Promise Keeping
The Need For Strong Leadership
As opposed to the idea of a strong polity as instantiated in The Articles of Confederation, Alexander Hamilton believed that a constitutional republic required a strong leader, one who would insure the steady administration of the laws, the protection of property, attention to due process, and the securing of the liberty of all against “the assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.” A strong leader was needed to stabilize the political system, to resist the transient impulses and passions of the moment that threatened to undo the republic. Hamilton argued for a strong leader who could see through “the wiles of parasites and sycophants” and had sufficient experience in the affairs of state to deal with emergencies. All regimes, Hamilton noted in Federalist #72, required as “an absolute necessity … the services of particular men, in particular situations … to the preservation of its political existence.” In short, Hamilton saw that the very existence of the Republic was at stake, and in such situations, the public could not be counted on to maintain it.
Uncompromising leadership was called for, someone who wasn’t afraid to do what was necessary, someone with “firmness and constancy” who, as he noted in Federalist #74, could provide “the terror of an example.” Since, as Machiavelli said, people “will be quicker to forget the death of a father than the loss of a patrimony,” the good leader would seek to be feared as a means of restoring order and would be loved for having done so, but would never concern himself with being liked.
Max Weber observed that the deadly sin of politics is vanity, whereby the leader has a “need to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible,” and is in danger of both “becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcomes of his actions.” Instead, a bad leader pursues “the glamorous semblance of power rather than actual power,” which must bring with it tragic choices and the stain of sin. This means, in turn, as Hamilton too was quick to note, that when the very existence of the polity was at stake, there was no place for tenderheartedness or sentimentality.
Hamilton believed this meant the leader had to attend to the creation and maintenance of public trust. The public will never trust a leader too weak to insure their safety or the preservation of the regime. In more normal times, they won’t trust someone who doesn’t display some of the public’s more characteristic virtues, but neither will they trust someone with power who will neither use it to proper ends nor employ all means required. Thus, the office of the presidency needed to be sufficiently energetic to deal with extreme situations and sufficiently restrained in order to maintain public trust in normal times. For all of Publius’ moral realism, the authors recognized the need to fill the office with persons of high character.
Madison wrote in Federalist #57 that “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” While Publius didn’t specifically identify the requisite virtues—and, of course, our Constitution in its qualifications clause makes no demand of it—there are certain ones we can glean from the Federalist Papers.
The Virtues of a Good Leader
In Federalist #74 Hamilton gave us in slightly nascent form a classical account of a political virtue. What do we do, he asked, when we have the fate of another person in our hands? A failure to protect that person would be a grave moral failing, and so Hamilton argued the leader must be “scrupulous,” which Hamilton contrasted in its deficiency to weakness and in its excess to connivance or indifference. The same would apply to the fate of institutions and the leader’s attendant obligations.
Publius also referred us to the need for magnanimous leaders: great-souled persons who would seek their rightful place of honor and attend to duty. They do not seek the comforts of private life. They realize they need to share their gifts with the world and that the times might be calling upon them. They would, Aristotle wrote, be “haughty towards men of position and fortune, but courteous to those of modest station” while always working to harmonize the classes and not taking sides in the divisions.
A good leader, Publius seemed to argue, must possess a certain toughness, particularly when dealing with matters of stability and self-preservation of the polity, and this toughness too operated between the extremes of idealism and cynicism, of squeamishness and callousness, of a concern for maintaining one’s purity and a naked calculation that results from the intoxications of power. The good leader recognizes the costs and accepts the burdens of both acting and not acting, and will not shirk from duty. The good leader will be firm and decisive.
In practice, this means that the leader may have to work with tools of deception, betrayal, and other objectionable acts so long as they’re done at the right time in the right manner and for the right reasons Again, the endeavor engaged in defines the virtue. After all, the qualities that make for a good president are different than the ones that make for a good pope.
The Indispensability of Promise-keeping
There is, however, one trait that Aristotle and Augustine, Machiavelli and Publius agree is morally indispensable: the ability to make and keep promises. It’s not insignificant that the one well-defined presidential act in the Constitution is the taking of an oath. Washington noted in his Farewell Address the central importance of oath-taking not only for the preservation of order but for the development of good order. Locke argued that oaths were the glue that held society together and an inability to vouchsafe oaths would dissolve everything. Almost all the colonies, other than Pennsylvania, had oath requirements—mainly dealing with loyalty to the political community and avowing not to do anything to harm it and severe punishments for violation. In the Virginia Articles of 1610, violating an oath was punishable by death. In every instance, it was believed that the very existence of the colony was at stake.
One reason why people we might otherwise regard as moral cynics regarded promises as so important is because the persons to whom promises are made predicate their decisions on the promisers’ future action, an action already begun in the making of the promise itself. There is no way to stabilize decision-making without such resolute gestures. A promise is already a performance of a moral act. Augustine and Cicero both identified the unity of word and deed as the central feature of a promise. By stressing again its importance, Machiavelli addressed what he believed had become a central problem in politics: the Christian separation of word and deed.
Promises are thus authoritative declarations that create obligation, and when broken carry the threat of injury. Their moral weight can be discerned in the way we often gild them (“pinkie swear”; “hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”). Furthermore, promises are inherently personal. We cannot make a promise on someone else’s behalf, and while we can imagine circumstances under which breaking a promise is the right thing to do, particularly if we make promises that we don’t know we can fulfill, we also know that we cannot break them selfishly or to our own advantage without exacting a huge blow to our reputation, the maintenance of which Hamilton regarded as a central characteristic of a good leader.
The Limits and Necessity of Promise-keeping
Still, they are not absolutely binding. Machiavelli observed that it was “praiseworthy for a prince to keep his word and live with integrity rather than craftiness,” but the prince also had to be “both man and beast,” and should not keep his word when to do so would lead to disaster, or the reasons for making the pledge in the first place no longer apply. “Doubtless,” he continued, “if all men were good, this rule would be bad; but since they are a sad lot, and keep no faith with you, you in your turn are under no obligation to keep it with them.”
Perhaps one of the best things we can say about a person is “He made promises sincerely and broke them regretfully.” Promises matter, as I said, because they induce others to alter their positions based on our predicted future conduct, and they will want to know if such alterations will leave them better or worse off.
Promises operate affirmatively, but Machiavelli noticed that threats carry with them the same moral weight and sense of purpose. They, too, are ways in which we predict future actions. For this reason, both idle threats and empty promises are taken as signs of moral weakness. Hobbes, recognizing the problem of trust as the central problem of political life, empowered the sovereign to punish promise-breakers. He could do this in part because he considered it a logical impossibility that the sovereign could himself be a promise-breaker, for the sovereign made only one promise: to establish peace and stabilize the regime, and in breaking that pact ceased to be the sovereign.
Because of the high costs associated with their breach, most notably the destruction of public trust, political leaders must be cautious when making promises and diligent in keeping them. They should make sure before they promise to do something that it will be in their power to perform it. They should make certain that they don’t promise to do what is in another’s power to do, or to make a promise on behalf of another.
The American President is required by law to make one promise to the American people: to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That promise supersedes any partisan promises made in the electoral mix, and even then, supporters will expect the candidate to keep his word. To make sure the President keeps the promise to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, we might have to get our hands dirty; but if we become indifferent to that promise we should hardly be surprised when our leaders refuse to take it seriously. If we live in a world where oath-taking and promise-keeping have lost their meaning, it’s unlikely our Constitutional Republic can survive.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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