the problem of dirty hands in politics peace in the vegetable trade_sutherland

Société québécoise de science politique

The Problem of Dirty Hands in Politics: Peace in the Vegetable TradeAuthor(s): S. L. SutherlandSource: Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 28,No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 479-507Published by: Canadian Political Science Association and the Société québécoise de sciencepolitiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3232339Accessed: 14/12/2009 22:15

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The Problem of Dirty Hands in Politics: Peace in the Vegetable Trade*

S. L. SUTHERLAND Carleton University

The standard conception of the dirty hands problem looks at desperate choices in the life of a political leader in terms of their consequences for the soul: the focus is the moral condition of the autonomous moral actor. Therefore reflection on dirty hands scenarios naturally encourages judgments about the inherently compromising nature of politics; the fatalistic message is that political actors will inevitably compromise their moral being by taking part in political action. Perhaps the single passage most cited to exemplify the supra-ethical stance of the political leader is a short speech from Jean-Paul Sartre's Les mains sales. The speech is taken to mean, in Coady's phrase, "that the vocation of politics somehow rightly requires its practitioners to violate important moral standards which prevail outside politics."' The revolutionary leader (Hoederer) apparently chides his young secretary and eventual assassin (Hugo) for the stiffness of his beginners' principles:

Comme tu tiens a ta purete, mon petit gars! Comme tu as peur de te salir les mains... La purete, c'est une idee de fakir et de moine. Vous autres, les intel- lectuels, les anarchistes bourgeois, vous en tirez pretexte pour ne rien faire. Ne rien faire, rester immobile, serrer les coudes contre le corps, porter des gants. Moi j'ai les mains sales. Jusqu'aux coudes. Je les ai plongees dans la merde et

* The author thanks David Braybrooke for his unfailing generous willingness to comment and advise, as well as colleagues Peter Emberley, Radha Jhappan and Denis St-Martin for their, in equal measure, helpful and challenging comments, and David Shugarman for providing the incentive to think about the subject. The JOURNAL'S referees also provided insightful and encouraging comments, for which the article is richer.

1 C. A. J. Coady, "Politics and the Problem of Dirty Hands," in Peter Singer, ed., A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 373 (emphasis added).

S. L. Sutherland, Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6

Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, XXVIII:3 (September/sep- tembre 1995). Printed in Canada / Imprime au Canada

S. L. SUTHERLAND

dans le sang. Et puis apres? Est-ce que tu t'imagines qu'on peut gouverner in- nocemment?2

These are Sartre's words, but, I argue, they are not a distillation of the message of his play, which is really about the inevitable sequel to a daring "political" act, that is, retrospective political and social judgment. Likewise, I hold, if there are important lessons about politics embedded in dirty hands or realist problematics, they are more likely to be found in the fifth act than in the first, that is, well after the initial executive acts, or first round of decisions.

This article is constructed in two parts. The first explores, through the definitional features of the dirty hands perspective, whether it is possible to sustain the claim that it reveals a moral compromise at the heart of political action. The second part argues that it is important to study dirty hands episodes for what we can learn about the capacity of our political structures to conduct thorough-going retrospective discussions about conduct in politics and public life, and to hold political actors to account for the impact of their actions upon the quality of process in collective life. By "process" I mean of course that public business is con- ducted under the rule of law, but also, more generally, that it is con- ducted with respect for deliberation and disclosure. The features of the classical dirty hands problem that are isolated and challenged are the following: (1) that the political actor must be pressured into acting on consequentialist reasoning in the context of a psychologically compel- ling narrative frame; (2) that he3 must then be judged as an individual in the context of a deontological ethics; (3) that the exploration of the modelled or schematic dirty hands situation captures the important aspects, or the heart, of politics; and (4) that the moral importance of the political gesture is somehow directly expressed in, or is inherent to, the act itself. This latter understanding is challenged through the dynamic argument of Les mains sales.

2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les mains sales (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 104. A free translation

might be as follows: "How fond you are of your purity! How afraid you are to dirty your hands.... Purity is an idea for holy men. The rest of you, you intellectu- als, middle-class anarchists, you use it as a pretext for doing nothing: to do nothing, to rest immobile, to hold your elbows in close to your body, to wear gloves. Me, I have dirty hands. Up to the elbows. I plunged them into shit and blood. And what of it? Do you imagine that one can govern innocently?" Hoederer also says, more succinctly, "Tous les moyens sont bons quand ils sont efficaces" (193).

3 The masculine pronouns are used because the dirty hands problem is historically gendered, making the use of "she" anachronistic or at the least, so counterstereo- typical as to suggest an unintended irony. The masculine pronoun is also much more faithful to the typical extension of ideas of masculine physical prowess and the aesthetic of heavy physical effort to the (male) leader's onerous task of strate- gizing and planning -probably to lend charisma for the followers. Thus male executives can be portrayed as sweating while only thinking, while this would seem quite odd in the case of a woman.

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Abstract. Most treatments of the problem of dirty hands in politics assume that merely holding a position of great political power will require a political actor to violate important moral standards. They assume that the successful political leader must inevitably be morally corrupted by the iniquitous choices that must inevitably be made, and, further, that this casts a shadow upon political life as a moral enterprise. This article argues, instead, that the conventional dirty hands problem is not particularly significant and that a much more serious test of the moral quality of public life in a given polity is how it makes its arrangements for formal public retrospection upon and judgment of the inevitable episodes of unwise, intemperate or immoral political action by leaders. In short, it is the deliberate corruption of democracy that should attract our scrutiny, not the condition of the soul of the supra-ethical or maverick leader.

Resume. La plupart des analyses sur le probleme des << mains sales >> en politique pos- tulent generalement l'exigence de la transgression des normes morales par ceux qui de- tiennent d'importantes positions d'autoritd politique. Ces analyses pretendent que pour reussir, l'acteur politique doit faire des choix iniques qui corrompent in6vitablement sur le plan moral, ce qui aurait pour effet de donner un caractere amoral a la vie politique en gen6ral. Cet article remet en question l'importance du probleme des << mains sales > et soutient plutot qu'une fa9on beaucoup plus significative d'examiner la qualite morale de la vie politique d'une societe donnee, est de voir comment elle organise les processus de revision lui permettant de discuter et de juger les actes moralement refractaires commis episodiquement par ses leaders politiques. En bref, c'est l'effet sur la democra- tie des actes < supra-ethiques >> du leader qui doit etre scrut6 par le public, et non pas l'effet de ses gestes sur son ame.

The second part of the article is built on three main ideas; Dennis Thompson's concept of mediated corruption, which holds that strategies to evade the deliberative phases of decision and the judgment of retrospective deliberation are to be seen as offences against the political system itself;4 David Braybrooke and Charles E. Lindblom's persistent and evolving image of policy making as an ongoing exploratory, remedial and serial activity, more or less systematic;5 and some of my own notions about how particular representative institutions are more or less apt in the task of configuring and conducting a retrospective cycle of concentrated deliberation to weigh the earlier acts of the executive. The

importance of the retrospective phase is that it enables the public deliberating in hindsight to be thoughtfully remedial (and even directly corrective) in respect to the quality of process and of political conduct expected of officials as well as in respect to identifying desirable substantial or policy changes. The usefulness of this perspective, which em- phasizes deliberation, systematic retrospection and remediation, is in-

vestigated in four examples: Hollis' discussion of the sacrifice of Cov-

4 Dennis F. Thompson, "Mediated Corruption: The Case of the Keating Five," American Political Science Review 87 (1993), 369-81.

5 David Braybrooke, Traffic Congestion Goes Through the Issue Machine (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974); David Braybrooke and Charles E. Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); Charles E. Lindblom and David K. Cohen, Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem Solving (New Haven: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1979); and David Braybrooke, Bryson Brown and Peter K. Schotch, Logic on the Track of Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy, forthcoming).

S. L. SUTHERLAND

entry; the use of the presidential pardon in American politics; an evasion of ministerial responsibility by the Conservative government in Canada in 1991, where it effectively tried public servants by vote by constituting a parliamentary committee as a surrogate court; and Brecht' s transposition to the Chicago vegetable trade of the story of the rise of German fascism leading into the Second World War.

