The Empire of Reason

In The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, Harvey C. Mansfield, one of the chieftains of modern American conservatism, suggests that ‘modernity’ is first and foremost an attempt to place reason in control of human life and to direct its powers toward human freedom (The Rise and Fall, p. 202). Politics then becomes the art of rational control over the passions of men for the sake of a more secure pursuit of individual happiness. 

A particularly famous expression of that idea can be found in the Federalist Papers. In Federalist no. 51, James Madison, himself an avid student of politics, observed that, ‘‘in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.’’ This is the language of rational control. It sets out the task of government in clear terms: to manage the attendant risks of human freedom, which includes the possibility of being oppressed by both individuals and the state. 

Liberalism, in short, begins with the assumption that violence and chaos are a threat to the plans of rational individuals, and as such must be seriously managed to preserve human life. It is easy to forget the importance of such a basic point until society breaks down before our very eyes, and we are confronted with extermination. After Haitian society suffered a complete collapse following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, gang leaders took over more than 80% of the capital Port-au-Prince, displacing close to 1.5 million people. More than 8,100 people were murdered in 2025 alone. The introduction of drone warfare has turned the capital city into an urban war zone, with more than 1,000 alleged gang members killed via aerial strikes in 2025. Government forces patrol the streets the best they can in tanks designed for wars in the Middle East. ‘‘Just ridiculous,’’ says William O’Neill, UN Human Rights expert in Haiti, ‘‘This is pure insurgency. This is Fallujah.’’

During the day, gang members make videos, for the purpose of intimidating their rivals, in which they play football with severed heads. Electricity cuts mean that the streets are pitch-black at night, with few signs of nocturnal movement during the gang curfew. It is at night that rival gangs wage deadly combat, piercing the night skies with the deafening sound of machine guns. ‘‘Sometimes I only fell asleep in the morning because of fear,’’ said Bettina, a single mother displaced by gang violence. Venturing out during the day is no less perilous. The Economist’s 1843 magazine reports that a boy stepped out his doorway for a phone call, and was shot in the leg because a gangster thought the boy was a police informant. In 2025 alone, 700 people were admitted to Tabarre hospital, a makeshift trauma facility situated in Port-du-Prince and supported by Médecins Sans Frontière. The vast majority of the patients were innocent bystanders who suffered from gunshot wounds incurred during one of the many gang fights. The chances of getting shot by mistake are high in Haiti. More than half of the country's street fighters are children, and the other half are men who have often not received serious weapons training. 

In a country where only 10% of clinics are operational, finding medical help for a life-threatening gunshot is very difficult. Finding the medical staff, resources, and safety to care for one’s wounds is another challenge. Workers in Haiti’s largest public hospital were stranded for two hours as gangs battled it out, leaving trapped journalists to attend to the needs of wounded colleagues. The New York Times reports that desperate journalists ‘‘ripped their own clothing to fashion tourniquets and used tampons to staunch the bleeding’’ because the few doctors on site ran for their lives. In any given month, more than 250 rape victims are admitted to French-run medical charities, with many others choosing to stay home to deal with the trauma of sexual violence, rather than zig-zagging their way through gang checkpoints. 

Haiti’s high homicide rate (76 per 100,000) and the absence of anything that resembles a functioning social service has filled the air with the stench of death as citizens stumble over lifeless bodies decaying in 92 degrees heat. When Jonathan Lindor, a resident of Port-au-Prince passed by a familiar road on his way home, he found three corpses lying side-by-side with no shoes on—a sign that the killers had removed their shoes after executing them. When he returned the next day, the bodies had been burned by weary citizens. The New York Times reports that the lack of police presence in a poor neighborhood in Port-au-Prince meant that for three days elderly civilians ‘‘were dismembered and thrown to the sea without authorities finding out.’’ 

The threat of violent death from marauding thugs is a feature of what some political philosophers call the ‘state of nature.’ This hypothetical thought experiment asks us to imagine an intellectually inaccessible moment in our pre-history when the state was absent and the psychological tendencies of our nature were set in stone. The classic state of nature theories offer an account of human origins which takes the absolute solitude of mankind as their starting point. 

