Month: October 2023

6. Will, Conservative Sensibility (15 April 2022)

by kurto

Contemporary American political debate comprises an argument between Madisonian conservativism and Wilsonian progressivism. To be conservative is to adhere to the Founders’ classical liberalism, to individualism borne of pre-government natural rights and the spontaneous social order which emerges. The core of its endeavor is promoting political and socioeconomic practices which promote virtuous living. More specifically, the political objective is to restore government based on natural rights, which imply limited government because these rights predate government, which exists to secure those rights. Conservatism faces three core problems: family disintegration, unfunded social benefits, and corrupt political culture, especially in Washington DC.

Since the Enlightenment, the West’s primary political problem has been the tension between self-assertion and self-control. In a plural society, government focuses on minimum moral essentials which can be described as empathy and self-control. Reasoning about the proper use of freedom is liberty in practice. By 1770, the colonials came to see individual rights not a originating in English common law but natural law: Madison wrote the Revolution was only a consequent of changed attitudes over 1760-75. The American project is exceptional in being free of feudal remnants, religion, or aristocracy, in stemming not from social theory but personal liberty – not what government should do, but what it must not do; this American sense of conservativism is incidentally opposed to the UK / continental traditions of duty and hierarchy. The Founding is one of history’s most extraordinary feats of political culture, made possible by general deference to excellence in public life, brought together in Philadelphia. Moreover, founding America on Madison interests was prudent; everyone has them, whereas virtues are difficult to acquire, agree, and sustain.

A society which values individualism expects unequal distribution of rewards. The more complex the society, the more government should defer to spontaneous order. Political economy was shortened to economy at the behest of social scientists touting rigor, yet the core remains allocation of scarce resources. Hayek asserted society advances by the functions it can perform without thinking (i.e., reflexively), contra JS Mill; government is an unequal and corruptible judge. Thus society’s economic regulator is pricing. Whereas JK Galbraith in the Affluent Society saw consumer desires as manufactured by corporate marketing, undermining respect for market equilibria. The effect is to reverse Burke’s view of government’s existing to deal with social wants; government can stimulate wants which it will be duly rewarded for providing. Inequality is not inherently injurious provided there is sufficiency (adequate resources).

Progressives attack individualism, reversing the view of rights preceding government. The democratic (majority) will is the manifestation of liberty; government’s antecedent job is shaping appetites, a European view which conflicts with the Lockean view of natural sociability. Progressivism holds human nature is plastic, is a product of shaping social forces, always becoming and therefore susceptible to steerage (which Will sometimes idiosyncratically calls historicism). Borne of Rousseau, this view is the more man is stripped of his own resources (i.e., of his nature), the greater the government’s possibilities – the very basis of 20th-century totalitarianism. It is Roman, government-made law with no limiting principle. Progressivism’s core text is Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which aside from asserting the economically determined views of the contemporary politicians, disparages judicial review, and its worldview follows Thomas Dewey’s results-oriented pragmatism. The contrast is cooperative order versus top-down social engineering. Paradoxically, though Progressivism sees no individual human nature, groups (races) possess them. Also, Progressivism feel plural society should not be allowed to carry core cultural views from generation to generation, that is, it is intentionally historicist. The modern presidency is the agent of Progressivism, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (who held that checks and balances are absurd) and then to Lyndon Johnson.

Modern Americans talk like Jefferson (‘wise and frugal government’) and vote like Hamiltonians. In contemporary America, 35% of receive means-tested benefits including 50% of blacks and Hispanics; in 1960 the ratio of disabled to employed was 1 in 134, today it’s 1 in 16. Dependency should not be a political right. Conservativism seeks an equilibrium. Human nature makes political claims; government inevitably has a nurturing role, borne of the virtuous qualities, which Will sees as a popular government’s continuing task of education. (Statecraft as Soulcraft was not a prescription but an observation of what government inevitably does: whether to secure individual rights or shape collective outcomes? Will declares he was wrong upon 1983’s publication that the Founders paid too little attention to civic virtues: everyday capitalism promotes good habits such as honesty, politeness which are implicitly virtues.) Virtually the whole of contemporary government has become a corrupting force in a Tocquevillian vein, degrading without tormenting.

