Digressions&Impressions

On Hazony vs Kirk, and original sin in modern conservatism

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony treats Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind as "the most important book by a postwar American conservative." (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; the fourth; and, fifth, on Hazony’s critique of Meyer here.) In particular, Hazony notes that "Kirk’s account of the Anglo-American tradition is in many respects similar" to his. They both praise Burke and the American Federalist party, although with important differences lurking in the latter to which I return below. 

Now Hazony draws out four important areas of overlap between his own conservatism and Kirk's. I quote Hazony:

Kirk emphasized that, for conservatives, (i) “custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power”—although they also recognize that “prudent change is the means of social preservation.” Conservatives regard (ii) religion as indispensable, including “belief in a transcendent order” and the recognition that “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” They see that (iii) “freedom and property are closely linked,” and that the attempt to eliminate “orders and classes” from society could only end in tyranny. And they view human life as (iv) a “proliferating variety and mystery” that cannot readily be reduced to universal formulas. Kirk regarded these principles as being given voice, most importantly, by Edmund Burke in Britain and by John Adams and the Federalist Party in America.

So far so good. Hazony adds that "Kirk made a magnificent start to reinvigorating the Anglo-American conservative tradition in America," (emphasis added.) This 'start' clearly implies there is unfinished business. In fact, Hazony also thinks that on two issues Kirk drove Anglo-American conservatism in the wrong direction: "The first is Kirk’s emphasis on regional traditions."

In fact, while Kirk opts for John Adams, Hazony has a clear fondness for Hamilton. This shapes a dramatically different view of the content of American nationalism they are willing to defend. Kirk sees in Hamilton an aggressive "empire-builder." I return to this below.

And the "second, more serious problem with his historiography" is to be found in Kirk's "diligent efforts to retrieve what was supposedly worthy in Southern political thinkers who provided the intellectual framework for defending chattel slavery [which] was a mistake from which American conservatism has not yet entirely recovered." What ties the two together is Kirk's unwillingness to see "some local traditions" as "morally questionable." Hazony clearly suspects Kirk is a moral relativist and because of that incapable of criticizing slavery. I return to Kirk's attitude toward slavery below.

As an aside, there is also another line of criticism of Kirk in Hazony: that is centered on Kirk's willingness to participate in fusionism, which for Hazony entails "nothing other than the view that one should be a liberal in one’s political commitments, and a Christian in private." I also return to this below.

Now, it is worth noting that one important reason Kirk admires Burke is that he understands Burke's role in the Hastings affair as a defense of Indian local customs; Hastings "had ridden rough-shod over native religious tradition and ceremonial in India." In fact, throughout The Conservative Mind, Kirk is scathing of (utilitarian) liberal imperialism which imposes uniformity on subject peoples. While critical of Macaulay, he admires "Burke's reforms" because they "were intended to purge the English in India from the diseases of arbitrary power and avarice, to secure to the Indians their native laws and usages and religions." So, it is not surprising that Hazony reads Kirk as a moral relativist of sorts.

But I don't think that's the right reading of Kirk for two reasons (the second being more important than the first). First, Kirk thinks local customs ought to be defended if and only if they involve sincere, socially inherited religious creed because the contents of which are principles of political and social order (see (i-ii) in the passage quoted from Hazony above). But he also thinks Christianity is the superior religion. I quote a passage in which Kirk attributes this precise view to Burke (without dissenting from it): "Christianity is the highest of religions; but every sincere creed is a recognition of divine purpose in the universe, and all mundane order is dependent upon reverence for the religious creed which a people have inherited from their fathers." So the problem with civilizational, imperial liberalism (of the sort familiar from J.S. Mill) is that it lacks understanding of a proper political art of ruling according to Kirk. Violently suppressing existing religion just opens the door to a kind of social nihilism. Kirk's stance is not an expression of moral relativism, but of political prudence.

As an aside, while Kirk is a firm critic of liberal and other homogenizing imperialisms (including "the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy"), and thinks that "generally imperial expansion is full of risks for any conservative society" it is sometimes defensible. In context he is, for example, not uncritical of Disraeli's imperialism. In fact, while the whole book is a frontal attack on really existing home-grown American imperialism, I read The Conservative Mind as a call for a reformed more prudent imperialism. About that some other time.

If he understands Christianity as the highest religion, then Kirk is not a moral relativist. The key teaching of Christianity is for Kirk the existence and ineliminable fact of original sin. It’s probably the most important concept in The Conservative Mind. As Kirk puts it, in the context of discussing Irving Babbitt’s views, “The saving of civilization is contingent upon the revival of something like the doctrine of original sin.” And before you stop reading here, there is something important worth salvaging from this position.

While Hazony is not adverse to using 'sin' and its cognates, 'original sin' is not part of Hazony's moral vocabulary in his Conservatism: A Rediscovery whereas it is the key organizing principle to Kirk's social philosophy. For, one of the crescendos of The Conservative Mind is Kirk's admiration for Nathanial Hawthorne's "chief accomplishment: impressing the idea of sin upon a nation which would like to forget it." In fact from a political perspective, we also find in this account one of Kirk's most important commitments. He praises Hawthorne's realization "that projects of reform must begin and end with the human heart; that the real enemy of mankind is not social institution, but the devil within us; that the fanatic improver of mankind through artificial alteration is, very commonly, in truth a destroyer of souls." (emphasis added.)*

Kirk's focus on original sin also qualifies to what degree he thinks one should be a Christian merely in private. As the previous paragraph suggests he very much believes that the devil within must be tamed by all social institutions working in tandem. And while this is compatible with a privatized Christianity, it does not require it and probably works better with a more robust public Christianity according to Kirk. Kirk is an admirer of various forms of Catholic social theory and a critic of certain strands of individualizing Protestantism. One may see in Shklar’s liberalism of fear a liberal attempt to struggle with Kirk’s diagnosis.

Be that as it may, at this point one may grant that I have provided considerable reason to allow that Kirk was no moral relativist. But in a way, one may think, this makes Kirk's obtuseness on slavery worse. So, Hazony is right to reject Kirk.

Before I continue: a reminder to the reader unfamiliar with my writings that I view myself as on-looker in the debates among conservatives. My own interest in these is primarily understanding and also a curiosity if anything can be learned from conservative self-reflection and understanding. I am not an impartial spectator, but I am also not an advocate for conservatism. Okay, having said that, there is something in Kirk worth paying attention to especially, alas, in the bits that are most egregious to our moral sensibility.

Now, it is true that Kirk claims that "we shall try to keep clear here of that partisan controversy over slavery." And he does so because he is eager to discuss "those conservative ideas which Randolph and Calhoun enunciated." One may well think that Hazony is right that such bracketing is a moral disaster and, when it comes to Randolph and Calhoun, impossible, if only because Randolph and Calhoun themselves tend to bring the issues together.

As it happens, Kirk is rather critical of Randolph and Calhoun and their support for slavery. He writes, "the slavery controversy confuses and blurs any analysis of political principle in the South: the historian can hardly discern where, for instance, real love for state sovereignty leaves off and interested pleading for slave property commences. Both Randolph and Calhoun deliberately entangled the debate on tariffs (at bottom a question of whether the industrial or the agricultural interest should predominate in America), and the debate on local liberties, with the debate on slavery; for thus they were able to rally to their camp a great body of slave-holders who otherwise might have been indifferent to the issues at stake." So, he recognizes that his own bracketing is not the political strategy pursued by Randolph and Calhoun.

Now, a skeptic of my interpretation might suggest that while Kirk clearly admires local liberties, it is not obvious he rejects slavery. But he goes on to claim explicitly: "Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon." This is not a local relativist speaking, or a friend of slavery. In fact, later, when discussing John Quincy Adams (of whom Kirk has no particular fondness), he adds that "he was right in detesting slavery."

Kirk also recognizes that Randolph and Calhoun were at least in part motivated to defend slavery (although Kirk also thinks that Calhoun was aware of the dangers of slavery). But Kirk thinks "one may lift" their ideas "of their transitory significance and fit them to the tenets of conservatism in our day." That is, Kirk explicitly allows that the origin of some conservative ideas is highly immoral, but (with a nod to the genetic fallacy) that that they can do good work in a different context.

This is a highly unpopular position today. In our political culture tracing contemporary views to bad previous political positions (slavery, eugenics, imperialism, racism, etc.) has become a sure route to disqualifying the opposition. And again, I don't mean to defend Kirk's blinders. He seems to lack warmth for the plight of the slaves, and is not much perturbed by racism. But if you are all in on original sin it is no surprise to find bits of wisdom alongside awful commitments—and I have some sympathy toward this methodological stance.

Kirk also clearly detests Northern abolitionism as species of fanaticism. He seems to be attracted to views he associates with President Franklin Pierce that hoped that slavery would wither away by itself. But that's because Kirk thinks the civil war was an outright disaster, and that it set up the subsequent disasters of failed reconstruction and what he considers the stupidity of Jim Crow. I wouldn’t want to endorse this position; but not seeing the civil war as a disaster is also problematic. (Of course, on my view the disaster should have been avoided by getting rid of slavery beforehand!) So, Kirk understands himself as objecting to the means (war) not the goal (getting rid of slavery).

Underlying Kirk's position is a decoupling of the institution of slavery from mercantile war-mongering nationalist-imperialism. By contrast a liberal would see in slavery and imperialism the same side of a mercantile coin. Slavery is clearly a transient institution for Kirk (and, again, this position also seems informed by a reprehensible lack of warmth toward the plight of slaves), but for him nationalist imperialism is a permanent temptation for democracies in which our nature is not properly tamed. In fact, Kirk understands the opportunities for a revived conservatism as a response to the revulsion engendered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he sees the atom bomb as a possible trigger for much needed moral awakening.

Kirk diagnoses war as the opportunity for destructive hubris and nemesis as much as it is the site of the growth of central planning and uniform, leveling standardization. For Kirk Hiroshima is the natural outgrowth of the valorizing of war. (Kirk is not a pacifist; he accepts the need of war for defensive ends.) For Kirk, slavery is, thus, not America's original sin; rather it is the (Hamiltonian) embrace of expansive genocidal militarism centered on an an imperial president.** Hazony, by contrast, while a critic of foreign military intervention, is a friend of (Hamiltonian) economic nationalism and a strong presidency.

