they did, in this wonderfully civilized, humane, and generous man?

Indeed in that last work-which brilliantly organizes French politics from Louis XIV to Robespierre around the notions of death and dying, linking Bossuet's oraisons funebres and Fontenelle's dialogues des morts to duelling, war, and the Guillotine-George Kelly had cited with evident relish d'Alembert's dicta for writing "the historical eulogy of an intellectual":

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 16 No. 2, May 1988 179-185 ? 1988 Sage Publications, Inc.

179

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180 POLITICAL THEORY / MAY 1988

The purpose of literary eulogy is to make literature respected, not to vilify it. If, then, by a hardly unique mischance, personal conduct dishonours literary production, what position do we take? We praise the writings. And if, conversely, behaviour is spotless and the writings worthless, what do we do? We keep our mouths shut.

D'Alembert-who for Kelly brought "the most theory" and "the most wit" to dloge-making-would have had no difficulty with George; his writings are as praiseworthy as his character was lovable.

His generosity, in both private and academic life, was legendary. In the summer of 1986, rather than keep an important wedding anniversary wholly to himself and his wife, he characteristically shared his joy with a hundred friends: on the sea-facing grounds of his summer house at Barnstable he had erected a stately pleasure dome that Coleridge might have admired, caused an orchestra to play half the night while dozens feasted and danced under his pavilion, and crowned the evening with a beautifully read sonnet of his own composition, dedicated to his wife. That is a memory that remains indelible.

That same generosity led him to be just to currents of thought that were alien to his moral and aesthetic sensibilities: in Victims, Authority and Terror, his evident sympathy for tolerant, urbane, kindly, Rousseau- loving Malesherbes never led him to doubt that the Jacobin Terror that had killed M. le Pr6sident was animated not just by "vendettas of would-be elites" or the "recovery of a fantastic 'Roman' ideology" but (centrally) by "the insatiable thirst for an egalitarian justice that would sever the Gordian knot of privilege." However he regretted the violent passing of Malesherbes-a man not unlike himself-he was intent on "taking Jacobinism seriously." He took everything seriously, but never earnestly; he knew that a charming phrase of Fdnelon or Fontenelle, artfully placed, could do the work of "analysis" without visible labor.

If one mentions Fenelon and Fontenelle, that is because George Kelly was most at home in the elegance and grace of the siecle des lumieres; his Francophilia even extended to a fantasy of retreating from academic life to the running of a Paris bistro where he would dispense ragou't and Vauvenargues. It is certainly no accident that, even in the preface to his Politics and Religious Consciousness in America, he described himself as "a historian of French and German political thought"-that he began even this book, with its reflections on Emerson, William James and Niebuhr, with a poem (again of his own composition) called Port-Royal des Champs, in which Pascal is brought back to life long enough to lament Louis XIV's murderous assault on Jansenism. The last decade of

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Riley / GEORGE ARMSTRONG KELLY 181

George's intellectual life-which had begun not with death in France but with the death of France qua empire (Lost Soldiers, 1965)-was given over to a monumentally-scaled illumination of French political, moral, and (above all) religious thought from Bossuet to Victor Hugo, lit up from the tomb. To achieve a "dialogue of the dead" between Bossuet (a kind of Divine Terrorist) and Saint-Just (a "Roman" Terrorist)-to see two centuries of French social speculation sub speciae mortatis-was an inspired idea that was left two-thirds realized (Mortal Politics and Victims), and that will be posthumously rounded out by the eventual publication of George's study of the nineteenth century (with its brilliant evocations of Lamartine and Victor Cousin).

But if he thought of himself as "a historian of French and German political thought"-in that order, West to East-it is the trans-Rhenish part of his accomplishment that is nonetheless most impressive and enduring: as a Hegel-scholar and, above all, as an interpreter of the Philosophy of Right (not the easiest to love of Hegel's works), he was non-pareil. And in his extraordinary Idealism, Politics and History (1969), which brought him only to the edge of Hegelianism-the full plunge reserved for Hegel's Retreatfrom Eleusis (1978)-he offered (en route to Hegel) accounts of Kant and Fichte that are unsurpassed small masterpieces. George Kelly was among the first American Kant scholars to give full weight to the notion of "culture"-encompassing republi- canism and eternal peace-in the Critique of Judgment (but without falling into Arendt's scheme to derive Kant's "true" politics from aesthetic judgment); he was among the first to see that teleology-the real subject of the Third Critique-might architectonically unify the whole of Kantianism:

Ideas or ends ... [for Kant] belong to the realms of both teleology and ethics.... Teleology frames hypotheses for the clarification of scientific (causal) knowledge. Ethics can "be defined as the system of the ends of pure practical reason.". . . For Kant the final resolution of this theoretical-practical parallelism is found, as we know, in ethical finalism.

