What follows are the remarks I delivered at the University of Notre Dame as a participant on a panel on "Education and Scale" at the annual conference of the Center for Ethics and Culture in November 2011.
The University as a Community within the Universe:
Getting the Relationship Right
Patrick J. Deneen
Georgetown University
This panel is entitled “Education in the Mass Age: Why Scale Matters.” If I know my compatriots well – given our shared work on a website called “Front Porch Republic,” whose motto reads “Place. Limits. Liberty.” – they will rightly argue that scale matters, and that in our age of globalization, expansion, homogenization, and consolidation, that we need to think small and insist upon the local. I want today to agree with them in part, but I want to suggest that we should be conscious of another and equally important argument in our age of secularized horizons: namely, that the gargantuanism and trends toward unification of the globe are finally too small, too narrowing, too “local.” I want to remind us today that we should be equally concerned not only with defending the local against the big, but to be wary of confusing the “big” with something bigger still, something truly universal, something not limited merely to the globe and to the human will and human action to fill that globe, but something that transcends what we today confuse as the “universal.” So, I want to suggest that a defense of the local needs to be linked with an argument in defense of the truly big, the truly comprehensive, the truly universal, that which goes beyond the saeculum in our narrow and constrained understanding of today.
Today we tend to pose the aims of smaller and arguably more local institutions – those we typically call “colleges,” particularly liberal arts colleges – against the aims of larger institutions called “universities,” by which we might typically mean “research universities.” The words we designate for the distinction between these two institutions reflect this difference of emphasis and self-understanding. The word college comes from “collegium,” meaning "community, society, guild," or literally an "association of collegae.” A college thus lays a stress upon the relationships between particular members of the community and seeks to foster an environment of learning in which the close bonds of its members is understood to be an integral part of the formation of students and the means by which faculty come to share a vision of their shared goal as educators. It is certainly this evocation of “college” that is stressed by the Patron Saint of the Front Porch Republic, Wendell Berry, in his arguments that colleges were originally formed in America as places that sought to educate the youth of particular communities in order to send them back into those communities where it was expected that they would contribute to the commonweal of those particular places.
The “university,” however – particularly today – emphasizes instead the relationship of its population to knowledge – and especially the scientific exploration and “creation” of new knowledge – and is organized around the principle of the division of labor and specialization. The members of today’s “university” – focused on the idea of attaining a knowledge of the universe – works toward this goal through specialized research that largely forestalls the creation of a community of scholars and students. Rather, the university, far from creating a “college,” in fact only can be seen to be adequately doing its work if most of its members work in extensive ignorance of the kinds of work being done by colleagues, often even those in the same departments.
The danger that is often highlighted by me and my colleagues on the Front Porch and elsewhere is that this model has become the norm, and that today every “college” is under pressure to remake itself in the image of the University, that every Ph.D. being trained today at Universities brings with him or herself the ideal of the contemporary fragmented university to institutions once designed to foster collegium. We see the acceptance of this norm in the trend today of renaming institutions once called “college” with the name of “university,” such as Bellarmine, Rider, Hollins, Beaver College (Arcadia University), even Globe College is now Globe University.
Against this trend there is a strong inclination to assert a defense of the college – the particular, the local, the community. This is right and meet, but it cedes too much of the ground of “universalism” to the contemporary University, which does not deserve this designation.
In fact, I want to suggest today that we accept too much of the narrative of a secularized conception of the university if we adopt the view that it is the collegium of the local that must be asserted against the globalizing claims of the university. For, when the local is shorn of recourse to a conception of the universal that it becomes susceptible to the attractions and claims of the false universalism, that “university” offered by today’s secular conception of knowledge.
I think this is largely the story of America’s colleges, in fact. That story has been well-told recently by thinkers such as Andrew Delbanco in a series of lectures at Princeton University entitled “Does College Really Matter? A History of Undergraduate Education,” and Anthony Kronman in his book Education’s End. Both describe the set of stages through which America’s institutions of higher education have gone, first from a wide variety of religiously-affiliated liberal arts colleges, then to a mix of land-grant and private universities that were increasingly disaffilitating, and today to a system that is dominated by the ideal of the research university and in which most institutions originally founded in a religious tradition have disaffiliated from their Churches. This particular story of disaffiliation – told well by James Burtchaell and George Marsden – should raise a discomfiting question, namely, what caused so many colleges – collegium - to become susceptible to the appeal of the call of the scientific claim to the “universal,” of a truth that could be thought to transcend the limited particularlity of the specific founding traditions of those colleges. While we tend to place the blame on the totalizing claims of the sciences, might we not raise the question whether the blame lies at least in part in the very particularity of the colleges – that is, the congregationalist foundings of many of the American liberal arts colleges that often stressed the truth of the particular community against the threat coming from forces outside those communities? Lacking a connection to, or animating vision of, a true universalism, thousands of colleges abandoned their religious affiliations, a dominant number within a century of their founding. This ought at least make us wonder not only at the power of the secular narrative, but the weakness of a particular theological understanding of “community.”
We might fruitfully compare these two American versions of the “college” – the particular – and the “university,” aiming at universality, with a different set of similar institutions ranging back in time, namely, the Monastery and the medieval University. The monastery placed similar stress upon the local and particular, with monasteries becoming an integral part of the particular places, and building deep relationships with the particular people, in their particular places. But the monasteries also understood themselves to be parts of a universal whole, related in their partiality to the universal Church and devoted to the worship of God. And further, even in the activities that were devoted to particular and seemingly limited ends – particularly the work of hands that might be thought to be deeply embedded in the particularities of local place and practice (“the mechanical arts”), monastic orders understood this work to be infused with a meaning that related it to the whole, to the true universal of God’s divine order. So it states in the Rule of St. Benedict that the monk will “regard all the utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar.” Even the most mundane tasks and tools were to be understood as part of a divine order, nothing particular shorn or divorced from a relationship to the whole of creation. The “college” was also a university.
Meanwhile, the medieval university was, as today, explicitly devoted to the exploration of the universe, but a universe not limited to that discoverable by the empirical sciences. And, like today, the university was comprised of people from every part of the known world, an association of foreign students gathered together to investigate the nature of the created order and man’s place in it. However, if today the university takes people from communities in order to make them into “citizens of the world” – or citizens of nowhere – in the Middle Ages, the universities attracted foreigners from around the world and formed themselves into what was called “nations” – sovereign entities apart from, and even in deep tension with, their particular cities. If today we might conclude that town-gown relations are sometimes rife with tension, it can barely be compared to the relations between the “nations” of universities and the Nation in which it happened to be located. One famous conflict occurred on St. Scholastica’s Day in 1354 between students and citizens at Oxford when students grew angry at the late night partying of the townspeople and a small conflict turned into pitched battle within the course of several days. On the second day of conflict, “the citizens, aided by some countrymen, defeated the scholars, and ravaged their halls, slaying and wounding. Night interrupted their operations, but on the following day, ‘with hideous noises and clamours they came and invaded the scholars’s houses … and those that resisted them and stood upon their defence they killed or in a grievous sort wounded….. The crowns of some chaplains, that is, all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy….” (Rait, 125-6). Now that’s a town-gown conflict…
The original meaning of the word “university” was not only invoked to indicate “universality,” but also meant, according to medieval jurists, “all kinds of community or corporation,” (Ridder Symoens, 37), in this case, “a guild in the world of learning …, a union of men living in studium and possessing some common interests to protect and advance” (Rait, 10-11). Thus, the university understood itself to be a particular organization of people – foreigners – who formed a community in the activity of investigating the universal. In order to achieve this, they had to organize themselves as a place distinct and apart from their particular places, as not to be embedded too much in the narrowing view of the city or “nation.” The “nations” of the university formed a community devoted to the universal. This idea of “university” has been replaced instead by a collection of foreigners who do not form a community in the pursuit of knowledge about the worldly, and hence become servants to the worldly and its limited and limiting ambitions.