On Kirk's view this Hamiltonian position cannot avoid permanent war, which Kirk views as destructive to any higher culture (recall (iv)) worth having. To what degree he is right about this I leave for another time. But since we’re in an age of aggressive and destructive left and right-wing Hamiltonianism, this strain in Kirk seems worth excavating, especially for those who wish to tame our capacity toward evil.

Let me close with some blog house-keeping. As hinted in yesterday’s post, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. Apologies for that in advance. 

• This first appeared at: <Hazony vs Kirk - by nescio13 (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*This also helps explain Kirk's preference for Adams and his rejection of Hamilton.

**Kirk is never more eloquent than when he quotes Burke's second letter of the Regicide Peace in which Burke links a certain kind of statism to militarism. Having said that, he expresses little interest in American, pre-settler indigenous native cultures.

On Hazony and Bourke on Burke and Frank S. Meyer, and the risks of Freedom

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

Lodged inside Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery is also a polemic against what came to be known as 'fusionism.' (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; and the fourth.) I quote Hazony: "This alignment of liberals and conservatives was assembled, first and foremost, by William F. Buckley Jr., the young founder and editor of the conservative weekly, National Review. But its principal theoretician was his close associate, Frank Meyer, who was credited with having devised a “fusion” of liberalism and conservatism appropriate to conditions in America during the Cold War. That this “fusionism” was politically successful cannot be denied...Meyer’s fusion was also a version of Enlightenment liberalism." Chapter VI (section 5)

In fact, when Hazony turns to Meyer's (1962) in Defense of Freedom, Hazony is scathing: "Meyer’s book is devoted to repeated attacks on Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and other defenders of the Anglo-American conservative tradition. Among other things, Meyer accuses Burke of having inspired a standpoint characterized by “an organic view of society, by a subordination of the individual person to society, and therefore, by a denial that the freedom of the person is the decisive criterion of a good polity.”"

Intrigued by Hazony's characterization of Meyer (how could the architect of fusionism, which I think a historic mistake, be an Enlightenment liberal?), I decided to read Meyer (1909 – 1972). Vefore I get to what I want to say about Meyer today, I should note that Hazony subtly misrepresents Meyer here. Meyer is not a critic of Burke the conservative. He is, however, a critic of Kirk and other so-called 'new Conservatives' who have conflated Burke "the practical statesman," whose pronouncements were (to use Huntington's taxonomy [recall yesterday's post]) situational not a political philosophy, with an oracular prophet of a movement. According to Meyer, Burke could take for granted the worth of the (1688) constitution he defended.* That is, Meyer actually admires Burke. (This is not to deny that Meyer also disagrees with some of the late Burke's pronouncements on reason, but he tends to agree with Burke's underlying commitments on liberty.)

Meyer thinks that certain pronouncements of Burke, when treated as an eternal philosophy, lend themselves toward an organicist conception of society and a dangerous form of status quo bias, that what is, is right. As Hazony discerns (and Meyer acknowledges in a note) this is de facto a version of Strauss' criticism of the Burke Strauss found popular among American conservatives.

As an aside, if I am right about this then Richard Bourke’s characterization of recent conservatism (recall yesterday’s post) is misleading. For, our contemporary historical interest in twentieth century conservatism is due in large part to its political success in its ‘fusionist guise’ Stateside. (There is no interest in Kirk today other than as the partial trigger of fusionism.) By design, then, fusionism also rejects the very ‘Burke myth’ Bourke diagnoses from the start. How this could be so forgotten is, in fact, a very interesting question; but about that some other time.

Okay, with that as set up, let me turn, in conclusion, to the main point of today's digression. Meyer thinks reason is, then, required both as a grounds of criticism of any status quo and in the articulation of the means by which the proper end of society, virtue, must be pursued. (Meyer is in contemporary parlance, a certain kind of indirect liberal perfectionist.) In fact, he puts the point in the following way in a passage from 1964 that I find especially congenial: 

In the political and economic realm, however, these truths establish only the foundation for an understanding of the end of civil society and the function of the state. That end, to guarantee freedom, so that men may uncoercedly pursue virtue, can be achieved in different circumstances by different means. To the clarification of what these means are in specific circumstances, the conservative must apply his reason. The technological circumstances of the twentieth century demand above all the breaking up of power and the separation of centers of power within the economy itself, within the state itself, and between the state and the economy. Power of a magnitude never before dreamed of by men has been brought into being. While separation of power has always been essential to a good society, if those who possess it are to be preserved from corruption and those who do not are to be safeguarded from coercion, this has become a fateful necessity under the conditions of modern technology.--"Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism," Reprinted from What is Conservatism? (1964), p. 14 in Libertyfund edition of In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. [Emphasis added.]

That is, we can describe Meyer's core insight that the pursuit of individual virtue requires negative freedom. But that effective negative freedom, or the freedom of choice worth having, also requires certain social conditions. And in particular, Meyer advocates the (legal) destruction of (to use Sam Bagg's felicitous phrase) concentrated powers (which prevent and curtail formal freedoms in all kinds of ways). Meyer here echoes what I take to be one of the true insights of ordo-liberalism of a generation before. (The ORDOs are more realistic, however, about how much state capacity this presupposes.)

Meyer repeatedly emphasizes that his own position requires fallible contextual judgment. Meyer recognizes that allying with conservatism often entails, I quote from the same page, being "associated with authoritarianism." In context, there is, in fact, a real difference between opposing the state's leviathan to defend the "principle of federalism that reserves to the states or to the people all power not confided to the national authority" before the break up of Jim Crow or after; to worry about sociological scientism in Brown vs Board of Education while agreeing with its verdict in the particular case (or to use such scientism to reject the verdict), etc. 

The previous paragraph is not written by a moralist. If one agrees with Meyer's framework it is worth recognizing that opposing concentrated power in the name of making the pursuit of private virtue as free and responsible agents possible is not sufficient by itself to guard against rather significant errors of moral and political judgment. For, one must also make reasoned, and fallible, judgments about the order in which these powers are tackled and by way of coalitions with those whose ends one only partially shares. What makes Meyer's philosophy especially notable, even tragic, is that his is a most articulate sensitivity toward the risk of such grave error as a feature of freedom, that is, ineliminable from the human condition.

• This first appeared at: <On Hazony and Bourke on Burke and Frank S. Meyer, and the risks of Freedom (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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See pp. 61-62 and p. 10 of the Libertyfund edition of In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays.  (P. 10 is a reference to Meyer's 1955 essay, Collectivism Rebaptized."

Hazony on Conservatism, Part IV

[S]uch expressions of traditional Anglo-American nationalism and public religion would soon come to an end. In the wake of the Second World War, America, Britain, and other Western countries underwent a dramatic change in self-understanding. Somehow, a war fought to defend God-fearing democracy inadvertently ended up destroying the religious foundations of the victorious Western nations. Within a few years, the God-fearing democracies came to see themselves as liberal democracies, and liberalism replaced Christianity as the perceived source of whatever was good about America and other Western nations.
We can see the beginning of this change immediately after the Second World War in the American Supreme Court’s determination, in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), that state governments could no longer support and encourage religion—whether a particular religion or any religion. In theory, this decision is deduced from the First Amendment of the Constitution as applied through the Fourteenth. But the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War to protect black Americans from violations of their right to due process under the law, had by this point been on the books for seventy-nine years without anyone supposing that support for religion by the states was a violation of anyone’s right to due process.
What had changed in the interim was not the letter of the law, but the narrative framework through which the justices of the Supreme Court, as representatives of elite opinion, understood the relationship between Christianity and the American nation. That there had been such a change is obvious from the fact that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Justice Hugo Black felt he needed to provide a new story of the American founding—one broadly hostile to government encouragement of religion. Among other things, he writes:

It is not inappropriate briefly to review the background and environment of the period in which that constitutional language was fashioned and adopted. A large proportion of the early settlers of this country came here from Europe to escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches. The centuries immediately before and contemporaneous with the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy. With the power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews. In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place, men and women had been fined, cast in jail, cruelly tortured, and killed.

In Black’s retelling, religion is no longer the source of American democracy and independence, as it had been in Roosevelt’s State of the Union address eight years earlier. On the contrary, religion is now portrayed as a danger and a threat to democratic freedoms. Indeed, the very form of the American Constitution is now said to have resulted from the excesses of religion that drove the first Europeans to settle in America. It is in the Everson decision, in other words, that we find some of the first intimations of the transition from a God-fearing democracy to a liberal democracy: one in which religion is perceived as being so great a threat that the federal government must act to safeguard every child in the country from being taught religion in a publicly supported school.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Part III" pp. 264-266,

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here; here the second one on Hazony's post-feminist conception of the family; and here the third one on Hazony's account of statecraft). In this series, I mix exposition with immanent critique (even if sometimes I am bad at hiding my own skeptical liberal commitments). 

The quoted material is part of a chapter, "Liberal Hegemony and Cold War Conservatism," that introduces Hazony's intellectual  history of the post WWII conservative 'fusionist' movement. It has major treatments of Russell Kirk, Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Frank Meyer. (Burnham is notably missing.) The first of these is, in many ways, closest to Hazony, but Kirk's defense of states' rights (and the racialism supporting it) are criticized by Hazony. (As I have noted, before Hazony is a fierce critic of ethnic and genetic accounts of nationalism.) The latter three are all treated as liberals, and criticized for their one-sided defense of individual freedom. The cumulative effect of the chapter is, to simplify, to show how the intellectual, 'fusionist' movement organized by and around Buckley's National Review somewhat unintentionally contributed to 'liberal hegemony.' For present purposes what matters is a common thread in these thinkers that in different degrees they are willing 'to privatize' (a phrase Hazony uses in context of Meyer) religion to a relatively domestic sphere.

Now, Hazony treats World War II as a major rupture, or a triggering cause, for the retreat from public religion Stateside. (He resists the temptation to throw this on the sixties youth culture.) His explanation for this change is that elite opinion -- shocked and shamed by the racial Nazi atrocities -- correctly retreated from Jim Crow and other forms of state enforced, domestic racial oppression, and then mistakenly treated other forms of state sanctioned distinctions as on par with the racial kind. By contrast, Hazony does not "believe these aims are substantively similar at all. However, it is important to recognize that the U.S. Supreme Court did fid them comparable. Indeed, it is fair to say that these two goals—erasing distinctions based on race and religion—were the principal engines driving the establishment of liberal-democratic government in America after the Second World War." (267) And this led to the mistake of "instead of engaging in a focused effort to assist black Americans in overcoming the racial barriers that had been placed in their way, the constitutional revolution of the 1960s set out to reconstruct America in the image of the social-contract theories of Enlightenment rationalist philosophy." (270)

My interest here is not to contest the historical accuracy of this narrative. But it is worth noting an important irony. As I have noted before, Hazony treats Locke as the key 'rationalist,' who is foundational to the 'Enlightenment liberalism' (and 'liberal democracy') that Hazony treats as a rival to his own conservative/federalist nationalism. And Hazony implies throughout his argument that the Lockean liberals are to blame for the retreat of public religion. The irony, of course, is that Locke thought only protestants ought to be tolerated, and that Catholics and atheists not. And while Jews could be tolerate in Locke's day, and in the American Founders' era, the thrust of his argument is that no such toleration is possible once there is a Jewish state (due to possibility of divided loyalty, which is the argument to reject toleration of Catholics).

