EVERYBODY KNOWS WOODROW WILSON in Carlisle, England. Not the man, but the 28th US president’s name, emblazoned on a mass-market pub’s fascia. Beer three quid a pint. The Professor — he had been president of Princeton — steamed into Carlisle railway station on 29 December 1918, a fortnight after two million Parisians greeted him with survivors’ relief. He was America-as-answer to shattered Europe.
That November, Wilson had asked American voters to return a Democratic Congress to back his peace. They handed both houses to the Republicans instead. He arrived this side of the Pond, having lost the mandate for a new international order. A century on, this November’s midterms are fought under a president who has already begun withdrawing America from its role as global guarantor. Losing the House, and perhaps the Senate, will trouble Donald Trump, but not stop the retreat.
Wilson had taken America out of isolation and into war in 1917. Preaching collective security, self-determination and “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”, he proposed nations answerable to shared rules, not raw power. Here was authority offered as answerable.
Wilson’s pilgrimage paid homage to the city of his mother’s childhood, and his grandfather’s pulpit, a dissenting chapel in Carlisle’s Lowther Street. He had already revived the custom of addressing Congress in person and held the first regular presidential press conferences. In September 1919 he collapsed on a train tour taking the League to the people. The Senate rejected the League, his successor, Warren G. Harding, promised “normalcy”, and America withdrew. Yet the idea survived him, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman built the post-1945 order on it.
Authoritative or persuasive
“The only nation in the world that is founded on a creed,” wrote G. K. Chesterton of America in 1922. Hence the exhausting work of the presidency, constantly proclaiming, always answering for itself. With the midterms looking gloomy for the Republicans, scrutiny will grow. America still believes in its manifest destiny, and that may now be to hold Europe at arm’s length and tell it to grow a spine. The superaddressee, Mikhail Bakhtin’s word for the listener above the room, is now America’s superpower rivals.
Wilson appealed in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall on 30 December to rip up the old balance of power. His rhetoric was providential, answering to heaven, whereas Trump is charismatic, answering to the crowd. It is easier to gaze through to the third party, be it God, the masses or Xi Jinping. Wilson suffered John Maynard Keynes’s charge that he was a “blind and deaf Don Quixote”: book-smart but lacking judgement for a worldly world, and ill at ease with the person in front of him. This is the gap Bakhtin names between the authoritative word, which is recited, and the internally persuasive word, which is answered.
The rules-based order as authoritative has been shaken by 9/11, the 2008 crash, Brexit and the rise of authoritarian states, and each tremor has raised the same question: where is our authority to be found? As America toys with a new isolationism, the West’s institutions are left with authority they can no longer explain, and few leaders able to make the case.
No alibi in being
In the same year Wilson collapsed, a twenty-three-year-old in the small Russian town of Nevel published a single page called Art and Answerability. Within a few years he had a phrase for it. In Russian it is ne-alibi v bytii: there is no alibi in being. Where Bart Simpson says, “I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove anything,” Bakhtin says you cannot escape the integrity of yourself. You are always somewhere, and probably here, now. So, you carry some authority, and some obligation, simply by being. Whether you will answer for that existence is the root question on which future agency depends.
Bart’s alibi is the schoolboy’s. The grown-up version: “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” Tony Blair told his party in 2005. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” It wasn’t me; it’s the seasons. Unanswerable authority hides behind inevitability, the purest alibi a politician can offer. And it was Retrotopia, Zygmunt Bauman’s Utopia-in-the-past, in modern dress. That is, Richard Cobden’s breathless nineteenth-century faith in free trade. Once again it was preferred to grieving over the present and building from the sediment. Blair made it sound new. In fact it was old. And it sank Britain’s authority further into neoliberalism’s blind trust in the market.
Perversely, America-as-future is offering its own retrofitting: Tomorrowland. Disneyland’s 1955 Autopia sold little cars on a fixed track as the freedom of the open road. Mars colonies, driverless cars are the same future, rebooted from Asimov and Heinlein paperbacks. The past’s dream of tomorrow. Retrotopia in a spacesuit: follow the track, and don’t ask where it goes. Plus ça change...
