Ignatieff’s Realm

Political philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously divided intellectuals into foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes, wrote Berlin in Russian Thinkers, “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” Hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate.”

Michael Ignatieff seems like a fox. His written work, which includes an admiring biography of Berlin, ranges from recent offerings on terrorism, human rights, and empire, to a family memoir, a book on nineteenth-century history, commentaries on nationalism and ethnicity, and three novels. Hovering between the footnote and the byline, his writings flit from the theoretically ambitious to journalistic works of evocative scene-setting and dramatis personae. Saint Augustine is cited, then Hobbes, then Dostoevsky; then, elsewhere, we are riding a plane with Boutros Boutros-Ghali or browsing a Greek market with Richard Holbrooke, before being encircled by a menacing band of Serbian paramilitaries. This mix suggests a versatile mind probing for answers across many domains and employing whatever mode of discourse is necessary.

Ignatieff’s most recent writings convey a certain disquiet, an impulse that purposeful politics has given way to righteous ideology on one side and venal pragmatism on the other. His writing and public speeches have taken on a new urgency, staking out positions and assuming considerable risk. While not generally reported as such, his address to Canada’s Liberal Party convention last March contained both a rebuke and a boast. The Liberal Party “has never been just a machine for winning elections,” he said, hinting that if the current Liberal leadership lacks the clarity and resolve to chart an independent and genuinely internationalist course for Canada, then perhaps a certain public intellectual should return from thirty years of exile to throw his hat into the electoral ring.

And so it has come to pass. Though the rumour mill was active for months, many were still surprised by Ignatieff’s entry into the hardscrabble world of politics. Knocking on doors, stumping for votes, and speaking during Question Period are seldom nuanced experiences. At the nomination meeting that marked his political birth last November in Toronto, raucous heckling denied the patrician scholar a platform from which to expound upon lofty ideas. The question of whether Ignatieff was up to the challenge haunted his campaign. Skepticism toward Ignatieff the candidate focused on two of his specific positions. The first was his support for the US-led Iraq war. Although he recanted this view when no weapons of mass destruction were discovered, the criticism remains that the Harvard professor was not circumspect enough vis-à-vis the Bush administration and its intentions. The second position was his willingness to countenance coercive interrogation practices in terrorismrelated emergencies, a stance prominent left-wing critics claim provided intellectual cover for Donald Rumsfeld.

If we take Ignatieff as he appears — as a fox, sprightly and cunning but ranging far and wide — then the attention given to his controversial stances should surprise no one. Since foxes have no overarching world view, we must take their positions one by one, and in politics this means asking, “What have you done for us lately?” A survey of Ignatieff’s divergent works, however, reveals a hedgehog-like consistency to his political outlook: a liberal, civic nationalism that aims to merge carefully articulated idealism with reality and that imposes specific demands on the citizenry.

Ignatieff’s emergent vision seems to be based on a model of strong citizenship and an ethos, similar to Thomas Jefferson’s, in which the strength of a polity rests primarily on the engagement and patriotism of its people. To twenty-first-century Canadians — uncomfortable with the language of patriotic sacrifice and, by most estimates, politically apathetic — such a vision may seem old-fashioned or out of place. Furthermore, Canadians may not be ready for the more direct consequences of this vision — the reduced domestic entitlements that would attend to the more robust military and more generous foreign-aid budget that Ignatieff sees as prerequisites for Canada to play a serious global role. And how prepared are we to put our troops in harm’s way in order to thwart ethnic cleansing or genocide? Such an updated — and more demanding — social contract may be just the tonic that Canada needs. The answer will depend on how well Ignatieff carries his ideas from the page to the podium.

Ignatieff’s intellectual journey began far from the mass graves of Kosovo and the battlefields of Fallujah. It began at Pentonville Penitentiary, the focal point of a debate over crime and punishment in nineteenth-century Britain. Pentonville was the subject of Ignatieff’s doctoral thesis at Harvard — later reformulated as the book A Just Measure of Pain, which explains the shift in British penal policy between the eighteenth century, when corporal punishment was the norm and imprisonment used only in rare circumstances, and the mid-nineteenth century, when the public became convinced that incarceration was a reasonable way of dealing with criminals. “Total institutions” such as Pentonville were constructed so that prisoners could be isolated from one another and put through scripted regimens with the goal of character reformation.

Ignatieff gives two explanations for the shift. First, following an evolution in the concept of citizenship, campaigns were launched to convince the public that penitentiaries could reform criminals. Second, prisons fulfilled a desire for order in the face of the social and economic disruptions stemming from the Industrial Revolution. Though a work of social history, A Just Measure of Pain signals a pragmatic bent and a clear interest in public policy. The book was written against the political backdrop of the deinstitutionalization movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and against the intellectual backdrop of Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault’s history of the penitentiary in France. Neither receives Ignatieff’s embrace — an early sign of his tendency to reject well-intentioned panaceas and to resist the pessimistic simplifications that often accompany sweeping social critiques.

In his second book, The Needs of Strangers, Ignatieff steps away from history to engage philosophy, literature, and economics. The book is the work of a public intellectual trying to find his voice, and Ignatieff at times comes off like a dilettante bored with footnotes yet ultimately unsuccessful in his quest to touch popular nerves. Just the same, the book contains the germ of a big idea, while displaying a keen interest in the torsions, anxieties, and longings of human lives.

The Needs of Strangers is a meditation on human needs and the liberal welfare state’s attempts to meet them. Needs, Ignatieff points out, vary among persons and historical epochs; even as individuals, we are often ignorant of our own needs. If our needs are varied, inscrutable, and evanescent, how can an impersonal administrative state ever meet them? Liberalism has addressed this dilemma by drawing a line between public needs that a state can attempt to satisfy and private needs that it cannot and should not. If the state provides the necessary substratum of public needs (food, shelter, health, and education), the theory holds that individuals will be better positioned to pursue their private ends.