The point here is not that Locke was a bigot, or even to suggest that the "spirit of old the Protestant republicanism" Hazony suddenly extolls in the context of Reagan's presidency, is rather Lockean in character (and so there is something off in Hazony's conceptual framework), but rather to look again at Justice Black's rationale (and by implication of those American elites) to change the relationship between 'government 'and 'Christianity.' And to point to a surprising equivocation in Hazony's position in which 'Christianity' is treated as a kind term and 'religion' or 'religious practices' a kind of synonym for it. We see this in how Hazony advocates for what he calls 'conservative democracy. I first quote the principle on which it rests:

Principle 3. Religion. The state upholds and honors God and the Bible, the congregation and the family, and the religious practices common to the nation. These are essential to the national heritage and indispensable for justice and public morals. At the same time, the state offers toleration to religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole. (337; this is repeated from pp. 30-1, end of chapter 1)

While Hazony rejects Locke's views on consent, in the practical effects this account of toleration (to tolerate 'religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole') is, thus, actually remarkably Lockean. And while Locke might emphasize more than Hazony the right to exit from one's congregation, Hazony, too, allows this as we have seen in his account of the nature of 'loyalty groups.'

Anyway, the principle is rather vague. And is to be balanced with a number of other principles. But the practical pay-off is articulated as follows: 

Public religion. Conservative democracy regards biblical religion as the only firm foundation for national independence, justice, and public morals in Western nations. In America and other traditionally Christian countries, Christianity should be the basis for public life and strongly reflected in government and other institutions, wherever a majority of the public so desires. Provision should be made for Jews and other minorities to ensure that their particular traditions and way of life are not encumbered. The liberal doctrine requiring a “wall of separation between church and state” is a product of the post–Second World War period and is not an inherent feature of American political tradition. It should be discarded both with respect to majority religion and to minorities. (341)

That biblical religion is (in 'Western' contexts) the only firm foundation for 'national independence, justice, and public morals' might raise protests from liberals (like myself). But that does not concern me here. Rather I am interested in the consequences for religion to Hazony's view that a (local or national) "majority of the public" can impose their religious views on minorities. And I do so by returning to Hazony's treatment of Everson vs Board of Education quoted above. 

In the passage quoted from Black's opinion of Everson v. Board of Education, justice Black is fundamentally concerned about the political effects of sectarianism that is repeated almost staccato like in the opinion: (i) 'escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches;' (ii) 'the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy; (iii) he power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews;' (iv) 'In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place.' And the implication is that such sectarianism has also shaped American political life, or is a danger to it.

Of course, for much of American history, Protestantism was the majority religion. But Justice Black is writing in the aftermath of a huge, century long demographic shift toward Catholicism, and consequent increasing Catholic, political emancipation. The series of legal rulings that make the state retreat from enforcing religion in public life, can be understood as an attempt to pacify the potential for non-trivial sectarian strife not the least among Catholics and protestants, and among different protestant sects. In fact, liberals of the age (including Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls) suddenly start to emphasize (it's an innovation) the significance of religious wars as a foundational myth in the growth of liberalism.

That is to say, if sects can justly try to control government, this means that religious life will be politicized and factionalized permanently. Now, I think Hazony accepts that loyalty groups are intrinsically political (and hierarchical), although he underestimates what kind of leaders will rise to the top within religion if religion is a means to political spoils. But the dangers of sectarianism are obscured in Hazony's argument because he kind of tacitly assumes that 'Christians' will agree with each other. Of course, he is not unfamiliar with the history of sectarianism and political religious persecution. But because contemporary conservative Christians understand themselves, rightly or wrongly, as embattled against, and unified in opposition to, the near victory of (secular) Enlightenment liberalism/rationalism, Hazony never has to confront the dangers of doctrinal and factional sectarianism.

Let me close. In a way the problem of sectarianism makes the problem of statecraft I diagnosed in the previous post on Hazony's book worse. For in order to maintain peace among different religious sects, the wise politician must not only navigate a complex commerce of honors (and interests), as Hazony advocates, but s/he must also navigate a complex set of doctrinal and theological religious disputes founded on by no means durable majority opinion. This is a recipe for permanent political strife. 

 

Hazony on Conservatism, part III

Regardless of its scale, the introduction of the state alters the order of tribes and clans in one decisive way. The ability of families, clans, and tribes to conduct independent policies in matters of war, peace, and the punishment of major crimes is brought to an end. The competition among families, clans, and tribes, which constantly led to bloodshed in the pre-state order, becomes, in the state, a competition in which violence is proscribed, thereby establishing a sphere of domestic peace over a certain territory. While rivalry among loyalty groups continues unabated within this domestic sphere, it is now conducted in accordance with norms of speech and behavior that have been adopted to assure a certain measure of honor and influence to all sides. So long as this balance of honor and influence is maintained, the peaceful coexistence and alliance among the families, clans, and tribes living under the state can be maintained.

The state thus introduces a profound transformation in human life. But the fundamentals of human nature are not changed by it. Human beings continue to form families, clans, and tribes. And while these loyalty groups are to various degrees domesticated—meaning that they become more peaceable among themselves—they nonetheless retain their hierarchical structure, their tendency to adopt a common judgment based on the views of leading figures within the hierarchy, and their intense competition for honor and influence. All this continues, along with the insult and anger that occur when one’s family or tribe has been disregarded or dishonored and its influence slighted. And if the norms of domestic speech and behavior, which have been established to guarantee a measure of honor and influence to all sides, are not upheld, then the peaceful coexistence and alliance among the tribes will quickly disintegrate. At such times, the old order of tribes and clans inevitably reasserts itself. Then the competition among the tribes becomes violent again, and their assertions of independence from one another grow more strident, until finally the state exists in name only or not at all. Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Chapter: V "The Purposes of Government,"pp. 234-235)

This is the third in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here; and here the second one on Hazony's post-feminist conception of the family). And as should be clear by now, I mix exposition with immanent critique (even if sometimes I am bad at hiding my own liberal commitments). Hazony starts the fifth chapter with the claim that "Enlightenment liberalism" -- by which he means an ideology that originates in what he calls a "rationalist manifesto," Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) -- has, in virtue of a one-sided focus on the "freedom of the individual," no place for "the national interest, or of the general welfare of the nation, or of the common good of the nation, or of the good of the commonwealth" (p. 223 emphasis in original).

The claim would have surprised Locke, who, after all, put the Latin phrase "Salus populi suprema lex esto" [that is, The health/welfare of the people should be the supreme law"] on the frontispiece of the Two Treatises. Locke goes on to remind the reader (at II.158) that  it "is certainly so just and fundamental a rule, that he, who sincerely follows it, cannot dangerously err." Even Jefferson -- who is the high priest of Enlightenment liberalism in Hazony's book -- appealed to the principle in a 1810 letter to John B. Colvin (28 September) in order to explain that the executive sometimes can ignore written law (and offering several examples of this behavior from one of Hazony's heroes, George Washington).*

I do not mean to suggest there is no genuine contrast between liberalism in all its varieties and Hazony's conservatism. One cluster of contrasts becomes clear if we look at how Hazony describes the purpose of government and the function of statecraft in it. As the quoted passage shows, the state transforms the state of war (constant bloodshed) into a situation of "intense competition for honor and influence." (At another point, Hazony describes a "bitter" competition. (p. 237)) The Hobbesian or Spinozistic state of nature is always a latent possibility within the ordinary life of the polity. Hazony doesn't mention Spinoza, but his view is actually rather close to Spinoza.** Unlikes Hobbes and Spinoza, Hazony understands the state of nature and peace not in terms of individuals, but in terms of hierarchically organized loyalty groups (families, congregations, tribes, clans, nations, etc.).

As a crucial aside, for Hazony such loyalty groups are not primarily organized around genes or race. He makes this clear in a crucial note attached to the introduction where he distinguishes his views from those of "the “white identity” movements of the extreme right, which seek a politics based on biological race."  His loyalty groups share a "heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies." In the note, Hazony emphasizes his is "the traditional Anglo-American conception of the nation, inherited from the Bible." In context he does not explain what he means, but there is a passage (recall here), drawing on Talmud Megillah 13a,  in his earlier God and Politics in Esther, centered on an interpretation of the daughter of the Pharao's actions at Exodus 2: 5-6, which shows that for Hazony through one's actions one can become part of, and be adopted by, a loyalty group. (In Graeber and Wengrow's Dawn of Everything one finds (recall) a description of such a mechanism in their account of pre-Columbian conquest practices of the Turtle and Bear clans.)

It's worth noting that the mechanism of inclusion (and exit) from a loyalty group is ground in a kind of individual conscience that the pharaoh's daughter exercises. Conscience is emphasized in Hazony's (protestant and American) sources, but Hazony ignores it in Conservatism. But the freedom to act on conscience -- and some room for exit -- is crucial for Hazony's scheme if one wish to avoid loyalty groups to become despotic. This is tacitly recognized in the moving, concluding autobiographical personal chapter. But it does not have a comfortable theoretical place in his general argument (because it would move his stance too close to Locke's and presumably open the door to a species of liberalism.)

Be that as it may, a key function, then, of statecraft or the art of government in Hazony's political theory is to manage or balance the intense competition for honor and influence among the hierarchically organized, social pillars of state. The point of managing it is to generate internal cohesion, so as to allow not just domestic peace, but also for a "unified front...[and] power projected" against foreign rivals. (p. 237) Without such proper management the cohesion and "bonds of loyalty" will quickly fall apart.