In 1919 Bakhtin was a young, yet-to-blossom Russian philosopher of language and culture, whose writing eventually found its way westwards from the late 1960s. Bakhtin is good news for all in the West who, from the 60s onwards, were told by French theory that “man” as a concept faced erasure, into sweet nothingness. In Michel Foucault’s image, man “would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”. As American hegemony took over from European empire, the question was what Western liberal values would now be built upon. Would it be the integrity of the self, authoritative by virtue of its sacred beingness? Or a self rendered illegitimate by what Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man”?
These warnings say your authority melts along with your temporary self. This long onslaught from the late-modern academy, the manic digging under ourselves (criticality) and under every institution, has left us fragilised as Western moderns. A bit trembly whenever we act. What if I am erased, no, obliterated, by my exposure as the only person who did the deed? Yes, everybody, it was ME!
Bakhtin, the dogged realist (there is a solid someone out there), lets us live through doubt by being answerable. To be a self is to have to answer for that self. That is one reason many in the academy prefer to escape to the margins of thought, as did French theory, which explored language as a medium that made the self, with the signifier (the word) more solid than the signified (the concept), let alone the thing in itself (whatever lies beyond our senses).
Bakhtin reverses the order. The speaking person, answerable for every utterance, is more solid than the system of signs they speak through. Ironically, it was French theory, through Julia Kristeva, that first introduced Bakhtin to the West, and read him in its own image.
From Bakhtin’s perspective your life will answer its questions whether you like it or not. Because you cannot see the whole of your self, you struggle to answer for the bits you can’t see. That is a sound reason for compassion and patience with your other side. We sometimes escape into totalising beliefs and their organisations, because they relieve us of having to piece ourselves together. That is easier than finding our own answers through life outside the grand structures. Bakhtin has a word for the alternative: otvetstvennost. Responsibility as answerability.
The Wavian retreat
Evelyn Waugh, perhaps England’s most persuasive twentieth-century novelist, withdrew into the totalising Roman Catholic faith. He did more than most to prop up a fantasy aristocracy for the declining British. His faith hemmed in his expansive self, enough to give a ‘quaint and antique’ Catholic grace to his masterpiece of swoon, Brideshead Revisited. Its third part takes its title from G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown story The Queer Feet, in which the priest-detective shows grace to a thief caught in the act and lets him go after hearing his confession: “I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” The thief had handed back the stolen fish knives and forks (see John Betjeman’s poetic symbols of middle-class insecurity), so answerability had begun.
So, for Bakhtin, struggling to find solid ground means facing the quite terrifying prospect of our uniqueness, outside of fantasy and magical faith. We can’t dissolve. And authority finds its roots in that uniqueness, because genuine authority is answerable.
It does not have to be our childhood nightmare. I used to dream of waking up in Worthing town centre, opposite Boots the Chemist, starkers or in my pyjama bottoms, running like the clappers to no effect. Full exposure is what we often feel when, outside the grand structures, we experience freedoms we didn’t choose. Bakhtin has another word here: vnenakhodimost, outsideness. We feel our nakedness, but what the other person sees can make up for what we can’t see in ourselves.
Hence, when we act with authority in the world, we must let others tell us whether our exposure is as bad as we fear, and whether our words have stopped fitting reality, breaching Cicero’s decorum. Our wholeness is only given by the people around us. The relief comes when the self is loved from outside itself. Of course, it is a risk to be answerable, as love may not be the response. So, as Waugh did, we run into strong towers, refugees from a life that will give its answer through its length. Waugh’s Charles Ryder drifts dissolutely but is finally drawn, by that twitch upon the thread, into the faith whose smothering piety had understandably repelled him in Lady Marchmain. Ryder is Waugh thinly disguised: as insecure, and as dazzled by aristos.
Miracle, mystery and authority
Bakhtin lifts the weight of religious and class grandeur through his muse-in-chief, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote The Brothers Karamazov (1880), in which the rationalist Ivan tells his devout younger brother, the novice Alyosha, a “poem” he has made up. In it Christ returns to sixteenth-century Seville, the day after nearly a hundred heretics have been burned, and is promptly arrested by the Grand Inquisitor, a man of nearly ninety.
