Ralph Hancock: Love and Virtue in a Secular Age: Christianity, Modernity, and the Human Good. Part I. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2026.

 

“I suffer, therefore I am. I am a victim. I am that I am a victim. This is the implicit fundamental creed of late Western humanity,” a claim to know, a claim of identity, and a claim of unchallengeable, godlike (“I am that I am”) authority. So begins Ralph Hancock’s profound meditation on ‘postmodern’ moral and political sentiment. Politically, the ‘I’ becomes ‘We’: Those who suffer, and they alone, wield a rightful claim not merely to receive assistance but to rule. Victims of oppression not only have the right to overthrow their oppressors but the right to rule them until they have mended their moral, political, and spiritual ways, as determined by the erstwhile victims. 

Hancock refuses the temptation to mock or trivialize these claims. “Until we can confidently answer the self-described victim’s claim to a privileged moral status, we cannot articulate a defense of our civilization.” The “ideology of victimhood…challenges our very understanding of our humanity” and, crucially, draws upon the foundations of that understanding and of that civilization to do so. It bespeaks two impulses. The first derives from philosophy, specifically from Rousseau; it longs for a return to a pre-civilized, innocent ‘state of nature’ in which all of us are equal, without the conventional hierarchies inherent in civilization. The second derives from but is surely not the same as a Christian command; it demands an emptying of the ‘self,’ an absolute openness to the claims of ‘the other,’ the victim, “voiding whatever moral feelings or convictions we may hold to embrace another’s standpoint.” It is as if Christ on the Cross emptied Himself of His human-all-too-human character not make of Himself a sacrifice, not to suffer the punishment for the sins of all past, present, and future human beings in obedience to His Father’s command, but to empty Himself of His own “standpoint” as the Creator and supreme Judge of those sins and of those sinners. 

Victimology’s double impulse thus “demands the same“—demands respect for own supposed underlying and shared identities as (injured) innocents—while also demanding “a kind of absolute transcendence, a repudiation of one’s own good in favor not of some other understanding of the good but for the sake of ‘the other,’ pure and simple,” affirming his/her/their/its own identity, self-defined. I, morally, and we, politically, must empty ourselves of our conception of the good for the sake of the ‘other’ on the basis of the claim that we are both radically equal as sufferers of civilizational inequalities. “The apparently opposite claims of the self and the other, absolute self-identity and absolute self-emptying for the other, are strict practical correlates.” We must therefore reject “the actual goods“—plural—inscribed “in the concrete institutions and ways of life of any real society, any actual moral and political order,” all goods “mediated by particular, finite, and imperfect institutions.” But this rejection of goods “in fact reject[s] the good, precisely because we have no access to any intrinsic goodness that is not in any way or to any degree contaminated by human mediation, moral, political, and religious.” Those mediations are all tokens of civilized—unequal, immoral—human beings. “For the victim, mediation is oppression”; it is rather “my common victimhood, my participation in victimhood, my communion with the oppressed,” that “is my very humanity, my essential being.” To translate such claims into politics (since despisers of civilization must somehow also say that everything is political), postmodern egalitarians must engage in the paradoxical practices of “aggressive victimhood” and “predatory humility.” Hancock urges that if we do not relearn “how to stand in, and therefore to stand up for, our humanity, even while confessing a God who descended below all things (Ephesians 4) to offer himself as the victim, we will not have supplied an alternative to the cult of victimhood.” A philosophic answer alone won’t do, because we are dealing not only with a Rousseauian but a spiritual demand. And just as Christianity is not a theory but a way of life —a practice guided not by a principle but by a Person—so too Hancock proposes an ethics not of theory but of practice, one “reconciled to the necessity of the mediation of tradition and politics as a kind of first philosophy and theology,” suggesting that “philosophy and theology, reason and faith, are insuperably bound up together for the most rigorous and self-aware thinker.”

Hancock therefore offers a critique of ‘critique,’ a critique of today’s dominant theory, which is “a secularized and purely horizontal humanitarianism,” an egalitarianism that finally requires what Tocqueville predicted egalitarianism must require, namely, pantheism—the rejection of an absolutely holy or separate and unequal, unqualifiedly superior God for a ‘god’ which (not ‘who’) pervades all things as energy pervades and is convertible to matter (and vice-versa). The answer to egalitarian humanitarianism, the morality and politics of victimhood, is “virtue-religion,” a reasonable faith “in which transcendence does not exclude the real goodness of practical virtue, or, in Thomas Aquinas’s terms, in which grace does not destroy but perfects nature.”

“To act is to aim at some good,” a good that “always has a public dimension,” inasmuch as we all live in communities and would not exist if a male human being and a female human being had not joined in producing us, and if some human being or beings had not protected, nourished, and taught us, shaping our ethos, our character, in relation to the character of themselves and of the political society composed of other human beings beyond our family. If those things had not occurred, we would have no “minimal experience in the good,” no standard of action, however imperfectly we may live up to it. Victimhood, however, “adopts a purely negative standpoint,” claiming “to name an oppressor without taking responsibility for defining what a common existence without ‘oppression’ would look like.” In this, it resembles those forms of communitarianism that beckon us to revolutionary action without specifying what things will look like after the revolution has been effected, what regime will replace the old regime—or perhaps telling us that there will be no regimes at all, any more, only human beings (whatever they will turn out to be) living in unlimited freedom and complete equality. The logos of victimo-logy, combining or ‘synthesizing’ “pure Sameness” and “pure Otherness,” exempts itself “from the practical problem of constructive action in the world, action for a practical good.” In so doing, victimology has appropriated the language if not the ethos of Christianity, the language of love. “Love wins.” “Love Has No Labels.” Indeed, and in a way indisputably, “Love is Love.” The Beatles put it to music: “All you need is love.” Question authority but “do not even think about questioning ‘love,’ understood as absolute acceptance and nonjudgmental empathy, as the sole standard of human goodness.” Hancock calls this notion of love, a sort of transcendent self-reflection, “the mirrored dome that arcs over our heads.” Under this dome, “all true individualism must be laid low; there must be no permanent, authoritative pillars of order, no mediating representations between the all-too-human and the divine.” Pantheism rejects mediation, since God and humanity are as interchangeable as energy and matter. 

Hancock cites the important work of Daniel J. Mahoney, who calls this “humanitarian pantheism,” with its “endless project of humanitarian equalization” the “idol of our age.” All “vertical aspirations to nobility or virtue” must be sacrificed to the horizontal-humanitarian god, a god to whom no one need look up since “divinity has no meaning other than humanity,” a humanity that “can mean nothing but the complex of (1) material necessity, (2) trivialized, empty freedom, and (3) spirituality converted into warfare serving (1) and (2)—that is, warfare for a ‘justice’ that is pervasively, exclusively, ‘social.'” The problem is that “the ideal form of universality can never be fully reconciled with the givenness and particularity of actual humanity.” This fact may well animate increasing demands for the ‘trans-human,’ beyond but encompassing the ‘trans-sexual’ in morality and the ‘trans-national’ therapeutics-without-borders in politics. “How can universal truth (whether understood to be rational or revealed) accommodate human nature as inevitably inflected by particular loyalties and beliefs?” Why, because “love is love,” and “love knows no barrier of race or nationality.” Love “must prevail over all particular creeds and loyalties.” But love must have some object, someone or something deemed loveable, and that is said to be the victim, the sufferers of all forms of inequality, which is now defined as oppression. 

This ideology derives from Christianity. Christianity is indeed a form of universalism. It overcomes “the particularism of the Jews,” the first receivers of God’s “rigorous, revealed law.” Christianity also overcomes “the natural particularism of our political condition, authoritatively described by Aristotle,” The Philosopher, as many Christians once called him, who argued that while “the natural virtues have a universal aspect,” they “are always bound up with the common good of particular cities or political communities,” each with its “ruling ethos” resulting from its ruling order, its regime. “Christian universalism thus necessarily confronts the particular claims of both revealed law and natural virtues, prior revelation and proud reason, Jerusalem and Athens.” Christians sometimes confront these claims very resolutely, indeed, as when Marcion rejected Judaism entirely in a non-secular form of ‘Love Wins,” and when Augustine called the pagan virtues “splendid vices,” additionally deeming philosophy too elitist-aristocratic, too much a rejection of the fact that we are all equal under God. We are all equally in need of His grace, Augustine taught, if we are to be saved from the consequences of our sin, which we all equally have, if not necessarily in equal quantities, kinds, and intensities. Hancock regards this Christian universalism not as true but deadly but as true but risky, always hovering close to “hollowing itself out, evacuating its own substance” by denying human particularity. By rejecting Christianity, modern secularism does not guard against this risk. On the contrary, it succumbs to it.

“Modern secularism is founded on a kind of mutually eroding interaction between Christian faith and pagan reason: Christian humility debunks the ‘virtuous’ pride of Greek reason, and Greek reason questions the supernatural claims of Christianity.” In Hancock’s assessment, this was an unintended consequence of the Protestant Reformation, “a movement based on a reading of Paul and on a radicalization of Augustine,” a radical “separation of grace from nature” which “tended to deprive biblical commands of any rational support but a purely utilitarian understanding” (emphasis added). Modern philosophy, preceding and then following up on this Protestant tendency, more or less explicitly “deploy[s] Christian motives (along with others, of course) to undo Christianity” altogether. Descartes, for example, “appeals explicitly to a secularized law of humanitarian love” in order to replace Christian love—agape, caritas. Hancock distinguishes “the counterfeit from authentic Christianity,” the “holy love of a neighbor” from “the ideological project of the universal mastery of material need and inequality.” He wants to understand how we can “discern the radical Christian virtue of humility in such a way that we do not renounce the classical virtue of magnanimity and thus sacrifice our souls along with our pagan pride.” There is a sense in which, indeed, all you need is love, but personal salvation and genuine politics or civilization require loves that are quite distinct from love victimological. Christian love according to Aquinas holds, as Aquinas writes, that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it”; and since human beings “are by nature familial, social, and political beings—and, for Christian, created as such by God—the human inclination to form families and political communities and to defend our particular families and political communities”—families and communities as they actually are—was “also a legitimate given.” Having dismissed such particularity in favor of, so to speak, universal universality, Christians have given in to the universalism of secularizing modern philosophic universalism. “The universality of our Christianity has outlived the Christianity of our universalism.” 