The most radical versions of this theory start off with the assumption that for all practical purposes, the question of God’s existence does not matter. Since God cannot help us in our hour of need, we are essentially on our own. Mansfield suggests that ‘‘Christianity would admit what Machiavelli asserts by implication—that God has given nothing to be thankful for.’’ Here again, Mansfield expands our understanding of the Florentine philosopher as the man who invented ‘‘a political science that owes nothing to higher sources above or beyond human necessities.’’ Machiavelli’s practical atheism is most clearly seen in matters of ethics. Machiavelli contends that the harshness of human existence—one in which claims to moral rectitude and religious sainthood are no security against oppression and treachery—puts morality on pause, at least until an opportune moment presents itself. In the meantime, man must cheat, steal, and kill if he wishes to see another day. Those who, as Mansfield puts it, subscribe to a ‘‘wishful imaginary morality’’ which depicts man as a naturally good and sociable creature are not long for this world (The Rise and Fall, p. 22). 

Wisdom is understanding that the romantic belief in natural goodness and the power of Christian morality to restrain evil will get you killed in a world where others are under no illusion about the necessity of injustice. Niccolò Machiavelli was particularly insistent on this point, urging his followers to disabuse themselves of the idea that they could afford to cast necessity aside for the niceties of Christian morality. If anything, to believe in a God that has humanity’s best interest in mind is to expose oneself and other similarly gullible individuals to exploitation and the embrace of an early grave. This consignment can occur at an early age. After the death of Chlodomer, King of the Franks, at Orléans in 524, his three surviving sons were put under the care of their two closest blood-related uncles—a mistake, it turned out, for both uncles plotted to massacre the children. Historian Robert Bartlett describes the scene (Blood Royal, p. 210): 

‘Without delay Clothar seized the older boy by the arm, threw him to the ground and driving a knife into his armpit cruelly killed him.’ The boy’s younger brother knelt at Childebert’s feet, wrapped his arms around his legs and begged for his life. Childebert, clearly the softer of the two uncles, then asked Clothar not to kill the boy. Clothar was unmoved: ‘Either you push him off or you will die in his place!’, he cried. Childebert pushed the boy towards Clothar, who stabbed and killed him. The uncles then killed the boys’ servants and nurses. ‘After they had been killed, Clothar mounted his horse and departed, little bothered by the killing of his nephews.’ Nor does he seem to have been bothered by the fact that, since he had married his brother Chlodomer’s widow, they were also his stepchildren.

Confronted by the evident treachery of his age, Machiavelli recommended the intelligent use of cruelty to survive the world of political intrigue. ‘‘If all men were good,’’ a strict adherence to good morals would make sense, but since ‘‘men are wretched creatures,’’ a posture of vigilance and preparedness to do evil must be embraced (The Prince, XVIII). The cruelty of human life teaches the most observant among us that there is no use praying for divine succor. No benevolent force is waiting in the shadows to bail us out of our earthly trouble. When precious Clarence pleaded before the men who had been sent to slay him, to consider ‘‘Christ’s blood shed for our grievous sins’’ and ‘‘depart and lay no hands on me,’’ the executioners dispatched the little prince with the taunt: ‘‘Relent? ’Tis cowardly and womanish’’ (King Richard III, I.4.238).

Man must survive on his own, and provide for the necessities of life by his own arms. Speaking to the Washington Post in the wake of the Haitian government’s collapse, political scientist Romain Le Cour said that what was most terrible about the uncontrollable violence in the country was ‘‘the sense of abandonment,’’ the sense that ‘‘you have no one to turn to.’’ One might believe in a God who is ultimately in control of everything, but at the end of the day, ‘‘You have to do what you have to do… But you have to do it alone.’’ A perfect encapsulation of the demands of necessity. 

