So I’m going to resist the cruel temptation to comment on David Letterman (hasn’t been funny for more than a decade) or say more on whether Beck and Limbaugh are worth defending. Instead, I’m sharing with you a bit of an article I’m writing on Scruton’s and Manent’s defense of the nation as the indispensable political form for democratic self-government in our time:
There’s a sense in which modern liberalism did promote a return, against the universalism of Christian liberalism (or personalism), to the the polis or nation as a political form. Christianity certainly detached people from political loyalties for membership in the “city of God” composed of all the faithful. One result of that detachment was wars of religion, wars over competing views of what it means to be included in the community of the faithful. The modern nation–or a return to territorial loyalty–emerged in opposition to the displaced or apolitical loyalty of creedal monotheism. Wars of religion came to an end with the return of the primacy of political or national loyalty. And the nation–or not some universal, creedal, apolitical city–again became the European’s truest home. Europe was once again divided into a large number of political or clearly territorial places.
But after the truthful liberation of the person to be a whole by Christianity–or not merely a part of nature or a political community–political loyalty in the comprehensive, classical sense couldn’t be completely restored. In Scuton’s England, the subordination of the universal, Christian church to the political requirements of a particular nation seemed to occur most seamlessly and otherwise successfully. But England is also the place in which modern, secular liberalism emerged against the pretensions of both the nation and the church.
October 7th, 2009 | 2:37 pm
Looks like a great article. One quibble–couldn’t one say that not England but SCOTLAND is the place where modern liberalism emerged in Smith, Hume, Ferguson and the rest of that gang? It’s worth thinking about in this connection because the Scots were a nation that had only recently decided to give up their state. So there’s a strong rational-secular spin to the Scots’ arguments about civic life, whereas king-and-country Toryism remained much stronger south of the border.
October 7th, 2009 | 3:14 pm
One oddity is that modern liberation of the self is both more aggressive (the ultimate goal being unfettered autonomy) and more narrow (autonomy requires the whole human person be replaced by a pale abstraction) than the XN version. The inherent instability, a kind of anthropological shizophrenia, at the heart of modernity makes their rehabilitation of the nation unstable as well. One could argue, as Delsol has, that the big thing now is a kind of cosmopolitanism without Xn faith, or a peculiarly secular interpretation of the Pauline spiritual unity of mankind. In a sense, today’s cosmopolitanism is easier to theoretically construct since the archimidean point, human rights, is so emptied of real content but practuially harder since there’s so little that functions as the ground of political unity. One way to discern the problem is to notice the tension between the facile universality of rights and the celebration of cultural and ethnic difference, both often championed by folks from the same quarter.
October 7th, 2009 | 3:46 pm
Well, I wish you would say something about David Letterman’s shortcomings.
When, exactly, was he ever funny?
October 7th, 2009 | 5:07 pm
Dave had an inventive period with the pet tricks and all that, and at one time even the top-10 lists were often pretty good.
October 8th, 2009 | 1:05 am
That’s interesting… This is more interesting:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-preparing-bomb-iran/story?id=8765343
October 8th, 2009 | 2:15 pm
@IK:
Could you clarify why the rights tradition is empty of content. This seems to be a PaleoCon/PoMoCon meme, and I’m not sure what the basis for it is.
I think there’s a common-sense understanding of rights that almost everyone grasps, regardless of how little such a person understands about sources from which the rights tradition grew. I would describe that common-sense content as a basic recognition that every human being has a fundamental dignity that must not be violated by other individuals, groups, or the state. That gets parsed out into particulars through the political process, for instance the one that gave us the Bill of Rights. How much more content do you need?
October 8th, 2009 | 7:46 pm
I would like to remark something about Manent. I have a problem with his concept of the political form. To call Empire, Nation (aka, ethnoi and tribe), City as variety of the political form is wrong. Here I stand with something Leo Paul de Alvarez commented on and in doing was reflecting what Strauss said in his City and Man piece in the Aristotle section about the tension between Empire and Nation/tribe as being pre-political. That the city is the political thing. That the Empire was the reduction of politics to mere RULE.. and reductionistic in ways that made the type of rule more despotic (and I chose my word carefully as despotism is the rule similar to mastery (as in mastery over slaves)). And the nature of tribes was tied to the rule of households. And please recall Pol 1.1 that politics and household rule are different in KIND. Now yes we speak of the nation-state, but one can make the case that without the modern state the nation would not have been political viable. But as its clear that the very concept of the state, that its nature and character ties its to the nation accidentally and contingently.