In this very brief sketch, I think we can more valuably find in the examples of the monastic form of localism within the universal, and the medieval university’s self-understanding as a “nation” apart devoted to the exploration of the truly universal, two complementary understandings of the relationship between the particular and universal, the local and the transcendent, that point to the necessary relationship between the two, and a way of moving us beyond the false contemporary and secularized categories of “college” and “university." We can further see the false dichotomy that sometimes informs contemporary understandings between the "local" and the "universal," albeit as a way of highlighting the limitations of our contemporary conception of the "global."
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Back
Occasional or regular readers of these pages will have noticed that the site was down for the past month or so. Without further explanation, the site is back online, with a slick new re-design (feel free to weigh in - as a traditionalist, I am loath to change for the sake of change, but the old design seemed to me to have grown a bit static, and I thought a new year might be the occasion for a new birth of web design).
I will endeavor to post more regularly. Much to discuss. Happy new year to one and all.
PJD
I will endeavor to post more regularly. Much to discuss. Happy new year to one and all.
PJD
Monday, October 17, 2011
Rousseau on Economics
"If what you wish is merely to make a great splash, to be impressive and formidable, to influence other peoples of Europe, you have before you their example: get busy and imitate it. Cultivate the sciences, the arts, commerce, industry; have regular troops, fortified places, academies, and, above all, a fine financial system, which will make money circulate smoothly and so multiply and greatly enrich you. Strive to make money absolutely necessary so as to keep your people highly dependent - which calls also for fomenting material luxury and the luxury of the spirit that is inseparable from it. Do all this, and you will end up with a people as scheming, violent, greedy, ambitious, servile, and knavish as the next, and all of it at one extreme or other of misery and opulence, of license and slavery, with nothing in between....
"But if perchance you wish to be a free nation, a peaceful nation, a wise nation, a nation that fears nobody and needs nobody, a nation that is sufficient unto itself and happy, then you must use another method altogether, namely this: keep alive - or bring back to life - simple customs, wholesome tastes, and a spirit that is martial but not ambitious. Instill courage and unselfishness in the hearts of your people. Employ the masses of your population in agriculture and the arts necessary for life. Cause money to become an object of contempt and, if possible, useless besides...."
--Jean Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772)
"But if perchance you wish to be a free nation, a peaceful nation, a wise nation, a nation that fears nobody and needs nobody, a nation that is sufficient unto itself and happy, then you must use another method altogether, namely this: keep alive - or bring back to life - simple customs, wholesome tastes, and a spirit that is martial but not ambitious. Instill courage and unselfishness in the hearts of your people. Employ the masses of your population in agriculture and the arts necessary for life. Cause money to become an object of contempt and, if possible, useless besides...."
--Jean Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772)
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Nine Eleven
September 11, 2001, we are frequently told, is the day that "changed everything." For the 3,000 people in New York City and Washington D.C. who were killed on that blue-skied day, and for their families, that 9-11 "changed everything" barely suffices to describe what happened on that day. For the many more thousands of people in our military who have been deployed in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for their families, their years of service have been very different than would have the case been before the attacks. For these people in particular - a fragment of our population - September 11th changed everything.
For the rest of us, very little has changed. Our national descent was likely accelerated by the events of that day, but that discernible course was not fundamentally altered. Our national ethic of consumption and distraction, while discomfited by the economic shocks experienced over the subsequent decade, remain our way of life. Our national reliance upon international militarism as our main discernible pose toward the world remains evident. Our recourse to the language of technique to confront deeper questions of moral crisis remains regnant. That a mere seven years after the attacks, the rot of our economic system came clearly into view - a system based upon a Ponzi scheme (yes, I said it), graft, debt and a "get-rich-quick" mentality that was universally shared, should at least give us pause about our character and our capacity for serious self-discernment.
After the first flush of horror and the desire to help, our long-term responses were two-fold. First, we were told by President Bush that we should "go shopping," and - finding it the easiest call to national "sacrifice" ever made - we followed his advice with abandon. We especially bought and sold property - countless sub-par piles of hastily constructed drywall structures unworthy of the first little pig - "paid for" by plentiful "cheap" money that we borrowed seemingly without limit. While 9/11 families continued to feel the anguished absence of loved ones whose lives were snuffed out inexplicably on a day they went to work or took a flight, and soldiers and their families prayed that they would not die on that day in the desert or the mountains far from home - we shopped. We spent - as families and as a nation - massive and finally uncountable amounts of money that was not ours. Many of our finest families became nominally rich on their "equity," turning their houses into piggy-banks which led to the purchase of more houses and a king's ransom in luxury goods.
A favorite television show in the years that followed the attacks on 9-11 became "Flip that House," joining other notable "reality" programming of the past decade that reflected the depth of our national seriousness and purpose after the attacks, such as "Jersey Shore" and "Keeping up with the Kardashians." During this week we have tuned in momentarily to recall the attacks and our hours of disbelief, and perhaps above all to be believe and hear voices intoning that we can feel deeply; but, tomorrow, we will return to our regular programming of empty carbs and circuses.
Second, we deployed. Every nation must defend itself, and a price doubtless had to be exacted from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. If there was no shortage of money to borrow in the housing market, the attacks of 9-11 justified the unquestioned and unquestionable, and perhaps finally incalculable expenditure of national treasure in pursuit of a small terrorist sect who spent roughly $500K to bring down the towers. According to one estimate, the United States has spent $7,000,000 for every dollar spent by Al-Qaeda in response to the attacks - or, one-fifth of our current national debt. We will never know for certain how many people have gotten rich off of the "war on terror, but we at least have an inkling of the existence of a growing and largely unaccountable "top secret America."
In the meantime, we have refused to understand the attacks of 9-11, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - not to mention much that has preceded those events in America's growing involvement in the Middle East since the 1970s - as further expansion of, and evidence for, our age of resource wars over a diminishing pool of that most essential source of the industrial age - petroleum. It is not tantamount to the heresy of "blaming the victim" to note a fact that is rarely commented upon about the rise of Osama bin Laden, preferring as we do simply to understand him as an incomprehensible, mad, fanatic: he was one of a wave of "fundamentalists" whose main complaint was the presence of Western, and especially American, troops in "Mecca." That presence was the result of the invitation of the House of Saud dating back to the 1940s, when a cozy bedfellowship created by Saudi need for Western scientific prowess and Western need for Saudi oil fostered an unholy alliance that led most recently to an American president bowing to a desert sheikh. While bin Laden's response to this perceived incursion of the "infidel" into holy land was heinous and despicable, the truth is that we have been the main party in supporting a deeply pathological political and economic system throughout the Middle East, all in the name of securing "oil markets." Yet, we remain "shocked, shocked," that we are hated especially in this part of the globe.
It goes without saying that, for all of our "support for the troops," we will be willing to deploy them everywhere, anywhere, and for any length of time, as long as we can put cheap gas into our weed whackers.
The golden thread that runs through our response to 9-11 is how little has changed, especially considering our incapacity to subject our actions to probing and even discomfiting scrutiny. Above all, we are unwilling to question the obscenity of our blithe consumption, our foundational economic reliance upon usury, our addiction to irony and distraction, and our unswerving capacity to discount the effects of our current actions upon future generations.
9-11 was a lost moment to gain a clearer national self-understanding, but we have instead embraced a national ethic of self-deception. A decade later we are nearly in ruins. We have wrecked our economy through our failure to exercise prudent and responsible "household management" - the Greek roots of the word "economy." We have wrecked our political system through our failure to see clearly what even (or only?) Sarah Palin was willing to pronounce recently - that we have lost the Republic and have gained an oligarchy. We have wrecked our primary educational institutions in the name of "self-esteem" and "no child left behind"; we have dismantled our vaunted liberal arts inheritance once aimed at teaching limits, character, and virtue, for the utilitarian ambitions of "assessment," job-preparation and STEM. We have wrecked our moral ecology with our willingness to trade vibrant local cultures in which families and communities might flourish, for a global profit-making anti-culture of distraction based largely upon pornography and violence. We have wrecked our physical ecology for the inconvenience of not having to live within ten miles of a market and the convenience of not having to wash the dishes.