How Can We Escape the Dirty Hands World?

The dirty hands dilemma is a circumstance in which a political actor must strive heroically and autonomously to achieve the least-evil outcome for some well-defined group, where he must do wrong to do so, in secret, and where, in a successful test, he is accountable only to himself. In his beautifully crafted exposition of the Glencoe massacre, for example, Martin Hollis endorses what he says is Machiavelli's starting point: that "there [exist] evil persons who do not wish the good of the people and who do not keep faith; and that they can only be thwarted by marshalling the apparatus of legitimacy against them; and that this apparatus has to be used dishonestly."6 The apparatus of legitimacy is here the arm and power of the state. In 1692, two companies of Argylls (Campbells) who, supposedly in the context of an effort to build peace, were billeted on the MacDonalds of Glencoe, acting on orders, rose against their hosts in the night and slaughtered everyone they could, then burnt what they could not take. The military hierarchy was not a brake on terror but a convenience to its operators who were precipitated into action by the opportunity to ambush. So the tribes were pacified- the least evil outcome. "Politics," Hollis concludes from his examination of the dilemma of the statesmen who organized the massacre, "is an arena where the best is the enemy of the good, where we license our agents to pursue the good and where they can succeed, only if they operate partly beyond our ken and our control."7 The task of the leader (and his secret service) is, then, to act autonomously and covertly as society's agent in areas that are beyond the prospect of being given direction or held under control by ordinary people, and are even beyond our understanding. The heroism of our agents arises from their-and our- acceptance of the Faustian bargain that great crimes require, and quite possibly even make, great men.

Other much-cited dirty hands situations include the following: the justification of political assassination as an action that can dramatically correct the course of history; whether it can be right to yield a targeted judge to terrorists in exchange for the safety of many innocent hostages;

6 Martin Hollis, "Dirty Hands," British Journal of Political Science 12 (1982), 396.

7 Ibid., 398.

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The Problem of Dirty Hands in Politics

what to do if one should meet a guerrilla leader who stipulates that if one will personally slay just one small peasant he will spare the rest of the otherwise-doomed group; and whether, as a leader of a country in civil war, one ought personally to order that a captured opponent be tortured to extract information that one expects will save lives.8 In brief, the role of the masses in a dirty hands problem is as the body count: the public is a passive collection of individuals of whom the lone decision maker must save the largest number possible.

Explorations of dirty hands problems almost invariably acknowledge a debt to, as Rossiter puts it, "the little book that Machiavelli wrote to wheedle a job out of Lorenzo de'Medici."9 As Albert Hirschman points out in The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Machiavelli's The Prince gave impetus to the timeless stream of rhetoric that debunks any and all mechanisms that have been proposed to allow the masses to participate in governing.10 The basic themes of the "realists" are those of Hirschman's title: any democratic reform will work in the opposite way to that intended, come to nothing, or place the whole state and society in the gravest danger. The essential message of the critics of democracy, that "maudlin enthusiasm of humanity," is that there exists an unbridgeable gulf between those who lead and those who are led. Thus it is best to be led by a bold elite which will govern with genius and fortitude. 1

8 Assassination is a subject for Albert Camus, notably The Just Assassins, in Cali- gula and Three Other Plays (New York: Knopf, 1958); the judges problem is from Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974); the torture example is taken up in Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1977), 184-89; and the jungle parable is developed in Ber- nard Williams, "A Critique of Utilitarianism," in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Wil- liams, eds., Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 98. But see also Williams' "Politics and Moral Character," in S. Hampshire, ed., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1978), 55-74. The authors' various scenarios have taken on a life of their own. Michael Walzer, "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands," Phi- losophy and Public Affairs 2 (1972-1973), 160-80, perhaps contains the most direct discussion of the possibility of living a moral life as a public figure. In real life, the defence presented by the former Vichy government official, Paul Touvier, in his 1994 trial for crimes against humanity half a century earlier, was that he had saved 93 Jewish prisoners by designating seven for execution. See Paul Webster, "Touvier Trial Goes Easy on Vichy," Manchester Guardian Weekly (Manches- ter), April 10, 1994, 4.

9 Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), viii.

10 Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).

11 Ibid., 93. The description of democracy as a "maudlin enthusiasm" that could de- stroy the institutional creations of centuries of "wise heads" is from the debates leading up to the Second Reform Act of 1867 in Britain.

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How can we escape the dirty hands world? I begin by challenging the definition of that world.

Consequentialism and Its Limits

The representative dirty hands scenario, as Benn notes, anticipates costs and benefits.12 It is therefore consequentialist in its form. The problem solving by the individual caught in the dirty hands situation thus suffers from the same telling weaknesses as does any system of reasoning that as- sumes that it is possible to elaborate a rational, comprehensive, robust predictive system that can give our rational actor direct control (agency) over the chosen variables. Braybrooke and Lindblom summarize the problems in relation to utilitarianism as follows: "no interpersonal calculus; no rule for bringing accounts of consequences to an end; no rule for specifying reference groups for whom consequences count." 3

Therefore, it seems fair to say that the dirty hands hero cannot found his belief that he has a "right" to take decisions for the masses in a predictive certainty that his strategy is best in the circumstances. Cer- tainly he may make probable judgments, but where the probability of success is low, the legitimacy of unilateral decision making, outside an emergency situation, begins to seem very dubious. Indeed, to relax the demand for certainty of a successful outcome seems to invite deception about the reasons that may have triggered a round of expedient, secret decision making: it is a political blank cheque. And certainly a lone decision maker might seek to reduce uncertainty and diffuse responsibility by consulting widely, but then the moral responsibility for the projected action would seem to be shared, and among an arbitrarily chosen council at that. The would-be decision maker must therefore find legitimacy as a political actor elsewhere than in certainty that personal rule will be most effective and economical in terms of the sacrifice imposed on those without the positional power of office: in the inherent right to be the decider, that is, in elitism of birth or power (no longer legitimate in the modern constitutional democracies among which we hope to continue); or in respect for the process under which the decision maker's role is circumscribed, that is, in constitutionalism, whose supremacy the dirty hands problem does not acknowledge.

The Incoherence of the Moral Perspective of the Hero

A second common assumption is that the decider's consequentialist output phase, in which he tries to succeed using evil means, is suitably

12 Stanley I. Benn, "Private and Public Morality: Clean Living and Dirty Hands," in S. I. Benn and G. F. Gaus, eds., Public and Private in Social Life (London: Croom Helm, 1983).

13 Braybrooke and Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision, vii.

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followed by a deontological phase of self-judgment. The dirty hands leader in a wicked situation must act as a bold consequentialist. But then, the well-intentioned expedient bad action having been accom- plished in secret, he must turn deontological principles upon himself. Under the set of rules by which he now judges his own conduct in his study, he must accept that he has done wrong in adopting wicked means and heartily and sincerely condemn himself. Meanwhile, the practi- tioner consequentialist twin must conceal all evidence of the wrong action by any means, keep the burden of his guilt to himself, and must stiffen his resolve to carry on in this vein, because he believes that only by so doing can he be of real use to his followers, towards whom he adopts a poulterer's morality. Furthermore, he must convince himself that at some higher level he was somehow "right" to have done wrong and that he has therefore been ennobled and tempered by the trauma of having undertaken a course of action from which ordinary persons would shrink, and is thereby fitted to take on bigger challenges of the same nature. The problematic thus has the heroic decider acting "politically," that is, as a consequentialist, but it also insists that he see himself as what he is on universal moral principles: a tragic failure. But is this pose coherent (note that one does not say "possible")? I would submit that it is not. The dirty hands leader is always in consequentialist mode, no matter how unhappy at nightfall.

Generalization to All Politics of a Flawed Model

The third assumption, that the typical dirty hands scenarios reveal the true nature of political action in general, is also flawed. It involves a generalization from the particular scenario (which can also be described as a modelled political problem) to some universalized characteristic of "political action." But a dirty hands scenario can shed light only upon the variables it explicitly takes into account in its specification of the important internal causal conditions. And, further, the feature of internal validity, assuming it is attained-that such a set of identified circumstances would plausibly interact for the predicted result-does not guarantee external validity.