October 9th, 2009 | 5:24 am
Peter, if you find time, could you look at this and comment (http://www.takimag.com/article/the_fear_of_god/). It has to do with the Germanization of early Christianity.
October 9th, 2009 | 6:38 am
Apropos to Clifford’s comments: 1) Manent distinguishes “nation” and “tribe” (see A World beyond Politics?); 2) he isn’t following Aristotelian terminology, but the trajectory of European political development, when he talks about “the nation”; 3) he significantly agrees with you on the pivotal or crucial role of the modern state in forming the nation (you may want to reread “Europe & the Theological-Political Problem” in An Intellectual History of Liberalism). There’s an interesting argument to be had concerning the political or un- or anti-political character of the imperial form, but simply dismissing it because it isn’t ruling and ruling in turn seems a bit dogmatic. It certainly is, and has been, a widespread form of authoritative organization in human history. (Hope all’s well in Poland (?).)
October 9th, 2009 | 11:37 am
Thanks Paul. All is all is ok in my exile here in Poland, now in its 10th year.
I think his [Manent's] attempt to preserve the nation-state is problematic. I fully support his attempt to preserve the political and preserve what I would prefer to call ‘macro-hetro-diversity’ of political communities, against the homogenizing tendency of the modern state. But to use the nation-state to fight the globalizing/leveling/UHS tendency of the modern state is what we say where I used-come-from in good old New England–ya can’t get there from here!
I am also aware that Manent is mostly would agree with my point about the origins of the European Nation-State resting in the concept of the modern state. I would refer people to Phillip Bobbitts chapters on the evolution of the state in European states in his Shield of Achilles.. he does the best job of showing both mechanism of the working of the evolution of the modern state in practice and its trajectory both in theory and fact.
What I seen about his teaching on the political form in his A World Beyond Politics?.. I am still not convinced by his argument about form. I think its contrived and incorrect. Paul your point that Manent “the trajectory of European political development” is not exactly accurate. He give a certain take on that. One that the very nationalism literature he points to in A World Beyond Politics mentions as only one view of the nation and one that was rather historically short… It seem that Manent sticks to an outdated use of nation… as what Hobbes used it.. as refering to a political body of people. The danger to that is the concept of nation before and after Hobbes (16th-18th century usage) reverts to a non-voluntaristic, homogeneous one, that would exclude the ethinic/racial other from the given body politic, esp in post-French revolution/post-Fichte?? trends in nationalist thinking. But why accept this take of the nation? Clearly it was done by Hobbes for a clearly rhetorical purpose to mask the radical character of his break with classical natural right. And that that use leads to the very de-politicizing and homogenizing trends Manent sees to oppose in Europe.
The political problem in Europe is that Europeans are not nor generally mostly never been a self-governing people. Rather they have been a people who been ruled by others (with some notible exceptions, the Swizz, the Dutch States, the Italian city-states, Hanseatic cities, Poland, the English landed classes. amoung a hand few others…). The creation of the modern state has not really altered that fact. And the pathologies of Europe are more due to the combination of a people not having traditions of self-governing and the de-politicalizing traits of the modern state, and preserving the nation-state won’t stop the rot as the rot is alive and well throughout the nation-states of Europe as was clear throughtout the 20th century.
I am waiting for his [Manent's] new book where he is more clear on the political form. Because what I see To repeat–I noticed how he distinguished ‘nation’ from ‘tribe’ but this is highly problematic. As if one studies the use of the term ‘nation’ in the 16th/17th century it was altered by linked to the term people/peoples. And so with early Social Contract theory of Hobbes, there was a possibility to understand peoples in a voluntaristic way akin to what Hobbes does in Leviathan.
As to the issue about Empire… I think that question of Empire is outside/above politics. And why not be dogmatic about what politics mean, as having a clear and concrete definition is what science is all about. And any attemtp to recover politics that does not understand that is doomed to fail.
Again I will refer you to Strauss’s comment on the tension between Empire and Tribe and why the Polis/Res Publica/the political community surpasses both. Both the Empire (those of historical fact) and Tribes/Nations of Europe owe their character more to household mgt than politics is something any careful student of History will have to admit.
October 9th, 2009 | 11:44 am
BTW–to Montesquieu’s treatment of despotism may be much more Aristotelian than one might think at first blush. Aristotle does not treat despotism as a political type, because his focus was on political communities, not the nature of tribes and Empires.. which he treated as being a-political. But given the trajectory of the history and nature of European political institutions a discussion of despotic rule becomes a must to understand the politics that Montesquieu faces. That he differentiated between Monarchies and Despotism may be an exoteric requirement given when and where he was writing.
