Francis Bacon's Essays are sometimes seen as a founding text for the ideology of the British Empire, and the reputation is warranted; but it is not limited to such. Really, this book could function as a how-to manual for any aspiring imperial power.
Bacon's ethic in the Essays is fundamentally one of realpolitik. It is ironic in this regard (and perhaps telling, in a "methinks he protests too much" sort of way) that he disavows the works of Machiavelli, and characterizes the great Italian thinker as an infidel; for in truth, Bacon is writing very much in the same spirit. This makes the Essays a timeless classic of political thought, though not always a wholesome one.
Having finished the book over the last two days, I'm confident in ranking it among the handful of truly great works on strategy and political leadership. It deserves to be as often read as The Prince or Sun Tzu's The Art of War—and perhaps even more so, because the Essays is arguably even more on-point for the problems of contemporary geopolitics and trade.
Of course, the political sections of the book are a relatively slim portion of the whole. In between them, Bacon tackles almost every other conceivable topic, from architecture, to gardening, to personal finance. (His tips in this regard, by the way, still hold up. He okays one-time expenditures but warns against ongoing ones, in a way that presages our contemporary woes regarding endless monthly subscription fees; and he advocates for maintaining a balance of risky investments with certain ones—a mix that sounds a great deal like the 60-40 stock-and-bond portfolio recommended by financial advisors today.)
But what really strikes me as timely are Bacon's thoughts on war and imperial expansion. Here, Bacon is all-too revealing of the way in which rising powers justify their plans of conquest and domination. He warns states, for instance, to watch out for any of their immediate neighbors who appear to be amassing power. Tellingly, he then follows up this admonition a bit later in the same essay by rejecting the opinion of the scholastic "just war" theorists, who forbade preemptive aggression in the absence of overt provocation. It is actually fine to strike one's adversary first, Bacon argues, even without "a precedent injury," so long as one acts out of "a just fear of an imminent danger."
Bacon, it would appear, is a harbinger of the "Bush doctrine." And in many ways, the Essays could serve as a manual for neoconservatives. Or for Vladimir Putin, for that matter (for he and the American expansionists are two sides of the same coin). After all, Putin has sought to justify his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine as a sort of "preemptive strike" against the possibility of Ukraine joining the NATO alliance (and has in the process, ironically, underlined exactly why his immediate neighbors are so anxious to join NATO and seek its protection in the first place—"how dare you act as if you needed to deter me from invading!" he seems to be saying—as he invades).
In fairness to Bacon, though, modern international law would actually back him up on this issue in a technical sense. The international law of armed conflict does indeed contemplate that states could lawfully engage in a preemptive strike, under the types of circumstances Bacon describes—namely, when they are responding to a threat of imminent violence from a neighbor. But, it is crucial to insist, this imminent threat is supposed to actually be "imminent." It has to be something like, a state just found out that a terrorist group is planning to set off a nuclear weapon in Washington, D.C., and they know exactly when and how they are going to do it, if they are not stopped. It can't just be a vague sense of geopolitical threat from another.
Bacon tips his hand that he really means "imminent" here not in a strict sense, but in a loose and easily manipulable one, in a later essay on "The True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates." Here, he recommends to rulers eager to expand their state's power that they come up with some convenient ideology that allows them to make war frequently on their rivals.
He offers a number of different pretexts that can serve for such purpose, of which the supposed "preemptive strike" against an "imminent threat" is only one. Others include: war-making for the sake of religious proselytization, developing a hyper-sensitivity to minor irritations and territorial incursions from neighbors ("[N]ations that pretend to greatness," he writes, should "be sensible of wrongs, either upon borderers, merchants, or politic ministers; and [...] sit not too long upon a provocation"), and entering into binding alliances that require one to intervene in defense of various weaker powers.
The only pretext for war of which Bacon seems skeptical is the one voiced most vehemently by the Bush-era Neoconservatives: namely, the idea of the war to impose American-style democracy on other countries. "As for the wars, which were anciently made on the behalf of a kind of party, or tacit conformity of estate," Bacon writes, "I do not see how they may be well justified: as when the Romans made a war for the liberty of Græcia; or, when the Lacedæmonians and Athenians made war to set up or pull down democracies and oligarchies: or when wars were made by foreigners, under the pretence of justice or protection, to deliver the subjects of others from tyranny and oppression, and the like."
But even such pretexts, Bacon says, may serve in a pinch. Anything that gives a would-be expansionary power an ostensible reason to strike its enemies, with the appearance of justice on its side, is good enough. Such a state must be "awake," writes Bacon, "upon any just occasion of arming," (emphasis added) and one feels that the insertion of that "just" in Bacon's sentence is a rather grudging afterthought.
Admittedly, it is not only Bush-era neoconservatism or the neo-imperialist ambitions of Vladimir Putin that find succor in Bacon's pages. There is something here to flatter everyone's politics—including my own. Bacon is a critic of economic inequality, for instance, warning against the aggregation of great land and wealth in a small number of hands ("money is like muck," he says, "not good except it be spread [around].")
And as much as Bacon can be cited as a critic of the worst excesses of emerging capitalism, he is also a prophet of the positive aspects of a market economy. To be sure, Bacon carries over some of the prejudices of the zero-sum pre-Adam Smith economic thinking of his era (claiming, not quite accurately, for instance, that when it comes to international trade, "whatsoever is somewhere gotten, is somewhere lost"). But he also tries to push back against the premodern era's superstitious dread of lending money at interest, arguing that such forms of finance are an economic necessity for any nation (for few will be willing to offer credit without a promise of profit), and therefore it should be permitted but regulated.