External validity, the appropriateness of attributing a result or dynamic observed in the model to the world, is to be judged by the ade- quacy with which the "experiment" or problem that has apparently been plumbed was appropriately modelled upon each of the telling conditions of the domain to which it is hoped to generalize. Unless each of the causal features of the setting has been seized in the schematic problem, one must not generalize from the model or experiment back to the setting from which the model was schematized. The dirty hands protagonist is a one-person executive, unencumbered by either assembly or ju- diciary. As Anthony King tells us, executives are the primitive core of

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government activity, being "already there" at the start of organized political life.14 Dirty hands scenarios therefore exclude the prospect of the reciprocity between citizens and leaders which arises through the citizens' role in choosing the governors, and is regulated by the structure of justice that predates them both: there is no prior structure of justice in the raw "politics" of a dirty hands problem because there are no courts or legislatures, only what was already there-power and domination. This is essentially a feudal world, in which the noble has rights of life and death over the inhabitants of his territories, and deals as an equal only with other nobles.

Because the dirty hands executive acts outside any constitution, all action in a dirty hands problem takes place within the paradigm of the emergency situation. The protagonist is thereby in a game with the following rules: he is the only actor in his round; if he refrains from bold action, the innocent will pay; the only way he can save at least some innocents is with the blood of other innocents; and time presses. His morality is engaged only in the utilitarian or "lesser evil" rule that he will seek to minimize suffering as he engages the problem.

Thus the feature that is seen to be missing here is that politics are social, and thus political activity is inevitably public (sooner or later).

Sartre's Play as a Perspective on Dirty Hands

The final assumption of dirty hands scenarios examined here is one that Sartre himself challenges: that the distinctive meaning of the political act is to be found in the act itself, and thus can be neatly explored in just such scenarios. Les mains sales repays examination in this respect, because it creates a reflection on this issue as its action progresses. Its protagonist acts, judges himself, is judged and is made to suffer from the brash "innocence" of his earlier acts as they take their own trajec- tory.

Sartre's story takes place as the war is coming to an end and various factions are jockeying for a favourable peacetime role. "Politics" is moving away from wartime struggle for absolutes toward dialogue and compromise with yesterday's enemies. The play is essentially a psycho- drama, focused as it is upon three struggles: first on the long moment of choice of the idealistic and thus uncompromising Hugo as to whether to kill the realist and compromising Hoederer; secondly on Hugo's moral and philosophical exploration of the meaning of his own act; then, finally, on Hugo's struggle to control, in a social context, the meaning of his original choice by exercising his freedom to reaffirm or to reinter-

14 "The [contemporary] executive... is neither more nor less than what is left of government... when legislatures and the courts are removed" (Anthony King, "Executives," in F. I. Greenstein and N. W. Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 5 [Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975], 181).

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pret it through his subsequent actions. (Authenticity, as the existential- ists tell us, is not won forever in one act, but in each act, every day.)

Soon after its appearance, Les mains sales was virulently attacked by the Communist press, which not unnaturally saw its story line as an attack.15 It was then appropriated as a propaganda weapon in the Cold War. To give one example of how the play was treated: the 1948 Ameri- can production was renamed "Red Gloves," cast the elegant Charles Boyer in the role of the virile man-of-the-people, Hoederer, invented for him a new speech about Abraham Lincoln, and saved Hugo from his inexorable fate.16

Another hijacking of Les mains sales is the constant invoking of the Hoederer speech, cited earlier, as though it were a final judgment on the essential nature of politics. Sartre himself did not think he had come down on either the side of realism or on that of idealism in the play:

Je donne raison a tous: au vieux chef realiste du Parti Proletarien, qui, parce qu'il transige provisoirement avec la reaction, se voit qualifie de "social- traitre" par pur opportunisme [of the party faction that wants to take over the fruits of Hoederer's long struggle]. Et aussi a son jeune disciple, eperdu d'idea- lisme, que les "durs" ont charge d'executer celui qui fut son idole.17

When Hoederer tells Hugo that he has dealt in both merde et sang, one must come to terms with the merde because Hoederer mentions it first, thereby qualifying his use of the word sang. Merde has a weaker scato- logical focus than the English "shit"; it comprises nonsense, doubt, pet- tiness, confusion and futility. Putting it first places blood as the other, fated, pole of this sad, muddled, human spectrum. Thus also the injus- tice of the standard finicky translation of Sartre's merde as "filth," which implies the speaker's distance from, and scorn for, the disorder and confusion of human struggle. Hoederer, on the contrary, is saying that he, unlike the bourgeois anarchists, is unconditionally willing to lose himself in the merdier of mass political action.

Therefore, the "filth and blood" translation obscures Hoederer's condemnation of those who pursue revolution as a series of poses. This

15 See Marc Buffat, Les mains sales de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 163-71.

16 At first Sartre tried washing his hands of the whole business, declaring that the play's fate in the world represented an "objective" path that had nothing to do with him. But by 1952, a declared critical sympathizer of Communism, he was refusing to authorize the play's production in certain cities, "des points nevral- giques." This semi-ban lasted until the mid-1960s (ibid., 167-71).

17 Ibid., 166, quoting Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les Ecrits de Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 178-79: "I make everyone right: the old 'realist' leader of the proletarian party, who, because he makes some provisional concessions with the reactionary party, sees himself portrayed by opportunists as a traitor to society, is correct. And so also is the young disciple, lost in idealism, whom the hard-liners have sent to execute he [Hoederer] who was once his idol."

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is the error-the bad faith-of which Hoederer is hoping to cure Hugo by telling him to abandon his naively intransigent idealism. To no avail, for Hugo peevishly replies, "On s'apercevra peut-etre un jour que je n'ai pas peur du sang." Hoederer's answer to this is: "Parbleu: des gants rouges, c'est elegant. C'est le reste qui te fait peur. C'est ce qui pue a ton petit nez d'aristocrate."'8 To think of proletarian blood as "red gloves," as a layer of protection from ce qui pue, is the fatuous (but still fatal) and narcissistic stupidity of the bourgeois anarchist, who is willing to wear the peoples' blood as a symbol of his own commit- ment to their emancipation.

Hoederer rejects Hugo's argument that intransigence is owed to the slain martyrs of the party. He rejects the idea that only still more blood can redeem the blood already spilled: "Je me fous des morts. Ils sont morts pour le Parti et le Parti peut decider ce qu'il veut. Je fais une politique de vivant, pour les vivants." 19 Living people are to come first.

Even knowing that Hugo is a danger to him, Hoederer so much prefers dialogue that he thinks he can save his own life by disarming Hugo with words.20 Hoederer is not afraid to die, only of being killed before his work is done. But Hugo is afraid to kill, and, alas for Hoed- erer, he is even more afraid of discovering that he is incapable of killing: Hugo apparently interprets the seductiveness of Hoederer's arguments as a sign that he, Hugo, lacks faith.

And here the characters would be hung for eternity like those in Huis Clos, had Sartre not provided Hugo with a young and attractive fe- male companion at headquarters, who is presented as his wife, Jessica. Hoederer's rationality and virility work somewhat more quickly on Jes- sica. Still hesitating as to whether to obey the orders to kill Hoederer, Hugo stumbles upon Jessica and Hoederer in each other's arms. He ac- quires the will to pull the trigger because of the shock of the double failure: Jessica's physical treason to their cause, made possible by his own temporizing.21 But with his last breath, Hoederer, infused with his characteristic charity towards human muddle, cheats Hugo of his moment of false decision by describing his own assassination as a crime of passion, exculpating Hugo. The Sartrean dilemma is that Hugo has not yet killed Hoederer.

18 Sartre, Les mains sales, 194 (emphasis added). Hugo: "You will see one day that I am not afraid of blood." Hoederer: "red gloves, that's elegant. It is the rest of it [i.e., the merde] that frightens you. That's what stinks to your little aristocratic nose."

19 Ibid., 191. Minutes later he says, "Pour moi fa compte un homme de plus ou de moins dans le monde."

20 Buffat, Les mains sales de Jean-Paul Sartre, 69. 21 The apparently chauvinist conception of Jessica's role, while it may date the play,

is unimportant. There are serious women in the party, such as the one who is charged with the responsibility of deciding whether Hugo must be killed, a task to which she seems equal.