Hazony explicitly recognizes that the skill-set involved in managing honor and influence among traditional loyalty groups is distinct from the leadership within traditional loyalty groups. But Hazony treats the problem as one involving issues of scale due to lack of repeated personal interaction. When one has a liberal sensibility one immediately recognizes a further problem for such statecraft in Hazony's account. Honor is intrinsically zero-sum. This is a feature and not a bug within traditional loyalty group in Hazony's account, but it turns into a dangerous impediment to stability in the interactions among loyalty groups, absent a common enemy. 

Hazony rejects the liberal solution which, roughly, is to displace the political onto non-zero-sum 'growing the pie activities' (increase trade -> wealth and cosmopolitan structures). So he offers an alternative:

To put this matter as simply as possible: The state and government are traditional institutions of certain societies. Their continued existence therefore depends entirely on the cultivation of bonds of mutual loyalty among the rival tribes that constitute the nation; and these bonds, in turn, depend on the conservation and transmission of particular traditions of speech and behavior that allow rival tribes and parties to compete, while at the same time honoring one another. There is, in other words, a causal relation between the cultivation and transmission of certain traditions within society and the existence of the state and state government. If appropriate traditions are not intensively and successfully cultivated, then the alliance among these rival tribes will end, and both the state and its government will cease to be. (237)

One effect of this is that political management becomes an intense task not just for the leadership of the state but also the leadership of the loyalty groups. And the glue that holds them together is constituted by traditions (including nationalism and a national religion(s)).

This is not incompatible with democratic life and constitutional parliamentarianism (as Hazony emphasizes). In fact, in principle, it can also be characterized by pluralism (which Hazony ignores). Some version of such an approach is familiar from, say, Lijphart's account of the social pillar system of Dutch Consociationalism. This is characterized by quite intense elite interaction (as Hazony emphasizes, too). Hazony's account does not really emphasize the pluralist possibilities. (The word 'pluralist' occurs, I think, only once in a reference to Isaiah Berlin's analysis of Selden, who is, in fact, a key progenitor of Hazony's intellectual thought.) In a later post, I discuss the motives and grounds for as well complications of Hazony's rejection of a pluralist consociationalism, and his insistence on adopting Christianity as a public religion. 

The problem here is that the existence of such glues does not solve the zero-sum nature of honor. Hazony himself kind of recognizes this because he returns to it again as follows:

What is needed above all else is to do the practical political work of cultivating ties of mutual loyalty among the various tribes and parties. This involves constantly balancing their interests and needs against one another, and ensuring that this balance leads to a renewed exchange of honors among them. Where the national political leadership has cultivated such mutual loyalties among the differents [sic] tribes and factions that constitute the nation, then the state can be firm and its government effective. (p. 239)

So, the domestic art of government requires constant political management of interests and needs of loyalty groups. The cultivation of "ties of mutual loyalty" is -- echoing Hume, who is self-consciously echoing Montesquieu -- in the service of the national spirit of unity. But the spirit of unity can only be stable if the loyalty groups have a commerce in honors among them. The problem is that such a commerce (it's the nature of the beast) has winners and losers.  

The problem for Hazony's scheme is not, as one might suspect I'll argue, that a system of hierarchy ground/founded on honor is intrinsically unstable (although it is always teetering on the brink of violence), but rather that it requires unusual if not rare and rather demanding skill to manage it properly. And as far as I can tell, he offers no mechanism such that the nation or the leaders of the nation can recognize and regularly elevate the right sort of leader into the position. (For as he notes this is not a skill that is exhibited in the life of loyalty groups themselves.) If anything, since in his scheme such leadership accrues non-trivial honor, one should expect the honor loving to seek it in particular. But there is no reason to believe that honor loving and the practical judgment needed to manage the honor loving are naturally conjoined. 

Hazony on Conservatism, part II

This is the second in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here). Hazony's conservatism fuses nationalist and religious themes. Here I explore his account of the family. For, while I am no expert on contemporary conservative thought, and generally Hazony presents his views polemically against liberal or Marxist (or so-called "woke") views, his account of the family is, in fact, rather revisionary relative to the public statements of those "who regard themselves as political conservatives" and when they "speak of the importance of the 'the family' as a cultural matter or in regard to government policy." (p. 213). His views on the family, thus, give a fascinating oblique glimpse into some serious rethinking on 'the right.'

Hazony's account of the family is offered as part of a larger account of the significance of families in congregations and congregations, in turn, in the life of the nation (or clan). Congregations are composed of families, and together with the families that constitute them are key to passing on traditions. (p. 218) The account of the family itself is functional in character. I return to this below. 

Now, a casual reading of Hazony's argument seems to suggest that it is based on sex-essentialist views of human nature. In particular, Hazony denies that enduring sexual monogamy is natural to men, especially, in fact, "nothing is more contrary to human nature." (p. 208) And so, in so far as "the lifelong bond of a man and a woman" is advocated by Hazony (which it is) as the "first pillar" of "civilized life," (p. 209) it turns out that for Hazony this lifelong bond is really the effect of the proper organization of social life (including families and traditions), that is, (what the Aristotelians would call) our second nature. So, it turns out that Hazony's sex-essentialist views are dispensable for his argument (which are compatible with all kinds of constructivist views).

And, in fact, in Hazony's favored account of the family -- what he calls "the traditional family" -- gender based dimorphism is rather small. It is much smaller, in fact, than in the patriarchic account of the nuclear family familiar from those "who regard themselves as political conservatives" Let me explain.

Because  he is attuned to the changing dynamics of the function and composition of families, Hazony works with a clear three-fold distinction among three ideal types: (i) the traditional family; (ii) the nuclear family; (iii) the hollowed out family. In brief: the traditional family is a business enterprise consisting of multiple generations in daily contact; the nuclear family involves a sexed division of labor within the household with the mother devoted to child-rearing and the father as breadwinner on a Fordist family wage; the hollowed out family has all its adult members involved in society's extended division of labor and purchases services from it to take on childrearing, cleaning, and education tasks.

While the distinction is conceptual (and normative) in character, it is presented as a temporal (and conceptual) descent, even thought it is possible for a great society to have instances of all three kinds of families existing at the same time (but usually one will predominate numbers-wise and/or normatively). 

Let me quote the passage in which he makes this three-fold distinction. (And then I return to what he calls the 'traditional family.') I suspect it will be received as a bombshell among Hazony's target audience:

As anyone who has lived among traditional families can immediately see, the nuclear family is a weakened and much diminished version of the traditional family, one that is lacking most of the resources needed effectively to pursue the purposes of the traditional family. When this conception of the family became normative in America after the Second World War, it gave birth to a world of detached suburban homes, connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains, automobiles, and buses. In other words, the physical design of large portions of the country reflected a newly rationalized conception of what a family is, which had been reconstructed in light of the economic principle of the division of labor. In this new reality, there were no longer any business enterprises in the home for the family to pursue together. Instead, fathers would “go to work,” seceding from their families during their productive hours each day. Similarly, children were required to “go to school,” seceding from the family during their own productive hours. Young adults would then “go away to college,” cutting themselves off from family influence during the critical years in which they were supposed to reach maturity. Similarly, grandparents were excised from this vision of the home, being “retired” to “retirement communities” or “nursing homes,” which cut the older generation off from the life of their family in much the same way that going away to college cut the younger generation off from it.
Under this new division of labor, mothers were assigned the task of remaining by themselves in the house each day, attempting to “make a home” using the minimalist ingredients that the structure of the nuclear family had left them. Much of this involved increasingly desperate efforts to keep adolescents somehow attached to the family—even though they now shared virtually no productive purposes with their parents, grandparents, and broader community or congregation, and instead spent their days seeking honor among other adolescents. The resulting rupture between parents and their children was poignantly described in numerous books and films beginning in the 1950s. But these works rarely touched upon the reconstruction of the family, which had done so much to inflame the natural tendency of adolescents toward agonized rebellion, while depriving parents of the tools necessary to emerge from these years with the family hierarchy strengthened.
But mothers had the worst of this new family life. Some did succeed in maintaining the cohesion of their families in a world in which grandparents and other family relations had grown impossibly distant, in which the family business had disappeared from the home, and in which the congregation or community, with its sabbaths and festivals, had likewise been reduced to something accessed by automobile once each week like a drive-in movie. However, many other “housewives” despaired and fell into the arms of the feminist movement, which, not without reason, declared the nuclear family to be a tomb for women. Feminist writers were mistaken in supposing that the reconstructed household of the postwar era was itself the traditional family. But they were right that the life of a woman spending most of her productive hours in an empty house, which had been stripped of most of the human relationships, activities, and purposes that had filled the life of the traditional family, was one that many women found too painful and difficult to bear. Many of these mothers quickly joined their husbands and children in leaving the home during the daytime—thus completing the final transformation of the post-traditional “nuclear family” into a hollowed-out shell, a failed imitation of the traditional institution of the family.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Chapter 4, pp. 213-215 (emphasis added)

I doubt a conservative has ever been so frank in acknowledging the solidity of key features of the argument of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique!

Hazony is, thus, explicit that he rejects a restoration of the nuclear family as an unworthy project. His is rather an attempt to restore the traditional family. This traditional family has five dimensions (and main characteristics): "lifelong marriage, permanent relations between parents and children, family business operations, the embrace of multiple generations within the family, and active [that is, daily] participation in a broader community or congregation." (p. 211) These are families, that is, that live on farms or compounds, or above/behind a store-front they own (or rent). As Hazony notes, it "becomes clear that the traditional Jewish or Christian family was a far more active, extensive, and powerful organization than the family as it exists in contemporary imagination and practice." (p. 211)*

As an aside, because Hazony is working with a cultural account of the Anglo-American nation, it's a peculiar fact that he does not explore how in immigrant communities -- including Muslim and Hindu --the traditional family is still very much alive and an attractive ideal. (Hazony's views on immigration are assimilationist in character, but compatible with this fact.) I suspect this reflects the unease on the political right with how to conceive the Anglo-American nation's internal relations with non Judeo-Christian religions. (I return to this in a future post when I discuss this more directly, and his views on public religion.)