Is it, then, “possible for nature—including our familial and political nature—to be God’s transcendentally free creation and yet for us to affirm it rationally as intrinsically, eternally, essentially good?” “This book is an essay”—in the original sense of an attempt—in “vindicating this possibility.” 

In the first of the four parts of his book, Hancock addresses the theoretical dimensions of the matter. Some time ago, I submitted a book manuscript to a publisher; it consisted of what were once called ‘close readings’ of books by André Malraux. A reader’s report came back, deploring the lack of “theory” in the manuscript, which in those days meant literary theory, which in those days meant Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism.’ My own references to Plato, Aristotle, and other such folk evidently didn’t amount to the presence of theory, despite Derrida’s own frequent recourse to them. In tune with the academic temper of the time, the editor rejected the manuscript. The reader’s complaint was an early example of what Pierre Manent calls the “hypertrophy of theory,” the inclination to use abstract notions as a substitute for looking carefully at what is in front of you. Hancock notes that in moral deliberation this practice “obscures the essential goods of practical human existence,” an existence which is indeed not only right in front but all around us and in us, too. In us, it is conscience. “Manent shows that Christian conscience can be interpreted either as the consummation of classical confidence in the inherent good, of morality or, in the form of sheer consciousness of sin, as a tipping point tending to the subversion of morality.” The postmodern moral theory that confuses Christian charity with compassion, “this flattening, secular universalization” of moral and political thought, can be countered by recourse to “the virtue of practical wisdom or prudence.” But virtues are strengths, and strength requires difficult exercise. This may be one reason why easy and lazy sentiment so often prevails over prudence.

“Can rigorous thinking support meaningful living?” While Nietzsche despised all easy ways out of the moral labyrinth, ridiculing the passive, shallow ‘Last Man,’ he also doubted the power of reason, famously preferring the ‘will to power.’ Manent traces such irrationalism to what he calls the “irreparable, unpardonable error” of modern natural right, which sought to derive moral commands from the ‘state of nature,’ the supposed condition of human life when there were no commands. This does indeed put morality under the command of the wills of those who agree to a moral code, effectively (in Hancock’s words) “render[ing] us ever more subject to the abstract and impersonal machinery of the modern state,” as is already explicit in Hobbes’s Leviathan. “Hobbes’s project truly foreshadows modern existence as the illusion of absolute freedom under the reality of absolute and inhuman sovereignty.” Hobbes in turn derives his theory from Machiavelli, who defines a “new world” to be “defined not by our human subordination to certain intrinsically moral ends but by our amoral knowledge of the circumstances or obstacles” to what we want, which is to place those circumstances or obstacles under our control, not the control of ‘Fortuna’ or, sotto voce, God. That is, he replaces both classical and Christian virtue with virtù, virtuosity, the savvy triumph of the will. 

In this, Manent argues, Machiavellianism was oddly, and inadvertently, supplemented by Martin Luther, who assuredly did not intend to conquer God and vigorously denied that he was a ‘theorist’ or philosopher. By claiming that the salvation of human souls depends solely on faith in God, Luther brought Christians to deprecate human action. The Christian believer replaces the Christian agent. And all believers are more or less equal, as believing cops and cobblers are “no less priests” than priests, equally charged with evangelizing the word of God. “This leveling is possible only because the dignity of such functions has been severed from any humanly accessible evaluation of lower and higher necessities and purposes, such as those that have framed the classical tradition of political reflection.” The spirit of leveling then begins to replace the spirit of, well, spirituality: the hierarchy of a secular realm obliged to obey “the superior, spiritual realm.” In order to undermine the priestly rule of Roman Catholicism, Luther “liberat[es] the secular from the spiritual,” making spirituality entirely “a matter of conscience,” a matter of the inner man, while making this world “wholly external,” the realm of “mortal life and property.” The inner life, Luther insists, “is immune from external force”; this contrasts with Aquinas, who “taught that political authority was essential to our humanity, even our uncorrupted humanity prior to the fall,” when human life was not mortal and there was no property. For Luther, insofar as life in ‘this world’ is lived by Christians, it registers the love of neighbor; politics ministers exclusively to the secular needs of neighbors. “Secular needs become authoritative for Christians as someone else’s needs.” If Machiavelli inaugurates the modernity of atheist ‘selfishness,’ Luther inaugurates the modernity of theist ‘otherness,’ a doctrine encompassing “the Christian duty of love.” Once Machiavelli’s atheism overtakes Christian theism, love becomes a sentiment, politics a Leninism pervaded by Lennonism. As Luther puts it, with characteristic forthrightness, “it is a Christian act and an act of love confidently to kill, rob, and pillage the enemy, and to do everything that can injure him until one has conquered him according to the methods of war.” Alternatively, such militancy can ‘go soft,’ as it does in a Beatles tune.

Philosophically, postmodernism owes a supreme debt to Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s early writings clearly indicate that “Martin Luther’s idea of faith and sin played a decisive role” in his “conversion from a staunch Catholic philosopher working within an Aristotelian-Scholastic framework to an atheist philosopher who embraced temporality or historicity as the insuperable horizon of human existence.” With Luther, Heidegger insisted that human corruption “can never be grasped radically enough,” that “hope comes not from works but from suffering.” Consistent with the overall tendency of Lutheranism, Heidegger regards “all human action” as “presumptuous and sinful.” As with Luther, nothing in humanity is not ruined by sin. Human nature is in no way naturally inclined toward God; “the being of man as such is itself sin,” the “real core” of humanness. Hancock comments, “We might say that Heidegger uses Luther to deconstruct Aristotle,” then “uses Aristotle to deconstruct Luther” by avoiding any belief in “a transcendent personal divinity.” Thus, while “an Aristotelian method strips Luther of God Luther strips Aristotle of the Good,” in a “mutual erosion of faith and reason” characteristic of postmodernity—existentialism in place of essentialism. “Rebellion and flight are the human condition, and authentic human existence is nothing but the lucid and resolute embrace of this condition.” In sum, “the absolute denial of a natural orientation toward the good,” whether in its modern, atheistic Machiavellian form or in its Lutheran form—with Heideggerianism as a sort of synthesis of the two—”entails a wholesale repudiation of the practical standpoint of the insuperable ‘gap’ of action,” that is, the gap between creator-God and created Man, philosophic theory and political practice, wisdom as sophia and wisdom as phronēsis. 

Hancock follows his account of Manent’s dissection of postmodernism with an account of Manent’s remedy for healing. In his turn, Manent follows Aquinas, who writes that to know God is to “join with one unknown.” That is, knowledge of the Creator will always be partial knowledge. In this, Aquinas follows the pattern less of Aristotle, ‘the master of all who know,’ but of Socrates, who turned from speculation about the heavens, from what we call the ‘philosophy of science,’ the attempt to know the enormous cosmos, to the surer knowledge of human beings, those political animals he sought out in the Athenian marketplace. Practical knowledge is more certain than theoretical knowledge. For the Thomistic Manent, this means that “practical life guided by the hope of eternal salvation is life ‘directed and judged by my conscience,” a conscience “not absolute and purely individual but a matter of ‘more or less’ and decisively mediated by the institutional church.” That is, just as the “gap” between God and man requires the Son to mediate between the Father and those who offend Him with their inveterate sinfulness, so too the gap between our conscience and our sinful impulses must be mediated by the regime of God on earth, the ecclesia or assembly of God, His Church. But although Manent affirms much of the Thomistic view, he clearly sees what Hancock calls “the limitations of the medieval understanding.” There is indeed a “continuity between the natural condition (as articulated, notably, by Aristotle) and the Christian condition,” but there is also “a fundamental discontinuity” between them. 

Manent takes Machiavelli’s critique of Christianity seriously and, it might be added, Luther’s critique of human nature seriously. There is something to Machiavelli’s cynical insistence on the contrast between what we say and what we do, “between the end [people] imagine and the actual motives of action.” Christianity, as he charges, can indeed lend itself to a “pretentious passivity.” This occurs when conscience is misconceived as merely the recipient of God’s grace and not as “the emblem of the continuity between nature and Christianity, the culmination of Aristotelian reflective choice and, therefore, of the true, practical condition of humanity,” a condition that requires prudential or practical reasoning if it is to make its way in the world on a path towards God. Reasoning is necessary because the path is narrow and winding, given the discontinuity between human nature and grace. That is, there is something to Luther’s claim that “the invisible and radically internal domain of the Christian soul is essentially incommunicable with respect to the visible realm in which the citizen acts.” “To recover a true and natural perspective of action—to recover natural law within the perspective of an openness to a divinity that infinitely transcends our humanity—must then require honoring the moral truth of Christianity while knowing how to avoid its overreach and, therefore, its collapse, a collapse that brings with it the loss of the classical-Christian truth of moral agency.” Manent regards Christianity both to fulfill nature and to risk undermining it. Christianity fulfills human nature by teaching that human beings can and should be more than the social and political conventions with which they live, which they have instituted for themselves. Christianity does this because conscience “crystallizes the moment of individual responsibility, the deeply personal and individual character of moral agency” under the regime of God and not only the regime of Man. In this sense, Christianity “Christian conscience is the supernatural fulfillment of the classical, natural understanding of reflective moral choice,” inasmuch as it is highly imprudent to ignore the laws of God, both natural and revealed. This notwithstanding, “the individualizing and transcending claims of conscience risk destroy confidence in all concrete norms,” which are “always connected in some way with the natural goods of particular human individuals and communities.” Speaking for himself, Hancock proposes that the good found only in the regime or ‘city’ of God, being “utterly beyond attainment by man’s natural powers,” can beckon human beings toward “hypertrophy,” as indeed can a misconceived Platonism, which without irony, that shield of prudence, holds up the standard of the best regime in a way that denigrates the ways of life human beings must consider on this mortal coil. The quest for “a unified and comprehensive system,” “a single rational standard” for human life—namely, “the contemplation of eternal, self-sufficient truth, as the highest good and lodestar of human action”—will not suffice for the conduct of real life. This is why Manent “declines to follow the ancient Greeks,” preferring an understanding of the cardinal virtues as, to be sure, “quite stable and universal in their manifestations in various regimes and cultures,” but “actualized not as independent ends-in-themselves to be grasped by theory but in practical, political deliberations relative to a particular regime and thus as means to further ends.” The good does indeed have a “structure,” but that structure can only be seen in practice, with “Christian humility and even…modern skepticism” (e.g., Hume). That is, modern and postmodern life needs a “humbling of theory in order to release the inherent good of practice.” 