Congress must reassert itself via less delegation to administrative bodies, and the judiciary led by the Supreme Court should insist on separation of powers. In the latter 20th century, government services were increasingly less connected with elected officials and more to semi-permanent bureaucrats. In 2016, Congress passed 3,000 pages of legislation, against 97,000 pages of administrative law enrolled in the Federal register, an example of legislative delegation to executive agencies such as the Consumer Protection Bureau – which dangerously funds itself. Congressional atrophy is executive branch hypertrophy. (An aside: stripping the states’ rights to appoint senators (in 1913’s 17th amendment) served to make states administrative extensions of Congress and senators more responsive to Washington.)

Only the courts can preserve constitutional order against the general will. Originalism is meant to defend a fundamental understanding; judicial restraint does not equal securing rights but only deference to majoritarianism. The US constitution specifies not democracy but federated republic. Its fixed purpose is to protect natural rights in changing circumstances. Contra Oliver Holmes, there is no right of majority to embody opinions in laws. Lochner wrongly sought to establish government’s right to prescribe contracts (Bork is majoritarian?); the due process clause should prohibit arbitrary government actions which restrict individual rights.

America’s problem is not wealth determining political power but the opposite. The Depression accelerated America’s dependence on government; the postwar era (including educational subsidies) renewed social confidence; the civil rights movement reinvigorated federal centrality. The New Deal’s break with Liberalism was abandoning the idea that society produces most elements of happiness: instead, government has a duty to provide. Providing for nebulous insecurity added emotional needs and established a permanent tension in the dynamics of free, capitalist society.

Americans are less likely to believe in the destiny of bleak social forces because they embrace individualism. Most Americans are not only patriots who love their country but also nationalists who feel their system is better. Progressives, notably Barack Obama!, disagree.

Pessimism is a check on scientific fatalism, a realistic opposition to prescribed outcomes, a revolt against passive role in predetermined events, a clarifying of what we can and cannot do. Freedom is not universally defined all countries, let alone universally understood relative to other political goods (equality, social cohesion). Totalitarianism rises from claims to certain understandings of history and the necessity of untrammeled action. Hannah Arendt forecast ideology plus bureaucratic social control would produce new, irresistible tyranny, but she admitted the 1956 Hungarian rebellion showed human nature was unchanging in its thirst for liberty.
Religion is helpful to but not necessary for American Conservatism. Christians should be wary of government which goes beyond defending individual rights, because Christianity is concerned with dignity of the individual. Locke said most need religion as a shortcut to wisdom; Christianity was certainly central to the Founders who observed the imperfectability of human nature, that original sin does not vitiate individual dignity, and there are universal moral truths. But the author’s overstates agnosticism as if to demonstrate realism.

Who will want to attend the postmodern university if everything is open to reinterpretation? Why devote scarce resources to obsessing race, sex, class?
Will is at his best identifying the contrasts of Conservativism and Progressivism, and the addition of Hayekian views of spontaneous socioeconomic order are helpful; yet his somewhat idiosyncratic in his views of religion, historicism. While immensely learned, the book should have condensed (or several books): too often it’s a clip job.

8. Spencer, Battle for Europe (17 May 2006)

by kurto

A well-constructed analysis of 1704’s Battle of Blenheim, in which John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, defeated (and captured!) armies of Louis XIV for the first time in nearly 50 years. The book nimbly progresses from Europe’s turn-of-the-century political environment (and Britains’s since the Glorious Revolution), to the War of Spanish Succession, and finally on to campaigning and the famous battlefield. Churchill and Prince Eugene of Savoy are the protagonists. Though it would be another five years before the conflict’s denouement, the battle ended French ambitions of annexing the Holy Roman Empire (or its remnants), and led to repulse from Italy. In Britain, Blenheim reshaped the country’s military stature on the Continent, and when aligned with sea power, set the stage of the first great imperial age of the 18th century. Primarily a synthesis of leading works; needs more theater maps; highly readable.

9. Dine, French Rugby Football (6 June 2006)

by kurto

Not for beginners is this cultural history, which favors academic theory at the expense of recounting events. Thus there is no mention of the 1999 World Cup semifinal versus New Zealand, nor does the author address the question of why the XV de France is so unpredictable. He’s at his best exploring ‘le rugby du villages’, showing for example how a postwar construction boom in Lourdes helped produce the country’s dominant team from 1948-60. The book also does well in summarizing the transition to professionalism, but does not really delve into the persistence of violence, which is described as an amateur tradition that continues to function as an extension of provincial territoriality. In keeping with Annalisme and structuralism, Dine skips over worthies like Lourdes’ Jean Prat. Once exception is Jean-Pierre Rives — but ties to Albert Ferrasse are of primary interest. Dine evidently would have preferred that league surpassed union because of the latter’s Vichy ties, and that Ferrasse have been succeeded by someone other than Bernard Lapasset. As with Braudel, it is impossible not to profit from this work. But in taking this subject on his terms, rather than the contemporary context, his conclusions become idiosyncratic and politicized.

10. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (25 July 2006)

by kurto

The true nature of the Enlightenment is best demonstrated by 18th-century Britain, where such concepts as nature, liberty, reason, rights and truth were most fully adumbrated in the concern for the ‘moral sense’. The thesis is revisionist, for the French philosophes have been considered to embody the paradigm, and only the Scottish (but not Burke!) have been understood as members of the canon. But British writers from Shaftesbury through Smith and on to the great Anglo-Irishman, along with the practical example of John Wesley’s Methodists, demonstrate the fundamental predilection to see dignity in all men. Not so the philosophes, preoccupied with the ‘ideology of reason’, as were the British Dissenters, or the Americans, focused on the politics of liberty. So Britain’s ‘sociology of virtue’ makes the strongest claim to the Enlightenment’s essence; however, each country’s subsequently development bears something of the others. A bibliography worth exploring, and worth revisiting for its brilliance and clarity.

1. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (20 Jan 2020)

by kurto

Politics and philosophy are categorically different: addressing ends, the former seeks to create, preserve, and generally adapt as it can; the latter seeks to understand for its own sake, and cannot be reduced.
Rationalists insist ideology or technocracy must guide politics, and cannot expect to reach their predefined goals. To the Rationalist, there’s no value in mere existence – nothing should be unscrutinized. Reform is wastage – it’s better to start over – and change must be induced. The customary and traditional is wrongly seen as changeless. Drawing on Bacon and Descartes (Pascal having avoided Cartesian certainty with his doctrine of probability), they see technical knowledge as the only kind of practical, genuine knowledge. Oakeshott sees early history of the US as Rationalist: pioneers were given to self-confident experimentation upon abstract ideals at the expense of tradition; but he overlooks their predominance from the 1900s.
There is no science of society. Social custom and arrangements must be seen as precursors to politics, since there indicate how societies go about their business. It’s necessary to define and understand political knowledge and education in order to improve the caliber of politics. A community’s politics is no less individual than its language and must be pursued more lore or less equal proficiency. Rationalism has misapplied philosophical writings to politics. Resolution of a given matter lies in actual arrangements, not in the greater or less application of a theory or system. The successes of government lie in orderly, peaceable routines, not in manifesting religion or theory or philosophy – all searches for truth or perfection.
Politics is a proper subject of history not because of history’s intrinsic concern with past events but as it reveals detail of concrete application – how affairs were handled. Equally it’s important to understand what was said about past events for understanding of contemporary process. Political machinery is not so much apparatus fit in advance for a purpose but the manners of behavior which fail without context from which they came. Contra Mill, who held representative government proper to any society which reached a certain level of civilization, arrangements reveal agreed approaches to unknown results – not best practices. Political philosophy is not accretive, does not increase the likelihood of success, but is redolent of history, ability to espy good or bad precedents.
The historian is scientific in looking at matters not as they affect but as they are in themselves. Freeing oneself from influence of the past (i.e., ‘relevance’) is harder still – the not understanding the world in our present interests. Events are not ‘necessary and sufficient’ but only intelligible; there aren’t ‘origins’ which implies Whiggish, but only trends and causes.
Civilisation is a conversation of manifold activities: science, art, politics, etc. The way to learn a given endeavor (e.g., history) is not to study ‘historical method’ but particular aspects (e.g., civil war) to which method is a way to understand.
The characteristic of a profession or trade is knowledge of how to decide questions and problems, not a set of propositions. Consequently reason is using knowledge, not ascertaining the validity of propositions. In politics the doctrinaire is the man who falls back on knowledge of other activities while supposing such knowledge is independent of any activity. Concrete activity is knowing how to (morally) act; no action is ex ante rationale; it is rational only as to what has gone before. See also the legal standard for reasonable care, which depends on circumstances.
There are three kinds of education: school, vocational, and university. The study of politics has come to be vocational, using current idiom of explanation but not in the search for knowledge in a philosophic sense. Justice is divided into explanatory ‘texts’ making them prescriptive and thus vocational. Academic study is suitably only when activity is isolated and richly illuminated (e.g., government in France, but not China or Soviet Russia). Politics is very difficult to study because idiom takes over, converting from knowledge of what’s being (been) done to ‘how it’s done’.
