Random APSA Observations

1. I don’t have the time today for the Darwinian natural right post.

2. The anticipated big showdown between David Walsh and Ralph Hancock didn’t really happen at the Sunday panel. But fear not, they are continuing the argument in a future issue of PPS. What they both say in some way is that liberalism or human liberty must be sustained by some idea of personal transcendence, a kind of transcendence shared by us all. And so there’s some truth is the essential Christian insight about who we are. David, according to Ralph, is too sanguine about detaching that insight from political life or the responsibilities we share in common, and so he’s too easy on (or indifferent to) Heidegger detaching Being from being moral and political. And perhaps he also goes too far in detaching the “luminosity” we all share from the truth of Christian doctrines. But maybe Ralph (David was too gentlemanly to say so far) remains too “Straussian” in understanding human responsibility too exclusively in terms of the classical categories of philosophy and political life, neglecting (as the Voegelians say) the greater differentiation in our understanding ourselves and the world offered to us by the personal logos of the Christians. But maybe David needs to be more Thomistic and less existentialist in connecting personal luminosity to the truth about our natures, explaining with greater rigor why he thinks we’re “hardwired,” so to speak, to be personal and “transcendent” beings. He may be too enthusiastic or too sanguine about the modern effort to detach the person from nature, seeing its indebtedness to but not so much its monstrous deformation of the Christian insight about who we are.

3. So there’s the tendency of Straussians (such as our Ceaser, RJ Pestritto, and Charles Kesler) to offer the “three wave” theory of American political development, following, of course, the schematic view of the development of modern thought of Leo Strauss. The first wave is natural rights (Locke), the second “History” (Rousseau and Hegel), and the third is “radical historicism” or “nonfoundationalism” (Nietzsche, Heidegger). In America, it’s Jefferson (and Lincoln), Woodrow Wilson (and Croly etc.), and Rorty—or Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s Republicans, the Progressives (from TR to FDR), and today’s Democrats. Now one problem with this theory, it seems to me, is that it implies that there’s no going back to Locke. Real theoretical “issues” with Locke’s inconsistent individualism produce Rousseau’s critique, and the ignoble incredibility of “the end of History” produced Nietzsche etc. Now the collapse into nonfoundational nihilism might allow a return to “classical natural right,” but not to Locke. (And I haven’t talk about the implicit view of the destructiveness of Christianity all through these waves, but clearly there’s no going back to Thomism either, in Strauss’s view.) Break up into small groups and discuss.