Having repudiated, each in its own way, “the evidence of practice” and “the claims of natural virtue,” modern philosophy and Protestantism have prepared the way for “a new, awakened secular spirituality for which the rivalry between reason and revelation,” still very much alive in previous centuries, “has been forgotten.” “Leftism has become a religion.” “Wokeness” parallels—some might say parodies—the philosophers’ ‘enlightenment’ and ‘consciousness’ as well as Christian’s receiving of the Holy Spirit. And while “woke religion violates common sense,” common sense “needs help defending against this violation.” Common sense receives little help in this from the modern state, since the attempt to manage Church-state relations by separating Church from state has in practice elevated the state over religion, whether in the monarchist France of the late Bourbons or in democratic America. Nor do the churches help, as Christianity for the most part forsakes the goal of salvation for the cultivation of humanitarian sentiment.

To say ‘humanitarian,’ however, raises questions: What is it? What is its purpose—what is good for it? Since Rousseau, we moderns have tended to say that the good inheres in the body, and the beginning of remedying the body’s health is pity. But, as Manent sees, when “the notion of evil tends to merge with physical suffering” it is impossible to distinguish between the rights of human beings and the rights of animals. If that is humanitarianism, then we are left with a morality of “weak and self-interested sentiment,” unable to make war or to defend the peace. This impotence of practice mirrors the omnipotence of imagination. Indeed, “Imagine” is another John Lennon tune, inviting us to worship humankind “as the Grand-Être that determines our horizon: imagine there’s no Heaven, and the world will live as one. Fat chance, common sense responds, but what chance has common sense to intervene when we ‘motivate’ ourselves with (to borrow from a song the Beatles didn’t write) feelings, nothing more than feelings. Pity isn’t Christian charity; for starters, charity isn’t easy. It is a virtue, and its aim, “otherworldly salvation” is so hard to achieve that human beings need divine help to obtain it. It is “an active disposition of the will,” activated not by human powers but by God’s power of providential grace. 

With regard to the state, which rules Christians and non-Christians, the Church has “a public role.” It mediates, connecting self-government, which human beings can practice regardless of their religious convictions, with “a confidence in the primacy of the good.” Such confidence is natural to human beings; André Malraux—no Christian—titled his novel set in the Spanish Civil War L’Espoir. “Human action at its best—that is, action according to the enduring cardinal virtues—naturally opens upon a hope for and in something ‘bigger than us, too big for us.'” As Christian citizens, Manent writes, “we address the Most High from the site of our action and for the common good of the city of which we are citizens.” And non-Christian citizens still want the good for something bigger than themselves, namely, their political community. If the human good was put into man by God at creation, leaving him “in the hands of his own counsel, then the nation takes part in creation’s goodness” and, in Hancock’s words, “rational, virtuous deliberation in the production of a political common good has divine significance,” being part of God’s intention for his creations. And even atheists and agnostics reject such deliberation at their peril if they put their trust in their own sentiments, reeds that are either too weak or too blindly powerful for their own good. Love in sentimental sense is not all you need.

God’s charity or love, as distinguished from all-too-human humanitarianism “guides and perfects the natural virtues,” “activat[ing] and extend[ing] our natural propensity to virtue. Hancock again cites Mahoney, who writes that “charity must be interpreted in the light of prudence.” In so saying, however, Mahoney’s elevation of “the mediating virtue of prudence,” which Hancock rightly calls an “urgent truth,” was urged by Jesus Himself, who commanded His followers to be innocent or harmless as doves but also prudent as serpents (Matthew 10:16). The passage is often translated “wise as serpents,” but the Greek word is a derivative of phronēsis, not of sophia. God evidently didn’t even need to read Aristotle to recognize the need for practical wisdom.

The modern philosophers, from Machiavelli to Heidegger, all draw upon Christian themes, typically in an attempt to substitute their own principles, whether natural or historical, for Christian charity, claiming that they can more effectually bring humanity to the goods it wants than the Church can. This, of course, can only be plausible if God and the human need for spiritual rather than bodily salvation remains well in the background. To do this, the moderns appeal the charm of equality that Christianity fosters, although in the moderns’ case this isn’t equality under God for the purpose of calling into question the eternal value of human hierarchies. Hancock finds more recent examples of this modern project in the writings of the United States, Britain, and France, respectively: from the philosophy professors John Rawls, Larry Siedentop, and Alain Badiou.

As “the most authoritative author of late progressive liberalism,” Rawls presents us with a perfect example of Manent’s “hypertrophy of theory.” A neo-Kantian, he repudiates “the practical point of view” and human nature altogether as sources of moral guidance. His well-known and doggedly egalitarian concepts—the “original position,” the “veil of ignorance,” and the “two principles of justice”—all depend upon “Rawls’s deep commitment to an obviously post-Protestant ‘purity of heart.'” Human beings are indeed “naturally moral,” he allows, but only “in the sense that they naturally receive the stamp of whatever morality, whatever conception of justice, a society authorizes.” He rejects such relativism while also rejecting the available universal principle of hedonism. “The only way to achieve true freedom, rationality, and humanity,” he supposes, “is to be prepared absolutely to sacrifice any concept of what is good, including emphatically any allegedly ‘higher’ good, to a system of justice based on a pure conception of right,” there being “no right or natural or divinely ordained ‘order of the soul,’ but only  ‘unity of the self’ defined by a purely social, purely horizontal reciprocity of rights, and thus by the conviction that ‘we participate in one another’s nature,'” realizing our selves “in the activity of many selves”—social existence being “the absolute horizon of human existence.” “The heart of Rawls’s Theory of Justice is the sacrifice of natural and unequal virtue to a spiritualized project of material equality”—welfare-state liberalism. However, such a moral theory, unbounded by any nature beyond purity of heart (which isn’t all that natural among humans), and therefore unbounded by prudence, is “inherently self-radicalizing,” not long to be confined to the modest measures of ‘progressive’ liberalism once upheld within the confines of Harvard Yard. Victimology has overcome it.

In his Inventing the Individual, Siedentop takes a more historicizing stance, claiming that “Christian belief is the wellspring of the moral idea of a community of equal and free individuals that we associate with modern ‘secularism.'” On that basis, he hopes to effect a marriage between Christians and secular liberals. In Siedentop’s reading of the New Testament, Paul invents individuality, if not its heir, modern individuality. Paul overthrows “the hierarchical political, spiritual, and intellectual framework of pagan civilization.” Even or even especially the ancient philosophers instantiate this hierarchy, as seen in Plato’s rigorously aristocratic dialogue, The Republic—more literally, Regime, Politeia. Paul “blasted this aristocratic framework, igniting a transformation with revolutionary social and intellectual consequences that are still unfolding in our times.” The social consequence of Pauline Christianity is of course ‘democracy’ in Tocqueville’s sense: social equality’s gradual but sure conquest of aristocracies everywhere. The intellectual consequence is “a new view of reason” that “prepares modern rationalism because it abandons the hierarchical claims of reason’s rule and instead bases reason on an egalitarian and universalist faith,” an “imperative of universal freedom and equality.” As early as Judaism, Siedentop writes, “Virtue consisted in obedience to God’s will” (emphasis added)— obedience not to a god who is Logos but a Being who avers, “I will be who I will be.” To this, Paul adds a “vision of a mystical union with Christ,” one that “introduces a revised notion of rationality,” which seems foolish to the philosophers. According to Siedentop, the ancient philosophers, imprisoned by the aristocratic regime of the polis, could only conceive of inequality as natural. Natural equality made no sense to them. But in Paul’s formulation, “Judaism’s favoring of law and command over logos or reason, its preoccupation with ‘conformity to a higher or divine will,’ is miraculously combined with the maximal extension of reason’s empire, with ‘the abstracting potential of later Hellenistic philosophy.'” Hancock finds this reminiscent of the distinction made by Manent in his Metamorphoses of the City—the distinction between the few and the many that animated “the natural life of the city,” the polis, disappears into “the one-all pair” of the Roman Empire, which the Hellenistic philosophers reflect. This “finds theological expression in Christianity, and continues to haunt modern secular humanism.” For Manent, “the one and the all, radical transcendence and reductive equality, are two sides of the same spiritual coin. The difference between Manent and Sidentop is not so much in their analyses but in their reactions to what they describe. Siedentop finds the “joint reign” of “the absolute one and the formless egalitarian” as “altogether unproblematic.” Manent still finds virtue in some aspects of the limits seen in the polis. And he also sees the God, the Christ, not simply of Paul but of John: the God Who is Logos, not simply a Being of will and therefore of ever-changing mind or logos, a God approached only by “a leap of faith.” As is so often the case on the ‘Left,’ the supposedly fluid character of the ultimate Reality always flows in the same direction: egalitarianism. This is how Siedentop can call for a marriage of Christianity and secularism. In his eyes, they both aim at the same thing.

Alain Badiou also centers his argument on Paul. In his version of the Gospels, Paul is the founder of secularism, a “Christian secularism” that “does not culminate in Siedentop’s [or Rawls’s] rather complacent liberalism but rather in an extremely vague but unmistakable invocation of collective, indeed ‘communist’ revolutionary action.” Here, Christ’s Resurrection bespeaks “the submission of reason to the ‘folly of our preaching,'” which in turn “liberates human action from all ‘rational’ limits.” Utopianism is possible and, since Christianity is at heart secular, it is possible without divine intervention. As for philosophy, it “is not transformed but is simply abolished. In Badiou’s modern version of Origenism (as distinguished and indeed sharply opposed to ‘originalism’), “Jesus” means an absolute moment in History, a “purely formal and revolutionary ‘Event.'” The Event inaugurates a Trotskyish permanent revolution, “a negation of law and reason without any stable content but only the form of revolutionary subjectivity and universality and universality, radical individuality opening up upon radical collectivity” whereby “love converts thought into sheer power, ‘the real materiality of militant universalism.'” “As a good communist, Badiou projects mankind’s universal material redemption—the overcoming by and for humanity of the realm of material necessity—as the horizon and implicit telos of his passion for the radical destruction of all given horizons.”