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Now things become a little complicated. On his release from the short jail sentence imposed for crimes of passion, Hugo still cannot decide whether he is a simple murderer or a principled political assassin. Again, external events provide a resolution. He finds that the group on whose orders he had killed Hoederer has now embraced Hoederer' s legacy of compromise, endorsing the very policies for which he was killed. The outstanding question for the party is whether or not Hugo, its tool for the killing, is "recuperable." Should Hugo agree to change his iden- tity and remain silent, the party will continue to give him shelter of sorts and make use of him. But if he chooses to claim the murder as his own political testament, the party will arrange to inter that testament with Hugo under one and the same tombstone. In short, the only way for Hugo to stay alive is to accept that he is a deeply compromised and fool- ish young man who has now lost almost any margin of freedom or hope of authorship of his own life. Thus Hugo finds himself in a replay of his first set of decisions, the pressure in this retrospective round coming from the party's condition that he must now interpret his past action in conformity with the party's current requirements, thereby relinquishing any ideals that may remain to him, or die.

But Hugo is revolted at the idea that Hoederer's death should stand as a kind of accident. He wants to honour Hoederer by affirming his murder as a politically motivated act; as an assassination and not as a blunder that became the cynical partisan tactical opportunity in which he would collude. Thus, in gallant irony and existential good faith, he stands his ground as, at one and the same time, his own man at last and the party's past dupe, and has his last and finest moment in crying out the words "non recuperable," triggering his own assassination. Hugo's more educated choice, his second chance at political action, says to the party that too much opportunism is a bad thing. (Hoederer's murder, like his arguments, show the opposite, that too much principle in politics is a bad thing.) In his death, Hugo yields to his fate as one of the party's unnamed soldiers, the meaning of whose action is open to interpretation and appropriation by the living. In so doing, he takes his place with Hoederer in the confused egalitarianism of the merdier of action and death. Hoederer's death of course always belonged quite squarely to his party just as he had said: he died for the party and the party made of his death what it wanted.

Thus while Sartre forces one to struggle with the politics in his play ("Je donne raison a tous . . "22), the central theme is clear: events may be enacted by individuals, but meaning (political morality) is found in the process of social negotiation, to which the actor has no choice but to give up his act and perhaps himself, somewhat as Sartre lost his play to the constructions fitted upon it by others. "First-round" events may

22 Ibid., note 17.

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well be behaviour squeezed out of the equivocating protagonist by the relentless pressure of the situation. But later, as the protagonist con- tinues to try to negotiate the meaning of the deed in society, one sees more clearly the political meaning of the action. Thus, regardless of an actor's experience and beliefs as to his own motivation at the time of an action, if indeed they were clear, the author's signature does not remain with the action to become the authoritative social interpretation. Instead, the action as it has been witnessed at second remove is subjected to a public reconstruction that moralizes it from the exterior. In the vocabu- lary of this argument, the social process of retrospective deliberation-a wickedly manipulated process in Sartre's play-appropriates and confers layers of meaning upon the first-round behaviour.23

Therefore Sartre's play, I argue, is a complex extended examination and, ultimately, a fatalistic mockery of the bold adventurer in politics who feels fit to decide for others as though the future were a game of chess in an empty room: the play insists that one cannot predict what will happen as a result of one's act from the basis of what one might want to think one had intended to happen.24

Political Action as Constituted by Rules, Deliberated and Retrospectively Evaluated

The dirty hands world and the emergency situation are inadequate to model political life, because the entire prospect of constitutional democracy is missing. Constitutionalism can be defined as the belief in the rule of law and the belief that ideals and rules about how deliberation is realized and how the mechanisms of democratic procedure will operate are important enough to be summarized and expressed in normative documents that should and usually do guide the processes of government, and, secondly, that these rules should try to ensure that the power of government will be linked and subjugated in some way to the

23 As Gadamer insists, the fissure that time creates means that meaning must be reconstructed, and, being reconstructed, is different from what went before ("alienated"). The past is remade socially in a mediation with the present. See Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 131-34.

24 On self-authorship and authenticity see David Carr, Time, Narrative and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 80-99. In Carr's terms, Hugo's choice of the timing of his own death can be seen as his clinging to authorship: he makes the issue of what social meaning is to be given Hoederer's death the sum- mation or, perhaps, rounding out, of his own "project." Carr notes that Heidegger and Sartre "share the same ideal of authenticity as self-authorship: it is simply that Sartre, with tragic pathos, believes the ideal unattainable" (84). In the same place, Carr says that to suppose that one can take complete charge of the stories in which one figures, or to work oneself up into a sense of tragic regret that one cannot do so, "is to succumb to the illusion of being or desiring to be God."

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people.25 This does not mean that moral and political safety are guaran- teed by constitutionalism through rule by law and the respect and adher- ence to democratic participation in decision making that it underwrites, because, as noted, emergencies and exceptional situations will always arise in which leaders may behave in unforeseen ways. What constitutionalism adds is the morning after: a public process of retrospection in which leaders' actions are reviewed. As its main purpose, political activity in representative institutions must channel and control, assess and sometimes condemn the use of power. This is so whether the political action is to be, or was, exercised within the state or externally, whether the action is routine or, on the other hand, involves the exercise of dis- cretion in poorly understood contexts.

The decision phase of the executive is thus inevitably followed by phases of judgment. These subsequent rounds of discussion, whose form and impact are dictated by the contingent configurations of the representative institutions, operate to moralize and, indeed, politicize the events of previous rounds: there will be reassessment, redefinition, approbation or disapprobation, and formulation of new issues for the agendas of all parts of the institutional framework. Public judgment takes the place of the autonomous phase of self-judgment in the dirty hands scenario. And retrospective deliberation also takes place, it must be remembered, outside the representative institutions in the "big loose" systems of social judgment (the latter now their own kind of merdier, because they are largely media-driven or media-appropriated for profit) and political influence that run through the whole society. Sometimes retrospective deliberation will lead to new policy, and occa- sionally to destitution or censuring of particular actors. These cycles will be more or less open, timely, exploratory, inexorable, just or remedial depending on actual structures of the representative institutions in a given political system and the issues in question.

This perspective on democracy as both a policy delivery system and a conversational system had its origin in David Braybrooke's book about public debate over traffic congestion, and his earlier book with Charles Lindblom, Strategy of Decision. Braybrooke and Lindblom say that public policy is "remedial, serial and exploratory."26 What is argued here is that particular political institutions provide particular structures and routes for ongoing public conversations about public life

25 See, for a recent exploration of democracies as communities of inquiry capable of intelligent collective adaptation, Charles W. Anderson, "Pragmatic Liberalism, the Rule of Law, and the Pluralist Regime," in Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan, eds., A New Constitutionalism: Designing Political Institutions for a Good Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 106. An important source for such treatments is John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: Putnam, 1963).

26 Braybrooke and Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision, vii.

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that are inexorably serial and differentially exploratory and remedial (and perhaps different in deterrent effect). My goal is to emphasize that political conversation does take place, not only in regard to the content and form of policy, but also, importantly, in regard to political action overall. In particular, I want to stress that these public conversations (within a particularly structured set of rules in the community of conversation) retrospectively explore and pass judgment on the morality and general aptness of previous rounds of political action. Thus society struggles toward substantial public policy and also toward public morality through its exercise of the deliberative opportunities provided under the so-called procedural rules of its public life. Both phases of political life count mightily: for new policy, the first-round decision phase; and, for maturing policies, results of decisions, the style and quality of conduct of the leadership, and the phases of retrospective deliberation.