Much of the greatest damage in all these spheres of life has occurred in the decade since 9-11. So perhaps I'm wrong - everything has changed. But it has changed because we have not.
For the rest of us, very little has changed. Our national descent was likely accelerated by the events of that day, but that discernible course was not fundamentally altered. Our national ethic of consumption and distraction, while discomfited by the economic shocks experienced over the subsequent decade, remain our way of life. Our national reliance upon international militarism as our main discernible pose toward the world remains evident. Our recourse to the language of technique to confront deeper questions of moral crisis remains regnant. That a mere seven years after the attacks, the rot of our economic system came clearly into view - a system based upon a Ponzi scheme (yes, I said it), graft, debt and a "get-rich-quick" mentality that was universally shared, should at least give us pause about our character and our capacity for serious self-discernment.
After the first flush of horror and the desire to help, our long-term responses were two-fold. First, we were told by President Bush that we should "go shopping," and - finding it the easiest call to national "sacrifice" ever made - we followed his advice with abandon. We especially bought and sold property - countless sub-par piles of hastily constructed drywall structures unworthy of the first little pig - "paid for" by plentiful "cheap" money that we borrowed seemingly without limit. While 9/11 families continued to feel the anguished absence of loved ones whose lives were snuffed out inexplicably on a day they went to work or took a flight, and soldiers and their families prayed that they would not die on that day in the desert or the mountains far from home - we shopped. We spent - as families and as a nation - massive and finally uncountable amounts of money that was not ours. Many of our finest families became nominally rich on their "equity," turning their houses into piggy-banks which led to the purchase of more houses and a king's ransom in luxury goods.
A favorite television show in the years that followed the attacks on 9-11 became "Flip that House," joining other notable "reality" programming of the past decade that reflected the depth of our national seriousness and purpose after the attacks, such as "Jersey Shore" and "Keeping up with the Kardashians." During this week we have tuned in momentarily to recall the attacks and our hours of disbelief, and perhaps above all to be believe and hear voices intoning that we can feel deeply; but, tomorrow, we will return to our regular programming of empty carbs and circuses.
Second, we deployed. Every nation must defend itself, and a price doubtless had to be exacted from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. If there was no shortage of money to borrow in the housing market, the attacks of 9-11 justified the unquestioned and unquestionable, and perhaps finally incalculable expenditure of national treasure in pursuit of a small terrorist sect who spent roughly $500K to bring down the towers. According to one estimate, the United States has spent $7,000,000 for every dollar spent by Al-Qaeda in response to the attacks - or, one-fifth of our current national debt. We will never know for certain how many people have gotten rich off of the "war on terror, but we at least have an inkling of the existence of a growing and largely unaccountable "top secret America."
In the meantime, we have refused to understand the attacks of 9-11, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - not to mention much that has preceded those events in America's growing involvement in the Middle East since the 1970s - as further expansion of, and evidence for, our age of resource wars over a diminishing pool of that most essential source of the industrial age - petroleum. It is not tantamount to the heresy of "blaming the victim" to note a fact that is rarely commented upon about the rise of Osama bin Laden, preferring as we do simply to understand him as an incomprehensible, mad, fanatic: he was one of a wave of "fundamentalists" whose main complaint was the presence of Western, and especially American, troops in "Mecca." That presence was the result of the invitation of the House of Saud dating back to the 1940s, when a cozy bedfellowship created by Saudi need for Western scientific prowess and Western need for Saudi oil fostered an unholy alliance that led most recently to an American president bowing to a desert sheikh. While bin Laden's response to this perceived incursion of the "infidel" into holy land was heinous and despicable, the truth is that we have been the main party in supporting a deeply pathological political and economic system throughout the Middle East, all in the name of securing "oil markets." Yet, we remain "shocked, shocked," that we are hated especially in this part of the globe.
It goes without saying that, for all of our "support for the troops," we will be willing to deploy them everywhere, anywhere, and for any length of time, as long as we can put cheap gas into our weed whackers.
The golden thread that runs through our response to 9-11 is how little has changed, especially considering our incapacity to subject our actions to probing and even discomfiting scrutiny. Above all, we are unwilling to question the obscenity of our blithe consumption, our foundational economic reliance upon usury, our addiction to irony and distraction, and our unswerving capacity to discount the effects of our current actions upon future generations.
9-11 was a lost moment to gain a clearer national self-understanding, but we have instead embraced a national ethic of self-deception. A decade later we are nearly in ruins. We have wrecked our economy through our failure to exercise prudent and responsible "household management" - the Greek roots of the word "economy." We have wrecked our political system through our failure to see clearly what even (or only?) Sarah Palin was willing to pronounce recently - that we have lost the Republic and have gained an oligarchy. We have wrecked our primary educational institutions in the name of "self-esteem" and "no child left behind"; we have dismantled our vaunted liberal arts inheritance once aimed at teaching limits, character, and virtue, for the utilitarian ambitions of "assessment," job-preparation and STEM. We have wrecked our moral ecology with our willingness to trade vibrant local cultures in which families and communities might flourish, for a global profit-making anti-culture of distraction based largely upon pornography and violence. We have wrecked our physical ecology for the inconvenience of not having to live within ten miles of a market and the convenience of not having to wash the dishes.
Much of the greatest damage in all these spheres of life has occurred in the decade since 9-11. So perhaps I'm wrong - everything has changed. But it has changed because we have not.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Community AND Liberty OR Individualism AND Statism
(What follows is the text of the remarks that I delivered at the recently concluded I.S.I. Honors Program. The conference was entitled "The Language of Liberty").
Fells Point, Baltimore A narrative today dominates our political landscape that poses liberty as defined by classical liberalism against the collectivism of “progressive” liberalism or Statism.
One might reasonably conclude that, when it comes to “the Language of Liberty,” liberty seems – like Americans – to speak only one language. Thus, if we confine ourselves to one language, this narrative seems compelling enough as far as it goes. But it is, in the end, a severely limited “language,” even one that finally leads us to an incomplete and even mistaken set of conclusions about the relationship between individualism and collectivism. I’d like to see if we can’t expand our vocabulary a bit, and even suggest that a more appropriate name for this conference might be “the Languages of Liberties.”
By expanding our consideration to a different understanding of liberty, we change our position somewhat and see with more clarity that, what looks from our current position like a deep antipathy between individualism and Statism, is in point of fact something more of a continuity and logical progression. Without the addition of a distinct understanding of liberty to that of classical liberalism, from close up, all that we can discern are the opposite features of the two dominant political views of our day. By expanding our vista, however, we can better discern their relatedness, and propose that a true alternative is not between these siblings, but between a false choice of these two ideologies and a true choice between distinct and competing ideas of the very nature of liberty itself.
While there are a number of thinkers who can aid us in this expansion of our vocabulary, one thinker I wish today to highlight is one of the most penetrating and prescient of the mid-twentieth century conservative authors, the sociologist Robert Nisbet. I will have recourse to some of his powerful insights in his 1953 book The Quest for Community – recently re-issued by ISI Books – as well as his later 1975 book Twilight of Authority. Nisbet's key insight, variously articulated, was that Statism is a logical and even inevitable consequence of individualism – and thus, that the apparently opposite and conflicting philosophies of classical liberalism and progressive liberalism are actually inseparable. If this is the case, to seek to combat iterations of collectivism by appeal to the individualistic principles of classical liberalism is to be engaged in the philosophical equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire.
At the heart of Nisbet’s analysis is the following claim – human beings are by nature social and relational creatures, and that modern liberalism begins with a set of assumptions that contradict that reality. In so doing, the assumption of anthropological individualism at the heart of liberalism, and the practical realization of individualism in the world, deforms the human person. It is this deformation – particularly the evisceration of a thick set of identities embedded in a variety of groups, whether family, community, polity, church, or any other of other institutions and organizations – that fosters the conditions that makes collectivism an attractive and even inevitable alternative. Without the rise of individualism, the rise of collectivism is inconceivable. To take recourse to an important image from an essay by Leo Strauss, the two philosophies represent major “waves” of modern thought – and, like waves, one forms from the material that preceded it onto the shore.