Much of the truth about Kant is in those half-dozen lines. If Idealism can be viewed as a kind of entrance to Hegel's Retreat

from Eleusis, it is that second book that will stand as long as there is Hegel scholarship. When it was published in 1978, it was partly new, partly a retrieval of splendid journal articles finally finding permanence; now it is simply the commentary on the Philosophy of Right. That division between the new and the old reflects a distinction drawn by

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182 POLITICAL THEORY / MAY 1988

Kelly himself, who tells us that parts of his book involve an "archaeo- logical" clarification of "Hegel's place in the European thought of his tradition and period," while other parts of Eleusis attempt to carry Hegel forward into the present, particularly by asking whether the Hegelian notion of "the neutral state" is living, dead, or moribund. Since, for Kelly, "true humanism means both recovery and replen- ishment," "consequent" writers on Hegel try both to understand and to "use" him: "the 'renovators' spread the sail, the 'antiquarians' hold the tiller."

The opening chapter of Eleusis, "Politics and Philosophy in Hegel," "places" the state in Hegel's entire scheme of thought. Hegel was a "state-worshipper," Kelly urges, not because he "revelled in the state's irrational emotional residues" but because "he saw it as the organizing principle which, through the institutional civilizing of the 'situated' human being and the protection of his higher values from disruptive disorder, made the creation of culture and philosophy possible in the modern age." Faithfully mirroring the Preface to the Philosophy of Right, Kelly reminds us that, on the Hegelian view, "although the philosophical understanding contains a critical element, it has also a justificatory duty: it does not abolish what is, in a vain leap toward some imagined perfection ... rather it familiarizes the mind of man with the conditions discovered in the actual world." But Kelly takes care to balance Hegelian political "realism" (some would say quietism) by quoting Hegel's insistence that "when the existing world of freedom has become faithless to the will of better men, that will fails to find itself in the duties there recognized and must try to find in the ideal world of the inner life alone the harmony which actuality has lost." After all, as the fifth chapter of Eleusis makes clear, the "most striking element" of Hegel's political theory is that he, like Rousseau and Kant, "takes the subjective will to be a cornerstone of modern government"-a will on which, however, Hegel "imposes a higher 'Hellenic' or sittlich [ethical] goal of public virtue and public service," so that the Hegelian state "must be collectively educative and secure to the freedom of the subject, at the same time; both Platonic and Kantian in the 'moments' of its dialectic."

That the Hegelian dialectic has more to do with Plato and Kant than with Marx is a point superbly made by Kelly in his second chapter, "Lordship and Bondage," which criticizes Alexandre Kojeve's celebrated quasi-Marxian reading of Hegel as a theorist of Mastery and Slavery. In his Idealism, Kelly had complained that Kojeve makes the master- servant tableau of the Phenomenology into a "synoptic clue to a whole

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Riley / GEORGE ARMSTRONG KELLY 183

philosophy"; in Eleusis, he argues that while "every student of Hegel is deeply enriched by Kojeve," nonetheless, in Kojeve's reading, "the master-slave relationship is made an unqualified device for clarifying the progress of human history." The notion that "the future belongs to the slave" (e.g., the "proletarian'), Kelly urges, is an "unwarranted romanticized refraction of Hegel's thought." Though Kojbve's "original exegesis of Hegelian themes" is "profound," a "Marxian" Phenomen- ology "does not make very good sense." Such a reading "ignores the depth and passion of Hegel's Greek attachments; it ignores, too ... his struggle with the Kantian split vision. These are the two combatants wrestling on the soil of Christian Europe for the possession of Hegel's own ego."

Relaxing his grip on the "antiquarian" tiller, Kelly turns his attention to "renovation" of Hegelian notions in a "final cluster of four essays" that "grapples, in somewhat new fashion, with Hegel's theory of the state, its historical and structural foundations, its demolition by a following generation, and, finally, its relevance." He begins, in a chapter called "the modern state," by declaring that "the state is a political term, and politics is to be viewed autonomously." We are not, he says, "likely to achieve heaven on this earth"; therefore "some semblance of laws and coercive power will persist as long as there is a society of men."

