When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  The freedom to speak is the value that has been celebrated in this book. The story that has been told in this chronicle of rhetoric is that the politics of the liberal democracies are a great achievement that needs to be defended and argued for anew. The great speakers have all, in their different ways, done this. The idea of popular sovereignty was given poetic life by Marcus Tullius Cicero, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. The willingness to suspend politics in order to fight for politics was never better expressed than by Pericles, David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan. A generous idea of national belonging was the rhetorical achievement of Elizabeth I, Benjamin Franklin, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi. The unrivalled capacity of liberal democracies to recognise the equal moral worth of all individuals was argued, with the greatest passion, by William Wilberforce, Emmeline Pankhurst, La Pasionaria, Martin Luther King and Neil Kinnock. The full extent of what is grimly possible if dissent is silenced is there in the chilling words of Maximilien Robespierre and Adolf Hitler. Fidel Castro describes the road to perdition via good intentions. They are answered by the wisdom of Václav Havel and Elie Wiesel, two men who lived under both tyranny and liberal democracy and know which dispensation is to be trusted. With the exceptions of the tyrants, these speakers are among the inhabitants of rhetoric’s shining city. Taken as a body of work, their words describe, for the discipline of politics, the best that has been said and done.

  Politics, at its best, is about the fulfilment of what Michelle Obama called ‘the impossibly big dreams that we all have for our children’. Ernst Bloch, another fugitive from the Nazi tyranny, spent his time in the library at Harvard writing a three-volume book called The Principle of Hope. Its subtitle was a phrase that, in Philadelphia, Michelle Obama used to describe the purpose of democratic politics: Dreams of a Better Life.

  At the end of his speech at the White House, Elie Wiesel, in response to a question, quoted Camus to the effect that ‘where there is no hope, we must invent it’. Wiesel went on to tell a story that precisely locates the source of political wisdom that this book has set out to defend:

  The story is that once upon a time there was an emperor, and the emperor heard that in his empire there was a man, a wise man with occult powers. He had all the powers in the world. He knew when the wind was blowing what messages it would carry from one country to another. He read the clouds and he realized that the clouds had a design. He knew the meaning of that design. He heard the birds. He understood the language of the birds, the chirping of the birds carried messages. And then he heard there was a man who also knew how to read another person’s mind. I want to see him, said the emperor. They found him. They brought him to the emperor. Is it true that you know how to read the clouds? Yes, Majesty. Is it true you know the language of the birds? Yes, Majesty. What about the wind? Yes, I know. Okay, says the emperor. I have in my hands behind my back a bird. Tell me, is it alive or not? And the wise man was so afraid that whatever he would say would be a tragedy, that if he were to say that the bird is alive, the emperor, in spite, would kill it. So he looked at the emperor for a long time, smiled, and said, Majesty, the answer is in your hands. It’s always in our hands.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Anthologies

  Burnet, Andrew (ed.), Chambers Book of Great Speeches, Chambers Harrap, 2013

  Carey, John (ed.), The Faber Book of Utopias, Faber and Faber, 1999

  Glover, Dennis, The Art of Great Speeches and Why We Remember Them, Cambridge University Press, 2011

  MacArthur, Brian (ed.), The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches, Viking, 1995

  MacArthur, Brian (ed.), The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches, Viking, 1999

  Safire, William, Lend Me Your Ears, W. W. Norton, 2004

  Sebag Montefiore, Simon, Speeches That Changed the World, Quercus, 2007

  Prologue

  Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, Penguin, 1991

  Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De oratore, Oxford University Press, 2001

  Cicero, Marcus Tullius, The Republic and the Laws, Oxford University Press, 1998

  Chapter One: Democracy

  Barton, William E., Lincoln at Gettysburg, New York, 1950

  Blair, Tony, A Journey, Penguin, 2010

  Claeys, Gregory, Searching for Utopia, Thames and Hudson, 2011

  Crick, Bernard, In Defence of Politics, Penguin, 1984

  Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, Penguin, 1992

  Hume, David, ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’ in Philosophical Works Volume III, Edinburgh, 1984

  Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, Vintage, 2007

  Kant, Immanuel, Perpetual Peace, London, 1795

  Kateb, George, Utopia and Its Enemies, Macmillan, 1963

  Kumar, Krishan, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Basil Blackwell, 1987

  Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, Cosimo, 2005

  More, Thomas, Utopia, Penguin, 1965

  Morris, William, News From Nowhere, Penguin, 1993

  Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Basil Blackwell, 1974

  Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin, 1949

  Plato, The Republic, Penguin, 1955

  Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989

  Runciman, David, The Confidence Trap, Princeton, 2013

  Schlesinger, Robert, White House Ghosts, Simon and Schuster, 2008

  Schurz, Carl, Preface, in Tom Griffith (ed.), Abraham Lincoln: Life, Speeches, and Letters, Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2009

  Shklar, Judith, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith, Princeton, 1957

  Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1978

  Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America Volumes I and II, HarperCollins, 1969

  Wills, Garry, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Simon and Schuster, 1992

  Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We, Penguin, 1993

  Chapter Two: War

  Angell, Norman, The Great Illusion, Cosimo, 2007

  Aquinas, Thomas, Summa theologicae, New York, 1948

  Cannadine, David, Introduction to The Speeches of Winston Churchill, Penguin, 1990

  Fraser, Antonia, Introduction, in Neville Williams, Elizabeth I, Sphere Books Ltd, 1975

  Frye, Susan, ‘The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 95–114

  Gilbert, Martin, Winston S. Churchill, Volume VI: Finest Hour 1939–1941, Heinemann, 1983

  Grotius, Hugo, De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace), Cambridge University Press, 2012

  Keynes, John Maynard, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Penguin, 2017

  Larkin, Philip, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, 1988

  McLean, Iain, Rational Choice: An Analysis of Rhetoric and Manipulation from Peel to Blair, Oxford University Press, 2001

  Robinson, Peter, ‘“Tear Down This Wall”: How Top Advisers Opposed Reagan’s Challenge to Gorbachev – But Lost’, Archives.gov website, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2007/summer/berlin.html

  Russett, Bruce, and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace, Norton, 2001

  Stevenson, Frances, Lloyd George: A Diary, edited by A. J. P. Taylor, Hutchinson & Co, 1971

  Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Penguin, 2000

  Toye, Richard, ‘Lloyd George’s War Rhetoric’, Journal of Liberal History 77, Winter 2012–13, pp. 24–9

  Toye, Richard, The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches, Oxford University Press, 2013

  Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars, Basic Books, 2015

  Wilson, Woodrow, History of the American People, Wise and Co., 1930

  Chapter Three: Nation

  Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983

  Brown, Judith M., Nehru: A Political Life, Yale University Press, 2003

  Colley, Linda,
Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, Yale University Press, 1994

  Franklin, Benjamin, Autobiography, Dover Thrift, 2015

  Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism, Cornell University Press, 1983

  Havel, Václav, Foreword, in Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear and Other Writings, edited by Michael Aris, Viking, 1991

  Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983

  Ignatieff, Michael, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics, Harvard, 2013

  Kertzer, David, Ritual, Politics and Power, Yale, 1988

  Madison, James, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, Soho Books, 2011

  Mandela, Nelson, Long Walk to Freedom, Little, Brown, 1994

  Nairn, Tom, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy, Picador, 1988

  Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Penguin, 1957

  Renan, Ernst, What Is a Nation?, conference at the Sorbonne, Paris, 11 March 1882

  Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, Picador, 1981

  Rushdie, Salman, Shame, Vintage, 1995

  Chapter Four: Progress

  Disraeli, Benjamin, Coningsby, Nabu Press, 2010

  Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Penguin, 2009

  Gómez, Isidora Dolores Ibárruri, El Unico Camino, Castalia, 1962

  Hague, William, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner, Harper Perennial, 2008

  Hemingway, Ernest, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Arrow, 1994

  Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, Pelican, 1968

  Jones, Clarence B., Behind the Dream, St Martin’s Griffin, 2012

  Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin, 2015

  Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, Penguin, 2000

  Pankhurst, Christabel, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote, Ebury, 1987

  Pankhurst, Emmeline, The Importance of the Vote, Women’s Press, 1913

  Pankhurst, Emmeline, My Own Story, Wembley Press, 2015

  Pankhurst, Sylvia, The Suffragette Movement, Wharton Press, 2010

  Purvis, June, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography, Routledge, 2002