David Carr's discussion of the narrative character of everyday experience illuminates such a perspective. Individuals take a prospective- retrospective stance toward their own projects, he says, in order to, like a storyteller, select and then attend to what counts, so they are better en- abled to negotiate with the future. Real hindsight is a luxury individuals poised for action do not have, yet they do ruminate on probable consequences of possible courses of action on an "as if" basis. But real hindsight is essential to the storyteller's position: it is not unjust, but is necessary to select the frame of the story itself, actively constituting a point of view. All narration is essentially intersubjective and thus social. Building on Carr, it is interesting to think of the democratic community of inquiry as constructing its own narrative on the meaning of events and actions as they flow past. It can decide upon the organizational features of the narrative and, in a sense, negotiate with the future on the basis of what is gleaned from the past: it collectively can make the decisions about "beginning-middle-end, suspension-resolution, departure- return, repetition, and the like."27 In such a perspective, the representative machinery of government can be seen as creating different kinds of fora and schedules for political conversation and the crafting of the narrative on public life: the House of Commons, "the great inquest of the nation," has long been so conceived. More concretely, one can hypo- thesize that a constitutional design that ensures retrospective deliberation within the representative institutions might have the following impact on the public policy process: allow it to be more effectively educa- tional and exploratory because it can be made more systematic; make it more remedial because judgment can be more timely and more concentrated, bringing closer the possibility of corrective action; and more calm and civil because the agenda for discussion and grievance will be

27 Carr, Time, 60-65.

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to a large extent in the hands of the assembly, thus the need for strategic overstatement is less.

In relation to constitutionalism and the dirty hands problem, it is useful to study the "political morality" of individual actions in terms of their capacity to subvert the intentions of actual political institutions, understood as rules for guiding public behaviour. One can maintain that the choices political actors may make under pressure should be seen as raw events to be studied and moralized in the course of the orderly, constitu- tionally appropriate processes of retrospective deliberation and evaluation. The political mechanisms of each constitution can then be examined for their capacity to structure retrospective rounds of public discussion in a timely and transparent way, and so remedy, lay to rest, or systematically and continuously reformulate the issues embedded in the choices.

In regard to a certain class of actions that effectively subvert the exploratory phases of political life but which are not usually regarded as crimes, Dennis Thompson's concept, that of mediated corruption, is helpful. For the purposes of this article, the most important aspect of his definition states that acts that subvert the democratic process by under- mining deliberation and thus competition are morally corrupt. Thomp- son uses the word "mediated" to describe the form of corruption because the actions at issue, undertaken by politicians in a kind of "loophole" thinking in the context of the system rules, are filtered through political practices that may in other contexts be legitimate:

mediated corruption differs from conventional corruption with respect to each of these three elements [that normally define corruption]: (1) the gain that the politician receives is political, not personal, and is not illegitimate in itself, as in conventional corruption; (2) how the public official provides the benefit is im- proper, not necessarily the benefit itself or the fact that the particular citizen receives the benefit; (3) the connection between the gain and the benefit is im- proper because it damages the democratic process, not because the public official provides the benefit with a corrupt motive. In each of these elements, the concept of mediated corruption links the acts of individual officials to qualities of the democratic process. In this way, the concept provides a partial synthesis of conventional corruption (familiar in contemporary political science) and systemic corruption (found in traditional political theory).28

Thompson stresses that mediated corruption "precludes deliberation about whether to deliberate." Actors become corrupting agents when they undertake to manipulate the rules for their covert political gain, "farming" the system to appropriate resources to consolidate their hold on power. Of course, many analysts before Thompson have woven moral judgments into their descriptions of the founding principles of particular systems of democratic representation and responsibil-

28 Thompson, "Mediated Corruption," 378.

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ity. Herman Finer, for example, says, in regard to British institutions, that the process of deliberation has to be complemented by a process of political responsibility for the decisions taken, and that, further, this responsibility for leadership has to be a public arrangement that all can see, a process external to the executive that operates within the power nexus of the representative machinery of government.29 Finer comes within a hair of equating democracy with the mechanisms of responsible government. Nonetheless, the principles that are important to both Thompson and Finer are that democracy is something that is public and deliberative in its character and nature. And Thompson has defined a clear standard of judgment: respect for deliberation.

Thus, although his conception of mediated corruption is broadly consistent with other theories of democracy, Thompson recommends that we might try founding respect for our system squarely upon the deliberative conception, "which prescribes that officials act on consider- ations of moral principle, rather than only on calculations of political power." The moral principle that is appealed to is that it is deeply wrong to bypass or otherwise corrupt the democratic processes of deliberation and competition. In this conception, neither ends nor means are legitimate unless they have been addressed in legitimate deliberative procedures. One can add that this is not the same thing as saying that all things that are chosen through legitimate procedures are just or necessary, only that the "warrant of the democratic process" must be obtained for two reasons: to legitimate a substantial course of action-a policy-and to support the health of the process itself. (In this regard, one must again insist upon the importance of the retrospective phase of a political process. "Loophole man" can be seen for what he is: a criminal of process.) The very idea of constitutionalism can thus be seen to incorporate the idea of deliberative democracy, and further, of deliberative democracy as exploratory, serial and remedial (that is, as explicitly retrospective as well as active or positive).30

Thompson's idea suggests a standard by which to assess the effec- tiveness of the machinery of government of an actual democratic system. The morality of an individual political action can be judged (along- side other standards)31 by whether or not its agents anticipated that re-

29 Herman Finer, "Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government," Pub- lic Administration Review 1 (1940/1941), 335-50.

30 Thompson, "Mediated Corruption," 377. 31 We are familiar with the standard of majority rule. In his 1987 book, Thompson

develops an argument to the effect that morally justifiable decisions can be assessed against three additional sets of standards: generality, autonomy and publicity. Very briefly, "Standards of generality require that legislative actions be justifiable in terms that apply to all citizens equally ... Standards of autonomy prescribe that representatives act on relevant reasons ... Standards of publicity require that an intervention take place in ways that could be justified publicly." See Dennis F.

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trospective exploration of the meaning and effects of the act would occur, took this appropriately into account, and did not try to evade it or corrupt its meaning. The integrating instrument of the individualistic and structuralist views of responsible action is our prior conception, indeed our moral judgment, of what kind of democratic process we want to encourage. The next challenge is to think about whole political systems as distinctive in the way they provide and ensure the realization of deliberative opportunities. In what follows, we extend Thompson's at- tentiveness to the deliberative processes to explore some examples of political advantage-taking that involve broad strategies to hold on to office (and afflict one's enemies).

Hollis' Treatment of the Coventry Sacrifice The deliberation standard as a test of political morality suggests that contemporary political systems-configurations of institutions and rules-differ in their capacity for engaging focused public discussion. They would therefore also differ in their characteristic vulnerability to dirty hands decision makers, and might even provide distinctive incen- tives to leaders to slip into secretive, consequentialist and self-interested modes of thinking and acting. Certainly the requirements for deliberation are different, or at least differently configured, in different political systems.

The article by Hollis that was cited earlier makes an almost- offhand observation about the British cabinet system which, I submit, errs in an interesting and useful way in that it illustrates the importance of contingent configurations of rules. The "story goes," he tells us,

that Churchill was told during the afternoon of 14 November 1940 that there was to be a massive air raid on Coventry that night. A word of warning would have saved hundreds of lives. Yet no warning was sent. For, if the Luftwaffe found themselves expected, they would know that their Enigma cypher had been broken and that was a consequence worth more in the war effort than hundreds of lives in Coventry. It might seem that Churchill had sacrificed his integrity to the war effort. But, on reflection, would it not have been self-indulgence to give the word? Did integrity not demand the keeping of a wider faith?32

But, in a note at page bottom, Hollis tersely informs us that "Churchill was given no such information." The note then dismisses the importance of Churchill's factual lack of involvement in the episode, in which his own integrity was nonetheless allegedly at stake. Why? Because,

Thompson, Political Ethics and Public Office (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), chap. 4. The concept of mediated corruption is distinguishable from the publicity standard in that it specifically considers the form and requirements of the system, rather than simple exposure of a deed.

32 Hollis, "Dirty Hands," 391.

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Hollis says, "certainly those who deciphered the German signals did know; so the case can stand, even if Churchill is not the focus of it."33 The anonymous officers who did contingently possess the information about the raid could have warned their fellow citizens in Coventry, but chose not to do so for wartime emergency reasons (with which we have no quarrel here), sacrificed their moral integrity, Hollis says, even though they had no choice in strategic terms.