But there are states and states, and what George Kelly wants reconsidered is Hegel's idea of a "neutral" state-a state "that is neither religion on earth, nor the elastic plaything of factions, nor the captive of a fictive ideology that defeats the human experiment." He admits, of course, that the notion of an impartial rule by a truly neutral state has been "hideously tarnished": "gravediggers" of various stripes have shattered the Hegelian syntagma. On one side of Hegel, "liberalism, in its most superficial moments, had wanted to liberate man for the widest practice of his willful caprice consistent with the endurance of society." On another side, "Marxism, in its most generous manifestations, despised the result" to which liberalism led: a Brechtian Mahagonny. Marxism, in Kelly's view, "wished to combine men in a common society of sharing and respect, but it cared scarcely for man's heritage." Hegel alone, according to Kelly, attempted something harder than anything envisaged by either liberalism or Marxism: "liberating men by binding them to their heritage; by reminding them that nothing valuable to civilization [e.g., the state] need be lost . . . and that freedom, to be meaningful, requires the discipline of memory." And what Kelly finally says about Hegel might be applied (on a more modest scale) to his own

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184 POLITICAL THEORY / MAY 1988

political theorizing: "His work is simultaneously a monumental summa- tion and glorification of the travails of the Western mind, commemora- tive in spirit, and also a summons for reasserting the primacy of politics, directed against those contemporaries who could place faith only in a 'community of spirit' lost somewhere in the clouds."

Nothing, however, could provide a finer overview of Kelly's enter- prise, both antiquarian and renovating, than the magnificent opening paragraph of Hegel's Retreat from Eleusis:

The title of this book was suggested to me by re-reading the youthful poem written by Hegel to his friend Holderlin in August 1796. It is a poem bristling with both ideological intransigence and Romantic trust and friendship. In it Hegel declares: "to live for free truth only; but for a peace with statutory law that regulates opinion and men's feelings-never, never to consent to that!" We have all known gifted young men who said "never, never." But the instances are rare when the repudiation of that "never" produces such fertile and honest results. As Hegel retreated from his Romantic world of Eleusis, he discovered and clarified a world at the service of human reason. But as he went forth into midday and afternoon to bequeath a majestic, but cooler, vision of his culture, he did not totally lose his attachments to that point of departure. The free truth was not forsaken; but Hegel also sought to achieve peace-the peace of the intellect and the peace of the city.

This passage, so brief but so movingly eloquent, has an Augustan poise and balance that a Johnson might have admired.

If there was something distinctive in George Kelly's reading of Western civilization-as if it were not distinction enough to write the definitive interpretation of the greatest political work of the 19th century's greatest philosopher-it lay in his effort to recover the religious dimension in social life, to light up the point at which religion and politics cross; surely, it is this-a scholarly echo of his own deepest convictions-that ties together an astonishingly wide-ranging Lebens- werk stretching from Pascal's "Augustinianism" to Kant's Religion Within the Limits to contemporary American sectarianism. Let him speak for himself:

I take the heart of the matter to be the character of religious conviction publicly expressed, the character of secular and civic conviction, the manifold crossings of these effects.... In some beautifully crafted words, Michael Oakeshott affirms that religion as a dialectical meaning-system rises above even the assuagement of guilt and the pain of death... if religion amounts to a "reconciliation with nothingness" [in Oakeshott's phrase], politics would appear to be a "reconciliation to facticity." As we spiral downward to less lofty things, we shall begin to discover ways in which these two "reconciliations" themselves manage or fail to be reconciled.

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Riley / GEORGE ARMSTRONG KELLY 185

And then:

A significant separation of the sacred and the profane returns us to the reality of this earth, but it does not privilege the earth against the mysterious, unforeseeable, and remote sources of hope and truth. The profane order has its own established, but alterable, ways of preservative control. These have usually been influenced, balanced, and moderated by the conceptions we have formed of the sacred. On the other hand, the organization of the profane does not lie within a sacred bondage, as our deep sense of free will and choice teaches us. We are therefore collectively responsible for the preservation of the civilized life-for the civility-we have arduously created since we were all hominids, and later nomadic food-gatherers. That is essentially the task of politics. The task of religion is to provide us with a collective persuasive pattern of cosmic meaning, a common ethic that transcends both self-interest and the prescriptions of public law, and a set of rituals that discipline our memory and give us a place of action in the precincts of the sacred.

A wonderfully sympathetic scholar, a revered teacher, a fine husband and father, a charming and generous friend has left us-but left us in possession of priceless and consoling memories.

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