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
- 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).
- 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.
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