While in some of Hazony's auto-biographical vignettes the traditional family has some gendered division of labor, it's pretty clear that within the family men and women are equal and that their contributions to the family functions, including its business and enduring partnership with other families, is valued even honored equally. And while the traditional family is hierarchical in character, the hierarchy is structured around age and contribution to the joint efforts not gender. In so far as there are any patriarchic elements left in it, these seem symbolic in nature. So, in some significant ways the traditional family is a much better home than the nuclear family is for a world that takes women and girls and their interests seriously. While it would be a mistake to ignore the anti-feminist rhetoric and arguments in Conservatism -- or the passages where Hazony expresses his criticism of abortion -- in many ways Hazony's program is not a return to patriarchy, but post-feminist.*

To what degree the traditional family is an attractive (or politically winning) ideal, I leave to others. But it is worth noting how much the political economy of the US would need to be re-shaped if it becomes at all feasible. As I noted above, at the level of dwellings and urban/suburban planning it would involve very different choices from the ones that are presently familiar (including a retreat from the suburb). In addition, the traditional family is incompatible with the large corporation; the underlying political economy is Smithian in character composed of price-taking small firms/units and protected by fierce anti-trust regulations and limitations on incorporation. (This is a bit ironic because Hazony's book has a Hamiltonian polemic with Jefferson.) So, this would have to be a conservatism that commits to non-trivial attacks on very strong vested economic and political interests (in the name of a restoration). Hazony hints at this when he warns against the "excessive accumulation of power by private enterprises and cartels" (p. 343), but this part of his program seems underdeveloped.+

 

Hazony on Conservatism, part I

Everything that we call a freedom of the individual, or one of the individual’s liberties, is a traditional institution whose particular form is learned by imitation, maintained through honor and self-discipline, and handed down, in a given society, from one generation to the next. Every freedom emerges through a well-structured constraint, and so it is worse than merely misleading to say that our political freedoms come to us by nature, or that reason leads easily to them, or that nothing is needed to maintain them but for government to let us be. All of this mythology diverts our eyes from the difficult road that must be traveled in order for the necessary constraints to be instilled in society, so that even the most rudimentary freedom or right can become a reality.
Where do these constraints come from?
They can come from the laws of the state and the commands of its officials, of course. And indeed, this is the most common Enlightenment-rationalist depiction of constraint. In Hobbes’s Leviathan, for example, fear of the government provides the constraint needed to bring peace and order to a society that would otherwise tear itself apart.
But constraint can also come from another source. In a free society, the principal constraining force comes not from fear of the government, but from the self-discipline of the people, who provide the necessary constraint themselves by upholding inherited relations and the obligations that attend them. This point was emphasized by the English political theorist John Fortescue in the fifteenth century, and taken up by Montesquieu, Burke, and the American founding fathers centuries later. Where nations can impose the needed constraints themselves, the government can be mild or moderate, offering them greater freedom to conduct their affairs without interference. But where a people is incapable of self-discipline, a mild government will only encourage licentiousness and division, hatred and violence, eventually forcing a choice between civil war and tyranny....

An individual who was guided by common sense enjoyed a broad range to think things through for himself. But his originality and divergences from the way others spoke and behaved were always constrained by a thick fabric of inherited relations and norms, which included the obligation to maintain and defend the place of God and religion, nation and government, family, property, and so on.
These inherited norms provided the framework (or “guardrails,” as we now say) within which reason was able to operate, yet without overthrowing every inherited institution as today’s adulation of perfectly free reasoning does. In our day, these inherited norms have been discarded in the name of the freely reasoning individual and his right to be rid of any constraint he has not himself chosen. God and religion, nation and government, marriage and children and caring for the aged—all these traditional ideas and institutions that once constrained the individual are now regarded as burdensome and difficult things, to be avoided because of the limits they impose on our freedom.
What would be required to build up this voluntary self-constraint rather than ceaselessly working to destroy it?
The propagation of such self-constraint depends on the honor that a given society is willing to award those who practice it. Indeed, the only known means of causing individuals to shoulder hardship and constraint without coercion or financial compensation is by rewarding them with honor.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, pp 164-166

When Donald Trump destroyed Jeb Bush in the (2016) South Carolina primary it inaugurated a seismic shift within the Republican party. One of the effects has been the rejection of a whole number of what we might call 'right liberal' commitments that centered on cosmopolitanism, individualism, free markets, free trade,  and a defense of the rule of law. In its wake there has been a scramble to provide a reasonably coherent intellectual program that can unify its nationalist and Christian coalition and provide a governing philosophy. This is, in brief, the political context of Yoram Hazony's increased prominence Stateside during the last half decade. 

Since 'self-constraint' and 'honor,' on one side, and 'Donald Trump,' on the other side, don't naturally go together in the same sentence, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the precise contents of Hazony's vision are at odds with Trump's persona and his style of leadership and governance. In addition, if one reads Conservatism: A Rediscovery with some care one will discern a whole number of subtle rejections of what one may call 'Trumpism' in political life not the least is a clear distancing from racism and racialized hierarchy, but also from Trumpism's zero-sum winner-takes all understanding of politics. 

Before I get to discuss the passage I quoted at the top of  this post, I don't mean to suggest that Trumpism is irrelevant to Hazony's argument even if Trump's actual views are barely mentioned. At the start of the book, Trump's 2016 victory is briefly identified as evidence for the rise of 'nationalist conservatism' and nearer to the end, the talk of 'resistance' to Trump's 2016 electoral college victory is offered as evidence that his legitimacy was denied and that Marxism has taken over the central organs of the old liberalism (pp. 327-328). There is no critical scrutiny of Republican malfeasance, and so this limits the audience of Hazony's message. 

Rather, a natural way to understand the role of Trump in Hazony's larger argument, is that he is a kind of symptom of a much wider social distress and inaugurates a period "when a major reframing of a scheme of ideas and the relations among them—a change in paradigm—becomes possible." (This echoes my own (recall) diagnosis back in December 2015.) In such periods, "we begin seeking the causes of our distress in earnest, and this search becomes the lever that pries the old paradigm loose. A period of open-mindedness is initiated, and proposed repairs that were once ridiculed are reconsidered. At this time, dissenting individuals who were once spurned and disreputable may grow quickly in importance, even as those who jealously protected the old consensus are diminished in stature and significance." (176)* 

Okay, let me turn to the passage which is from the long third chapter, "The Conservative Paradigm." This paradigm is situated in a historical narrative about the theoretical and political roots of Hazony's position in what he calls 'The English Conservative tradition" and "American nationalism," with the latter understanding itself as a continuation, even restoration (a key word for Hazony) of the former in the wake of the 1787-1789 Constitution. 

While self-discipline and constraints are not at odds with a liberal political worldview, a focus on honor is. Even liberal counterparts such as 'social credit' or 'recognition' or 'social approbation' all function differently than Hazony's account of honor. This is especially noticeable if one recognizes that those that (properly) perform the traditionally sanctioned role in a (traditional) hierarchy (parents, teachers, soldiers, political leaders, etc.) are to be honored. In addition, on Hazony's account obligations are the effects not primarily of consent, but rather of the existence of traditional relationships within this hierarchy (marriage, parenthood, childhood, membership in a clan, tribe, a nation, but also a corporation, a platoon, etc.). And so it is no surprise that this understanding of obligation is, in turn, repeatedly linked to loyalty, and that, as one can discern in the quoted passage, imitation is treated as praiseworthy. By contrast, there is no place in Hazony's scheme for (a celebration of) individual autonomy and authenticity. 

So, while I think his account of freedom can be accommodated by certain republican liberals, on the whole Hazony offers a genuine alternative to liberalism, but he has no interest in facilitating, in his doctrines, what we might call Confederate irredentism. Rather, he celebrates "Edmund Burke in Britain and...the Federalist Party of George Washington, John Jay, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton," who stood for a strong national government and rejected States' rights and slavery. Lincoln is treated as the great inheritor of this program, and Jefferson the exemplary misguided Enlightenment rationalist (and defender of slavery).+ And despite the emphasis on tradition and hierarchy, this Anglo-American conservatism is, thus, presented as not just as fully compatible with constitutional self-government, but as the true bearer of its tradition. I think this is, in fact, an improvement over the earlier (2017) presentation of these views (recall here) in an essay with Ofir Haivry at American Affairs. (Haivry seems to have co-authored the first two chapters of the present book.)

Since there are elements on the contemporary nationalist-Christian right, intoxicated by (natural law) Integralism and/or Schmittian decisionism and/or racialized hierarchy (the latter we might call the 'Jacksonian strain'), who seem little interested in constitutional and democratic self-government, it is actually to be wished that Hazony's position becomes the dominant element in Republican elite circles. For it would allow the possibility of the continuation of competitive elections that would permit alternative rule by different elites in the service of political coalitions and so the nourishment of hope that one can reverse a majority and policy. (Hazony claims that the cultural Marxist take-over of Liberal institutions will make that impossible.) In that respect, it's actually quite notable that at key moments in Hazony's narrative it is acknowledged that his favored tradition was a minority option. And unlike many other public facing thinkers on the nationalist conservative right, there is in Hazony no sign of rejection of scientific expertise. In a future post, I'll discuss his views on what a revived Conservative and Christian democracy would look like in greater and more critical detail. But here I want to close with an observation.

Hazony's road map from the present to the restoration of nationalist conservatism is, in fact, not centered on The Supreme Court or even electoral politics, even if the uptake of his views among Republican cadres will make him more influential. Rather, it is fundamentally ground in a "personal journey of repentance and return" and a rejection of "personal decadence." (p. 391) Not unlike his adversaries, Hazony believes the personal is political. And this means, for Hazony, in practice, building "family and congregation" dedicated to the passing on and honoring of tradition. (p. 393).  

Given this self-transformative focus, I find it odd that Hazony barely touches on the nature and causes of contemporary celebrity and attention culture and the (consequent) frivolity of what passes for spirituality today.** For even if one grants (as I do not) that the vacuity of contemporary celebrity culture is the effect of liberalism, and evidence of its moral bankruptcy, it is also a rather effective block on the revival of a honor society he wishes for. In celebrity culture nurses and teachers and all lives dedicated to service, or any activity that provides social [what Hazony often calls] "cohesion," are simply not truly honored. This we have seen in a pandemic that should have caused a major cultural shift in attitudes. And within this celebrity culture, attention and success are its own ends and engage in a (if you will, vicious) mutually reinforcing cycle with financial rewards. And while some charismatic religious leaders may develop huge followings, they will do so in virtue of their charisma and success at attracting attention (and huge bank accounts) not because they have been touched by the divine.