October 9th, 2009 | 11:51 am
OMT–The more one looks at the History of post-Norman Conquest England, one can see what fits as a modern state although without self-understanding and rather incomplete as a state. But if one looks at the political development of England vs.. the continent the trend in England goes from political Homogeniety to disvestment and distribution of power away from the King and His Court/The Center and sole holder of power… to that of the Continent where kings were weak and all too often those who are able to best cobble out networks of backers behind their move to be king. So as the history of the modern state allows for kings to centralize and homogonise on the Continent, in the England we see a different trait that only get halted Great Reforms of the 19th Century and 20th Century.
October 10th, 2009 | 7:37 am
Thanks to Cliff and Paul. I’m not, in this article, ascending to the pay grade of your comments. Scruton is better than Manent in understanding the nation as a territorial home that’s indispensable for self-government but can’t quite be reduced to a polis. Scruton is also better than Manent in explaining why Europe can never be a political whole. The universalism of Europe–with its indispensable reliance on Christian premises–is not political. Manent, because he’s French, is better on religion than Scruton –the Englishman who instrumentalizes religion in terms of the social bonds and custom etc. Scuton is much more clear–and follows what even Kant actually says–that Europe can only work as an alliance of nations for the purpose of peace. For Manent, the whole that is Europe is more than that.
October 10th, 2009 | 9:33 am
Clifford, you’re quite right about the distinct Sonderweg of English/British state-development. Richard Pipes, among others, has a nice development of it in Property and Freedom (in which he pointedly contrasts English with Russian development). Manent, too, is aware of English distinctiveness, since he’s read the many French thinkers who have engaged in just such comparative study. Think of Voltaire’s Letters from England or Montesquieu’s famous chapters XI, 6 & XIX, 27 of the Spirit of the Laws, for starters, but don’t forget Joan of Arc and the 100 Years War either! As a general proposition, Manent maintains (with many others) that to understand France requires constant c & c with England and Germany (in its various permutations).
Thus, to return to Peter’s post & point, Scruton’s discussion of modern liberty, the nation, and the state is rather British-focused, while Manent’s is Franco-focused.
Neither of them would contest the claim of differing political development in Central & Eastern Europe. As Michael Roskin put matters: “During the Middle Ages, there were kingdoms in East Europe as developed as any in West Europe at the time. … Around half a millennium ago, at about the time much of East Europe fell under the Ottomans, a series of changes hit West Europe that moved it to modernity. In East Europe these changes were generally weaker and occurred later, leaving it relatively backward. The ‘strong state’ developed in West Europe first.” He then goes on to bring in another political reality (or “form”): “East Europe lagged, in part for reasons of geography, but in large measure because it had already been incorporated into empires.” (He then goes on to talk about a series of empires: the Ottoman; the Hapsburg; the Tsarist Russian; the Prussian; finally, the Soviet)
To explain (somewhat) my comment on the definition of “political” — and staying simply with Aristotle: it seems to me that Aristotle has several elements in his notion of “political”: materially: circumscribed territory & population; morally: shared notions of justice and nobility; militarily: the capacity & willingness to exercise the sword and the shield in defense of the foregoing, and final or sovereign authority located somewhere in the body politic and recognized as such, and autarchy or independence, as well as (the rightly famous) “ruling and being ruled in turn.” The empire or imperial form, it seems to me, has all of the items, except for ruling and being ruled in turn, so I don’t want the absence of(admittedly or allegedly) the key element to simply disqualify a form of human organization and rule from being called “political”. You may call (or think) me an intellectual slackard or fuzzy-headed, if you wish. In addition, in some instances imperial rule does allow for self-government at lower & local levels. This, for example, was one of Guizot’s main points about the character of the Roman Empire, as he makes clear in his discussion of municipal government in the Empire. And the Roman (then, Holy Roman) Empire is the main empire Manent has in mind, since his focus is, by and large, Western and European, even Western European.
Hope all’s well in Poland! It’s Columbus Day weekend/holiday here, so life is good.
October 10th, 2009 | 2:49 pm
Thanks to Lawler for causing the Kenneally commentary….a particularly arresting summary of the current dilemma.
When contradiction is the central organizing force of a human era, everyone is advised to batten down the hatches. Too bad we cannot fill the tank with Irony.