But how does this involve Churchill? Hollis even picks up the Cov- entry decision a second time. His implication is clearly that the "integrity" dilemma does hold vicariously for Churchill, that the cleanliness of his hands in the Coventry deaths is seriously in question. But, again, why? It seems most likely that Hollis can let his references to Churchill stand because his own thinking is immured in the British framework of responsible government: the minister is politically responsible (must answer in public and must provide for redress or a rationale for not acting) for the actions of subordinates in the portfolio. Were Hollis Ameri- can, the concept of "deniability" would certainly have entered his calculations, because deniability, or the contingent ignorance defence, is an explicit repudiation of the possibility of vicarious moral responsibility, and thus of political responsibility, at least in an expedient version of the American system of government.

Certainly, in the British constitution, Churchill was politically responsible for the suppression of a warning by the officers who deciphered the German signals-just as though he himself had been the officer who had contingently decided to let the citizens of Coventry be struck. But political responsibility here means retrospective answerability to the House of Commons and before the public, followed by any le- gal or electoral consequences. It is not the same thing as vicarious moral responsibility. Churchill's formal political duty would be to explain the reasons that the anonymous decision makers could offer for having overridden the rights to reciprocity of the citizens of Coventry, and to attempt to reconcile the public to such reasoning. (If Coventry were discussed under a new war minister, that person would interpret and de- fend the government's past action in the public discussion.) But Churchill could only be morally responsible for the blood spilled in Coventry were it to be shown retrospectively that he had personally known of the raid before it happened, and had personally chosen not to warn the city for reasons that could not survive scrutiny; that is, for reasons that were self-serving, quite possibly followed by attempts to cover up his bungling. In short, unless his decision making was later seen to have been irregular and flawed, Churchill's political testament would be found in the formal political relations of the time. One can note that the concept of mediated corruption adds the standard that Churchill would

33 Ibid., note 5.

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have been at fault had he in any way evaded or shirked a duty to make himself available to consult with his officers-had he acted in such a way as to keep himself "out of the loop" of information. Thus the tactic of providing political chiefs with "deniability" can be given a little dig- nity as the systemic offence of a conspiracy to commit deliberate negli- gence.

Mediated Corruption and the American Presidency

The idea of mediated corruption as action that defeats the established lines of the system as they are understood by the main players and by citizens-action that precludes public deliberation-provides help to those wishing to grasp some of the dilemmas of the modern American presidency. One can offer as examples the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals and their sequels. President Nixon apparently thought he had the right to order any action that he believed might be instrumental in maintaining the safety and stability of American life. This included breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building. One reconstruction of a motive is that Nixon and his officials honestly thought that information would come into their hands that could help preserve the stability of the country. Another interpretation is that they only wanted to collect partisan information to hurt their opponents in the forthcoming election. (Or both motives could have fig- ured.) Nixon himself told David Frost on television that no law is violated if a president's staff members are simply doing whatever it takes to implement a presidential decision.34 The opinion of the Ameri- can courts was different, for Nixon's officials were tried and sentenced for criminal actions. Yet Nixon was not impeached because he resigned, and, further, he was never tried for any crime, because President Gerald Ford pardoned him prospectively, as it were.

Likewise, both the Reagan and the Bush presidencies were haunted by the fear of the revelation of the scope of secret weapon sales to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages, as well as the money that was used to make undeclared war on the Nicaraguan government. President Reagan ducked the question of his own political responsibility for the acts of several officials who reported directly to him, claiming that he had never been personally involved in these particular matters. President Bush subsequently, and likewise, long claimed that he had been "out of the loop" of information during the same events. In December 1992, at the end of his term of office, with proof of his per-

34 Michael Foley, The Silence of Constitutions (London: Routledge, 1989), 68. Benn notes that to lie for the government's survival can be acceptable, if embarrassing to its supporters when found out. Nixon's error was to keep on lying when there were no grounds for believing that lying was in the public interest (Benn, Public and Private Morality, 166).

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sonal involvement appearing ever more likely, Bush short-circuited the possibility of a resolution of the question of both Reagan's and his own involvement, by using the power of presidential pardon to prevent the impending criminal trial of his associates. In his announcement of the Christmas Eve pardons, President Bush claimed that the officials he pardoned had been motivated by patriotism, which made their deeds pure. The motives of those who were prosecuting the cases, he said, was opportunistically to seize the law in order to criminalize what Bush called mere policy differences. "Thus did he define law-breaking as a public duty, and law enforcement as an extension of party politics."35

For a similar dynamic but higher stakes, one can read C. A. J. Coady's discussion of the Cuban missile crisis. Coady notes that Presi- dent Kennedy thought that the probable gains for his political career- his need to regain prestige, demonstrate courage, eliminate the prospect of impeachment and avoid Democratic defeats in upcoming congres- sional elections-justified what he assessed as a risk of between a third and one half of the situation ending in nuclear holocaust.36

What one can say about this, following Thompson, is that the use of the presidential pardon has forestalled deliberation and moralization of the chief executive's actions. The very existence of the power to extend a full pardon before a case is tried may well have incited Reagan and Bush to use it in this way, and thus begs to be remedied, even though the actions which its liberal use covered up might eventually have been judged to have been acceptable in the circumstances. (Mali- cious prosecution is a lesser evil, because it at least invites deliberation.) One might say that the presidential pardon so-used amounts to a short- circuiting of the deliberative evaluation phase of the quality and correct- ness of the original round of decision making and executive action. From this perspective, it looks like a system flaw. And if Kennedy really felt free to use a nuclear threat to improve his chances for re-election, as Coady charges, the lack of a tighter, more formal and much more re- sourceful cycle of accountability again looks like a flaw. One sees that the power to pardon prospectively, combined with the solitary nature of presidential decision making in foreign policy in general, and in the emergency situation in particular, can effectively trump constitutionalism. They combine to forestall formal public processes of retrospective deliberation. But the power to pardon cannot put an end to media and

35 Hugo Young, "If This Is the New Ethical Order, It Stinks," Manchester Guardian Weekly (Manchester), January 17, 1993, 5.

36 Coady, "Dirty Hands," 373. Lewis Lapham has identified a kind of social pathol- ogy in his nation's life, in that in many American narratives the violent man is the hero, and he unerringly discovers evil in "even the most rudimentary attempts at civilization." Complementarily, the villains always form part of "the system" which even the little children know to be corrupt (Lewis Lapham, "Burnt Offer- ings," Harpers, April 1994, 11-15).

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public speculation and thus it conduces to the erosion of the public's belief in the legitimacy of the system.

Mediated Corruption in Canadian Parliamentary Life

But parliamentary systems are no better if not appropriately run. One can find a rich example of mediated corruption in Canada in the episode in 1991 when an Iraqi diplomat who had served as his country's ambas- sador to the United States in the lead-up to the Gulf War was, with un- common dispatch, admitted to Canada as a landed immigrant within weeks of his first enquiries. The ensuing media coverage and opposition interest made the admission a political event of considerable importance. But the ministers of the Conservative government whose depart- ments were involved flatly refused to give reasons for the speedy admission, on the grounds that they had not been personally engaged in the decision, thus could know nothing of it and could not provide answerability for it-perhaps nothing more than a case of the deniability strain of the idea flu virus picked up from their American homologues. The ministers, consulting with the clerk of the privy council (then Paul Tel- lier) and the other most senior officials in the executive's main support agency, the Privy Council Office, arranged for an inquiry by a House of Commons committee, one that would naturally operate as a creature of the House of Commons, dominated by the large government majority.37

Thus, by allowing the problem to be framed in a such a manner, the government constituted itself as a dirty hands actor to debase the political processes for partisan gain in the following ways: it evaded its duty (under responsible government) to provide political answerability to the House of Commons for the rationales behind the original decision; it sacrificed the rights to natural justice of the individuals who were desig-

37 See, for a description of the inquiry, S. L. Sutherland, "The Al-Mashat Affair: Ad- ministrative Accountability in Parliamentary Institutions," Canadian Public Ad- ministration 34 (1991), 573-603. Government documents since released to Ken Rubin, an access investigator, suggest the hypothesis that the Privy Council Of- fice, having perhaps initially misinterpreted some of the technical aspects of the case and of the modalities available to bring a foreign national into the country, carried a battle, which it may have seen as one for its writ in national security matters, into External Affairs, where it easily became focused upon the person of the associate undersecretary, Raymond Chr6tien, because such a focus was attractive to the Conservative partisans. But even if PCO did play a role in directing the partisan dynamic in the inquiry and the subsequent demoralization of one of the important ministries of government, the political responsibility belongs to the prime minister and the other relevant ministers. The damage that this episode did to the Canadian public service ethos lost its profile when the Conservative party was left with only two MPs after the subsequent national election. Its legacy is a public service conviction that ministers will henceforth claim a right to victimize arbitrarily public servants rather than to test their political skills in providing answerability in the representative institutions.