Since medieval societies seemed to find no objection to generations of titled aristocrats renting out the use of their land for profit, through various systems of tenant farming, it is refreshing to find someone finally making a case for the lending out of money at profit as well; since, after all, both are merely uses of capital (albeit different forms of capital). Bacon of course must acknowledge and turn a sympathetic ear to the views of his contemporaries, who had retained the prejudices of the middle ages in this regard and still regarded "usury" as a thing unnatural (for how can money breed money?). But he ultimately rejects these arguments, and rightly so. (For why is it any more natural for land to breed money than for money to do so?)
Beyond his still-relevant economic insights, Bacon is also—perhaps most surprisingly of all—an advocate for modern immigration reform. And he arrives at this recommendation through the most stoutly unsentimental realpolitik reasons that one could wish for, as a means to persuade the not-already-convinced.
In a few of the essays, Bacon tackles the problems of population and birth rate declines that beset contemporary societies. Long before Malthus got this point so disastrously wrong, Bacon was already arguing that excessive population growth is far from the only resource constraint societies need to worry about. A population can shrink, he points out, and nonetheless end up costing the state more than a larger aggregate of people would. Population is not "to be reckoned only by number," he writes, "for a smaller number, that spend more and earn less, do wear out an estate sooner, than a greater number that live lower, and gather more."
This, of course, describes pretty well the problems we face now in developed societies. Far from endless population growth turning into the danger it appeared to be in the 1970s, the real challenge we face now in advanced economies is one of population decline. A shrinking population base means that a large number of people are aging out of the workforce in Europe, East Asia, and the United States, without a large cohort of young people entering the workforce to replace them. The aging population requires ever more expensive health care and public benefits, without a growing base of working-age adults to pay for them. The result is an inverted fiscal pyramid.
Bacon, therefore, rightly agues that states need to find ways to expand their population size, and not worry so much about population growing too rapidly. And, with remarkable foresight, he argues that raising birth rates is not the only way to do this; rather, states can also achieve this goal by inviting immigration and by naturalizing non-native-born citizens.
Admittedly, Bacon's case for this policy is couched in his imperialistic vision. But the point stands in general as one about the fiscal health of states. "[A]ll states that are liberal of naturalization towards strangers," Bacon writes, "are fit for empire." He invokes the example of the Roman Empire: "Their manner was to grant naturalization [...] And this not to singular persons alone, but likewise to whole families; yea to cities, and sometimes to nations." In short, we might say, he concludes, "that it was not the Romans that spread upon the world, but it was the world that spread upon the Romans; and that was the sure way of greatness."
Here is a good and timely word of counsel to the so-called "America First" nativists and isolationists. For all their prating about American "greatness," after all, the real greatness of the United States has come largely from the fact that people around the world want to come here and enrich our society with their talents. Not only do we need to encourage migration to the United States through more generous immigration policies, therefore, but we also need to incorporate the people who come here into our body politic by granting citizenship more readily. It could be said of America at its best, after all, that it was not we that spread upon the world, "but the world that spread upon" the United States.
If Bacon is an imperialist, then, he is at least not an ethnically chauvinist one. He recognizes the need for a power bent on expansion to become as pluralistic as the populations it seeks to embrace.
But, as much as Bacon's lessons for political success are out of step with the isolationist and nativist turn of the MAGA wing of the Republican party today, they are all-too compatible with the old Bush-style neoconservatism, as we have seen—which I would also not want to see return.
To be sure, I do confess that the MAGA movement makes me nostalgic at times for the old days of neoconservatism. At least back then, the Republicans embraced a morally universalistic ideology (indeed, something like the liberal imperialism of Bacon, in many ways); and at least they cared about things like promoting democracy abroad (instead of actively trying to destroy democracy, both abroad and at home). Plus, with Vladimir Putin now invading his neighbors on the flimsiest of pretexts, I am more inclined to support NATO and U.S. military aid abroad than I ever was in the past (even while feeling a queasy sense of recognition at Bacon's point that defensive pacts and military alliances can come to serve as pretext for aggressive war). In some ways, I am therefore arguably closer to the neoconservative position now that I was earlier in my life.
But reading Bacon also serves as a reminder of the problems with neoconservatism as an ideology. It is not really about the defense of democracies or the deterrence of expansionary autocrats like Putin, after all. It is about expanding American power, in the belief that this is an inherent good for the world as a whole. Rather than being a salutary counter to Putinism, therefore, American neoconservatism is really its mirror image. Both are ideological justifications for imperial expansion.
To the extent that Bacon can be used to justify either, therefore, the Essays is, perhaps, a dangerous book. But at least we can say that Bacon is forthright and honest about what he is doing. There is no false rhetoric here—Bacon acknowledges full well that the ideology of expansion he favors is one that actively seeks out pretexts for war-making, not one that is merely thrust into combat by the force of circumstance. I would prefer this to the mealy-mouthed rhetoric of Bush-era hawks and Putin-era Russian neo-imperialists any day. Here is no propaganda about "WMDs" or "demilitarizing Ukraine."
Instead, Bacon advocates frankly for unprovoked aggressive war as a method for securing imperial advantage. In this sense, he at least pulls the mask off the various pretexts that ideologists forever deploy to justify the expansionary incursions into their neighbors they would have liked to carry out anyway (so long as they could find a seemingly "just" rationale for it).
Bacon advocates for war, in the end, not because he thinks it is a necessary evil, but because he thinks it is a good thing. "A civil war," he concedes, "is like the heat of a fever; but a foreign war is like the heat of exercise, and serveth to keep the body in health." Bacon prefers war, therefore, simply because it is, as Randolph Bourne would say, "the health of the state."
Alas, though—it so happens that the "health of the state," to Bourne's point, is generally likewise the death of liberty. And this is what Bacon failed to foresee.
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