In the cell at night the old man explains, at length (in David McDuff’s translation), why Christ was wrong. “Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.” So, the Church corrected his work. It gave people what they really wanted in place of freedom: “Miracle, mystery and authority.” They no longer have to answer for themselves. He answers for them, and calls it love.
It is the most seductive alibi in being offered: you were not there, you did not choose, we chose for you. And it is offered by a grave and sincere old man. Mystery, in his hands, is not the wonder that draws a person closer. It is the fog that spares them from asking. The comfort of the void.
Christ does not argue back. He rises and kisses the old man on his “bloodless, ninety-year-old lips”. The Inquisitor trembles, opens the door and says, “Go, and do not come back.” Then: “The kiss burns within his heart, but the old man remains with his former idea.” Dostoevsky answers the case against freedom not with a better argument but with an answerable act, Christ’s love given from outside, which is Bakhtin’s vnenakhodimost in a single gesture. This is not the “mechanical” love Bakhtin mocks in Art and Answerability, the borrowed “inspiration, sweet sounds and prayers” of structures we enter to escape answering for ourselves. The quaint grace of Waugh and Chesterton does not let us escape blame; it gives us time to own our liabilities willingly. But Waugh’s beauty, like the inspiration Bakhtin distrusts, ends by possessing us. The Christ of Ivan’s poem unites art and life in a single answerable act.
To be fair to the French theorists, they had good reason for their suspicion. They had seen what absolutes were used to justify in the twentieth century, and Jean-François Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” grew partly out of Auschwitz and the Gulag. In Dostoevsky’s terms, they met the Grand Inquisitor and assumed every absolute was him. Bakhtin’s answer, and German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, is that the absolute at the heart of the Christian story is not the Inquisitor but the silent Christ who kisses him. An authority that confers integrity, gives freedom and listens is the opposite of one that controls.
Wilson, a Presbyterian minister’s son and a Congregational minister’s grandson, came from the opposite tradition to the Inquisitor’s, the dissenting chapel. In it, no bishop stands between you and your answer. Every member may stand and speak, and every soul answers for itself. Authority there is not a robe you inherit but a word you must stand behind. But, as Waugh recognises, it might be the priest’s craftsmanship, born of structures, that ensures he hears your last breath, as Lord Marchmain found in the clunky final pages of Brideshead. The first half of The Brothers Karamazov glows because of Zosima’s presence, but when he dies answerability continues for Alyosha, towards life, as the dead body decays, and smells, revealing its cold light of day ordinariness.
Yet the chapel’s grandson left another legacy. Wilson did not invent American exceptionalism. John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” was nearly three centuries old, and John O’Sullivan’s “Manifest Destiny” had already carried the flag to the Pacific. What Wilson did was globalise it. The city on the hill became a mission to the world: “America is the only idealistic nation in the world.” Veracruz, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic learned what that idealism could mean. An authority certain of its own righteousness need answer to no one it acts upon. Wilson gave America its noblest vocation and its most dangerous entitlement in the same breath. That exceptionalism wanted mystery about its vision and unquestioned moral authority.
Bakhtin’s self enters the city from the rural monocultures, draws down new language and absorbs it into its own voice. The fogey, by contrast, enters the city, finds an old script and rehearses it, putting off renewal.
Britain’s alibis
Britain’s new Attleean Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, may find his Manchesterism amounts to little more than novelty schemes, such as socialised local buses. Now he is beard-stroking over becoming an ornament again on the Franco-German EU Christmas tree. Since Suez in 1956, Britain’s fundamental strategy has been partnership with America’s liberal-democratic expansionism, honouring the golden rule: never be on the wrong side of Washington. Yet a US–UK trade deal is still pending, and far from comprehensive, while Britain’s own political-economic engine sits burbling in Retrotopia, a period exhibit viewable through Tom Nairn’s enchanted glass, marked ‘Do Not Touch’.