There are passages that hint at a willingness to control the "corrosive effect" of capitalism on "traditional institutions," (and especially the off-shoring of good jobs abroad), but since celebrity culture now infiltrates our lives 24/7 on hour handheld, algorithmic networked devices introduction of (say) a number of tariffs will make no material difference here. That is to say, even if Hazony got his way and the "separation of church and state" would be abolished Stateside (p. 345) and Christianity would be restored to the centrality he wishes for it in our midst, the odds are it would be a repackaged Christianity fundamentally unmoored from its history and its sacred texts, in which resources are pooled to give fellow congregationalists a leg up in the social battle for attention. 

 

 

Hobbes on Natural Equality

[1] Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.

[2] And as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat els,) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equall, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.--Hobbes Leviathan, Chapter XIII.

It's natural to read a Spinozism before Spinoza into the first sentence quoted above. While I do not want to reject that out of hand, it's worth recalling that in the first sentence of the "Introduction" of the Leviathan, we learn that nature just is "the art whereby God hath made and governes the world." So, we are equal in virtue of God's art which both creates and governs the world. To what degree this government is providential I leave to discussion of chapter XXXI.

Such cosmocraft is the theological, or natural, counterpart to the statecraft (or art of governing people) that Hobbes teaches. The term 'statecraft' does not appear, I think, in the Leviathan, but we are informed in chapter XIX that the absence of "the art of making fit Laws" is one of the main conditions of the dissolution of states. And in that very sentence (of chapter XIX) laws are treated as coordination devices of human action. In fact, Hobbes is explicit that only fit laws can make a state last. 

That there is an art of government, Hobbes explicitly defends -- against a kind of Thrasymachian objection "some say, that Justice is but a word, without substance; and that whatsoever a man can by force, or art, acquire to himselfe, (not onely in the condition of warre, but also in a Common-wealth,) is his own" -- in chapter XXX. And he explicitly goes on to say that "time, and Industry, produce every day new knowledge" of  commonwealths. And "so, long time after men have begun to constitute Commonwealths, imperfect, and apt to relapse into disorder, there may, Principles of Reason be found out, by industrious meditation, to make use of them." And while "industrious meditation" gives the suggestion that these principles are rationalistic or Cartesian in character (as thinkers as different as Hume and Hazony imply), the wider context suggests he thinks these principles are empirical in character, even subject to trial and error. For these principles are "observed by industrious men, that had long studied the nature of materials, and the divers effects of figure, and proportion, long after mankind began (though poorly) to build."* That Hobbes thinks that the longevity and well-structured-ness of a state is a kind of practical response to the Thrasymachian objection is worth further exploration, but I leave it aside for now.

As regular readers know (recall here), I am rather fond of Leviathan's account of natural equality. Even so, Hobbes' defense that we are naturally bodily equal is a bit peculiar. Leaving aside the Spinozistic way of expressing things, in effect, in the first quoted paragraph (13.1) Hobbes re-tells the story of Glaucon's account of the origin of the social contract in Book 2 of the Republic at 358e/359a, where the not so powerful gang up against the powerful in order to restrain them. I call it 'peculiar' not just because Hobbes appeals to our political nature (confederacy, secret cabals) to explain we're naturally equal, but also because if Glaucon's social contract is apparently just as possible in the state of nature (and later in 13, we're reminded about the brutish and short lives there) as Hobbes' own version of the contract; then why do we need Hobbes' (different) version of the social contract?+ 

In XIII.2, Hobbes articulates a kind of natural ignorance. Science is historically late on the scene, and by Hobbes' light it is something "which very few have, and but in few things." Those that deny our equal natural ignorance tend to be our elitist vanity. As regular readers know, I think XIII.2 is significant because Hobbes shifts here from a kind of extensional perspective (in XIII.1) to a more intentional perspective in what we believe. And he appeals to a kind of no-envy-principle to suggest that we often seem satisfied with our own capacities or natural wisdom. And by 'wisdom,' Hobbes means here a kind of superior prudence in human/social affairs. 

It is worth noting that Hobbes here rejects what Hume would call the monkish virtue associated with (say) Christian humility and epistemic deference to superiors as somehow unnatural. By this I mean that Hobbes thinks these are acquired perspectives on ourselves and can't be used in the escape from the state of nature. We don't really have easy epistemic access to the practical wisdom of others, while, on his view, we can relatively easily discover that others are funnier, and more eloquent and learned than we are. Since Hobbes is, in fact, very funny in XIII.2, I take it he means this claim to be proven or illustrated by example.

There is, of course, a peculiar fact that in defending our mental equality, Hobbes presupposes a distinction of rank between the gentlemen (who are, in fact, a mere subset of "all men") and the "vulgar."  It's a nice example of a rhetorical maneuver that appeals to the prejudices of one's audience to simultaneously undermine it. That is to say, in XIII.2, he also illustrates superior eloquence by example. In fact, I am inclined to say that in 13.2 Hobbes improves rhetorically on (say) Romans 12:16, which also presupposes the distinction of ranks: "Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits." That Hobbes has this in mind is plausible because in chapter XV he writes, "For there are very few so foolish that had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others: nor when the wise, in their own conceit, contend by force with them who distrust their own wisdom, do they always, or often, or almost at any time, get the victory."

Be that as it may, Hobbes goes on to say (in XIII.3) that each of us think ourselves wise is a political problem in a world of material scarcity because it generates dangerous (because mutually incompatible) hopes. Hope had been defines as a passion or "Appetite with an opinion of attaining." That is to say, how we view ourselves is, alongside our desires, action guiding. And, in fact, earlier (at chapter XI.13) Hobbes had already alerted the reader to the political problem of our satisfaction with our own wisdom: "Men that have a strong opinion of their own wisdome in matter of government, are disposed to Ambition." And for this to be true, one need not assume that satisfaction in one's own wisdom is equally distributed. The political problem Hobbes is pointing to is generated if even only a few are really excessively self-satisfied in their own capacities, and these few are not in a position to hope to rule. Of course, making room for them to rule can cause its own problems. But I have gone on long enough.

 

 

The European Union and Hobson's Nationalist Imperialism

Yet, when Professor Pearson passes from a society of individuals to the society of nations, which we call humanity, he insists upon retaining the older, cruder, irrational method of securing progress, the primitive struggle for physical existence. Why? If it is profitable and consistent with progress to put down the primitive struggle for life among individuals with one another, the family and tribal feuds which survive even in fairly developed societies, and to enlarge the area of social internal peace until it covers a whole nation, may we not go farther and seek, with hope, to substitute international peace and co-operation, first among the more civilised and more nearly related nations, and finally throughout the complete society of the human race? If progress is helped by substituting rational selection for the struggle for life within small groups, and afterwards within the larger national groups, why may we not extend the same mode of progress to a federation of European States, and finally to a world-federation? I am not now concerned with the grave practical difficulties besetting such an achievement, but with the scientific theory.

Although a certain sort of individual efficiency is sacrificed by repressing private war within a tribe or nation, it is rightly judged that the gain in tribal or national unity and efficiency outweighs that loss. May not a similar biological and rational economy be subserved by substituting government for anarchy among nations? We admit that a nation is strengthened by putting down internecine tribal warfare; what finality attaches to the arbitrary social group we term a “nation” which obliges us to reverse the economy applicable to tribes when we come to deal with nations?...

But to ascribe finality to nationalism upon the ground that members of different nations lack “the common experience necessary to found a common life” is a very arbitrary reading of modern history. Taking the most inward meaning of experience, which gives most importance to the racial and traditional characters that mark the divergences of nationality, we are obliged to admit that the fund of experience common to peoples of different nationality is growing with great rapidity under the numerous, swift, and accurate modes of intercommunication which mark the latest phases of civilisation. It is surely true that the dwellers of large towns in all the most advanced European States, an ever-growing proportion of the total population, have, not merely in the externals of their lives, but in the chief formative influences of their reading, their art, science, recreation, a larger community of experience than existed a century ago among the more distant members of any single European nation, whether dwelling in country or in town. Direct intercommunication of persons, goods, and information is so widely extended and so rapidly advancing that this growth of “the common experience necessary to found a common life” beyond the area of nationality is surely the most markworthy feature of the age. Making, then, every due allowance for the subjective factors of national character which temper or transmute the same external phenomena, there surely exists, at any rate among the more conscious and more educated sections of the chief European nations, a degree of true “like-mindedness,” which forms the psychical basis of some rudimentary internationalism in the field of politics. Indeed it is curious and instructive to observe that while some of those most insistent upon “like-mindedness” and “common experience,” as the tests of a true social area, apply them in defence of existing nationalities and in repudiation of attempts to absorb alien nationalities, others, like Professor Giddings, apply them in the advocacy of expansion and Imperialism.

Surely there is a third alternative to the policy of national independence on the one hand, and of the right of conquest by which the more efficient nation absorbs the less efficient nation on the other, the alternative of experimental and progressive federation, which, proceeding on the line of greatest common experience, shall weave formal bonds of political attachment between the most “like-minded” nations, extending them to others as common experience grows wider, until an effective political federation is established, comprising the whole of “the civilised world,” i.e. all those nations which have attained a considerable fund of that “common experience” comprised under the head of civilisation.

This idea does not conflict with the preservation of what is really essential and valuable in nationalism, nor does it imply a suspension or abolition of any form of struggle by which the true character of a nation may express itself, in industry, in politics, in art or literature.---J.A. Hobson 1902 Imperialism, Part II, Chapter II

After yesterday's digression on Hobson's imperialism, David Gordon called my attention to a short, biting (1963) essay by Gordon Tullock, who had then just published The Calculus of Consent. The piece anticipates my point that Lenin's reading of Hobson has clearly shaped Hobson's reception. Oddly, Tullock does not remark on the rent-seeking argument that drives Hobson's analysis (or so I claimed.) Tullock is wrong to treat Hobson as an anti-capitalist. But Tullock's main point is spot on: "Thus the fact that Hobson attacked the empires of the capitalistic nations of his day cannot he used as evidence that he op­posed empires in general, any more than Kipling's harsh words about the Russian empire proved that he opposed all empires." (160)

But given Buchanan's genuine interest in European federation (recall here; and here) it is a bit odd that Tullock says nothing about the content of Hobson's vision of empire. For, Hobson promotes a European federation, which, mid-twentieth-century, when Tullock was looking back at the reception of Hobson was not utopian anymore.