Before exploring this dynamic in more detail, let me first contrast two competing understandings of liberty, one largely developed in the ancient and Christian world, and the other centrally developed in the early-modern period by, among others, the philosopher John Locke. Both claim the “language of liberty,” but if one is true, the other is false, but, importantly too, it is only from the perspective of ancient liberty that one can see more clearly the close relationship between the individualism of classical liberalism and the collectivism of progressive liberalism.
Modern liberalism begins not – as might be believed if we were to follow the narrative of contemporary discourse – not in opposition to Statism or Progressivism, but rather in explicit and intense rejection of ancient political thought and especially its basic anthropological assumptions. Hobbes, among others, is frequently explicit in his criticisms of both Aristotle and “the Scholastics” – that Catholic philosophy particularly influenced by Aquinas, who was of course particularly influenced by Aristotle. Modern liberal theory thus began with an explicit rejection of Aristotelian/Thomist anthropology.
According to Aristotle, and later further developed by Thomas Aquinas, man is by nature a social and political animal – which is to say, that humans only become human in the context of polities and society. Shorn of such relations, the biological creature “human” was not actually a fully realized human – not able to achieve the telos of the human creature, a telos that required law and culture, cultivation and education, and hence, society and tradition. Thus, Aristotle was able to write (and Aquinas after him essentially repeated) that “the city is prior to the family and the individual” – not, of course, temporally, but in terms of the primacy of wholes to parts. To use a metaphor common to both the ancients and in the Biblical tradition, the body as a whole “precedes” in importance any of its constitutive parts: without the body, neither the hand, nor foot, nor any other part of the body is viable.
Within human societies, to the extent that humans are able to develop true and flourishing individuality, it is only by means of political society and its constitutive groups and associations, starting of course with the family. An essential component of our capacity to achieve human flourishing is our learned ability to place ourselves under rule and law. At first, as children, we are expected to obey because of the claims of authority – we follow rules and law because we are told to do so by our elders. As we grow in maturity and self-knowledge, we assume the responsibility of self-government – ideally in a form that is continuous between the individual and the city. For the ancients, liberty is the cultivated ability to exercise self-governance, to limit ourselves in accordance with our nature and the natural world.
The various practices by which we exercise self-limitation and self-governance is comprehensively called virtue. By contrast, for the ancients, the inability or unwillingness to exercise virtue was tantamount to the absence of liberty. The unbridled or even extensive pursuit of appetite led necessarily to a condition of servitude and even slavery – slavery to one’s passions. Thus, for the ancients, law was not an unnatural imposition of humanity’s natural freedom; rather, law (ideally, a self-imposed law) was the necessary and enabling condition for liberty.
This idea of liberty is certainly not unknown in more recent times, though it is rarely articulated. One can find it, for instance, beautifully stated in the second verse of Katherine Lee Bates hymn "America the Beautiful":
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
The ancients emphasized the necessity of an appropriate scale in which such human flourishing could take place. First, the experience of law must necessarily be close, not distant, and must ideally be experienced as a form of self-governance. The more distant and impersonal the promulgation of law, the more it would necessarily be experienced as an external and even unnatural imposition upon me, and a divide would open between law and liberty (government “out there”). Additionally, the larger the scale, the law would fall generally and categorically upon a variety of circumstances, thus tending to inherent injustice as the natural variety and distinctivenss of human arrangements would be ignored or dismissed. Further, a large scale also lent itself to the anonymity and corresponding forms of irresponsibility (think of nature of anonymous commentary on many websites), while undermining the kinds of trust and responsibility that were required to foster a sense of gratitude and corresponding obligation between generations. Another consideration was that large scale political entities tended to aim at national or imperial greatness and wealth, and thus tended to stoke and tempt the appetites and undermine the inculcation of virtue. Ancient theory thus centrally considered the appropriate scale in which liberty as the practice of self-government through virtue could be realized. Liberty, so conceived, could only be realized in a small and local setting.
For the ancients, the highest aim of society was the flourishing of the free, self-governing individual and the achievement of our particular capacities – our talents and abilities – but such “individuality” could only achieved through the auspices of our political and social relationships. Thus, even as we might flourish in our particular gifts, we are simultaneously obligated to acknowledge that such gifts have their source in and through the contributions of our community. The achievement of our full humanity is necessarily appropriately accompanied by a disposition of gratitude, and a corresponding assumption of obligation to proffer the same prospects for future generations. Thus, while classical philosophy – especially Aristotelian and Thomistic iterations – extolled the condition of achieving the condition of a free individual, it was a philosophy that could be confused as aiming at “individualism.” The properly cultivated individual can never be conceived, much less experience, a wholly separate relationship to his community. It is incorrect to suppose that ancient thought denied a place for “liberty” or the aspiration to achieving distinct forms of individuality, but the context and definition of each differs considerably from contemporary understandings.
*** *** ***
Liberal theory fiercely attacked this fundamental assumptions about human nature. Hobbes and Locke alike – for all their differences – begin by conceiving humas by nature not as parts of wholes, but as wholes apart. We are by nature “free and independent,” naturally ungoverned and even non-relational. There is no ontological reality accorded to groups of any kind – as Bertrand de Jounvenel quipped about social contractarianism, it was a philosophy conceived by “childless men who had forgotten their childhoods.” Liberty is a condition in which there is a complete absence of government and law, and “all is right” – that is, everything that can be willed by an individual can be done. Even if this condition is posited to show its unbearableness or untenability, the definition of natural liberty posited in the “state of nature” becomes a regulative ideal – liberty is ideally the ability of the agent to do whatever he likes. In contrast to ancient theory, liberty is the greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of the appetites, while government is a conventional and unnatural limitation upon our natural liberty.
For both Hobbes and Locke, we enter into a social contract to secure our survival, but to make the exercise of our liberty more secure. Both Hobbes and Locke – but especially Locke – understand that liberty in our pre-political condition is limited not only by the lawless competition of other individuals, but by the limitations that a recalcitrant and hostile nature imposes upon us. A main goal of Locke’s philosophy especially is actually to expand the prospects for our liberty – defined as the capacity to satisfy our appetites – now through the auspices of the State. We come to accept the terms of the Social Contract because its ultimate effect will actually increase our personal liberty by expanding the capacity of human control over the natural world. Locke writes that the law works to increase liberty, by which he means our liberation from the constraints imposed by the natural world.
Thus, for liberal theory, while the individual “creates” the State through the social contract, in a practical sense, the liberal State “creates” the individual by providing the conditions for the expansion of liberty, now defined increasingly as the capacity of humans to expand their mastery over nature. Far from their being an inherent conflict between the individual and the State, – as so much of modern political reporting would suggest – liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection between the liberal ideal of liberty that can only be realized through the auspices of a powerful State. The State does not merely serve as a referee between contesting individuals; in securing our capacity to engage in productive activities, especially commerce, the State establishes a condition in reality that existed in theory only in the State of Nature – that is, the ever-increasing achievement of the autonomous, freely-choosing individual. Rather than the State acting as an impediment to the realization of our individuality, the State becomes the main agent of our liberation from the limiting conditions in which humans have historically found themselves.
Thus, one of the main roles of the liberal State becomes the active liberation of individuals from any existing limiting conditions. At the forefront of liberal theory is the liberation from limitations imposed by nature upon the achievement of our desires –one of the central aims of life, according to Locke, being the “indolency of the body.” A main agent in that liberation becomes commerce, the expansion of opportunities and materials by which to realize not only existing desires, but even to create new ones that we did not yet know we had. One of its earliest functions is to support that basic role it assumes in extending the conquest of nature. The State becomes charged with extending and expanding the sphere of commerce, particularly enlarging the range of trade and production and mobility (e.g., Constitution positively charges Congress with “to promote the Progress of sciences and useful arts.” (“Progressivism” already in the Constitution). The expansion of markets and the attendant infrastructure necessary for that expansion is not, and cannot be, the result of “spontaneous order”; rather, an extensive and growing State structure is necessary to achieve that expansion, even at times to force recalcitrant or unwilling participants in that system into submission (see, for instance, J.S. Mill's recommendation in Considerations on Representative Government that the enslavement of "backward" peoples can be justified if they are forced to lead productive economic lives.).