Readers familiar with the correspondence between the Hegelian Alexandre Kojève and the Platonist Leo Strauss will hear resonances of these themes in some of Kojève’s claims. Though a rationalist, Hegelian reason reaches a limit only very late in human history, indeed in the thought of Hegel himself. Strauss “considers Alexandre Kojève’s philosophy as exemplary of the interpretation of secular rationalism as the real fulfillment of Christian rationalism,” but much more rigorously so than anything that Rawls, Siedentop, or Badiou can offer. In his version of Hegelian grand ‘synthesis,’ Kojève “combines Siedentop’s prosaic liberal and democratic sympathies with Badiou’s revolutionary resolution.” It is to Strauss’s reply to Kojève in the name of classical, ‘pre-modern’ philosophy that Hancock now turns. Hancock will go part of the way with Strauss, rather as Aquinas goes part of the way with Aristotle. His account of Strauss, and his response to ‘Straussian’ thought, which concludes his final chapter on theory and begins first chapter on practice, deserves careful attention.

Rémi Brague: Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022.

 

Brague argues that certain “premodern ideas” have been “made to run amuck” by modern philosophy. If God is rational and He created the material universe, then human beings, themselves rational creatures of God, should be able to understand that universe. But if modern thought denies the existence of God, then it “severs the link between the reason supposedly present in the things and the reason that governs or at least should govern our doings.” This leads ‘we moderns’ to a sharp dualism, one that can find no natural support for morality in nature, and ultimately in human nature; morality becomes a matter of convention or of will, with no rational content. Similarly, removing God removes divine providence; it too becomes “‘secularized’ and warped,” redefined as ‘History,’ the validation of whatever happens to happen. Removing God additionally removes divine grace; we are left without any real criterion for mercy or forgiveness. And if so, why bother to repent of one’s wrongful acts, except under social pressure?

Put simply, “the modern worldview can’t furnish us with a rational explanation of why it is good that there should be human beings” to enjoy such things as “health, knowledge, freedom, peace, plenty.” “The culture that flatters itself with the sovereignty of sober reason can’t find reasons for its own continuation.” 

The worldview in question conceives of human thought and activity as a project. “What the etymology of the word suggests” is throwing, “a motion in which the mobile body (missile) loses contact with the mover and forges ahead”—the “very phenomenon that ancient physics failed to account for.” Newtonian physics and, in mathematics, the calculus (the geometry of moving points along a curve) are two manifestations of this philosophic shift, seen in Machiavellian conquest of Fortune and Baconian conquest of nature—conquest being a movement aimed at rule. A project also “implies a new interpretation of the three dimensions of time: (1) toward the past it implies the idea of a new beginning, of a beginning from scratch, so that whatever came before will be forgotten; (2) toward the present, the idea of a self-determination of the acting subject; (3) toward the future, the idea of an environment that will yield further opportunities for action and that pledges that that further action will be rewarded with achievement,” that is, with “progress.” This contrasts with Biblical providence, whose subject is “a personal and loving God who cares for His creatures” and can do so rightly, being not only loving but supremely wise or prudent. Jesus tells his disciples to imitate him, innocent as doves and prudent as serpents. Providence and prudence (in Latin, the two words have the same root) form a bond between human beings and a Person who is ‘above’ them, who enters them, when He so chooses, from ‘outside’ them. Many of the non-Biblical ‘ancient’ philosophies conceive of theoretical and practical wisdom operating in the same way, albeit with nature rather than God acting as the impersonal but still supportive surrounding home of man. Thus, “Providence and project are the two poles that could roughly define the difference between the premodern and the modern outlook.”

In Biblical religion and premodern (pre-Machiavellian) philosophy, it is the task that concerns human activity and prudential-practical reasoning. In undertaking a task, “I am entrusted to do something by an origin on which I have no hold, and which I don’t always even know and must look for”; therefore, “I must ask myself whether I am equal to my task, agreeing thereby to be dispossessed of what was, all the same, irrevocably entrusted to me”; further, “I am the only one responsible for what I am asked to fulfill, and I can’t possibly off-load it onto another who could pledge for the success of my action.” So, while “we inherited from the book of Genesis the idea of the domination of nature,” in Genesis this is a task assigned by God, with limits assigned by Him in His wisdom and justice.

A second “basic idea of modernity” is experiment. One’s projects test the limits of progress. In the Bible, by contrast, there is the trial or test, judged not by man but by God. The experiment not only seeks to extend the limits of human rule over nature outside man, it “conceives of man as being not a fully achieved being but a sketch of sorts”; “mankind as a whole is an experiment of life.” Human nature itself may be surpassed, as Zarathustra’s Overman replaces Man, and most especially the ignoble Last Man. This suggests that man might be “a failed attempt” of the life forces, an experiment gone wrong, an evolutionary botch who deserves to die, either by blunder or by suicide. And indeed, if mankind “can determine itself, by itself and only by itself,” then “why should it choose to be rather than not to be,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet asks himself, early on in the modern project? Indeed, self-destruction is the easier path, a path that weapons of mass destruction, human-produced biological catastrophe, and low birthrates might bulldoze and pave.

And so, “modernity can’t answer the question about the legitimacy of mankind unless it gives up its own project,” which has caused us to be “at a loss about how to explain that mankind as a whole has to be.” To be sure, modernity produces more goods, for more people, than premodern action guided by premodern thought could do. That is a good thing, in and of itself. But “the modern project is unable to tell us why it is good that there are people to enjoy those goods.” Put more bluntly, “atheism has failed, hence it is doomed to disappear in the long run”; “the majority of our contemporaries are unwilling to face either this fact or its consequences.”

Modern atheism has achieved some remarkable successes. Modern physical science gives us “a very accurate and fruitful description of reality” without any need for bringing in God to explain things. “In order to orient ourselves in the material world” and even “in social organization” animated by religious toleration, “we need no religion.” If not atheism in the sense of denying the existence of God (which would be unscientific) then agnosticism or ‘bracketing’ God when doing scientific work or getting along with one another, is quite feasible. The question is, can it be sustained by the human beings who have founded modernity?

Brague doubts it. “If we admit that there is on this earth a being, known as Homo sapiens, that is able to give an account of the universe that surrounds him and to live peacefully with his fellow human beings, in both cases without having to look up toward any transcendent reality—would it be good that such a being should exist and keep existing?” Science does not and cannot answer that question.

Modern atheism is intended to liberate man from God and, to the extent possible, from nature. “Man was to decide his own destiny; he had to give his own law to himself, which we somehow loosely call ‘autonomy.'” As Marx put it, “the root of man is man himself”—man is quite literally ‘radical.’ But this “humanism”—a word redefined to register this autonomy—cannot “pass judgment on man’s value or lack of it as such.” As Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar already sees, the principles of atheism “do not cause the death of people, but they prevent them from being born,” given the narcissism implied by ‘self-creation.’ It is true that some atheist ideologies additionally killed a lot of people outright, as well, with all the fanaticism the early modern atheists attributed to religiosity, but Brague doesn’t need that argument. It is enough for him to look at the peaceful liberal societies of today and observe that “man is no longer convinced that he has the right to conquer and exploit the earth,” that “man is no longer convinced of his superiority over against the other living beings,” and that “man is not even sure that he distinguishes himself from other living beings by radically different features.” Here, Tocqueville supplements Brague nicely, as each of those contemporary doubts expresses what Tocqueville calls “democracy” or civil-social egalitarianism. Atheism lends itself to egalitarianism, claiming or at least not affirming that there is a being superior to man, unless it is the whole of nature, whose superiority consists in its greater mass. In the supreme democracy of the cosmos, nature has man outvoted.

Modern science is expert as discovering causes of things, explanations of “what is the case already.” It cannot discover the ground of things, “what we can bring about in the future” and why it would be good if we brought it about. “If the project of Enlightenment is to be successful, man needs a ground for man to go on existing, and to exist in the full meaning of ‘man,’ as a rational and free being, not only as a biped without feathers.” For this, there are any number of religions that offer us a serviceable god or set of gods, but “Christianity distinguishes itself” from its predecessors by imposing no laws on human beings “other than the ones that natural, unaided reason either discovered or could have discovered”—prohibitions against murder, incest, theft, and so on. “It leaves the content of the moral rules untouched and adds a further dimension only where morality can’t save us,” as in the ‘theological virtues’ of faith in God, hope in his willingness and power to deliver us from evil, and charity or agapic love towards one another. “God gives the creatures whatever is necessary for them to reach their own good by their own exertions,” revealing Himself “only when such a disclosure is necessary for a creature to do that.” Brague here quotes Irenaeus: “The life of man is the vision of God.”

Premodern philosophers, a-theistic regarding the God of the Bible, nonetheless discovered standards for human action beyond the simple assertion of the will. Aristotle finds in the “Idea of the Good” remarked in some of Plato’s dialogues—which is indeed a standard ‘above’ and beyond human beings themselves, to be “useless for ethics,” except perhaps in the discouragement of utopian ambitions. For Aristotle, it is the prakton agathon, the good that can be practiced, which makes sense for real persons in the real world. He distinguishes between life and living well, both for individuals and for political communities. Life’s opposite is death, whereas the opposite of living well is living badly, living in a way that contradicts the nature of human beings as such. The fact of the existence of an Aristotle, but even of the not-so-bright interlocutors of Socrates (one of whom is described as making a serious effort to think, albeit fruitless) shows that human nature isn’t the same as a dog’s nature, or a stone’s. To be a good human being in this philosophic sense is not to obey a higher Being but to activate one’s nature. This a-theistic good can decline into Machiavellianism, to the claim that to be practical morality must concentrate simply upon acquisition for the sake of self-preservation or self-aggrandizement, and that is why Brague prefers the Christian God to the sober humanism of the ancient philosophers.

“What if the Good is a condition of life, and an absolutely necessary one into the bargain?” God creates all beings other than Himself, then judges them to be good. “If every being, as such, is good, then the presence of the Good is necessary wherever there is something, that is, everywhere.” The human freedom, the exercise of free will, that modern philosophy so often posits is indeed necessary if morality is to be possible; one must choose, as Existentialists say. Choosing requires a subject who chooses. This subject is “a rational being” and its actions have purpose, inasmuch as its actions are not simply movements but movements toward something or someone. “The proud self-image of modern thought puts freedom in the center of the human,” as seen in Hegel, who in his Philosophy of History writes, “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” As human beings, although we cannot create ourselves, we can “choose ourselves”; we cannot choose whether we are born as humans and as ourselves, as individuals each in his own body with its own unique genetic code. The point “on which freedom as the condition of action and the radical unfreedom of birth meet, or even clash against each other” is generation, the “free decision” of human beings to procreate, to perpetuate existing human pairs in other related but never identical individuals. Such a choice, if it is indeed a choice and not the result of some accident, benign or malign, can only assume that an additional human being is a good thing. While Aristotle observes that human beings generate only other human beings, with “the help of the sun,” Brague takes this biological or causative explanation and gives it a ground as “a metaphor for the necessity of the Good for the survival of man.”