  Roth, Philip, The Plot Against America, Vintage, 2005

  Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Mask of Anarchy, Templar Poetry, 2016

  Young, Michael, The Rise of the Meritocracy, Transaction, 1994

  Chapter Five: Revolution

  Aron, Raymond, The Opium of the Intellectuals, Transaction, 2001

  Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, 1969

  Berlin, Isaiah, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, John Murray, 1990

  Bracher, Karl-Dietrich, The German Dictatorship, Penguin, 1970

  Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Penguin, 1968

  Caistor, Nick, Fidel Castro, Reaktion Books, 2013

  Camus, Albert, The Rebel, Penguin, 1971

  Camus, Albert, The Stranger, Hamish Hamilton, 1982

  Camus, Albert, The Plague, Penguin, 1986

  Chang, Jung, Wild Swans, William Collins, 2012

  Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind, Bibiolife, 2009

  Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, Penguin, 2003

  Goebbels, Joseph, ‘Der Führer als Redner’, Adolf Hitler. Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers, Hamburg, 1936

  Havel, Václav The Power of the Powerless, Routledge, 1985

  Havel, Václav, To the Castle and Back, Portobello Books, 2008

  Haydon, Colin and William Doyle (eds), Robespierre, Cambridge University Press, 1999

  Hillberg, Raul, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945, New York, 1992

  Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, Jairo, 2007

  James, Clive, Cultural Amnesia, Picador, 2007

  Koestler, Arthur, Darkness at Noon, Vintage, 1994

  Kołakowski, Leszek, Main Currents of Marxism, W. W. Norton, 2008

  Lasky, Melvin, Utopia and Revolution, Chicago, 1976

  Levi, Primo, If This Is a Man, Abacus, 1991

  Malthus, Thomas, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Oxford University Press, 2008

  Mao, The Little Red Book, Hinky, 1972

  Montesquieu, Charles, The Spirit of the Laws, Cosimo, 2011

  Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics, Methuen, 1962

  Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1991

  Revuelta, Alina Fernández, Castro’s Daughter, St Martin’s Press, 1999

  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, Wordsworth Editions, 1998

  Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Communists and Peace, Hamish Hamilton, 1969

  Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Wall, New Directions, 1969

  Sen, Amartya, Development and Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1999

  Seth, Vikram, Three Chinese Poets, Faber and Faber, 1992

  Scurr, Ruth, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, Chatto and Windus, 2006

  Short, Philip, Mao: A Life, I. B. Tauris and Co. Ltd, 1999

  Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, New York, 1936

  Wiesel, Elie, Night, Penguin, 2008

  Zantovsky, Michael, Havel: A Life, Atlantic Books, 2014

  Epilogue

  Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell, 1986

  Bremer, Francis J., John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father, Oxford University Press, 2003

  Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge University Press, 1988

  Milton, John, Areopagitica, New York, 1951

  INDEX

  Adams, John, 31, 32, 177

  Adams, John Quincy, 28, 122, 163

  Afghanistan, war in (from 2001), 73, 150

  American Revolution, 29, 174–80, 328

  Amis, Martin, 124

  Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 163

  Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman, 41

  Angell, Norman, The Great Illusion, 154–5

  Annan, Kofi, 380

  Anti-Corn Law League, 298–301, 302–3

  anti-Semitism, 12, 308, 331–2, 333, 335, 370–81, 395

  Aquinas, Thomas, Summa theologicae, 149, 150

  Arab Spring, 75

  Arendt, Hannah, 285

  Aris, Michael, 202, 203, 209

  Aristophanes, The Clouds, 5–6

  Aristotle, 4, 126, 169

  Aron, Raymond, 316–17

  Asquith, Herbert, 101, 254

  Athens, 3, 6, 88, 89–99, 232, 294, 405, 407

  Attlee, Clement, 88, 124, 210, 292

  Auden, W.H., 84, 222, 265, 327

  Aung San, 202, 203, 210–11, 212

  Bagehot, Walter, 309

  Bailyn, Bernard, 378

  Batista, General Fulgencio, 47, 343–4, 345, 353, 356

  Beckett, Samuel, 359

  Bennett, Alan, 175

  Berlin, 46, 53, 333–4, 395, 405; Berlin Wall, 74, 88, 138–47, 155, 157, 159; Brandenburg Gate, 138, 140, 145, 146, 155; ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech (26 June 1963), 138, 139, 155–6, 157; Reagan speech (12 June 1987), 88, 138–44, 145–7, 157, 159