Political discourse in modern Europe is distinguished by clannish vocabulary: the beliefs behind such idiom are axioms for constructing polemic, but are unable to prove their premises, instead relying on ‘generally helds’. This condition stems from Plato and Rousseau but is a false process because it does not admit competing claims. More specific to Marx, explanatory ‘laws’ of social change cannot entail political deliberation for arriving at correct decisions, or even proofs of correct and incorrect. It is the great failure of the 20th century. Yet the project continues in social sciences, the study of social and political organizations and governments of various types. No recognition of ideal types can solve distinct matters; granting axiomatic status to opinions is vice. Worse, it discourages the only solution of matching conditions to the first principles of the state.
Contemporary Europe harbors opposing ‘moralities’ of individualism and socialist ‘mass man’, and so there are two understandings of government objectives. Society finds its purpose in continuity and its principle in consensus. One is free because pursuit of current ends does not deprive one of respect for precedent. Collectivism and individualism are true alternates – there can’t be both. Collectivist government cannot tolerate individual opportunity; paradoxically nor can it abide trade unionism. The freedom of England stems from avoiding the overwhelming concentration of power – man is free because he does have to sacrifice the present to an ‘incalculable future’ nor the future to a transitory present.
On Hobbes: Leviathan is the greatest English-language masterpiece in political thought! Every masterpiece draws a new vision of man’s predicament: Hobbes can be compared to Hegel in creating a political system, a civic philosophy that intends to conciliate politics with the material doctrine of the world. For Hobbes, philosophy is the mirror of reason: civic philosophy is civil reason (order). Reason is chiefly concerned with cause and effects; this is to exclude things eternal, final causes, things cause divinity, and so on – things that are not rationally explainable. The purpose is to determine conditional causes of given effects, or conditional effects of given causes. Thus three contrasts run through Hobbes: philosophy vs theology (reason vs faith), philosophy vs science (reason vs empiricism), and philosophy vs experience (reason vs sense). There is standing tension in Hobbes between science and philosophy: things as they appear conflict with the theory of knowledge. Locke and Kant are similar, in contrast with Bacon and Descartes.
Hobbes begins with sensations because we can be certain of them, and then reasons out to determine what must be. He pursues causes of things not their nature. Therefore his view lies in a conception of the nature of philosophic knowledge, not in a doctrine of the world.
The greatest liberty of civil subjects derives from silences of the law. No distinction can be held between revealed law and natural law. Hobbes commences not with natural law or right but land and obligation, law being the product of reason. He stems from the tradition of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas but decisively breaks in that the sovereign (or sovereign body) is not subject to laws but prioritizes reason of state. For Plato and Aristotle civic association falls short of the best life of contemplation; for Hobbes the best is not common will but release of wills into desire. His opposition to Aristotle is somewhat overstated but nonetheless the latter believe in teleology (ends) while Hobbes though human behavior random. The greatness of Hobbes lies in constructing a political theory reflecting the changes of the 15th and 16th-century theologians, who consider that will, imagination, and passion replaced divine reason.
Bentham exemplifies the philosophe, who is concerned with ignorance but does not admit perplexity (i.e., the unknown); ironically, he is credulous. Either one agrees or is foolish (science or superstition). Generally Bentham is critical of 18th-century rationalism for not extending reason but instead promoting dogma.

24. Skidmore, Bosworth (27 Nov 2022)

by kurto

Narrates the civil war between the Plantagenet houses of York and Lancaster over the second half of the 15th century, culminating in the battle of Bosworth, in which Henry VII bested incumbent Richard III with the aid of the turncoat Stanleys, and the Tudor dynasty’s establishment through victorious Henry’s marrying Edward VI’s daughter Elizabeth to unite the lines. Using a popular style to point up contemporary sociopolitical perceptions as well as military and political calculation, the author is well balanced and generally steers clear of omniscience. Still, it is antiquarian in that no ideas or values seem to be at stake, only allegiances and place in an aristocratic society.