“How,” then, “can we articulate to each other the physical world and what singles out man, that is, the moral dimension and the sensitivity to values?” “We badly need” a “philosophy of nature” to counter the modern philosophy of history that seeks domination of nature for purposes that that philosophy is powerless to justify. Modern science can trace what Aristotle identifies as the efficient, material, and formal causes in nature; it cannot identify ‘final’ causes or purposes but instead reduces human intentions to a concatenation of the first three. “Final causes have no place in the study of the physical world”; in that, the moderns are correct, seeing that “scientists are perfectly right to do without them” as anthropomorphist. Yet that leaves anthropos himself only partially understood and human beings as “strangers in the cosmos,” a cosmos in which we are manifestly not strangers but members. Conceiving ourselves as strangers, we begin to think that we really should be somewhere else, justly self-exiled. But to where? If man is captive and stranger in the earthly city, he might find a home in the City of God—except that modern science rejects the Kingdom of God as a myth. 

“My claim is that what we need in order to meet the challenges of our time is something like the medieval outlook,” the experience of the world not as nature “but as creation,” sustaining St. Bernard’s distinction between a creature “in general” and a “creature of God.” A creature of God is designed purposefully, by God as Logos, as speech and reason. In the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, God creates beings “that have a stable nature of their own.” This understanding of creation contradicts the claim of (for example) the Muslim thinker al-Aš‘arī, who contended that there are no stable natures, that all beings are created, sustained, and held together (when they are) by the inexplicable will of God. As it happens, “the idea of stable nature set into being by the creative being was at least a necessary, if not a sufficient condition of natural science,” ancient and modern. Aquinas maintains that “studying nature gives us an inkling of God’s attributes, his wisdom and power.” Such a “sober view of nature prevents us from yielding to the temptation to lower the level of our own being” as creatures made in the image of God, which lowering is precisely what Machiavelli and his philosophic progeny have proposed.

Modernity posits the malleability of things and persons—the malleability of Fortune (Machiavelli), of nature (Bacon), and finally of human nature itself (Hegel, Marx). What Aristotle identifies as the specifically democratic definition of freedom, “doing as one wants,” pervades modern thought on morality and (therefore) on politics. Brague finds this view simpliste. He identifies eight kinds of freedom, each fitting the various dimensions of nature, including human nature. There is the freedom of energy released from matter in fire or in nuclear fission; “matter is bound energy,” as Einstein formulated. For the material elements themselves, freedom is “the removal of an obstacle that thwarts a spontaneous tendency,” as when an object falls to the ground without interference from any other object that would ‘break its fall.’ For plants, freedom is growth unimpeded by lack of water or sunlight. For what Aristotle calls the parts of animals, and especially internal organs, freedom is “release,” the emission of the chemicals inside them. For animals considered not as parts but as wholes, freedom is escape, deliverance, as from a trap or a jail. For rational beings, freedom is choice, which implies reasoning, not mere autonomic movement. For slaves, freedom is a “legal act” releasing them from bondage to others, and for social and political beings freedom is liberty ensured by their citizenship, their share in rule within a community. 

All of these freedoms might be seen by persons who reason. “The basic new idea introduce by the Bible is the idea of a radical new beginning,” as seen in Genesis (God’s creation of the cosmos), of a people (Exodus), and of the choice between good and evil. And when human beings choose evil, they are not only free to change their minds, to repent, but they are offered God’s forgiveness, “a new beginning in moral life,” which men may offer to one another, as well. It is “faith in creation” that ‘makes freedom understandable as freedom for the good” because the God of the Bible is benevolent, not “the bogey imagined by ancient or modern Gnosticism.” “Conversely, the experience of freedom makes faith in creation a meaningful choice,” since we can ascribe this experience either to “inanimate matter”—and if so, it must be illusory, finally a determined thing—or to God’s own free choice to endow us with freedom as creatures in His image. The latter choice has two consequences: creation becomes “less opaque and unintelligible,” a matter of “find[ing] in ourselves an equivalent of the creative act whose presence we suppose” in God; it also enables us to “become the dialogue partners of a rational Being,” as seen, among other places, in the Book of Job. And because that rational Being is more rational than we are, wiser, He can guide us to right choices without compelling us, then graciously strengthening us if, in our weakness, we turn to him for aid. Brague contends that “there is no concept of freedom of the will in pre-Christian antiquity.” The Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Arabic words translated as freedom or liberty “all designate the social status of whoever is not a slave, and nothing more.” In Christianity, “freedom is the unfolding of what we really and essentially are, in the core of our being”; it is what “enables us to reach the Good,” although not fully in this life. It might be added that in Aristotle and in some of the other ancient philosophers, human beings can also “unfold” or grow into what they really and essentially are—in this life, but seldom if ever completely and never eternally. Natures are limited by their ends but also by their finitude in time, even if nature as a whole may be eternal.

Reason is not the only distinctive characteristic of human beings. Man wants to know, as Aristotle observes, but he also wants to take in beauty. “Beauty is lovable, but the love of beauty is of a special kind; it doesn’t aim at getting its object, but keeps the distance that enables enjoying by contemplation.” Brague cites C. S. Lewis, who remarked that “man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals,” as it were, neither having nor desiring leisure. This helps to explain the task medieval monks set for themselves, preserving the writings of pagan culture, especially Latin culture. To be sure, having jettisoned the bulk of Jewish law, Christians sought help from the Roman jurists and the more sober Greek philosophers, but why else would monks preserve “the historians, or the bawdy Catullus, or the lewd Ovid, let alone Lucretius the Epicurean atheist,” if not for the beauty of their literary style? This lent an additional freedom to Christendom. “Christianity never claimed to produce a full-fledged culture,” instead leaving “huge chunks of human experience…entrusted to hu man intelligence,” “unaided by a special revelation.” Judaism and Islam ordain dietary laws and dress codes, but “there is no Christian cuisine” or “Christian fashion.” Christianity retains the Jewish command to love God and neighbor, but this is the sum of God’s law, not a determination of its details.

Modernity pushes moral freedom into the domain of licentiousness. Human beings are now said to have ‘values.’ Values, a term borrowed from economics, registering demand, appetites, has colonized moral thought. Whereas virtues “are grounded in the nature of things,” the nature of human beings, “bringing out what most decidedly expresses what kind of beings we are,” value morality “rejects the grounding of the good on God’s will and wisdom” while rejecting its grounding “on any natural properties of beings.” Ultimately, values are generated by the will to power, as Nietzsche asserts. Nietzsche intended the values he lauded to counteract modernity’s nihilism, but unlike God’s will, human wills waver, covering that underlying nihilism slightly. “We need to come back to the two premodern notions,” virtues and commandments, bringing them into coordination. We will not need to “construct” such a coordinated system: “It already existed in the Middle Ages in three religions.” 

From the ancient philosophers, the men of the Middle Ages took the idea of virtues “as the flourishing of the human as such, regardless of the diversity of cultures and religions,” an idea that “implies acknowledging something like a human nature,” something within each person. As for the divine commandments, they are scarcely the expressions of “the whims of a tyrant, foisted upon a fold of slaves,” as the moderns incline to claim. “All the Biblical commandments stem from a first basic and utterly simple commandment, namely ‘Be!’ ‘Be what you are!'” “Deuteronomy summarizes all the commandments to be observed under the heading of ‘choose life.'” 

Not only a child’s biological but also his moral life typically begins in a family, “the first place in which people are taught virtues and commanded to obey a benevolent being,” “introducing them into the sphere of what transcends the biological level”—morality and also language, literature, religion, art.  The modern state and its commercial markets “can’t help trying to break the family and to recast it according to their own needs,” as “the family doesn’t fit into the inner logic that pushes the state and the market forward.” Indeed, the word ‘society’ initially referred to companies, trading enterprises; its transfer to human groups signifies the commercialization of those groups in modernity. Those ruling modern states prefer dealing with individuals, who are weaker, more easily governed, than families; the modern market inclines to treat persons as commodities and/or consumers. “The family is a space inside of which people are accepted for what they are, and not for what they do,” a space that states and markets dislike. At the same time, states and markets need persons who have been ‘well brought up.’ Hence the push for public education, whereby the state takes over familial and ‘churchy’ functions. And, as Brague notices, Christianity challenges the family, too: “The Bible is not that sweet on the family,” as Jesus “has harsh words against people who prefer their family to the kingdom of heaven.” The family “is a very good thing, but it is not the Good.” 

With their valorization of heredity, traditional aristocracies especially prized the family, and for centuries resisted modern state-building monarchs while looking down on commoners engaged ‘in trade.’ Admittedly, such “aristocratic societies belong to the past.” Still, “their view of life should be kept as a precious treasure if we want to avoid the dire diagnosis of Edmund Burke that ‘people will not look forward to posterity, who never look back to their ancestors.'” Aristocrats did something democrats seldom do: “They thought in the long run, not because of special moral qualities, but simply because they couldn’t do otherwise, and they had to think that way because the underlying model for their whole practice was the family.” That is why Alexis de Tocqueville, while understanding the triumph of democracy, called upon his fellow aristocrats to do their best to guide democracy, even if they could no longer rule it, and advised democrats to listen to their advice. Instead, the task of long-run thinking has fallen to what is left of the churches, tenured bureaucrats, and corporate boards—none of whom can be described, as the saying goes, of being ‘family- friendly.

The family is where we learn to speak. Brague defines civilization as conversatio civilis, a phrase whose origin he attributes to Aquinas, who criticized Averroës’s “thesis of an immediate communion of all minds in the Agent Intellect,” a claim that tends to deny that understanding is “a task to be fulfilled by undertaking some sort of work,” not a spontaneous and effortless affect. Aquinas wants political life, the life of the city, where speaking with one another is “possible, even easy” to initiate if not to maintain well. Aquinas concurs with Aristotle in defining man as a political animal, a being whose nature flourishes in civilization. The give and take of conversation suggest “some sort of dialectics,” which may lead to reasoning. Unfortunately, modernity has at times inclined in the opposite direction, with Herder’s enthusiasm for the barbarian invasions of Rome (“new blood flowing into the aging body”), Nietzsche’s “blond beast,” and Heidegger’s nonsense about the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. Brague answers, if the barbarian invasions “had a positive effect on the culture of late antiquity,” it was “because the Germans and other invaders wanted to enter the Roman Empire not to destroy it but to share in its benefits,” to “become part of the Roman nobility.” In exchange, they eschewed human sacrifices, as is “very much to their credit.” Thoroughgoing barbarism unrepentantly seeks to destroy civilization, since barbarism wants to cut off conversation, sever the continuity among generations—very often by ‘severing’ the persons who constitute one or more generations of the peoples they target. 