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nated to take the blame (and thereby to protect ministers) by pretending that the ministers were only cooperating with "Parliament" in making their officials available for questioning, whereas de facto the committee could not have become seized of the issue without explicit government management of the House of Commons' committee agendas; it knowingly allowed its MPs to cross-examine aggressively the accused officials, thus play-acting for the public in show-trial fashion in order to legitimate the "verdict," a verdict which was eventually and shamelessly arrived at by a partisan vote directed by the government, which amounts to gross manipulation of the system of legitimation; and it knowingly used "national security" rationales as a shield for itself, and to protect from scrutiny the government's reasons for which the individual in question had been admitted, and the issues of whether, and how, blame should be fixed for having mishandled the case (assuming that it had been mishandled), actually silencing all attempts to provide a fuller ex- planation of the event and its administration, one that might have sup- ported both the working-level bureaucrats and the merits of the appli- cant, which latter had been put in grave question by the government's steadfast denial of answerability.

In effect, the government strategy pretended that the admission (past, present and future) of the diplomat to Canada had in fact been, not a case that could be discussed on its merits, but a dirty hands dilemma (between, perhaps, giving shelter to an enemy national or sentencing him to death at the hands of his enemies) that belonged completely to officials, something that is not possible in our system of government. As has been discussed in relation to the Hollis example, the working framework of the constitution provides that ministers are politically answer- able in retrospect-are the spokespersons -for everything that goes on in their ministries, present and past, whether they knew of it at the time or not. Their duty is to know of it now. The new theory said, simply, in an imitation of American-style deniability, but without ceding an iota of Westminster-style government power to manipulate and impose, that ministers simply could not be expected to speak and to argue in the House (held politically responsible) for anything within their portfolios of which they had not personally known at the time.

Then the government went still further. It moved from self-protection to prosecution of its enemies. It used the apparatus of coercion to hide its own hand and force a certain line of what it pretended was a dis- covery. In the event, two individuals, one civil servant and one political officer, were selected for blame by partisan vote. That one of the civil servants-a career bureaucrat of 25 years-who was chosen to be guilty of having failed to inform his minister was the nephew of the then-leader of the official opposition party was presented alternatively, and conveniently, as the merest of coincidences, or as only to be ex-

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pected, given the government's pure presumption as to his loyalties.38 The crime against the democratic process consists in disarming and sub- verting the structure of justice of the formal retrospective phase of responsible government.

Parenthetically, one can notice that Thompson's concept of mediated corruption is helpful in thinking about the systemic immorality of politicians' refusal to account for national security functions. The political leadership is allowed to seal itself off from its own current security operations so that these operations become self-managing. In effect, the kind, scope and amount of activity becomes essentially what the security agents decide to supply.

Mediated Corruption as Fascism (through Caesarism) in Brecht

The purpose of Brecht's play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,39 is to strip the political adventurer, here Ui, of glamour by casting him as a common gangster. The play shows Ui's rise in the murderous step-by- step transposition to the Chicago vegetable trade of the chronology and strategy of Hitler's takeover beginning in 1929, culminating in the 98 per cent popular vote in 1939 for his party. Brecht's play starts in peacetime, in a world of democratic political structures operating under law, mostly honourable decision makers, a free press, mostly good citizens and business and political elites who know enough to distrust Ui. Nonetheless, political gangsterism triumphs. The play is therefore a demonstration of the concept that political actors who are personally wholly amoral can commit political crimes that are nonetheless properly understood as being in themselves moral offences against the prior structure of justice. It shows mediated corruption in action.

The result being a foregone conclusion, the interest of the play comes from the relentless peeling away of the spectator's illusions about the solidity of the normative structure of political life. In Ui, those entrusted with the highest positions in government and society make their choices on a calculus of personal expediency, rarely thinking about the honour of the system as a factor in itself. Even when the vegetable wholesalers and the elite businessmen begin to wake up, the closest they can come to wisdom is the bromide, "Morals go overboard

38 Actually, two memoranda had gone to the current minister of external affairs through the career advice stream of Chr6tien's shop, both from Tony Vincent, a senior official, dated March 8 and April 2, the latter a reminder along with press lines. These memoranda were released to Ken Rubin as part of a larger information request. No trace was found of any warning of the minister of immigration before the fact of Al-Mashat' s entry, other than a draft memorandum that was turned back to its author and never revised.

39 Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976). The play was only produced in Britain in 1967, and published there in 1976. Later the BBC made an excellent film with Nicol Williamson as Ui.

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in times of crisis."40 Every individual looks for a strong man, rather than to any process available under law, to offer resistance to Ui: "We only hope with Gods help that the bastard / Some day comes across some guys that show / Their teeth."41

Before each stage of his rise, Ui retreats to brood until his plan for the next strategic phase is ready, and until the situation is ripe. He is a caricature of the tortured and sweating strategist, in fact, of the Weber- ian statesman. As in 1932, when Hitler's party was out of money and Hitler had to hold back and wait for the ripening of a scandal which would open the way, Ui, rebuffed by the king-makers of his own world, sets the simple traps of greed and complicity that will compromise the smug power brokers. Even the most noble statesmen turn out to be quite affordable-the Hindenburg counterpart delivers himself body and soul because he had thought he deserved the gift of a country estate some time before. He is led to suppress the capacity of political chan- nels to deal with Ui, both because he wants to save his own personal legacy of respect and because he wants to show the heavens more just than could be believed were he to allow himself to be seen as the pawn that Ui has made of him.

Ui, although his initial conception of the masses had been as con- sumers and producers, begins to see the usefulness of the mass as a source of legitimacy-as a Caeasarist electorate rather than as citizens, for citizenship entails a relation of reciprocity and respect between the leader and the led, something that does not enter into Ui's calculus. So he courts the vote, and when the electorate comes to its moment of choice, it is as individuals without a system and therefore without a remedy, and the mass legitimates Ui ("we," "oui"), the beast in itself. Ui promises to fulfil his part of the bargain:

With Pride I accept your thanks. Some fifteen years Ago, when I was only a humble, unemployed Son of the Bronx; when following the call Of destiny I sallied forth with only Seven staunch men to brace the Windy City I was inspired by an iron will To create peace in the vegetable trade. We were a handful then, who humbly but Fanatically strove for this ideal Of peace! Today we are a multitude. Peace in Chicago's vegetable trade Has ceased to be a dream. Today it is Unvarnished reality. And to secure

40 Ibid., 12. 41 Ibid., 91.

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This peace I have put in an order For more machine-guns, rubber truncheons Etcetera. For Chicago and Cicero Are not alone in clamouring for protection! There are other cities: Washington and Milwaukee! Detroit! Toledo! Pittsburgh! Cincinnati! And other towns where vegetables are traded! Philadelphia! Columbus! Charleston! And New York! They all demand protection. And no "phooey!" No "That's not nice!" will stop Arturo Ui !42

In Brecht's play, democracy (as due process, deliberation and participation) is Ui's victim. Brecht gave the task of guarding the quality of political life to the collectivity, which here failed because it allowed the institutions that would ordinarily have provided organization-and thus mobilization and potency-to public discussion to become ineffective and corrupted. In other words, Brecht invests the collectivity with the moral responsibility for the failure of its constitutionalism, precisely because those who believe that they are fated to answer the call of destiny (the lone hero leaders) cannot be trusted to restrain their impulses to hasten and autonomously interpret that call. There is no difference between Capone-style "protection" in cauliflower and the Nazi regime, Brecht tells us: the apparatus of legitimacy, as Hollis calls the power of the state, is always vulnerable to being appropriated by crass adven- turers, who will, if allowed, turn it into an apparatus of exploitation for their own ends, and even demand that the public see their intemperate and ignorant gestures as sacrifices. Politics is not about blind trust but about justified trust:

Therefore learn how to see and not to gape. To act instead of talking all day long. The world was almost won by such an ape! The nations put him where his kind belong. But don't rejoice too soon at your escape- The womb he crawled from still is going strong.43

Conclusion

I have argued that the problem of dirty hands, as focused on the intentions of the lone political actor trapped in a vicious scenario, distorts our understanding of the nature of politics.