One of the main goals of the expansion of commerce is the liberation of otherwise embedded individuals from their traditional ties and relationships. The liberal State serves not only the “negative” (or reactive) function of umpire and protector of individual liberty; simultaneously it also takes on a “positive” (that is to say, active) role of “liberating” individuals who, in the view of the liberal State, are prevented from making the wholly free choices of liberal agents. At the heart of liberalism is the supposition that the individual is the basic unit of human existence, the only natural human entity that exists. If liberal theory posits the existence of such individuals in an imaginary “state of nature,” liberal practice – beginning, but not limited to the rise of commerce – seeks to expand the conditions for the realization of the individual. The individual is to be liberated from all the partial and limiting affiliations that pre-existed the liberal state, if not by force (though that may at times be necessary), then by constantly lowering the costs and barriers to exit. The State lays claim to govern all groupings within the society – it is the final arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate groupings, and from its point of view, the only ontological realities are the individual and the State. (for evidence of this fact, consider the frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan). Eventually the State lays claim to set up its own education system to ensure that children are not overly shaped by family, religion or any particular community; through its legal and police powers, it will occasionally forces open “closed” communities as soon as one person claims some form of unjust assertion of authority or limits upon individual freedom; it even regulates what is regarded to be legitimate and illegitimate forms of religious worship. Marriage is a bond that must be subject to its definition. A vast and intrusive centralized apparatus is established not to oppress the population, but rather to actively ensure the liberation of individuals from any forms of constitutive groups or supra-individual identity. Any allegiance to sub-national groups, associations or communities come to be redefined not as inheritances, but as memberships of choice with very low if any costs to exit. Modern liberals are to be pro-choice in every respect; one can limits one’s own autonomy¸ but only if one has chosen to do so, and generally only if one can revise one’s choice at a later date – which means, in reality, one hasn’t really limited one’s autonomy at all. All choices are fungible, alterable, and reversible. The vow “til death do us part” is subtly but universally amended – and understood – to mean, “or until we choose otherwise.”
*** *** ***
Various forms of Statism thus arise quite logically from these basic aspects of the liberal system. Progressive philosophy agrees fundamentally with the liberal vision of the liberation of the individual from all partial and mediating institutions, but eventually comes to include the State itself as one of those partial and limiting associations. This follows with iron and inevitable logic: if the State is the creation of individuals, then eventually the State itself needs to be abolished to achieve the thoroughgoing liberty of the individual from all partial associations. Marxism’s dream of the “withering away of the State” is a logical extension of the trajectory of liberalism.
It is here that Robert Nisbet notices some additional relationships between the two. It is only when the variety of institutions and organizations of humankind’s social life have been eviscerated – when the individual experiences himself as an individual – that collectivism as a theory becomes plausible as a politics in fact. Liberalism’s successful liberation of individuals from what had historically been “their own” and the increasing realization of the “individual” made it possible for the theory of cosmopolitanism to arise as an actionable political program in the modern era. The idea that we could supercede all particular attachments and achieve a kind of “cosmic consciousness” or experience of our “species being” was a direct consequence of the lived experience of individualism. Locke is the midwife to Marx, in a manner of speaking.
Nisbet also notes the psychological conditions arising from liberalism’s unfolding that also give rise to a longing for collectivism. He argued that collectivism arises as a reaction against the atomization of liberalism. The active dissolution of traditional human communities and institutions provokes a violent reaction in which a basic human need – “the quest for community” – is no longer being met. As naturally “political” or “social” creatures, we long for thick and rich set of constitutive bonds that necessarily shape a fully-formed human being. Shorn of the deepest ties to family (extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture – and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon our autonomy – we seek membership and belonging, and a form of extended self-definition, through the only legitimate form of organization available to liberal man – the State. Nisbet saw the modern rise of Fascism and Communism as the predictable consequence of the early-modern liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities – shorn of those memberships, modern liberal man became susceptible to the quest for belonging now to distant and abstract State entities. In turn, those political entities offered a new form of belonging by adopting the evocations and imagery of those memberships that they had displaced, above all by offering a new form of quasi-religious membership, now in the Church of the State itself. Our “community” was now to be a membership of countless fellow humans who held in common an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation and isolation. It would provide for our wants and needs; all that was asked in return was sole allegiance to the State and partial and even the elimination of any allegiance to any other intermediary entity. To provide for a mass public, more power to the central authority was asked and granted. Thus Nisbet concludes – following a basic insight of Alexis de Tocqueville: “It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.”
Lastly, collectivism arises logically from classical liberalism out of sheer necessity. Having shorn human ties to the vast web of intermediating institutions that sustained people through good and bad times, the expansion of the experience of individualism renders humans bereft of recourse to those traditional places of support and sustenance. The more individuated the polity, the more likely that a mass of individuals will inevitably turn to the State for help in times of need. This observation – made before Nisbet most powerfully by Tocqueville – suggests that individualism is not the alternative to Statism, but its very cause. As Tocqueville wrote in v. 2, bk. iv, ch. 3 of Democracy in America,
Far from fundamentally opposing one another, the individualism arising from the philosophy of classical liberalism and the subsequent philosophy of collectivism have been mutually reinforcing. Indeed, they have powerfully combined to all but rout the vestiges of the ancient conception of virtue as a practice or even an option. Today’s classical liberals and progressive liberals remain locked in a battle for the end-game – whether we will be a society of ever more perfectly liberated, autonomous individuals or ever more egalitarian members of the global “community,” but while this debate continues apace, the two sides agree on essential means to achieve their distinct ends, thus combining in a pincer movement to destroy the vestiges of the classical practices and virtues that they both despise.
To the extent that modern "conservatism" has embraced the arguments of classical liberalism, the actions and policies of its political actors have never failed to actively undermine those areas of life that "conservatives" claim to seek to defend. Partly this is due to drift, but more worringly, it is due to the increasingly singular embrace by many contemporary Americans – whether liberal or “conservative” – of a modern definition of liberty that consists in doing as one likes through the conquest of nature, rather than the achievement of self-governance within the limits of our nature and the natural world. Unless we recover a different, older, and better definition and language of liberty, our future is more likely than not to be one not of final liberation of the individual, but our accustomed and deeply pernicious oscillation between the atomization of our Lockean individualism and the cry to be taken care of by the only remaining entity that is left standing in the liberal settlement, the State. If we care about liberty, we need rather to attend to our States and localities, our communities and neighborhoods, our families and Churches, making them viable alternatives and counterpoints to the monopolization of individual and State in our time, and thus to relearn the ancient virtue of self-government.
Fells Point, Baltimore A narrative today dominates our political landscape that poses liberty as defined by classical liberalism against the collectivism of “progressive” liberalism or Statism.
One might reasonably conclude that, when it comes to “the Language of Liberty,” liberty seems – like Americans – to speak only one language. Thus, if we confine ourselves to one language, this narrative seems compelling enough as far as it goes. But it is, in the end, a severely limited “language,” even one that finally leads us to an incomplete and even mistaken set of conclusions about the relationship between individualism and collectivism. I’d like to see if we can’t expand our vocabulary a bit, and even suggest that a more appropriate name for this conference might be “the Languages of Liberties.”
By expanding our consideration to a different understanding of liberty, we change our position somewhat and see with more clarity that, what looks from our current position like a deep antipathy between individualism and Statism, is in point of fact something more of a continuity and logical progression. Without the addition of a distinct understanding of liberty to that of classical liberalism, from close up, all that we can discern are the opposite features of the two dominant political views of our day. By expanding our vista, however, we can better discern their relatedness, and propose that a true alternative is not between these siblings, but between a false choice of these two ideologies and a true choice between distinct and competing ideas of the very nature of liberty itself.