To be a Machaviellian is to reject ‘‘justice for necessity,’’ not because justice as such is bad, but because it is imprudent (The Rise and Fall, p. 22). The prudent person understands that the path out of misery must involve a departure from traditional morality. This takes the form of a rather crude legalism in Thomas Hobbes' philosophy. In fact, says Mansfield, of all the early modern British philosophers, Hobbes is the one who takes Machiavelli’s sacrilegious worldview to its furthest extent. What is serious about Hobbes’s treatment of religion, says Mansfield, ‘‘is his dislike for it, kept barely in check by his respect for its power’’ (The Rise and Fall, p. 81). 

Since in the state of nature, man cannot depend on God for his salvation, he must rely on his rational faculties to see him out of this bind. ‘‘Nature teaches men to preserve themselves, but reason teaches them how,’’ says Mansfield (The Rise and Fall, p. 60). The same power of imagination which enables man to conceive of a thousand ways he might lose his life in a world full of danger and cruelty enables him to ‘‘conceive of the possibility of a common power before it exists, and in so conceiving, make it come into existence’’ (pp. 56, 68).

Government appears a wondrous work of the imagination, but its creation is the product of fear. ‘‘The passion to be reckoned upon is fear,’’ says Hobbes—fear of molestation, fear of dispossession and humiliation, and most viscerally, fear of violent death (Leviathan, p. 94). The frightful conditions of this state of nature are not illusory, but pressing, and the paranoia it inspires, entirely rational. A world in which human passions run amok, where naturally excitable creatures such as ourselves are allowed to satisfy every whim, fancy, and carnal craving without the civilized fear of swift and predictable punishment would be destructive of human designs. Such a world would indeed make life ‘‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’’ but it would also foreclose the possibility of commerce, at least at the scale needed to lift entire communities out of poverty (p. 84). 

The source of the wealth of nations, noted the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, rests not on well-stocked ports or worked-on soil, but on the question of ‘‘whether a people’s laws give men the courage to seek prosperity, freedom to follow up, the sense and habits to find it, and the assurance of reaping the benefit,’’ (Journey to England and Ireland, p. 114–115). Unfortunately, the ‘‘continual fear, and danger of violent death,’’ which characterizes the state of nature habitually discourages enterprise, leaving ‘‘no space for industry’’ because, as Hobbes explains, ‘‘the fruit thereof is uncertain,’’ (Leviathan, p. 84). Without the security to acquire and legitimately keep hold of the fruits of one’s labor, one cannot be said to have what Hobbes calls ‘society.’ 

A society, in Hobbes’s seventeenth-century English mind, is one in which there are signs of intelligent industry and commercial organization. A place where, as he says, there is no ‘‘culture of the earth; no navigation, no use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require force,’’ cannot be considered a society in any mature sense of the word (Leviathan, p. 84). Any civil society worth its name must therefore include some power which makes the pursuit of those commercial practices possible. ‘‘Law and government,’’ wrote Adam Smith, ‘‘seem to propose no other object but this, they secure the individual who has enlarged his property’’ (Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 489). This bourgeois conception of civil order finds its expression in the Hobbesian search for an escape route from the destitution of an economically barren world. In a place like Haiti, people starve or suffer malnutrition because gangs control food supplies, including the importation of food from gang-controlled ports. As if having to import almost all of one’s food was not bad enough, when it arrives on the island, the security situation makes it difficult for such sustenance to reach their intended recipients. 

Hobbes’s solution to man’s problem, his path out of anarchy and poverty, is to form a covenant authorizing a common power to enforce rules and regulations which leaves men free to pursue their own private commercial interest. This newly erected power averts the threat of another descent into civil war by claiming exclusive right to determine what is right and wrong, and to punish wrong-doers when (not if) they get carried away by their exalted opinions. Hobbes’s attack on unbridled public opinion of the kind that threatens social peace is in many ways a reflection of his personal experience with the disorder of the English Civil War, and his subsequent aversion to religious intolerance. 