October 10th, 2009 | 9:08 pm
Peter, although I like much of what Scruton has to say, but sadly England as England of what was worth emulating is long long gone and what has replaced it is either small inward looking bunch of soccer hooligans or the metrosexual/hip CoolBritiania which has more in common with Pari than England of old. Just go look at British publications in the notes and see how in form and style British has move more towards French and Continental styles than the English of Fowler and Fowler. The Heath’s government who brought Britain in the ECC, decimalize the English currency, and also destroyed the counties and the habits of local government and made Britain more European and less British.
And towards Paul, esp his comment about “Guizot’s main points about the character of the Roman Empire, as he makes clear in his discussion of municipal government in the Empire”. Yes,.. there is self-government in the Empire because of the limits of communication and the ability of the Emperor to have his commands executed as he himself would wish them to be. And when you look at the Roman Empire you can see pockets where self-rule was permitted as long as it did not threaten Rome’s dominion and the moment it did was was crushed without mercy. Again the Spirit of Empire is despotic rule, to rule as a master over slaves. Even a master could let his slaves to care for their own affairs… until their affairs contradict his wishes.
October 10th, 2009 | 10:29 pm
Jack,
Sorry for the delayed response–I’ve been away from a computer and out of town for a few. I’m actually pro-rights–and Delsol makes clear in several places that she is too–but rights discourse, especially since it rests upon such a narrow vision of the individual—doesn’t come even close to capturing the whole of our moral experience. In fact, Locke seems aware of this–he somewhat playfully experiments with interpreting marriage and the family reductively through the prism of the reciprocal recognition of rights and consentual contract–it produces some obviously ridiculous consequences. I would go as far to say that one intentional point of reducing morality to rights was to get around the much more substantive and politically messy understanding of human dignity which directly engages, versus avoids, more fundamental questions about the nature of the good life.
Great discussion by Paul and Cliff. To follow up my one earlier comment a little (and to freely riff on Brague’s work), part of the problem of modernity is the complex and often contradictory way in which it has coopted XN categories–the issue of rights is a good example itself. While the modern view of individuality, equality, and rights have an obvious debt to Xn principles, its interpretation must diverge given the impulse to secularization….part of the story here, though, has to be the extent to which the Xn understanding of individuality, which has a tendency to delink the inviolability of our moral conscience from its connection to the law, leaves itself vulnerable to the modern appropriation. I would argue that even some of those who defend Xn from this commandeering, like Delsol, go too far in lionizing the centrality or “ontological singularity” of moral conscience…this very well might be her own idiosyncratic misinterpretation of XN morality but still illustrates the theoretical temptation among the brightest and most sympathetic readers. It might be the case that the fundamental a-politicality of Xn’ity couldn’t possibly resist some deformation once politically coopted…and so it might also be the case that modernity turns out to be remarkable in the way it both politically profanes XN moral principle but also makes some political aspect of its moral psychology even clearer. This a long winded way of saying that the modern nation in an expression of contradictory impulses–towards both nationalism and cosmopolitanism–and this might have something to do with the source of its political inheritance.
October 10th, 2009 | 11:25 pm
Ivan, “the source of its political inheritance”, i.e, Rome?
October 11th, 2009 | 11:44 am
Dave hasn’t been funny in years.
October 12th, 2009 | 12:05 pm
I am hostile to ‘rights’ as they are all too often a means to trump politics by legal fiat. The concept of natural rights as understood by the Framers are much more complex than how Locke/Hobbes present them. The fact that the DoI establishes both equal creation of man and the endowment of right to individuals by the creator as two seperate axiomatic positions clearly distinguishes the DoI from either Hobbes or Locke. For Hobbes/Locke, rights are a consequence of man’s nature.. and thus follow from the equality of man possessing the same nature. I think this steams from the Framer’s gloss on Locke and the issue of natural rights through the lense of Puffendorf/Vittel.
October 12th, 2009 | 12:14 pm
Now I need to once again poke Peter–since you are talking about self-government, I would suggest that contemporary England and Europe as a whole, the very idea of self-government is lacking, rather in its stead you have democratic governace…. a form rule over the people by a represenative body democratically elected. That what you have are not citizens, who are sharers in rule, but rather subjects who get to choose who their masters will be.
October 14th, 2009 | 9:58 am
I agree with Clff on the near-disappearance of Scruton’s England (both at the hooligan and intellectual levels), the lack of interest in the Europeans in self-government–partly because they view all political or national life as an infringement on their rights, and that what’s wrong with rights today is that they’re used to allow judicial fiat to trump democratic politics.
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