While there are a number of thinkers who can aid us in this expansion of our vocabulary, one thinker I wish today to highlight is one of the most penetrating and prescient of the mid-twentieth century conservative authors, the sociologist Robert Nisbet. I will have recourse to some of his powerful insights in his 1953 book The Quest for Community – recently re-issued by ISI Books – as well as his later 1975 book Twilight of Authority. Nisbet's key insight, variously articulated, was that Statism is a logical and even inevitable consequence of individualism – and thus, that the apparently opposite and conflicting philosophies of classical liberalism and progressive liberalism are actually inseparable. If this is the case, to seek to combat iterations of collectivism by appeal to the individualistic principles of classical liberalism is to be engaged in the philosophical equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire.
At the heart of Nisbet’s analysis is the following claim – human beings are by nature social and relational creatures, and that modern liberalism begins with a set of assumptions that contradict that reality. In so doing, the assumption of anthropological individualism at the heart of liberalism, and the practical realization of individualism in the world, deforms the human person. It is this deformation – particularly the evisceration of a thick set of identities embedded in a variety of groups, whether family, community, polity, church, or any other of other institutions and organizations – that fosters the conditions that makes collectivism an attractive and even inevitable alternative. Without the rise of individualism, the rise of collectivism is inconceivable. To take recourse to an important image from an essay by Leo Strauss, the two philosophies represent major “waves” of modern thought – and, like waves, one forms from the material that preceded it onto the shore.
Before exploring this dynamic in more detail, let me first contrast two competing understandings of liberty, one largely developed in the ancient and Christian world, and the other centrally developed in the early-modern period by, among others, the philosopher John Locke. Both claim the “language of liberty,” but if one is true, the other is false, but, importantly too, it is only from the perspective of ancient liberty that one can see more clearly the close relationship between the individualism of classical liberalism and the collectivism of progressive liberalism.
Modern liberalism begins not – as might be believed if we were to follow the narrative of contemporary discourse – not in opposition to Statism or Progressivism, but rather in explicit and intense rejection of ancient political thought and especially its basic anthropological assumptions. Hobbes, among others, is frequently explicit in his criticisms of both Aristotle and “the Scholastics” – that Catholic philosophy particularly influenced by Aquinas, who was of course particularly influenced by Aristotle. Modern liberal theory thus began with an explicit rejection of Aristotelian/Thomist anthropology.
According to Aristotle, and later further developed by Thomas Aquinas, man is by nature a social and political animal – which is to say, that humans only become human in the context of polities and society. Shorn of such relations, the biological creature “human” was not actually a fully realized human – not able to achieve the telos of the human creature, a telos that required law and culture, cultivation and education, and hence, society and tradition. Thus, Aristotle was able to write (and Aquinas after him essentially repeated) that “the city is prior to the family and the individual” – not, of course, temporally, but in terms of the primacy of wholes to parts. To use a metaphor common to both the ancients and in the Biblical tradition, the body as a whole “precedes” in importance any of its constitutive parts: without the body, neither the hand, nor foot, nor any other part of the body is viable.
Within human societies, to the extent that humans are able to develop true and flourishing individuality, it is only by means of political society and its constitutive groups and associations, starting of course with the family. An essential component of our capacity to achieve human flourishing is our learned ability to place ourselves under rule and law. At first, as children, we are expected to obey because of the claims of authority – we follow rules and law because we are told to do so by our elders. As we grow in maturity and self-knowledge, we assume the responsibility of self-government – ideally in a form that is continuous between the individual and the city. For the ancients, liberty is the cultivated ability to exercise self-governance, to limit ourselves in accordance with our nature and the natural world.
The various practices by which we exercise self-limitation and self-governance is comprehensively called virtue. By contrast, for the ancients, the inability or unwillingness to exercise virtue was tantamount to the absence of liberty. The unbridled or even extensive pursuit of appetite led necessarily to a condition of servitude and even slavery – slavery to one’s passions. Thus, for the ancients, law was not an unnatural imposition of humanity’s natural freedom; rather, law (ideally, a self-imposed law) was the necessary and enabling condition for liberty.
This idea of liberty is certainly not unknown in more recent times, though it is rarely articulated. One can find it, for instance, beautifully stated in the second verse of Katherine Lee Bates hymn "America the Beautiful":
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
The ancients emphasized the necessity of an appropriate scale in which such human flourishing could take place. First, the experience of law must necessarily be close, not distant, and must ideally be experienced as a form of self-governance. The more distant and impersonal the promulgation of law, the more it would necessarily be experienced as an external and even unnatural imposition upon me, and a divide would open between law and liberty (government “out there”). Additionally, the larger the scale, the law would fall generally and categorically upon a variety of circumstances, thus tending to inherent injustice as the natural variety and distinctivenss of human arrangements would be ignored or dismissed. Further, a large scale also lent itself to the anonymity and corresponding forms of irresponsibility (think of nature of anonymous commentary on many websites), while undermining the kinds of trust and responsibility that were required to foster a sense of gratitude and corresponding obligation between generations. Another consideration was that large scale political entities tended to aim at national or imperial greatness and wealth, and thus tended to stoke and tempt the appetites and undermine the inculcation of virtue. Ancient theory thus centrally considered the appropriate scale in which liberty as the practice of self-government through virtue could be realized. Liberty, so conceived, could only be realized in a small and local setting.
For the ancients, the highest aim of society was the flourishing of the free, self-governing individual and the achievement of our particular capacities – our talents and abilities – but such “individuality” could only achieved through the auspices of our political and social relationships. Thus, even as we might flourish in our particular gifts, we are simultaneously obligated to acknowledge that such gifts have their source in and through the contributions of our community. The achievement of our full humanity is necessarily appropriately accompanied by a disposition of gratitude, and a corresponding assumption of obligation to proffer the same prospects for future generations. Thus, while classical philosophy – especially Aristotelian and Thomistic iterations – extolled the condition of achieving the condition of a free individual, it was a philosophy that could be confused as aiming at “individualism.” The properly cultivated individual can never be conceived, much less experience, a wholly separate relationship to his community. It is incorrect to suppose that ancient thought denied a place for “liberty” or the aspiration to achieving distinct forms of individuality, but the context and definition of each differs considerably from contemporary understandings.
*** *** ***
Liberal theory fiercely attacked this fundamental assumptions about human nature. Hobbes and Locke alike – for all their differences – begin by conceiving humas by nature not as parts of wholes, but as wholes apart. We are by nature “free and independent,” naturally ungoverned and even non-relational. There is no ontological reality accorded to groups of any kind – as Bertrand de Jounvenel quipped about social contractarianism, it was a philosophy conceived by “childless men who had forgotten their childhoods.” Liberty is a condition in which there is a complete absence of government and law, and “all is right” – that is, everything that can be willed by an individual can be done. Even if this condition is posited to show its unbearableness or untenability, the definition of natural liberty posited in the “state of nature” becomes a regulative ideal – liberty is ideally the ability of the agent to do whatever he likes. In contrast to ancient theory, liberty is the greatest possible pursuit and satisfaction of the appetites, while government is a conventional and unnatural limitation upon our natural liberty.
For both Hobbes and Locke, we enter into a social contract to secure our survival, but to make the exercise of our liberty more secure. Both Hobbes and Locke – but especially Locke – understand that liberty in our pre-political condition is limited not only by the lawless competition of other individuals, but by the limitations that a recalcitrant and hostile nature imposes upon us. A main goal of Locke’s philosophy especially is actually to expand the prospects for our liberty – defined as the capacity to satisfy our appetites – now through the auspices of the State. We come to accept the terms of the Social Contract because its ultimate effect will actually increase our personal liberty by expanding the capacity of human control over the natural world. Locke writes that the law works to increase liberty, by which he means our liberation from the constraints imposed by the natural world.