Since disagreements over values and visions can quickly get out of order, and can at any moment disturb the serenity of the entrepreneur with outbreaks of fanatical violence, contentious debates must not be allowed to spill out onto the public forum without the restraining power of government. That is why there is no formal right of conscience in Hobbes’s kingdom, nor any uncontested liberty to criticize the sovereign’s rule and the order of society as either just or unjust. All such public judgments are handed over to the ultimate power for safekeeping. The covenant Hobbes has in mind, says Mansfield, is ‘‘an open and avowed transfer by all persons of the right to judge good and bad’’ (The Rise and Fall, p. 80). 

When ‘‘you authorize the sovereign over yourself,’’ Mansfield explains, ‘‘you sign away your right to ask the question, How should I live?’’ That does not however mean that all recourse to private judgment disappears. Having signed away the right to judge between good and evil, ‘‘the sovereign, if well instructed, will allow you the maximum private liberty consistent with common security’’ (The Rise and Fall, p. 78). So while intellectual disputation—along with many of the other aspects of human life which give rise to conflict—is removed from the public sphere into the cloisters of the home, those intimate spaces come under greater protection from the sovereign. 

Mansfield puts it this way: absolute sovereignty increases the power of the public and decreases its sphere of activity. Protecting the rights of the individual becomes the focal point of the government’s agenda, thereby elevating the importance of the individual, while his daily cares, aspirations, life goals, values, and other personal facts are sealed off from state scrutiny and attack by the voluntary temperance of government (The Rise and Fall, p. 78). 

It may not be immediately obvious how ‘‘Hobbes's doctrine of absolute sovereignty can be regarded as an advance toward liberalism or even as the foundation of liberalism,’’ but the link becomes clearer, says Mansfield, once one focuses on the priority of rights over duties (The Rise and Fall, p. 76). Hobbes’s government exists to secure the rights of citizens against the encroachment of their fellow covenanters. Mansfield argues that this basic security creates a ‘‘sphere for private liberty in which selfishness can thrive in peace’’ (p. 74). Enforceable laws against robbery now mean that the covenanter can safely retreat into a bourgeois life of careful calculation, purposeful perspiration, and ceaseless acquisition. The question of how each individual ought to live and the duties that they hold toward others becomes a matter of personal discretion, beyond the care of the government, so long as such views do not disquiet society. 

Here again, it is important to emphasize that the state has absolute power to intervene in the ‘private’ lives of citizens, but prefers not to in order to better fulfill its mission. The state must have absolute power, says Mansfield, but ‘‘its purpose is to serve society’’ (The Rise and Fall, p. 76). Hobbes reckons that society’s interests are best served when government thinks it good de ne pas trop gouverner. In Hobbes’s economy, laws ‘‘have the minimal function of making society possible by supplying the conditions of common life.’’ They do not ‘‘prescribe what the common life should be.’’ As such, the greatest liberty, says Mansfield, ‘‘is to be found in the silence of the laws’’ with respect to what we would today call ‘personal lifestyle choices’ (ibid.). If that is right, then what Tocqueville called an  ‘‘immense, protective power’’ which gladly works for the public’s happiness, ‘‘but wants to be sole agent and judge of it’’ would probably go beyond what Hobbes had in mind for the security of mankind (The Making, p. 228). 

At this point, it is important to note that in securing the conditions most favorable to man’s success, Hobbes does not extinguish the worries of human existence (how could he?). Man is still beckoned by necessity and wracked by anxiety. Entering civil society comes at a cost. ‘‘No sooner is he born,’’ says Tocqueville, ‘‘than the idea of necessity assails’’ the mind of the man born into a commercial society (Democracy in America, p. 441). Despite the security which the state offers him, he is still constantly looking over his shoulder, and around him, for any threats that might weaken his hold on a particular piece of property. So while the market society of Hobbes’s dream is decidedly an improvement on the state of nature, it does not entirely eliminate our entirely natural and reasonable dread of loss. Rather, ‘‘to live in freedom,’’ says Tocqueville, ‘‘one must grow used to a life of agitation, change and danger.’’ One must ‘‘keep alert the whole time with a restless eye on everything around; that is the price of freedom’’ (The Making, p. 208). 