This can be done violently but also peacefully, as when “reforms in the educational system give evidence of a deliberate attempt to get rid of whatever constituted the reference points of our identity. Destroy what made us ourselves, the peaceful barbarians say, and we can create ourselves anew. “Western Civ has got to go!” chanted the students, half a century or more back. Once they became the teachers, they did a fairly thorough job of that. 

Brague is no simple traditionalist, however. “What has led to us is older than history,” “even older than the whole human adventure.” Nature predates humanity. But modern historicism negates “the boundary that separated history and nature, the transitory sublunary and the eternal,” claiming that “Nature herself” forms part of “an evolutionary process.” Augustine new better, praising agriculture not as an abrogation of nature but as its measured use for human purposes through cultivation, “a metaphor for culture at large.” “Is there a greater spectacle,” he asked his readers, “and more worthy of our wonder, or where human reason can more somehow speak with nature, than when the force of the root and of the seed is asked about what it can do and what it can’t?” This means that agriculture “consist[s] in some sort of dialogue with nature,” answering “the questions we ask her.” “Reason in us has its echo in the reason that is buried in the world.” Agriculture shows us how we can “steer a middle course between two excesses, one that sees [nature] as a corpse that we can cut up as we want and another that sees in her a goddess, like the Nature of the eighteenth-century philosophes or the Gaia worshipped by some deep ecologists o of the present time.” In this, again, the medieval thinkers were better, understanding that “Nature has her laws because things have a stable nature.” They added that this was so because God created it that way, for reasons He reveals in His book. “It is mankind as a whole, the speaking animal, the conversing animal, that doubts of its own legitimacy and that needs grounds for wishing to push further the human adventure.”

 

Aurel Kolnai: Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays. Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999.

 

Modern political thought inclines to associate equality closely with liberty. That assumption needs scrutiny, not necessarily with a view to denying it but with a view to making it more precise, more accurate. Kolnai undertakes this critical task.

Born in 1900, the Hungarian Jew and Catholic convert Aurel Kolnai witnessed the technologically brilliant, politically catastrophic first three-quarters of the twentieth century. In his excellent introduction to this collection, Daniel J. Mahoney calls him “one of the greatest thinkers of the century to place the restoration of common-sense evaluation and philosophical realism at the very center of his philosophical and political itinerary”—a distinction that makes Kolnai a very rare specimen indeed. He was especially critical of the fashionable ideologies of Existentialism and Marxism, which twisted political life in malignant directions throughout the period, each holding out the utopian prospect of human perfection without God. As Mahoney writes, “Kolnai’s deepest, most original contribution to the understanding of the utopian mind is his recognition of the ‘utterly fundamental contradiction’ at the heart of the ideological enterprise,” which promises “a new world without human alienation and divisions of any kind” while “the attainment of such a new reality is impossible without a radically unprecedented ‘revolutionary’ schism between the old humanity and the new—a schism that cannot ever be surmounted.” Instead of realizing perfection, regimes animated by utopian ideologies crush liberty, murder innocent people, and achieve social equality under conditions of political tyranny because their rulers cannot understand, or stand, that they are not forming new human beings out of formless clay.

In his substantial 1949 essay, “Privilege and Liberty,” Kolnai takes up the question of aristocracy and democracy addressed variously by Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and Tocqueville. In the postwar years, with Stalin still securely ensconced in the Kremlin, his regime having made colonies of a half-dozen countries in eastern and central Europe, and Mao completing his conquest of China, the Western commercial republics were on the defensive. Kolnai sees that the moral and intellectual defenses of those regimes were weak because they share the egalitarian claims of the Communists, seen in their mutual espousal of what he calls “the cult of the ‘Common Man,'” “a construct of subversive sophists and seekers for power” who, although “dread[ing] Communism as the blighting tyranny it is,” incline “to submit to it half-heartedly,” lacking any serious argument against the Communists’ stated aims. Communists could stage their claim to power on the right of the “great multitude of people as such, in regard to its rights, interests, welfare, security, perfection, and so forth” to overthrow “Privilege.” 

Kolnai identifies three fallacies in both Marxism and, crucially, ‘Progressive’ egalitarianism: the notion of class conflict, which assumes that life is a zero-sum game; the notion that egalitarian distribution of goods and services by the state is just; and the notion that the common good is the same as sameness, that “collectivism is only individualism raised to the high power of an absolute monism,” that ‘society’ resembles a person. In both of these ideologies, “Privilege is not merely an ‘injustice’ which favors ‘the few’ to the detriment of ‘the many’ but above all, a symbol of the imperfection of Man as compared with God…a symbol of the ‘irksome,’ ‘irritating,’ ‘humiliating’ transcendence of the Good in relation to human Will.” A comical example of this was the undergraduate in an English class who complained that the problem with God in Paradise Lost is that He has a holier-than-thou attitude. But in politics the mindset of egalitarian resentment can prove lethal.

Egalitarianism runs up against “the fact that a few or rather, very many men in different ways transcend the ‘common level’ of mankind.” Egalitarians war against reality, even as Milton’s Satan wars against God. In both instances, the rebellion looks like a campaign for liberty but ends in tyranny, however temporary that regime may be. In opposition, Kolnai “propose[s] to envisage Privilege most of all in its close interrelation with Liberty”—indeed, as Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and Tocqueville saw the European aristocrats as liberty’s defenders against excesses committed by both the rule of the One and the rule of the Many.

By “Privilege,” Kolnai means distinction: to be set apart from others but not above the laws. He does not mean a hierarchy of ruling offices (the Communists had that) or the sort of ‘Platonist’ regime that veers into utopianism (if taken literally). He means, under modern conditions of ‘statism,’ a civil society in which dissimilar and distinct persons and classes, ‘privileged’ and ‘underprivileged’ alike, participate in civic life, the former as trustees for the latter because their participation occurs on the private or civil-social level and aims at the good of the latter. Such a civil society is reasonable without being rationalist, without expecting reason to rule outright. That is, in such a society, reasonable persons will recognize the limitations of reason as a means of civil-social and political organization—which may indeed be the point of Plato’s Republic.

Rationalism operates on “the principle of Identity,” the express hostility to anything that is not the same as itself. ‘Identity politics’ homogenizes. (Today, it might be added, what is now called identity politics homogenizes under the guise of ‘diversity,’ with the ‘New Left’ proposing the same egalitarian socialist regime as the ‘Old Left’ of Communism and Progressivism.) “The new Caliph Omar will not content himself with having the library of Alexandria burnt but cause most of the books to be ‘edited’ so as to form ‘future’ chapters in the progressive Koran.” Without confusing human regimes with God’s regimes, Kolnai insists that those who deny that there are some people who by their very nature orient their souls to the cultivation of “a certain set of higher values,” incline also to deny the existence of a holy, that is, separate and superior God. “The ideal of Identity precludes the reality of Participation: in other words, Pantheists or Anthropotheists cannot realize, or live by, their status as children of God.” It is true that “every high value is ‘meant for me,'” no matter who I am, “not only in the sense of benefiting me as a recipient of its causal effects but of perfecting me through an appreciative response on my part,” but it is meant for me as something ‘above’ me, “not as an immanent function of the unfolding of my volitions, needs or capacities.” Privileges persons and classes are not intrinsically better in some metaphysical sense; all men are in “bondage” to “what is intrinsically better than they, tow what essentially transcends their scope yet enters into the constitution of their goal.” As a Catholic, Kolnai identifies the Pope as one whose holiness and fatherliness exists because he serves God. Some persons may indeed by “more saintly personally than the Holy Father,” but they properly approach in with reverence as “the symbol and guardian, not so much of human saintliness as of our corporate super-natural ‘subjectness'” to God. “Hierarchy stands for the submission of man to what is highest in man and higher than man but claiming his attention: ultimately, along with many necessary or completive avenues of approach to God; whereas ‘Emancipation’ stands for the subjection of man to man, and his bondage to what is lowest in him; or again, ultimately, to the Spirit that seeks to destroy him.” While Participation registers “the basic truth that response, not fiat, is the prime gesture of the human person,” ‘Emancipation” and ‘Equality,” in “proclaiming the equal and joint sovereignty of men, speak the idiom of Identity,” “supplanting or, indeed, ‘creating’ God.” In Aristotelian terms, Participation is reciprocal, political in the strict sense, whereas Identity is the principle of a command-and-obey relationship, not merely camouflaged by egalitarianism but animated by it in “a pledge of (sham) perfection”. Egalitarianism intends to override human reality because although human beings are all equally human and equally under God, they are not equally gifted or positioned, and the attempt to make them so requires a decidedly inegalitarian regime to enforce the equality it demands. It “aspires to surmount the individuation, plurality and contingent inequality of men, inherent in the specific imperfection of man and his position in the order of being.” Such a regime “will insist not only on enforcing the allegiance” to itself “but on determining the wills and creating the souls of all”—an ambition that distinguishes modern tyrants from “the comparatively harmless tyrants of old who contented themselves with being obeyed.”