To see what Hobson is getting at it is important to recognize that Hobson distinguishes between different kinds of nationalism. His positive conception of a "genuine nationalism" is explicitly indebted to J.S. Mill (recall also). It is pacific in nature and it is ground in mutual solidarity of people (recall) "united among themselves by common sympathies," which Hobson quotes. This good kind of nationalism, which anticipates (recall) Hazony's conception, can generate a form of colonialism that Hobson endorses. But by 'colonialism' he means what the ancients meant, "migration of part of a nation to vacant or sparsely peopled foreign lands, the emigrants carrying with them full rights of citizenship in the mother country, or else establishing local self-government in close conformity with her institutions and under her final control, may be considered a genuine expansion of nationality, a territorial enlargement of the stock, language and institutions of the nation." (Introduction) This Tullock  noticed. The key point here is 'vacant or sparsely populated.' Hobson, perhaps naively, thinks such settler ("genuine") colonialism need not become the genocidal and inhumane practice he denounced. As I noted yesterday, and as Tullock anticipates, it is not obvious Hobson's proposals have the resources to block the bad things from occurring.

As an aside, long before the 1619 project, Hobson was -- not unlike Las Casas -- completely forthright about the genocidal nature of much European imperialism. Hobson repeatedly and critically calls the reader's attention to deliberate policy of extermination of peoples who stood in the way of European expansion. This is, for him, the effect of bad nationalism. (He also recognizes an aggressive form of nationalism that is more defensive in character.) This is the reason why Hobson could become the hero of some anti-imperialists (which Tullock mocks). Hobson does so in a chapter that seems to embrace the superiority of Europeans, and the need for a kind of soft eugenic policy.+

With that in mind, let me now turn to Hobson's proposal of a European federation of pacific nations which includes at least some of its colonial projects. Hobson echoes Kant's call for a "federation of European States," as preparatory to "a world-federation." Now, as any reader of Kant's Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim will notice, colonialism and fondness for European federation are not incompatible. And, in fact, as Chris Brooke loves reminding me when the European Union was founded in the 1950s it still contained an imperial hinterland. (Long before Brexit, Algeria and various once Dutch possessions left the Union.) That is to say, Hobson anticipates Hayek's vision of European federalism (recall) in which great European powers maintain some trappings of empire.*

That Hobson proposes a European federation follows naturally from his liberal analysis of the sources of imperialism. Tariffs, protectionism, and rent-seeking all cause and reinforce imperial projects in states with the economic development and resources to do so. And so a federated free trade region would simultaneously undermine imperial interests, reduce friction among the federated, and be more prosperous and so have resources to invest in public goods (including elements of a welfare state). In this sense Lenin is right that Hobson does really anticipates Kautsky's more social democratic vision for Europe.

Let me close with a final remark. Hobson thinks that under modern conditions nations develop and peoples far apart have increasingly similar lives. And he thinks that while modern economies and technologies help intensify national feeling they, simultaneously, create more like-minded nations and so the possibility of a different kind of sympathetic process. That World War I proved, what theorists of sympathy already knew, that such like-mindedness can intensify the nature of mutual conflict, does not refute Hobson's insight. It just reminds us that even the grounds for optimism about a pacific, federated internationalism committed (recall) to liberty must be tempered by a sense of its fragility.

On Siedentop and The Re-Invention of Liberalism (II); against autochthonous tradition

The Gospel of Thomas urges a new project on believers: nothing less than turning women into men! They are to become as ‘one’. By that it is clearly meant that women should be enabled to become rational agents, to recognize that they have the same rational and moral capacities as men. ‘When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner ... and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, then you will enter (the kingdom).’

That reconstruction of the self, which Paul had urged on his followers, is here tied overtly to a change in the status of women. Larry Siedentop (2015) Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism]. p.75  [HT Bart Wilson]

I agree with Siedentop that anti-clericalism may well hide key Christian contributions to liberal self-understanding. I agree with him (recall) that "Christian moral intuitions played a pivotal role in shaping the discourse that gave rise to modern liberalism and secularism." (359) But it is one thing to insist that Christianity played a central, even constitutive role in developing the conceptual scaffolding for Liberal individualism and another thing to claim or imply that only Christianity played such a role. This has unfortunate consequences. For example, earlier in the week, I argued that this commitment leads him articulate a rather impoverished understanding of liberal individual (that somehow misses the contribution of Mill, or at least now identified with Mill's defense of non-conformism). I also noted that Siedentop's argument also effaces the cosmopolitan roots of liberal thought. Today, I would like to develop this thought.

A key point in the book is that Christianity invents by reversing the once pervasive and omnipresent assumption of natural inequality and social hierarchy for a view of natural, moral equality. And while plenty of Christians recoil from the implications of this intuition, as Christian institutions shape society, it has many intended and often unintended consequences that, ultimately, feed into liberalism. This draws on two key methodological "assumptions "that frame the study:

The first is that if we are to understand the relationship between beliefs and social institutions – that is, to understand ourselves – then we have to take a very long view. Deep moral changes, changes in belief, can take centuries to begin to modify social institutions. It is folly to expect popular habits and attitudes to change overnight.
The second assumption is that beliefs are nonetheless of primary importance, (2)

As regular readers know, I believe that habits and attitudes can change overnight, even if we then (recall) pretend for political reasons the change is more modest and incremental, and that when they don't, we should explore how institutions and force prevent change. But in what follows, I'll pretend that memetic change is glacial.  Okay, with that in place, I want to tackle two claims. 

First, in the passage quoted at the top of this post, Siedentop suggests that once Christianity embraced natural equality, gender equality (even gender homogeneity) was a firm conceptual possibility within Christianity. And while it laid dormant for many centuries thereafter, once Christian moral intuitions could shape society, there were no logical barriers against the habits and attitudes of gender equality.* As he puts it: "we have seen that the conventional view in antiquity was that women could not be fully rational beings. Their subordination, like that of slaves, was justified in that way. The Gospel of Thomas urges a new project on believers: nothing less than turning women into men!" (75)  A similar impulse, "a presumption in favor of equality," shaped "the attitudes of Gregory of Nyssa, who in fourth century Constantinople delivered a fierce attack on slave-owning." (119) Nothing is said about Gregory of Nyssa's attitudes toward gender equality.

One could never guess from Siedentop's account that one could find the doctrine of natural equality elsewhere in the Ancient world. My favorite example can be found in Philo of Alexandria's description (in an essay known as, De vita contemplativa or Of the Contemplative life) of a monastic community outside of Alexandria, the therapeutics, that practices gender equality, women joining the "sect with equal deliberation and decision."+ But not not just outside Alexandria; in fact, Philo is explicit that such communities "may be met with in many places, for it was fitting that both Greece and the country of the barbarians should partake of whatever is perfectly good."  In addition, they reject slavery. Their ground for doing so is worth quoting: "they do not use the ministrations of slaves, looking upon the possession of servants of slaves to be a thing absolutely and wholly contrary to nature, for nature has created all men free, but the injustice and covetousness of some men who prefer inequality, that cause of all evil, having subdued some, has given to the more powerful authority over those who are weaker."

To the best of my knowledge there is consensus that Philo is describing a Jewish community; or at least it is an idealized version of possible Jewish life modeled on the description in Exodus 15 of the relationship between Moses and Miriam.* It's important to note that unlike The Gospel of Thomas, in Philo's description the therapeutics maintains, while something close to equality, gender difference. 

Philo's description of the therapeutics also calls attention to a detail that undermines another key part of Siedentop's argument. For, while drawing heavily on Fustel de Coulanges, Siedentop argues (correctly) that the patriarchal family is the basis of the inequality of Ancient political life and that each family is originally a religious cult. (This is important because there is no space for the true individual and equality in the Ancient household.) The center of the patriarchal family is the family shrine. And throughout the early chapters of his argument Siedentop, runs arguments ground in the necessary identity of family as a religious cult and the practice of political inequality/hierarchy.

As it happens, as Philo reports (or imagines) "in every house" of the therapeutics "there is a sacred shrine." It's unclear whether the home shrine is gendered male. I think not because there is a communal "holy place" which is clearly co-gendered: "this common holy place to which they all come together on the seventh day is a twofold circuit, being separated partly into the apartment of the men, and partly into a chamber for the women."

Now I don't mean to suggest that Philo always and everywhere endorses natural equality. But I do claim he did not need Christianity to arrive at it in De vita contemplativa. Philo's life and writings are pretty much contemporaneous with the life of Jesus and his writings may or may not have influenced early Christianity (and the Gospel of Thomas). But there is no reason to believe the influence ran in the other direction. 

Second, among the most striking claims in Siedentop's narrative, is that the political side of liberalism really grows out of monastic self-government in three key ways: (i) democratic values of consensual, bottom up and deliberative government ground in individual association are developed there; (ii) the work ethic is embraced and the aristocratic-intellectualist bias against work is rejected; (iii) the Cluniac reform movement gave rise to the attempts to use canon law to create unified papal sovereignty.  (Chapter 7 is devoted to articulating (i-ii) and chapter 17 to the connection between (i) and (iii).) So far so good (and (iii) is worth returning to.)

But Siedentop presents monastic life as a Christian invention developing out of the practice of Christian hermits in the 'East' (Syria, Egypt, etc.).  Here's the key passage:

[W]hile urban churches compromised with the aristocratic world in which they had developed, the new, chaotic movement of monks preserved the primitive norms of the church....Nonetheless, the gradual organization of monasticism reveals more about the moral thrust of Christianity than what had become the ‘state’ religion of the Roman empire by the late fourth century could do. As hermits or anchorites became cenobites – that is, as asceticism became communal – Christian beliefs began to generate a new conception of ‘community’, an utterly new form of social organization. (93)

Now, Siedentop could have dropped a footnote here and mentioned that there were monastic communities prior to Christianity. Quite famously -- (and not to draw on Philo again, I mention) Pliny the Elder devotes a rather striking passage to them in the Natural History -- the Essenes were a monastic community that share in many of the characteristics that Siedentop praises in early monastic Christianity. But he doesn't. I don't mean to suggest Jews invented monastic life. When I teach the history of political thought, I call attention to the significance (for political theory) of Buddhist monasticism invented half a millennium earlier or so. Many of the characteristics that Siedentop praises in Christian monasteries were pioneered there. I don't know how much of this was known in the Roman mediterranean, but Pliny mentions plenty of contact between Romans and Greeks and Indians. Pliny and Philo are not obscure.

It's possible, of course, that Siedentop is misled in part, by his hero Fustel de Coulanges, who emphasizes the uniqueness of Pauline Christianity. But I also think Siedentop has an earnest desire to show that liberal individualism is wholly, even purely, 'Western' because he wants to promote, if not a battle of civilizations, at least a dominant role for a self-confident liberalism that shapes" the conversation of mankind" (363). And so the Jewish (and other) sources on Christianity and future liberalism have to be homeopathically thinned to the bare minimum.