The fancy of the quarrelsome

For John Locke, the advantages of civilization far outweigh its downsides. Man’s actions in the state of nature are guided by a moral sense of right and wrong, and thus offer at least the possibility of temporary peace and mild contentment. The problem with such a society is that opinionated and often disagreeable creatures such as us often come to blows with no impartial judge in sight to settle our disputes. This constitutes a grave social problem, for where property is not secure, human life itself is not safe. 

Property is not just stuff. It is a signal ‘‘marking where one’s life’’ is in danger and liberty jeopardized (The Rise and Fall, p. 111). Without a proper authority to keep us safe in our property, our lives would be ‘‘full of fears and continual dangers’’ (Two Treatises, p. 350). Locke agrees that a society that allows for property violations and irregular settlements would be intolerable, and could not be endured for very long without drastic change. This is where the government comes in. The government restores confidence in the integrity of commercial affairs, and the business cycle more broadly, by offering a fair and impartial disposal of property, and a safeguard against eruptions in internecine political violence. 

To do this well, the state withdraws from questions of higher meaning which it has, in principle, the power to determine. Mansfield is clear to avoid any misconception about Locke’s theory of government.  Contrary to what is often asserted, the Lockean state is not limited in scope. Locke’s government ‘‘extends everywhere to all controversies, however private, and to all parties, however protected or secluded’’ (Mansfield, The Rise and Fall, p. 113). While its power is absolute, the exercise of this power is not arbitrary. The state abstains from forming public opinion, shaping moral character, and guards against fanaticism, ‘‘Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious,’’ by protecting the individual from the schemes, whether ill-intended or not, of others (Locke, Two Treatises, p. 291). The liberal government gives the individual an inestimable peace of mind by recognizing that the product(s) of his intellectual and physical efforts are truly his. 

This security is the stimulus of all his endeavors, especially those that involve great risk. That is partly why a bow-tie liberal like George Will thinks that the most important word in the American Declaration of Independence is the word ‘secure’: ‘‘Government’s primary purpose is to secure pre-existing rights. Government does not create rights; it does not dispense them. This assumption, the bedrock premise of American political thought, has hardly been uncontroversial in our time’’ (The Conservative Sensibility, p. 23). Yet, even moderate liberals such as Michael Oakeshott understood this very condition of guaranteed security as ‘‘the order without which the aspirations of individuality could not be realized.’’

What is most striking about liberalism, especially to those who live in places not wholly shaped by this intellectual tradition, is that the liberal state has no interest in directly producing virtue. It is for the individual, and the individual alone, to determine the means of his own preservation. Instead of telling him what to do, the government works to protect his right to judge the means of his own self-preservation. 

The tendency of government to refrain from directing the shape and course of human life is taken for granted today, but it is important to remember the fairly recent import of this idea. Ancient writers, for example, thought that the business of government was to get into other people’s business. The purpose of human life was usually outlined by the poet or philosopher, and the city-state stepped in to help citizens follow the moral script laid out for them. Legislation was in essence about ‘‘uniting the ends and means’’ to produce the flourishing of society (Rise and Fall, p. 75). Liberal government is different. It does not legislate morality but leaves individuals to do ‘‘what they think should be done’’ (Rise and Fall, p. 102). As George Will explains, ‘‘government exists to protect the individual’s right to the pursuit of happiness as the individual defines it, not the pursuit of the good life as government defines it.’’ 

Reason is key to this self-creating human enterprise. Humans are free to use their reason to determine the means of their self-preservation, but must ensure that this right does not infringe upon the rights of others. At the heart of this ‘harm principle’—the idea that freedom can only be abrogated when harm is caused to others—is a sensible distinction between right and duty. Mansfield pinpoints the distinction between the ‘‘right held by the individual’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘the exercise of that right’’on the other,  as ‘‘the essence of what is today called liberalism’’ (Rise and Fall, p. 101). 