This strategic drift is sustained by civic structures curated by sentiment, by institutional isomorphism, low productivity and a twitching moral compass. Bodies mirroring each other’s unanswerability. Old mining villages and textile mills have scrubbed up well under Keynesian reforms. Now Britain’s safety fetish manages decline through craven pastiches of its past, inside National Trust tea rooms and country-house gift shops. Trump’s admixture of cant and realpolitik has movement; Britain has marketised nostalgia.
The country that made things has become a museum to itself. That is a form of authority too: look at our heritage. But, as Mark Fisher argued, borrowing Jacques Derrida’s term, we are then haunted by those images. Institutions, as Thomas Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh says in Sartor Resartus, are clothes: they wear out and need re-tailoring. Yet every effort to broker a new set of clothes meets a ghost holding up the old ideal.
Britain has form here. Just as it was about to be eclipsed by America and Germany, and industrial modernity ripped through its ordered structures, Oscar Wilde and later Waugh offered high, glittering images of art and beauty to stave off the nakedness. Those images still sell. They saved Britain from being remembered as all clunking industry and ploughboys munching meat pies. But they were clothes, not a body.
You keep the old fogey garments on because, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, only grief lets you put on the new ones. Royal consciousness numbs us with managed optimism so we needn’t feel lost. Skip past the grieving and you get optimism (good enough), a form of denial that the British do particularly well.
To borrow Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s phrase from post-war Germany, the inability to mourn fits our own lifetime. Between the fall of the Soviet system and 9/11, just as communities were lamenting the last of heavy British industry, the chance to come to terms with that loss was cut short by a manic reinvention. Cool Britannia propelled another wave of globalisation, and liquid modernity (from structures to networks) spread round the world, and it needed optimism in the shape of Blair’s seasons.
Blair was not far from Cobden, speaking in Manchester in January 1846: “I look farther; I see in the Free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe, drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.”
As we concede now, the aggregate gains were real. Hundreds of millions in Asia left poverty. But the shocks are still being felt politically. Thomas Friedman’s Golden Straitjacket enforced disciplines that were needed, and also hollowed out parties’ ability to respond to voters. Globalisation worked, and quietly depoliticised its citizens. We admire institutions for sustaining our lives but fear they are drifting away from us, answering to forces we cannot trace.
In my lifetime real authority was answerable. It invited attention, and even had a sweet temper. Now it has melted, and we answer only to coercion. As globalisation goes into reverse, repoliticisation is under way at the margins, where the angst lives. V-Dem now counts around seven in ten of the world’s people as living under autocracy. Trade did not liberalise China; it strengthened its autocracy.
It is too easy to blame the modern world. Modern people are looking for geniuses they can trust because of their brilliance. But, as Søren Kierkegaard insisted, the apostle speaks with authority precisely because he is not a genius. There is nothing clever about him, only the claim that the message comes from somewhere of real substance. The Sanhedrin saw that Peter and John were “unlearned and ignorant men”, and marvelled.
Love begets vision, vision begets dialogue, and dialogue begets courage. It is boring. It is also the only authority that lasts.
Back to the Woodrow Wilson
Back in the Woodrow Wilson, it is Retrotopia in miniature: the past kept on display, reality on hold. The northern collectivised working class has gone, but its residual values remain, and something latent is still ticking over. Global markets and their client institutions chase ‘likes’ in the attention economy with little to say, which leaves structural holes for answerability: a broken middle between the lanyardista and a depoliticised public square, overrun by transactional officialdom.
Trump’s charisma offers its own miracle and mystery, and his supporters hear in it an answer to elites who never answered to them. The midterms will test both claims, not as prophecy but as the plainest form of answerability a republic has: the electorate.
The choice for our councils, clubs, churches and committees is the one the Inquisitor says Christ got wrong. We can keep the bargain of marketised nostalgia, miracle, mystery and authority, and let others answer for us. Or we can take the harder freedom of being answerable, and of being answered. There is no alibi in being. What does answering look like? Dialogue: asking the other person how they see things, and holding the space open while they hesitate, stumble, go silent, walk away, gaze, wonder (answerability). As the young Bakhtin put it in Nevel in 1919: “Art and life are not one and the same, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability.”