Most obviously, it does not model the most difficult and interesting aspects of politics: those that aspire to democratic action under constitu-

42 Ibid., 95. 43 Ibid., epilogue, 96.

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tionalism. The dirty hands problematic is deceptive in its assumptions that a sole political actor can routinely and somehow properly engage in "lesser-evils" choices on behalf of the whole of society, taking on, as a personal moral burden, society's role in publicly deliberating upon hard choices, at least retrospectively, and, further, dispensing with public answerability for such choices. This is in part because, as Braybrooke and Lindblom point out, the necessary calculations to support such hard choices are in real life subjective, and information is scarce, and in large part only available after the fact.

Indeed, the illusion of heroic, statesmanlike wisdom successfully executed in dirty hands situations, is probably preserved only by the suppression of deliberative politics in both the decision making and retrospection cycles, as was shown in the examples of side-tracked answerability in American and Canadian politics. While it may be necessary to bypass deliberative politics in emergencies, in principle, such substantial debates as may have been avoided in the decision-making phases, with justification or not, can still be undertaken after the event. One might even say that practical wisdom would suggest that it is truly a false economy to suppress the retrospective-deliberative process, because it represents the only hope that society has to become educated about its challenges. In short, the purpose of political institutions is not exhausted by the simple fact that they can sometimes limit the arbitrary use of political power in the first-round or executive phase, or even that they might be used to restrain the scope of government action: they should facilitate intelligent social problem solving and help form the character of citizens by conducting formal retrospective deliberation in a framework of orderliness and civility that cannot be appropriated for partisan purposes.44

In systems of responsible government, the apportioning of blame for previous activity (or inactivity) is the defining political ritual of the adversarial assembly. Thus, the cycle in which retrospective deliberation is undertaken is comparatively short or timely, and "the system" can ideally see the executive forced to respond quite thoroughly to the political opposition and the signals from the electorate it may convey within very short time periods-provided of course that secrecy is either not imposed or fails. The American system of separated institutions, on the other hand, concentrates its energy on substantial debate about the content of the first or output phase of new political decision making, and, further, on politically and legally regulating the amount of influence that the separated institutions, sharing power, can have on the substance of new policy in each instance. Thus the institutional plan of American government is to force intense prospective discussion of posi-

44 Stephen L. Elkin, "Constitutionalism's Successor," in Elkin and Soltan, eds., A New Constitutionalism, 124.

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tive political options by the device of distributing vetoes widely. In some areas, such as health care, to mobilize the separate institutions of the political system to act in concert to undertake a substantially new direction, virtually requires that the whole politically active layer of society speak with one will. The first or substantial phase of decision being so deliberately undertaken, with so many procedural requirements, and drawing on all institutions, it is perhaps the case that formal, systematic retrospective deliberation inside the representative institutions is less important than in cabinet government systems where planning takes place in closed fora and the executive controls the legislative pro- gramme. But in areas such as foreign policy and national security, the US president can act almost unilaterally, and exempt himself and his officials from investigation. Nevertheless, retrospective judgment still oc- curs in the "big loose" accountability system outside the framework of representative institutions, and a number of the intractable difficulties of the modern presidency are due to a lack of orderliness and fair-minded procedure in such ad hoc evaluation, often pursued equally as "info- tainment" or for low and even hysterical partisan reasons. In parliamentary systems, on the other hand, the executive gets power to act unilaterally by taking responsibility for anything that may occur in an area that is within the scope of a ministerial department: at any given time the "disaster-bring-forward" mechanism, from which the House of Com- mons takes its energy, can lay responsibility for any state of affairs at the feet of the government, which in turn can effectively acquire the ju- risdiction and legitimacy to act remedially or in expiation, by accepting retrospective, current and prospective responsibility as a government. It is perhaps because the acceptance of responsibility creates political capacity that adherents of the small state battle against the Westminster design of institutions, and in particular misrepresent the doctrine of individual ministerial responsibility as a duty to resign rather than as what it is, a duty to converse.

Perhaps the most harmful aspect of dirty hands politics is its bland acceptance that political leadership, individual or collective, inciden- tally or deliberately, has a kind of natural right to deny reciprocity to members in good standing of a duly constituted polity: to sacrifice them. It is obvious to anyone that the executive's status and positional power can put into its hands the capacity to sacrifice strategically members of the group in "first round" politics (first round at least for the survivors). As Evan Simpson points out, dirty hands problems flatly pit expediency (or sympathy) against rights. In utilitarian thinking, as it is standardly represented, the welfare of the whole (assuming it can be calculated) can legitimately trump the rights of individuals.45 That conflicts some-

45 "Willingness to get one's hands dirty in politics expresses an orientation toward thinking in terms of welfare at the expense of principles of right. It is permanently

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times exist between the rights of individuals and the needs or expediencies of the group, or between the needs and expediencies of individuals and the rights of a group, is a fact of life. But one can suggest that here is where political institutions come into their own. The task, again, is to insist that the retrospective phases of deliberative democracy are meticu- lously executed. Because the power to trump rights of those who are less well-positioned is conferred on leaders by their control of process and mechanisms, political actors must never be allowed to be judge and jury in their own case. No system worth its name could be satisfied with the ad hoc private moral blame of individual souls: rather, political responsibility, located in the structures and processes of the political framework, must be engaged, and the citizens must accept their duty, not to realise substantial justice in the aftermath of events (for which it will often be too late), but to ensure that the answerability phase of political life can operate deliberately and calmly, and that the public can learn from its sacrifices.

Jonathan Wolff, in his reflection on Robert Nozick's work, pro- poses that there must be two elements for a meaningful life. Nozick, following Kant, is correct, he says, that a meaningful life must be self- shaping. Dirty hands leaders deny to others the right to shape their own lives. Wolff then adds his own condition: a meaningful life must include the feature of attachments to others, which involves seeing oneself as part of a network of human relations.46 The dirty hands leader, by definition, operates quite alone in a supra-ethical realm of elitist thinking. Even if the leadership can be excluded from the normal networks of human relations that would bind it into society, which seems doubtful, and which Sartre contests, the networks of reciprocity between ordinary citizens that constitute normal peacetime society require active tending. Deliberation within and about the prior structure of justice is an important way of tending these mutual restraints. Any serious discussion of how processes of answerability are to be arranged will also help to clar- ify and rank (if not to formulate) at least some of the social goals that such processes are designed to protect and fulfil.

The article also found in Sartre's play, Les mains sales, a demonstration that the will of one actor (individual or corporate) cannot unilaterally impose political meaning for a society. The meaning of a particular politically intended action, rather, is not a pure philosophical concept, but can be puzzling even to the actors, who may have had confused motives, and is ultimately lost to the protagonist, being negotiated in so-

subject to question from the alternative orientation but not to refutation" (Evan Simpson, "Justice, Expediency and Forms of Thinking," abstract of a paper de- livered at the "Dirty Hands" Workshop at York University, December 12, 1993).

46 Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), 28-30.

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ciety. The escape from the charisma of arbitrary power and elitism- from the Faustian drama in which those who believe they are destined to write history will willingly undertake to sacrifice others-is the (only) relative safety of constitutional politics. As Brecht's almost stridently anti-romantic play demonstrates, a democratic public has in any case no alternative but to tend to its political processes and its claims to reciprocity and respectful public conversation, including formal, patient, thorough, unsentimental and intelligently charitable conversation about past deeds many think would be better forgotten: Ui is the alternative. Thus "the guys" that show their teeth must do so in a timely and deter- mined fashion, while the living still matter, and within formal, public, political structures.

the problem of dirty hands in politics peace in the vegetable trade_sutherland

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