Liberalism, as Mansfield defines it, is ‘‘the form of government that protects rights and leaves to individuals, or to a society of individuals, to exercise them as they please’’ (Rise and Fall, p. 101). This is not just an intriguing ideal, it is a good idea. As George Will once more explains, ‘‘It has been well said that the United States is the only nation founded on a good idea, the proposition that people should be free to pursue happiness as they define it.’’ As a result, the U.S. remains the most economically dynamic country in the world. Underlying this success is the recognition that the individual’s natural right to the pursuit of property and happiness had to be protected from the specter of overt brigandage in a state of anarchy and the more covert expropriation by government in a civil society. Without effective legislative checks on all known sources of organized and disorganized despoliation, the liberal’s valorized individual cannot plan and society cannot grow rich. 

The founders of modern political philosophy also recognized that ideological extremism, as well as recurrent appeals to supernatural authority, could be a source of social disorder. In response, liberalism seeks to chasten the influence of ‘superstition’ in human affairs and to enthrone ‘reason,’ whether embodied in positive law, or at work in the movement of history, as the supreme principle of human conduct. Rational control is in essence an attempt to make war against luck and arbitrariness in order to attain greater certainty and predictability in human affairs. 

Writing from Dublin in July 1835, Tocqueville marveled at the economic fruits of the modern ideology of rational control as seen in the smoke-filled cities of industrial England. ‘‘Looking at the turn given to the human spirit in England by political life; seeing the Englishman, certain of the support of his laws, relying on himself and unaware of any obstacle except the limit of his own powers, acting without constraints; seeing him, inspired by the sense that he can do anything,’’ Tocqueville concluded that ‘‘the reason for his commercial success’’ was not to be found in busy ports. Rather, ‘‘it is in himself’’—in the mind of the man who can walk to his job in perfect serenity knowing that he can apply his skill and luck to any endeavor he chooses without fear of violence (Journey to England and Ireland, pp. 114–115).

The modern citizen of a liberal democratic society carries within himself the unmistakable confidence of a person who has grown accustomed to a social and political order built on the principle of rational control. This empire of reason has spread to other regions of the world, but the ‘westerner’ remains most spoiled by its emergence on his soil. Others are not so lucky.  In Port-au-Prince all movement from one neighborhood to the next has to be negotiated by a fee. There is a gang-imposed tax for the movement of vehicles through the streets, and another fee for the movement of food through the human digestive system. The richest, most prosperous members of Haitian society have barricaded themselves in wealthy enclaves such as Carrefour, and have chosen to wisely limit their movement to avoid getting kidnapped or killed. Rhum Barbancourt, one of the county’s largest rum bottlers, has suffered major disruptions due to gang warfare in and around the airport. The economic results of living in such a hyper-extractive society are entirely predictable: the country has an annual budget of some $2.2 billion (half that of the New York City Police Department) and a government revenue below 5% of GDP, the lowest in recorded history. The state spends three-fourths of its meager resources on the salaries of highly vulnerable professionals who are one gunshot wound away from either quitting or fleeing the country. 

Haiti’s only saving grace has been the support of foreign groups, mostly from the U.S, who have worked around President Trump’s publicly known dislike for Haiti in order to provide much-needed tactical security assistance to its beleaguered police force. America’s defense industry, led by Vectus Global, a firm hired by the Haitian government, has been instrumental in pushing back against gang rule, but with mixed results. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 1,243 people have been killed during drone operations in 2025, including 17 children and 43 adult bystanders. Haitian leaders feel like they have no choice but to make war against armed civilians within their territory. A state of war reigns, immobilizing the economy, and destroying real opportunities for individual self-actualization and national enrichment.

Citizens of liberal democratic societies have  grown rich and prosperous off the ideology of rational control, but have unfortunately become complacent in its defense. Mansfield’s new book is a reminder of what liberalism stands for, the many indulgences we get to enjoy because of it, and why (with good reason) we ought to be thankful for its existence. 

Featured image is "The Garden of Earthly Delights," cropped, Hieronymus Bosch c. 1500.