Communism redefines liberty in terms of egalitarianism. According to the regime of the Soviet Union, real, as distinct from bourgeois freedom consists of the unlimited rule of “the supreme power” because it supposedly “embodies the power of ‘every one and all,'” with the exception of those who refuse to go along, which it deems “outside the pales of humanity.” That is, “government shall be omnipotent” and “it shall represent the identical thought, will and power of all.” Unlike the republican regime as understood by (for example) James Madison, in which elected officials can be voted out of office if their constituents decide that they no longer represent the sovereign people who put them there, modern tyrants lead the people, posing as the vanguards of an unfolding, immanent dialectical process that progressively and in the last inevitably shapes humanity into a homogeneous mass whose constituents will be capable of communitarian life. Because this amounts to a form of Pantheism, “Communism is nothing but the determinate attempt to take seriously, and to actually realize the one true and ultimate Freedom of the Common Man: man’s ‘Freedom from God.'” “Man as such is elevated to the rank of god head” and rightly so, according to the ideology, because “universal Matter” is ultimately identical to “rational humanity”: matter is evolving according to rational, dialectical laws toward a fully rational, communitarian worldwide society. “Man’s ’emancipation from God’ is coined out, as it were, in the concrete scheme of his emancipation from his ‘self-forged chains’: from the ‘natural law’ and ‘moral order’ on the one hand, from the limiting and paralyzing fact of his substantial dividedness and his multicentric will on the other.” After all, “if I recognize any valid law and authority over and above my will…I cannot be God.” But in reality, Communism betokens not liberation but “the self-enslavement of man.“

As for Progressivism in contemporary liberal democratic regimes, it makes them increasingly less liberal, less free. President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” and especially his “Freedom from Want,” amounts to a demagogic appeal to the insecurity of industrial populations vulnerable to the ups and downs of a market economy. What is now called ‘welfare” is thereby made a part of freedom, no longer simply a good; as in the Marxist critique of ‘bourgeois liberalism’ and ‘bourgeois freedoms,’ real freedom is said to be the guarantee of material well-being. Similarly, “Freedom from Fear,” once named as a virtue, courage, now becomes “a boon” citizens can “demand from the State.” “It connotes the suggestion that people cannot be really ‘free’ so long as they are in any sense subject to fear: until, that is, the State has removed all cause for their being afraid of economic insecurity, or even made psychoanalytic treatment freely available for everyone suffering from ‘anxiety neurosis.'” Liberty now means not the “Constitutional State,” a state subject to “checks placed on public power, be it state-power as such or class oligarchy,” but the “Welfare State,” with welfare “including psychic ‘welfare,’ which opens up the perspective of the so-called ‘conditioning‘ of the citizen, and thus involves a tendency running counter even more fundamentally to the original meaning of civic liberty.” “Democracy has progressively come to look upon ‘freedom’ no longer a s a high good in itself, as the signature of the civic status of man, but as a title-deed to ‘real’ goods only, a mere ‘formal’ or promissory scheme which acquires its true value, indeed its actual meaning, by its ‘implementation’ with tangible need-gratifications also to be guaranteed by social organization…to be furnished by public power itself.”

Madison regarded what he called the “manly and vigilant” spirit of the American people as the final guard of their liberty. But in “the ‘common man’ world of silly matrons, meddlesome maiden aunts, vociferous viragos and literate wenches of both sexes—the world of a Puritanism sunk down to the morasses of pacifism, prohibitionism, psychoanalysis and milksop promiscuity—the ‘opposites interblend'” or ‘synthesize’ “not on the high plane of a tense revolutionary dialectic,” as in Marxism, “but in the sense of a paradise ‘available’ here and now, of an ‘ideal’ society designed to be at once a department store, a brothel and a nursery.” Freedom indeed—as defined by the Common, or perhaps the Last, Man.

This is why “totalitarian subversion” can “disguise itself under a cloak of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ within the liberal democratic regimes themselves. There is a “totalitarian aspect implicit in Liberal Democracy itself,” as it has been redefined by Progressivism. Only if the liberal democracies rests “on axioms, conventions, traditions and habits…which transcend the liberal-democratic framework itself”—as seen in the Declaration of Independence’s “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—and “impose certain ‘material’ or ‘objective’ limits on both individual liberty and popular sovereignty, thus helping to maintain a kind of accord among the multiple individual ‘wills,’ between the between the free citizenship of the individual on the one hand, and the ‘General Will,” as monistically embodied in state power, on the other,” can real liberty be secured. One impediment to this security is the historical fact that the original liberalism arose as a response to the “pseudo-Christianity” of Machiavellian and Hobbesian statism; statism preceded liberalism in time, and inclines to usurp it because liberals too often share the philosophic assumptions of the statists, even as they attempt to resist them, just as Progressives today share many of the same philosophic assumptions of the Communists.

Considered historically, the “root” of political liberty as seen in constitutional democracy lies in “Privilege”—specifically, the privileges of titled aristocrats held against monarchs and only later extended to ‘commoners.’ The extension of liberty to citizens generally does not eliminate privilege or liberty; if anything, it arms it more formidably against the ‘monarch,’ the centralized modern state, ‘the Crown.’ But there is a danger. Aristotle’s politeia or ‘mixed’ regime, in which the few and the many balance one another, may easily become too democratic, too much the rule of ‘the many,’ and then incline toward tyranny “as the all but inevitable ‘next step.'” Kolnai sees one effective way of preventing that from happening, a way unavailable to Aristotle: Christianity, which resists tyranny because it considers all human beings equally children of God, equally persons not to be tyrannized. But “Christian society,” as distinguished from Christianity itself, also faces a danger, the danger of a “humanistic misreading of the Gospel as a promise of man’s terrestrial paradise and perfection (with a stolen flavor of true Heaven about it), as a divinization of man’s abstract ‘reason’ and ‘will’ (a travesty of the beatific vision), as a doctrine of supernatural grace being taken for granted and as a part of man’s natural constitution itself”—in sum, the false, pantheistic assertion of “man’s union with Divinity in the sense of Its expropriation and absorption by the autonomous ‘energy’ of mankind.”

Obviously, privilege too has its hazards, “necessarily open to abuses,” as is “every form of official power or of professional authority.” Anything that “reduces to making the entire order of society the function of One all-determining central consciousness, the object of One omnipotent arbitrary human will” endangers liberty. That is why privilege must be constitutionally limited; such limitation, but also Privilege itself, so limited, makes Privilege the guardian of liberty. And even then, some abuses will occur: “With privilege existing in society, the freedom of some men will inevitably be trespassed upon and unduly circumscribed of narrowed down by others; with privilege eliminated from society.” Nonetheless, without any privilege “there will be no one possessing any substantial kind of freedom—and capable of using it—at all.”

In terms of practice, Kolnai remarks that federalism alone does not suffice to guard liberty if all the ruling offices are elective because egalitarianism “always tends to centralization and uniformity.” And so, to take the example of the United States Constitution, it is a very good thing that the Supreme Court is appointed, not elected. Kolnai cites the Catholic Church and independent universities as examples of such undemocratic institutions in civil societies. The Church and the universities share the “salutary mission” of “inoculating the national mind with the seeds of objective value-reference, a vision of things ‘sub specie aeterni,’ of intellectual independence and moral backbone.” Without such institutions, “civic liberty” comes into “mortal peril.” The same is true of private property and its attendant inequalities. “Private property without ‘wealth’ is possible in pure logic but not in social reality.” By ‘socializing’ it, “we can get nothing but a monistic central power tending to omnipotence and compassing the death of liberty.”

In the same year, Kolnai elaborated on his critique of “the Common Man” in an essay titled “The Meaning of the ‘Common Man.'” The Common Man is common to communism, liberal democracy, and social democracy; if liberals in the West embrace undiluted popular sovereignty they will weaken themselves in their struggle against the communists.

It is simply not true that “all social superiority as such relates antagonistically to the Common Man.” It is one thing to say that we are all “born equal,” equally human, with certain unalienable rights we all share and properly intend to guard, but quite another to say that this must entail equalization of “material ‘conditions’ or ‘chances'” as well. Such an attempt to perfect civil societies (if indeed equalization of material conditions would perfect them) presumes Godlike power, wisdom, and justice in the human beings who would be in charge of the equalization. This means that imperfect human beings would be in charge of the perfection of everyone else—what gamblers would call a ‘long shot,’ to put it mildly.

Kolnai affirms that any two men “are presumed fundamentally ‘equal’—which in fact they are in regard to the natural rights of the person as such.” But “once we go beyond the wholesome and Christian principle of a limited equality, formal and material, as implied by Man’s basic dignity and rational nature as well as by the radical transcendence of the person’s ultimate value before God above his social, physical, intellectual and cultural, and even, in a tangible sense, moral, distinctions or shortcomings,” then “we cannot help sliding down the path that leads to the abyss of material equality, with its concomitants of an impoverishing, oppressing, suffocating and deadening uniformity,” seen in actual socialist regimes.

Socialists will protest, saying that egalitarianism is “hostile neither to the division of labor nor to personal genius, talents or accomplishments, but merely to the social hierarchy of artificial group privileges which perverts the division of labor and stifles rather than brings to fruition personal prowess or merit.” Creativity will flourish, even as acquisitiveness will disappear. Socialism will “liberate genius from the shackles of poverty and the handicap of a humble origin,” enabling “true art, true science, true individuality [to] flourish.” This was indeed the claim of Leon Trotsky in his unintentionally hilarious 1924 book, Literature and Revolution. [1] Kolnai contents himself with irony: “The Common Man, then, is a very mysterious, not to say a mystical fellow, who according to need is admirably fitted even to ascend the highest peaks, inaccessible to a privilege-ridden mankind, of Uncommonness.”

And then there are some egalitarians without such utopian dreams, who instead endorse a policy of “break[ing] down the high peaks of human worth” while “rais[ing] up the low levels of human existence to an acceptable average standard.” This aspiration rests on “the crude fallacy” that there exists “a constant ‘sum total’ of ‘goods,’ in the all-embracing sense of the term, which can be ‘distributed’ in more unequal or more equal ways.” This ignores the dynamism of real human societies and of reality itself. Peaks will arise, like it or not, and any comprehensive effort to prevent that, or to demolish them when they occur, can only stifle the enrichment of human life. Biology itself, but also “early education and coining influence of the family atmosphere” (more succinctly known as ‘good parenting’) will tell. Aristocracy defined as ‘titled nobility’ once reflected this, if roughly—such terms as ‘titled’ and ‘nobility’ indicate prominence, the fact of being known. Nobility in this sense “represents value intrinsic, distinctively ‘qualitative,’ pervading the essence of its bearer as it were, and as such directly underlying a claim to social prerogative or leadership,” a “quasi-natural, quasi-essential superiority that is necessarily not only in  society but also of society and so far inseparable from an aspect of artificiality not, however, by  or from society” because it “originates in supra-social, quasi ‘entitative’ human value.” This in no way suggests that those who are ‘in the aristocracy’ are less “liable to sin, sickness and ignorance as any proletarian.” It does more than suggest that conventional privileges recognize the existence, in civil society, of the natural inequalities that enrich civil society, in some respects making it civil—differentiated and thereby free from tyrannical centralized rule. “What matters is the humility displayed by society as a whole in accepting and elaborating a manifold pattern of ‘distinctions between higher and lower’ as part of its own vital constitution.”