Thus, for liberal theory, while the individual “creates” the State through the social contract, in a practical sense, the liberal State “creates” the individual by providing the conditions for the expansion of liberty, now defined increasingly as the capacity of humans to expand their mastery over nature. Far from their being an inherent conflict between the individual and the State, – as so much of modern political reporting would suggest – liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection between the liberal ideal of liberty that can only be realized through the auspices of a powerful State. The State does not merely serve as a referee between contesting individuals; in securing our capacity to engage in productive activities, especially commerce, the State establishes a condition in reality that existed in theory only in the State of Nature – that is, the ever-increasing achievement of the autonomous, freely-choosing individual. Rather than the State acting as an impediment to the realization of our individuality, the State becomes the main agent of our liberation from the limiting conditions in which humans have historically found themselves.
Thus, one of the main roles of the liberal State becomes the active liberation of individuals from any existing limiting conditions. At the forefront of liberal theory is the liberation from limitations imposed by nature upon the achievement of our desires –one of the central aims of life, according to Locke, being the “indolency of the body.” A main agent in that liberation becomes commerce, the expansion of opportunities and materials by which to realize not only existing desires, but even to create new ones that we did not yet know we had. One of its earliest functions is to support that basic role it assumes in extending the conquest of nature. The State becomes charged with extending and expanding the sphere of commerce, particularly enlarging the range of trade and production and mobility (e.g., Constitution positively charges Congress with “to promote the Progress of sciences and useful arts.” (“Progressivism” already in the Constitution). The expansion of markets and the attendant infrastructure necessary for that expansion is not, and cannot be, the result of “spontaneous order”; rather, an extensive and growing State structure is necessary to achieve that expansion, even at times to force recalcitrant or unwilling participants in that system into submission (see, for instance, J.S. Mill's recommendation in Considerations on Representative Government that the enslavement of "backward" peoples can be justified if they are forced to lead productive economic lives.).
One of the main goals of the expansion of commerce is the liberation of otherwise embedded individuals from their traditional ties and relationships. The liberal State serves not only the “negative” (or reactive) function of umpire and protector of individual liberty; simultaneously it also takes on a “positive” (that is to say, active) role of “liberating” individuals who, in the view of the liberal State, are prevented from making the wholly free choices of liberal agents. At the heart of liberalism is the supposition that the individual is the basic unit of human existence, the only natural human entity that exists. If liberal theory posits the existence of such individuals in an imaginary “state of nature,” liberal practice – beginning, but not limited to the rise of commerce – seeks to expand the conditions for the realization of the individual. The individual is to be liberated from all the partial and limiting affiliations that pre-existed the liberal state, if not by force (though that may at times be necessary), then by constantly lowering the costs and barriers to exit. The State lays claim to govern all groupings within the society – it is the final arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate groupings, and from its point of view, the only ontological realities are the individual and the State. (for evidence of this fact, consider the frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan). Eventually the State lays claim to set up its own education system to ensure that children are not overly shaped by family, religion or any particular community; through its legal and police powers, it will occasionally forces open “closed” communities as soon as one person claims some form of unjust assertion of authority or limits upon individual freedom; it even regulates what is regarded to be legitimate and illegitimate forms of religious worship. Marriage is a bond that must be subject to its definition. A vast and intrusive centralized apparatus is established not to oppress the population, but rather to actively ensure the liberation of individuals from any forms of constitutive groups or supra-individual identity. Any allegiance to sub-national groups, associations or communities come to be redefined not as inheritances, but as memberships of choice with very low if any costs to exit. Modern liberals are to be pro-choice in every respect; one can limits one’s own autonomy¸ but only if one has chosen to do so, and generally only if one can revise one’s choice at a later date – which means, in reality, one hasn’t really limited one’s autonomy at all. All choices are fungible, alterable, and reversible. The vow “til death do us part” is subtly but universally amended – and understood – to mean, “or until we choose otherwise.”
*** *** ***
Various forms of Statism thus arise quite logically from these basic aspects of the liberal system. Progressive philosophy agrees fundamentally with the liberal vision of the liberation of the individual from all partial and mediating institutions, but eventually comes to include the State itself as one of those partial and limiting associations. This follows with iron and inevitable logic: if the State is the creation of individuals, then eventually the State itself needs to be abolished to achieve the thoroughgoing liberty of the individual from all partial associations. Marxism’s dream of the “withering away of the State” is a logical extension of the trajectory of liberalism.
It is here that Robert Nisbet notices some additional relationships between the two. It is only when the variety of institutions and organizations of humankind’s social life have been eviscerated – when the individual experiences himself as an individual – that collectivism as a theory becomes plausible as a politics in fact. Liberalism’s successful liberation of individuals from what had historically been “their own” and the increasing realization of the “individual” made it possible for the theory of cosmopolitanism to arise as an actionable political program in the modern era. The idea that we could supercede all particular attachments and achieve a kind of “cosmic consciousness” or experience of our “species being” was a direct consequence of the lived experience of individualism. Locke is the midwife to Marx, in a manner of speaking.
Nisbet also notes the psychological conditions arising from liberalism’s unfolding that also give rise to a longing for collectivism. He argued that collectivism arises as a reaction against the atomization of liberalism. The active dissolution of traditional human communities and institutions provokes a violent reaction in which a basic human need – “the quest for community” – is no longer being met. As naturally “political” or “social” creatures, we long for thick and rich set of constitutive bonds that necessarily shape a fully-formed human being. Shorn of the deepest ties to family (extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture – and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon our autonomy – we seek membership and belonging, and a form of extended self-definition, through the only legitimate form of organization available to liberal man – the State. Nisbet saw the modern rise of Fascism and Communism as the predictable consequence of the early-modern liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities – shorn of those memberships, modern liberal man became susceptible to the quest for belonging now to distant and abstract State entities. In turn, those political entities offered a new form of belonging by adopting the evocations and imagery of those memberships that they had displaced, above all by offering a new form of quasi-religious membership, now in the Church of the State itself. Our “community” was now to be a membership of countless fellow humans who held in common an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation and isolation. It would provide for our wants and needs; all that was asked in return was sole allegiance to the State and partial and even the elimination of any allegiance to any other intermediary entity. To provide for a mass public, more power to the central authority was asked and granted. Thus Nisbet concludes – following a basic insight of Alexis de Tocqueville: “It is impossible to understand the massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth-century, appearing so paradoxically, or it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism in economics and morals, unless we see the close relationship that prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.”
Lastly, collectivism arises logically from classical liberalism out of sheer necessity. Having shorn human ties to the vast web of intermediating institutions that sustained people through good and bad times, the expansion of the experience of individualism renders humans bereft of recourse to those traditional places of support and sustenance. The more individuated the polity, the more likely that a mass of individuals will inevitably turn to the State for help in times of need. This observation – made before Nisbet most powerfully by Tocqueville – suggests that individualism is not the alternative to Statism, but its very cause. As Tocqueville wrote in v. 2, bk. iv, ch. 3 of Democracy in America,
Since … no one is obliged to lend his force to those like him and no one has the right to expect great support from those like him, each [person] is at once independent and weak. These two states – which must neither be viewed separately nor confused – give the citizen of democracies very contrary instincts. His independence fills him with confidence and pride among his equals, and his debility makes him feel, from time to time, the need of the outside help that he cannot expect from any of them, since they are all impotent and cold. In this extremity, he naturally turns his regard to the immense being [the tutelary, bureaucratic, centralized State] that rises alone in the midst of universal debasement. His needs and above all his desires constantly lead him back toward it, and in the end he views it as the unique and necessary support for his individual weakness.” (644)
Far from fundamentally opposing one another, the individualism arising from the philosophy of classical liberalism and the subsequent philosophy of collectivism have been mutually reinforcing. Indeed, they have powerfully combined to all but rout the vestiges of the ancient conception of virtue as a practice or even an option. Today’s classical liberals and progressive liberals remain locked in a battle for the end-game – whether we will be a society of ever more perfectly liberated, autonomous individuals or ever more egalitarian members of the global “community,” but while this debate continues apace, the two sides agree on essential means to achieve their distinct ends, thus combining in a pincer movement to destroy the vestiges of the classical practices and virtues that they both despise.