  Berlin, Isaiah, 286, 395

  Berlusconi, Silvio, 81

  Bevel, James, 271

  Bhavagad Gita, 150

  Biden, Joe, 288

  Bigelow, John, 39

  bin Laden, Osama, 64

  Birmingham, Alabama, 268

  Blair, Cherie, 229, 230

  Blair, Tony, 5, 6, 37, 149, 229–31; Economic Club speech (Chicago, 1999), 148–9, 151–2, 153, 158; speech to European Parliament (2005), 214, 215, 222, 224, 225

  Blake, William, 80

  Bloch, Ernst, 83–4, 408–9

  Blum, Léon, 317

  Boer War, 100, 102

  Bonham Carter, Violet, 132

  Booth, John Wilkes, 38

  Botha, P. W., 192

  Brandt, Willy, 155

  Bright, John, 298–300, 304–5

  Britain:
declining confidence in democracy, 75–6; and European Union, 77, 219–20, 224–5, 231; factories in nineteenth-century, 231–2, 235; idea of as a nation, 215–16, 226; lack of communism in, 303, 306; and meritocracy, 308–9; rejoins the Gold Standard (1925), 124; slavery in British Empire, 232, 234, 235–45; see also entries for individual speechmakers; London; Manchester

  British Union of Fascists (BUF), 307–8

  Brittain, Vera, 255

  Brown, Gordon, 229, 230

  Bundy, McGeorge, 156

  Burma, 165, 202–4, 205–13

  Bush, George W., 51, 121, 136, 139

  Butler Education Act (1944), 309

  Caballero, Francisco Largo, 261

  Caesar, Julius, 22, 23–4

  Calvo Sotelo, José, 261

  Cameron, David, 224

  Campoamor, Clara, 260

  Camus, Albert, 78, 84, 212, 313–16, 317, 382, 384, 397, 398–9

  capitalism, 10, 72–3, 141–2, 145, 156–8, 263–4, 266, 392

  Care, Henry, English Liberties, 173

  Carlyle, Thomas, 318

  Carnegie, Andrew, 41

  Carter, Jimmy, 139, 371

  Castro, Fidel, 47, 317, 343–56, 398

  Catiline, Lucius Sergius, 21, 22

  Chamberlain, Neville, 124, 127–8, 152, 333, 340–1

  Chaplin, Charlie, 395–7

  Chávez, Hugo, 79, 81, 345, 349

  China, 72, 73, 384–5, 387, 388, 389–91, 392, 397

  Churchill, Winston, 4, 6, 8, 123–4, 158, 159, 164, 305, 329–30, 398; ‘blood, sweat, toil and tears’ speech (13 May 1940), 88, 124, 133, 153; on public speaking during war, 128–9; ‘The Few’ speech (August 1940), 87, 129; ‘Their finest hour’ speech (18 June 1940), 125, 126, 127–8, 130–1, 132–3, 134–5; ‘United States of Europe’ speech (1946), 216–17; voice of, 4, 105, 129, 237; wartime image/popularity of, 129–30; wartime speeches recorded for posterity, 105–6; ‘We Will Fight Them on the Beaches’ speech (4 June 1940), 131–2, 133–4; and women’s suffrage, 306; writing of speeches, 126; Savrola, 393

  Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 6, 20–8, 111, 149, 193, 229–30, 325; influence in USA, 18, 28, 30, 40, 80–1, 177–8; De oratore, 4, 20, 123; First Philippic against Mark Antony, 21–7, 77, 83; In Verrem: Civis Romanus sum, 155–6

  Clarkson, Thomas, 235, 240

  Clinton, Bill, 51, 139, 371, 375, 379

  Clinton, Hillary, 57, 70–1, 371, 403, 404

  Cobden, Richard, 298–9, 300, 301, 304