By contrast, here's what Siedentop says about the Jewish influence on his story:

Conforming to an external will was becoming the dominant social experience. And the voice of Judaism spoke to that experience, as no other did. The message of the Jewish scriptures was radical. Virtue consisted in obedience to God’s will. His will was not something that could be fathomed by reason. It could not be deduced from first principles. Nor could it be read in the book of nature. Scripture alone mattered, because it was the record of God’s commands and promises. Historical events – the medium of God’s will – were privileged over deductive reasoning. The Jewish God refused to be pinned down: ‘I will be who I will be.’
A new sense of time thus went hand in hand with the new awareness of will. (54)

So, on this account, the main message of Jewish scriptures is submission to the will of God. This is characteristic of the idea that Jerusalem and Athens are polar opposites (and as Hazony has noted often implies that Judaism is not a religion of reason). This is a form of Judaism as exemplified by the Christian interpretation of the commandment to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. (Here's how Siedentop puts it: "What Paul did, in effect, was to combine the abstracting potential of later Hellenistic philosophy – its speculations about a universal or ‘human’ nature – with Judaism’s preoccupation with conformity to a higher or divine will." (61))  I have noted before that J.S. Mill had a different view (itself indebted to Machiavelli), "Conditions more favourable to Progress could not easily exist: accordingly, the [Ancient] Jews, instead of being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and, jointly with them, have been the starting-point and main propelling agency of modern cultivation."

My point is not that the liberal individual is Jewish, or Buddhist. But rather that one can tell a version of Siedentop's story, and point to heterogeneous influences and exemplary sources for it, that is truly cosmopolitan. As it  happens, that is historically (in his prophetic sense) more accurate; it's also more fascinating. It's also a myth worth having for a political tradition that self-consciously wishes to shape humanity's common destiny in an egalitarian key. 

 

On Marilynne Robinson's Edomites

Assmann’s argument is the sort of razzle-dazzle that depends on coinages like “mnemohistory,” which is the exalted and useful discipline of interpreting history that collective memory has displaced and suppressed so thoroughly only the writer has an inkling even of the fact of suppression. In this cognitive implosion a fusion occurs between Moses and the Aton cultus which conventional history simply cannot achieve. Assmann is writing this book in response to Freud’s abysmal question about the origins of anti-Semitism. “Strikingly enough, his [Freud’s] question was not how the Gentiles, or the Christians, or the Germans came to hate the Jews, but ‘how the Jew had become what he is and why he has attracted this undying hatred.’” He paraphrases Freud’s answer thus: “Not the Jew but monotheism had attracted this undying hatred. By making Moses an Egyptian, [Freud] deemed himself able to shift the sources of negativity and intolerance out of Judaism and back to Egypt, and to show that the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality came from outside it.” So we are to concede, apparently, that these are “the defining fundamentals of Jewish monotheism and mentality.” Comment is unnecessary, though I will draw attention here to the notion of victimization I remarked on earlier. We gentiles have the Torah to blame for our worst moments, it would appear.

Like others of these writers, Assmann argues that ancient polytheism was essentially tolerant, “cosmotheism,” and readily accepted other gods, translating them into the terms of the culture that received them. Granting that Melqart, a god of Carthage, did indeed lounge around in a lion skin looking just like Hercules, we have the fact that Rome loathed Carthage, and was despised in turn, and reduced that great city to bare earth and then plowed salt into the ground. Athens and Sparta had just the same pantheon, and they fought to the death. And Rome conquered Greece, whose gods it had thoroughly Latinized. That is to say, whatever the merits of polytheism, at best it only obliged people to find other than religious grounds for hostility, which they were clearly very able to do. How the wars of the Hebrews against the Canaanites are more culpable than the wars of the Romans against the Etruscans I fail to see, or why anyone should imagine that these wars were less formative for European civilization than those distant, inconclusive wars among the Semites. Or, for that matter, why they do not prove that the character of the civilization was already formed when Rome set about the conquest of Italy. Jack Miles attributes the structure of Western consciousness to monotheism on the grounds that “the Bible was the popular encyclopedia of the Middle Ages.” But in fact through most of the Common Era in Europe the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, existed almost exclusively in Latin, a language incomprehensible to the great majority of people, who were in any case illiterate. So its influence is easily overstated. Yet ferocious intolerance has characterized most of Western history in the Common Era.

Polytheism is as fashionable now as it has been since fascism was in its prime. As a corollary to the current tendency to blame monotheism for intolerance and aggression and genocide, there is an assumption that polytheism must have been tolerant, pacific and humane. This notion is old, too. In The Natural History of Religion, Hume says, “by limiting the powers and functions of its deities, [idolatry] naturally admits the gods of other sects and nations to a share of divinity, and renders all the various deities, as well as rites, ceremonies, or traditions, compatible with each other … [By comparison] when one sole object of devotion is acknowedged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious.”

It is striking to see how the cultural discourse is circling on itself. Perhaps the real familiarity of their arguments explains why these writers I have looked at offer so little in the way of evidence. For example, Assmann, the most scholarly of them, says the Old Testament is deeply informed by aversion to Egypt, then offers no support from the text. And, coincidentally perhaps, little evidence is to be found in the text. One Mosaic law of unambiguous relevance, which goes unmentioned by him, is Deuteronomy 23:7: “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land.” This law provides that both Edomites and Egyptians may enter the assembly of the Lord on favorable terms — after three generations, that is, which seems long, but which is liberal by comparison with the ancient Athenians, for instance, who never naturalized the descendants of foreigners. Nor, as I understand, do the modern Germans. This one verse is sufficient to demonstrate that there was not hatred but in fact a certain bond between Hebrews and Egyptians.

This idea, that the hatred of the Other is the signal preoccupation of the Old Testament, is carried to great lengths by Regina Schwartz..."--Marilynne Robinson, "The Fate of Ideas: Moses" in When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), pp. 114-116. [First published in 1999 in Salmagundi.]

During the Summer my mom called attention to a lovely, recent essay by Robinson in the NYRB. (Thank you mom!) In that essay Robinson vindicates the Puritans and Cromwell as (for example) legal reformists who develop the idea of the rule of law. I may be the only would be aspiring contributor to the Republic of Letters who had missed the impact of Robinson's novels and essays and even Obama's endorsement of her. (Serves me right for skipping the NYRB for a few years!) I am trying to use the remainder of this Summer to catch up on what I missed. When I Was a Child I Read Books contains two essays, "Open thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism" and "The Fate of Ideas: Moses," which are the bedrock on which the recent NYRB essay is built. These two essays are often read in tandem by those with an interest in advancing, what we may call, contemporary political theology (see, e.g., Paul Steaton critically; Scott D. Moringiello admirably).

The long quoted passage is kind of exemplary of Robinson's philosemitism. She is very acute on the ways in which biblical scholars and even very progressive intellectuals have a tendency to attribute bad features of European civilization or today's culture to a disparaged version of the Old Testament.

As an aside, she uses "Old Testament" and not "Hebrew Bible" because they have "very different cultural histories [and] the order of the books is different." (96) En passant, Robinson raises the question to what degree these can be said to be, in fact, the same book(s).*

Be that as it may, Robinson, who is often humane and wise, is pretty compelling that often the unlovely critiques of the Old Testament are grounded in lack of familiarity with the actual text. She notes that for much of the history of Christianity such familiarity cannot be presumed among many. (The revival of knowledge of the Old Testament occurred during the reformation by humanists and reformers.)+  And one of her more endearing features is to quote Scriptures to unmask dangerous nonsense presenting itself as scholarship. I don't mean to suggest she is committed to simpleminded literalism or infallibility of scripture; not unlike her hero, Calvin, she uses sola scriptura as a means to expand one's judgment and sensitivity and to ground what she calls free thought. 

Even so, I think something is off in her reading of Deuteronomy 23:7. And I will suggest it's the kind of offness that characterizes the advocate. Before I get to that, everything she says in the passage quoted above is true -- both true as readings of others and about the larger purported truths to which they refer. More important, given the contemporary scene, the passage she quotes from Deuteronomy helps provide background to the kind of claims my friend (and sometime co-author) Yoram Hazony makes (recall, for example, here and here) about what he calls the order of nation states which co-habit in peace. Hebrew, Egyptian, and (especially?) Edomite can be expected to cohabit. In fact, and again with a nod to the contemporary headlines, this is a Hebraic nationalism that rejects ethnic/racial purity and is open to immigrants becoming part of the community (and intermarry). Hazony himself has written eloquently on this (recall).** 

Okay, with that in place, I would like to quote 23:7 in Deuteronomy's slightly larger context:

3An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the LORD for ever: 4because they met you not with bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt; and because they hired against thee Balaam the son of Beor of Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse thee. 5Nevertheless the LORD thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but the LORD thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because theLORD thy God loved thee. 6Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days for ever. Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother: thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land.8The children that are begotten of them shall enter into the congregation of the LORD in their third generation. KJV

It's pretty clear that the Old Testament treats Ammonites and Moabites very differently from Egyptian and Edomite. What's especially striking is not the historical rationale offered by Moses,++ but the insistence that one should not aim to make peace or (I think) trade with  Ammonites and Moabites. To put the point anachronistically, in the order of nation states there will be states that are perpetual enemies (e.g., Ammonites and Moabites) and those that are not (e.g., Edomite and Egyptian. Since the Jews had been slaves in Egypt this is indeed remarkable.) It seems that there is something about the national character of perpetual enemies (lack of hospitality and, to sound Hobbesian, war-preparedness) that makes them (these nations) incapable of change.*** 

I think Robinson would be inclined to read, and she would not be wrong to do so, this passage of the Old Testament as showing that an unwillingness to open one's hand to the stranger is, according to it, almost the worst national character-trait. So, the passage supports her larger spirit.  

Even so, I close with a yes, but. 

Even if one allows (for the sake of argument) that national character is fixed, I am unsure what the assumed mechanism is by which flawed national character infects each individual such that it makes members of these nations permanently unwelcome. But it's pretty clear that the passage justifies inhumane treatment of those taken to belong to natural enemies. So, surely Robinson is correct to say that the Old Testament shows no signal preoccupation with hatred of the Other. It would be pleasant if we could all be Edomites. But that's compatible with the injunction to be on guard, in the sense of keeping out, alas, some distinct Others, forever.