Egalitarian ideology does not confine itself to government and relations among socioeconomic classes. It has spread to “the relationships of the sexes and the domain of parental authority.” “Its main theme with regard to the emancipation of women is really the superimposition of artificial similarity upon natural dissimilarity in the place of ‘artificial’ mores shaped in reverent awareness of the natural order and the elemental differences between the sexes which it implies.” As for “the destruction of parental authority, linked with the odd idea of the emancipation of youth” (odd because youth is “a necessarily transitory stage in human life,” unlike sexuality and class), it “strikes even more fundamentally at the root of the concept of a social order pervaded with natural bases of authority” and “is obviously inherent in the drive for totalitarian State regimentation.” 

Kolnai distinguishes between the “Common Man” and the “Plain Man.” The “Common Man” represents man absent custom, convention—an abstraction who does not exist in actual life. The “Plain Man” is man as most men actually exist in civil societies everywhere—unprivileged but not ‘underprivileged,’ an ordinary guy. He will differ from one country to the next because conventions vary from one country to the next. “He is not the ideologist of his own grandeur”; “the last thing that would naturally occur to him is to abolish ‘his betters,’ in the broadest sense of the term, and to actually step into their place.” And “though it is nothing but vulgar obscurantist mysticism to believe that the ‘plain man’ can ‘govern himself’ better than a Prince and a State aristocracy can govern society, it is indubitably true that a system of government in which the ‘plain man’ as such ‘has a say’ is intrinsically better than government by an esoteric caste of public officials no  matter how well bred, ‘cultured’ and ‘public spirited.'” The “sane sense” of democracy isn’t egalitarianism but participation, “at various levels, of the broad strata of the people in the shaping of public policy,” ensuring that a prince or an aristocrat is “reminded of his limits and of his duty of subordination to the whole of which he is a part.” 

The only real Common Man, “in the sense of being the Head and Representative of all Mankind,” is Jesus Christ. He is the sole embodiment of the “common good,” being “a universal Cause and End,” the one Person truly “common to mankind.” The Common Man as “molded and formed by the intelligentsia,” however, has no divinity about him, lacking either the wisdom, the justice, or the power to redeem human beings. This is why Kolnai calls “the war against nobility, that ostensibly righteous social rebellion,” actually amounts to a “metaphysical rebellion leveled at something that towers infinitely above kings, dukes, barons, squires, factory owners, generals and admirals, fops or usurers,” its proximate targets. The Common Man so conceived is “a robot sublimized into an angel,” “a man prepared and trained for slavery to that Power which is constituted upon the principle of his claim to sovereignty and in terms of his consciousness of unchecked selfhood” but fashioning “the yoke of a comprehensive scientific knowledge of necessity,” whether socioeconomic (Marxism) or racialist (Nazism). In order to impose such (pseudo-)scientific rule, human beings must be induced to suppose that their good is the satisfaction of their appetites, physical phenomena that can be satisfied empirically. “It is no accident that it should have been Spinoza, the ‘sublime’ and ‘pious’ rationalist, monist, and pantheist, not some unruly voluptuary, not an empirical or materialist epicurean, who first codified with classical rigor the great modern principle of the good defined in terms of the appetite.” The ‘low’ needed to be presented as if it were the ‘high,’ indeed the highest. Spinoza, it will be recalled, was neither a Marxist nor a Nazi but a ‘liberal’ of a new sort. The ‘progressivist’ liberalism he prepared the ground for (it needed the historicism of Hegel to complete it) constitutes “the primal form of the ‘Common Man’ world, instinct with an ‘ideology’ of its own.” And while Progressives typically oppose Communism and Nazism (they do not recognize the children of their own mother-assumptions), they often cannot separate themselves from them with sufficient rigor to really fight them in any thoroughgoing way, as Kolnai had seen in the 1930s, when appeasement of fascism and collaboration with Communism afflicted ‘the democracies.’

A decade after the publication of “Privilege and Liberty” and “The Meaning of the ‘Common Man,'” Kolnai offered a critique of utopianism, which he distinguished from utopias. Utopias, seen in such literary works as Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia, do not exist anywhere and are not intended so to do. “Every utopia suggests a human world (a society conceived as a whole) determined by one unitary and sovereign human authorship: sprung from one human mind with its peculiar vision, scale of preferences, habits of reasoning, and imagination, although calculate to carry a more or less universal appeal”—a world “analogous in some way to Divine creation” and characterized by an imitation of  the “streamlined perfection” seen in the world as God indeed created it. And as in Eden before evil crawled into it, “the things of Utopia are not right as opposed to wrong things but manifestations of the right way of being.” By contrast, utopianism claims that such perfection can be achieved in the postlapsarian world. This ambition rests upon a contradiction: “a Will operating on behalf of the total good, the total needs, the unitary mind of mankind, yet necessarily against most of what men really want and cannot cease to want.” Against this, Kolnai concurs with the German philosopher and follower of Husserl, Max Scheler: “Repentance, not Utopia, is the greatest revolutionary force in the moral world.” [2]

In the final essays in the volume, Kolnai turns from a critique of egalitarianism from an examination of conservatism, emphasizing “the pluralist trait of all true conservative thought,” thought not to be confused with “the inflexibility of archaic societies” with their lives of “unthinking habit” or, “above all,” the “counter-revolutionary or fascist-influenced conservatism of panic.” Conservatives uphold “public liberty, which rests on the fully realistic multiformity and mutual limitation of authorities, hierarchies and power relations, on the idea not of equality but of equilibrium.” Conservatives know how to defer, never assuming that they ‘know better’ than those ranked above them in society while readily guarding themselves against tyrannical encroachment. Kolnai gives as his example Tocqueville, who “could not have known Marx’s febrile dream of a ‘realization of the human race’—the real totalitarian ideal—or the ‘historical necessity’ of this operation, or of the Marxist vision, as highly revolutionary as it is reactionary, of the future abolition of the division of labor. Yet he saw, with piercing vision and fearful foreboding, the danger that the demand for ‘equal rights,’ with which he completely sympathized, leads with almost logically unavoidable necessity to the demand for an equal level of culture and welfare.” Tocqueville saw that aristocrats such as himself could no longer rule modern ‘democracy,’ but they could still guide it, advise it, temper its excesses. 

A genuine conservative is an ‘authoritarian,’ not in the sense of unthinking subservience to whoever happens to be ‘in power’ but in the sense of acknowledging the sovereignty of God in the manner of “the great Duns Scotus” and “certain scattered protestant theologians of the present day” (Reinhold Niebuhr, for example?) who define “the morally good as what is in accord with God’s will,” as distinguished from Hobbes and his epigoni, who derive “what is morally good from the will of the state, especially the undivided and unambiguous decree of one man, the monarch.” Conservatives incline to what Anglophone philosophers call an ‘intuitionist’ ethics and “the closely related doctrine of objective value,” against “any kind of ‘vitalistic,’ pre- or antimoral, defiantly immanent affirmation of the primary order,” which denies the transcendent character of what (indeed Who) sets the standard for flawed human beings. “Hegel’s historicist, emphatically developmental ‘dialectical’ theory of ‘absolute consciousness’ has imparted new impetus to the modern extremisms of the Right, but it is an even more important basis for Marxism’s egalitarian and all-human, ultra-revolutionary vision of perfection, which has in our own century legitimized a totalitarian state power which goes incomparably further than any earlier known form of tyranny.” “The more subtle virtue of patience is almost a natural prerogative of the conservative, something which the revolutionary in general—we might venture to add, necessarily—lacks.” Patience fortifies the conservative’s “innermost secret,” the “most puzzling of all virtues, hardest to analyze and to justify, trust in God.” Kolnai “gladly concede[s] that blind confidence is a neither advisable nor praiseworthy caricature of trust,” which “should be bestowed in the knowledge that one can be deceived” by men, including men who claim to speak for God.

Kolnai refines these distinctions still further, distancing himself somewhat from such sober conservatives as Michael Oakeshott and Jacques Maritain. “Professor Oakeshott is liable to overshoot the mark and attribute to habit, routine, tradition, casual expedients, the ‘skill’ and ‘know-how’ of the experienced and the ‘self-propelling’ virtue of activity once engaged in, both a larger space in human life and a more independent status than they really possess,” “inclin[ing] to underestimate the inherent spiritual stature of man and the intellectual claims it implies,” including the spiritual claim of reasoning. For his part, in his Man and the State, Maritain offers a confused mixture of Catholicism and modern progressivism. This consists of “a synthesis, suffused with all the religious afflatus of the soul, between Christ and the idol of modernity,” between “Christ and His modern caricature,” between “the true Crist of the faith and the substituted Christ of humanism,” “Christ and the Anti-Christ.” This “sentimental and romantic attempt” at “dressing poor Thomas Aquinas in the rags of a laicist apostle of democracy” overlooks the fact that “men only deified the state because they took to deifying man.” (One might also say that Maritain makes Catholicism look a bit too much like the Protestantism of Woodrow Wilson.) 

Daniel J. Mahoney concludes his Forward to this volume with the just observation that “Kolnai’s conservatism is undoubtedly too European, too attentive—for an American audience—to the role that socially recognized traditional institutions such as monarchy and aristocracy can play in supporting liberty and maintaining the larger equilibrium of the social order.” It is also likely that Kolnai’s hopes in that regard, plausible as they may have been in Chateaubriand’s and Tocqueville’s day, were much wanner in the decades following the Second World War. The European revolutions and the Napoleonic wars wounded the aristocratic class and hollowed out legitimist monarchies, but the two world wars of the twentieth century and the Communist regimes that followed them in Eastern and Central Europe eradicated them as political entities. European conservatives have instead turned to organizing the ‘plain men’ in national organizations that so far have resisted the excesses of Fascism, although Kolnai would worry that populism cannot long resist despotic tendencies.

 

Notes

1. See Leon Trotsky: Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1971). For a brief and decidedly unimpressed commentary, see Will Morrisey: Reflections on Malraux: Cultural Founding in Modernity (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996, pp.161-163).
2. This aphorism may well trace back to Scheler’s days as a Catholic, which he later repudiated, adopting none other than the pantheism Kolnai himself decries.