To the extent that modern "conservatism" has embraced the arguments of classical liberalism, the actions and policies of its political actors have never failed to actively undermine those areas of life that "conservatives" claim to seek to defend. Partly this is due to drift, but more worringly, it is due to the increasingly singular embrace by many contemporary Americans – whether liberal or “conservative” – of a modern definition of liberty that consists in doing as one likes through the conquest of nature, rather than the achievement of self-governance within the limits of our nature and the natural world. Unless we recover a different, older, and better definition and language of liberty, our future is more likely than not to be one not of final liberation of the individual, but our accustomed and deeply pernicious oscillation between the atomization of our Lockean individualism and the cry to be taken care of by the only remaining entity that is left standing in the liberal settlement, the State. If we care about liberty, we need rather to attend to our States and localities, our communities and neighborhoods, our families and Churches, making them viable alternatives and counterpoints to the monopolization of individual and State in our time, and thus to relearn the ancient virtue of self-government.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
The Tocqueville Forum
Here's a nice birthday present for me - an excerpt from the latest edition of Choosing the Right College, from the section on Georgetown University.
"The most outstanding resource that Georgetown students should explore is the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, whose purpose is to highlight 'the two main roots of American democracy, Western political philosophy and the biblical and Christian religious tradition.' Its founding director, Professor Patrick Deneen, is a leading scholar in classical political theory and a popular cultural commentator. The forum offers lectures and conferences featuring first-rate authorities ranging from Andrew Bacevich to Patrick Fagan, and also serves as a meeting place for many of the most thoughtful students on campus."
I started this program five years ago, and I couldn't agree more that the program draws together "many of the most thoughtful students on campus." It's been a labor of love, and a deeply rewarding one at that. An even better birthday present would be a growing number of Georgetown alumnni supporters. If you are a graduate or know any, I hope you'll consider lending support or passing on the word.
"The most outstanding resource that Georgetown students should explore is the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, whose purpose is to highlight 'the two main roots of American democracy, Western political philosophy and the biblical and Christian religious tradition.' Its founding director, Professor Patrick Deneen, is a leading scholar in classical political theory and a popular cultural commentator. The forum offers lectures and conferences featuring first-rate authorities ranging from Andrew Bacevich to Patrick Fagan, and also serves as a meeting place for many of the most thoughtful students on campus."
I started this program five years ago, and I couldn't agree more that the program draws together "many of the most thoughtful students on campus." It's been a labor of love, and a deeply rewarding one at that. An even better birthday present would be a growing number of Georgetown alumnni supporters. If you are a graduate or know any, I hope you'll consider lending support or passing on the word.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Caylee's Law and the Specter of Civil Breakdown
In the wake of the "not guilty" finding in the Casey Anthony trial, large numbers of outraged individuals have begun a campaign for the creation of various State and even a Federal version of "Caylee's Law." In addition to such an effort in the state of Florida, similar legislation is being explored in states such as Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia. This law would promulgate strict requirements under which parents or guardians would be expected to report a missing and deceased child to police. Under such a law, it can be presumed, such actions as that of Casey Anthony would have led to a guilty verdict - if not for murder, at least on the scandal of a parent failing to report a missing child.
The law is clearly a response to the outrage and anger felt by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in the wake of the Casey Anthony verdict. Yet, what would be the expected efficacy of such a law? Can it really be expected that it would deter what must be a infinitesimally small number of parents who would not immediately call the police at the slightest suspicion of a missing child? (Let's face it - if anything, most parents are likely to contact authorities before checking all the likely places a child might be).
The pressure to pass such a law is most obviously an expression of thwarted vengeance, an outburst of outrage and frustration toward someone the public believes got away not only with murder, but the murder of her own small child. This is an understandable human response.
But it seems also plausible that the pressure to pass such a law reflects more deeply the anxieties and fears of many that the fabric of informal social norms have become so frayed that only the impotent passage of largely pointless laws can give some comfort in the belief that there is some kind of replacement. What strikes one about Anthony's is how relatively "normal" they are in today's America. The Anthony's had moved to Florida from Ohio, indicating a normal "mobile" American lifestyle. They live in a suburban neighborhood in Orlando, one of innumerable such "communities" where people can live in relative anonymity amid proximate families. As of 2006, there were 12.9 million single parents raising over 21 million children. Some four million of those single parents live with their parents. The stories of Casey's insecure employment history is not unusual for many young people today, particularly for under-educated single mothers. The anxiety provoked by the Casey Anthony story is not born of the perception of someone so wildly different from the way many Americans live today; it arises from the deeper perception that this is the way that many more of us are likely to live in America today.
In his recent book The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama seeks to explore the question of how more advanced industrial societies have moved away from "kinship relations" of more "primitive" societies to more complex societies of strangers in which our relationships are based on impersonal legal and economic relationships. Fukuyama - still evincing his characteristic progressive worldview - regards these advances as an inevitability of evolution itself, a sign of our greater advancement. But these very "advances" render us increasingly strangers even to those near to us - not only our neighbors, but our own children and parents. Our liberation from "kinship" is based upon our increased ability to artificially create radical forms of isolation from even those kinship relations. As Fukuyama correctly notes, "that individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts" (29).
The calls for lawmakers to "do something" in the wake of the Casey Anthony "not guilty" verdict shows the limits of our impersonal age. Lacking confidence in the remnants of the social norms (not legalisms) upon which those kinship cultures were based, we turn now to the law to instruct fellow citizens how to behave with their children. The passage of such laws, far from indicating a triumph of our greater civility, reveals its unceasing attenuation and even breakdown. Our anxieties will only be stoked, not relieved, and each "solution" will only exacerbate the root causes of our deeper alienation.
The law is clearly a response to the outrage and anger felt by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people in the wake of the Casey Anthony verdict. Yet, what would be the expected efficacy of such a law? Can it really be expected that it would deter what must be a infinitesimally small number of parents who would not immediately call the police at the slightest suspicion of a missing child? (Let's face it - if anything, most parents are likely to contact authorities before checking all the likely places a child might be).
The pressure to pass such a law is most obviously an expression of thwarted vengeance, an outburst of outrage and frustration toward someone the public believes got away not only with murder, but the murder of her own small child. This is an understandable human response.
But it seems also plausible that the pressure to pass such a law reflects more deeply the anxieties and fears of many that the fabric of informal social norms have become so frayed that only the impotent passage of largely pointless laws can give some comfort in the belief that there is some kind of replacement. What strikes one about Anthony's is how relatively "normal" they are in today's America. The Anthony's had moved to Florida from Ohio, indicating a normal "mobile" American lifestyle. They live in a suburban neighborhood in Orlando, one of innumerable such "communities" where people can live in relative anonymity amid proximate families. As of 2006, there were 12.9 million single parents raising over 21 million children. Some four million of those single parents live with their parents. The stories of Casey's insecure employment history is not unusual for many young people today, particularly for under-educated single mothers. The anxiety provoked by the Casey Anthony story is not born of the perception of someone so wildly different from the way many Americans live today; it arises from the deeper perception that this is the way that many more of us are likely to live in America today.
In his recent book The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama seeks to explore the question of how more advanced industrial societies have moved away from "kinship relations" of more "primitive" societies to more complex societies of strangers in which our relationships are based on impersonal legal and economic relationships. Fukuyama - still evincing his characteristic progressive worldview - regards these advances as an inevitability of evolution itself, a sign of our greater advancement. But these very "advances" render us increasingly strangers even to those near to us - not only our neighbors, but our own children and parents. Our liberation from "kinship" is based upon our increased ability to artificially create radical forms of isolation from even those kinship relations. As Fukuyama correctly notes, "that individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts" (29).
The calls for lawmakers to "do something" in the wake of the Casey Anthony "not guilty" verdict shows the limits of our impersonal age. Lacking confidence in the remnants of the social norms (not legalisms) upon which those kinship cultures were based, we turn now to the law to instruct fellow citizens how to behave with their children. The passage of such laws, far from indicating a triumph of our greater civility, reveals its unceasing attenuation and even breakdown. Our anxieties will only be stoked, not relieved, and each "solution" will only exacerbate the root causes of our deeper alienation.
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