Month: January 2024

On pluralism and public harmony

by kurto

Individualism lacks a sense of civic virtue, eschews prescription, and is selfish. Individuality expresses freedom within sociopolitical parameters, and blends with pluralistic insitutions which intermediate the state. Robert Nisbet’s

    Quest for Community

explores how people ought to live together.

Hobbes endorsed authoritarianism as removing barriers to individual autonomy; the Enlightenment more destructively sought to diminish intermediaries as irrational and oppressive, trusting in the reasonable state. Neither has proved out. Nisbet turned to book 2 of the

    Politics

, supplmenting Aristotle with Burke and Tocqueville.

In the

    University Bookmanwrites:

    … A western democratic world in crisis needs above all “harmony,” but a harmony that resists the temptation to settle for a unanimity or unison that is the counterfeit of true harmony. This is the great task of contemporary politics for Nisbet and for us: combining civic and social harmony with a political unity that respects pluralism as such. This means that pluralism is not enough. Our great institutions, public and private, must relearn how to speak and act authoritatively again, imbued a genuine sense of public purpose.

3. Davie, Anglo-Australian Attitudes (17 January 2024)

by kurto

Explores the Anglo-Australian relationship through stylishly recounted stories of upper-end society, culture, and sport (i.e., cricket): Australia’s ties have been fraying and the country must inevitably become a republic. Davie correctly assumes that connections which are not husbanded must decay; wrongly presumes Aboriginal problems means British and Irish heritage must also be; and nowhere considers that the Westminster tradition has been helpful to an effective political system. Less systematic assessment than a series of essays, Davie looks to have been deflated by 1999’s ‘no’ vote: ‘spiritual independence cannot be rushed’.

Menzies and cabinet had been surprised to discover Australia’s politics did not map to Britain’s. The key cultural break of the 20th century was Curtin’s refusing to deploy troops to Burma, prompting Aussie recognition that self-defense should trump imperial concerns. However, Britain’s 1941 decision to prioritize Europe was no betrayal, as in David Day’s telling. Australia and Britain hardly collaborated in postwar immigration: the UK resisted sending skilled people; the Aussie unions didn’t want those trained outside the British system; the ‘whingeing Pom’ had committed only £10 to emigrate and so took things for granted. The 1930’s self-deception (i.e., appeasement) did not persist in the 1960s, when the political class took the measure of Britain’s turn to the EEC and its Commonwealth Immigration Act – no more favored treatment for the dominions – and in turn opened toward Asia. 1964-70 was the most difficult period since the early colonial era, but the author confuses the correlated rise of the Tigers and China with causing England’s turn to Europe.

Manning Clark thought Australia was a geographic terms and self-contained historical topic. Stuart McIntyre and Davie see parallels to Australia in Canada and New Zealand, notwithstanding differing attitudes toward republican status. British educators and artists in exile are portrayed as exercising outsized influence on elite Aussie culture. In cricket, following a nuanced study of 1937’s bodyline tour, Aussie pragmatism ‘routs’ English romanticism. Less encompassing than Pringle, he dedicates an entire chapter to Windsor gossip and another to the editorial echelon of the chattering class.

‘When an Aussie enters a British room, you can hear the chains clanking’.

22. Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government (7 November)

by kurto

The philosophic import of political parties was established in 18th-century England, when Burke’s realism bested Bolingbroke’s ‘patriotism’, downgrading statesmanship to a conservative prudence.
In the classic era, philosophers solved the fundamental problem of rich versus poor by mixed government, not party government. The Glorious Revolution settled the contemporary problems of religion and divine right by reconciling warring elements of the ruling class, vindicating not Shaftesbury’s raison d’etre but something between Macaulay’s Whiggism (as represented by William of Orange) and Trevelyan’s prudence (seen in the trimmer Halifax). Burke’s

    Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

then gave the first justification for party as the best use of talents, harnessing statesmanship to honest conduct by compromising the individual’s discretion and requiring the party’s action to be both defensible and practical. As against Bolingbroke’s disinterested statesmanship, which reached its apex in the 1760s, he sought to remedy the possibility of tyranny: he didn’t actually believe George’s court to be a cabal, but needed to illustrate the defect for which party is the remedy.
Bolingbroke saw James I’s divine right as formerly preempting the country party’s split into Tories and Whigs. Men can know the works of God but not his nature; they can reason a posteriori as to God’s will, but not a priori; they can have knowledge of knowledge which they can’t fully possess. Nature is beneficent because it’s intelligible; but its essence is not understandable, so there must be a God who means well. Bolingbroke straddled ancient and medieval thinkers who supposed beneficence, and modern ones who saw a hostile nature to be conquered. Natural law is obvious in God’s work because men appreciate the benefits of society irrespective of without its contrasts with the state of nature. Averring man’s natural sociability marked his great break with Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes is to Bolingbroke in religion as Bolingbroke to Burke in party: Hobbes had not foreseen the resolution of religious conflict, but Bolingbroke, seeing religion had been solved, thought parties were consequently superfluous. He presumed a society based on truth (i.e., first principles) which expresses intolerance of not truth, and results in lack of partisanship. But politics are not (cannot) be nonpartisan, and parties can be helpful. Bolingbroke saw that parties are groups associated for purposes which are not those of the entire community, and become factions when personal or private interests predominate communal good; whereas Burke followed Plato and Aristotle in praising prejudice (‘noble truth’). Commerce is the foremost example of nonpartisan association; government is nonpartisan when its ends are not happiness but the means of happiness. For example, military policy might serve commerce.
The king and a court of the most able patriots were to be the most virtuous; corruption was the risk. The patriot king required not aristocrats but men of ability, resistance to corruption, the preferment of peace over military glory, and the fostering of commerce. Such a program reduces reliance on statesmanship-cum-virtue: it is the ambition of party beyond tyranny. Bolingbroke and Jefferson firstly sought to replace absolutist / aristocratic statesmanship with party; Burke sought for multiple parties, thinking a group of super-able men of ability, supernaturally virtuous – however unlikely – conferred undue advantage.
Burke thought parties possible in Britain because the great parties of religious conflict and divine right were bygone; only the quotidien remained. Open, established opposition was not a requisite for party government but instead evidence of attenuated great parties, that politics no longer culminated in civil war. (In founding political parties in America, Jefferson capitalized on the success of republican principles, yielding productive, legitimate partisanship.) Yet simultaneously he opposed fomenting general discontent with present good (e.g., pamphlets criticising the constitution) while suggestively promising improvement that might in fact fail. This was nearly Aristotle’s opposition to innovation: since virtue is a product of habitation and innovation disrupts habit, innovation disrupts virtue, even if the outcome is otherwise good.
Burke understood the constitution after 1688 to be mature, no longer needing improvement, and the monarch now being head of state but sharing leadership of government. The king, whose powers rested more on the normative than the statutory, retained the discretion necessarily vested in the executive, provided these were prudentially used – Aristotle’s phronesis. The ‘political school’ (i.e., Bolingbroke’s supporters) were implicitly required to support the king’s ministers because they were appointed by these rulers, whereas Burke saw the Commons as a check on the monarch and his ministers, and so the chief worry was abuse of prerogative. All uncontrolled power will inevitably be abused. Burke’s theory of popular government straddles Bolingbroke, American federalism (the Federalist saw legislators as subject to the Constitution, and so Congress), and modern British constitutionalism as described by Bagehot (responsible to the people).
Burke thought prescription embodies heritage (or tradition), and ‘establishments’ are the artefacts of heritage. Then, British government was to be ruled by gentlemen who defended the establishments and their prejudice: ‘Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. For my part, I find it impossible to conceive that anyone believes in his own politics, or thinks them to be of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to mark the proper ends of government. It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect. Therefore, every honourable connection will avow it as their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the State.’
Burke considered that the patriot king increased the likelihood of tyranny, and sought to redefine party in British politics. His Thoughts disguised counterrevolution against Bolingbroke’s party: ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle’. Bad describes those corrupted by executive (monarchical) prerogative. Party for the sake of liberty doesn’t manifest the true practice of politics. The program of a party is in its history, its rationale for past judgment of public measures, not its plans for the future. Deference goes to the party’s self-understanding, rather than the individual executive. The people are not to be included in government, but to be restrained by government, restraints aiming to preserve equal rights in civil society (as opposed to majority rule, which is arbitrary and likely to forget historic rights amid contemporary events). He opposed ‘responsible’ or opposition criticism as bound to flatter the people, and ‘independent’ criticism as lacking ambition to rule. Party did not require far-seeing statesmanship: there is a tension between prudence and consistency. It is a matter of leaders and led, not Aristotle’s rulers and ruled; though the leaders are of the people and mingle, the better to represent (but not to be delegated). The leaders’ property is a result not of public duty, but duty as a consequent of property. Their role is the cause of what they do, not what they do the cause of their role. Honor is the negation of the false pride of one who tends toward tyranny. It facilitates the association of good men, whereas Aristotle tended to isolate them.
Theories of natural law, being accessible to common sense, tend to elide the Aristotelian distinction between moral (or political) virtue and intellectual (or philosophic) virtue. Burke thought the laws we live by should be obvious at least to gentlemen, because there are natural penalties for their failure, and this makes the Aristotelian legislator unnecessary. He opposed viewing politics as a matter of first principles, but instead prioritized began Roma law treatment of prescription (whereby land was effectively titled when longstanding use could be shown). People remain in society to benefit from civilized liberties. The good for Aristotle is the discovery of reason: in politics, it is the product of the legislator. For Burke, civil liberty is based on natural feeling protected by prescriptive right. Prejudice can be effective only if not subject to first principles. His prudence avoids the legislator’s appeal to first principles. (Bolingbroke sided with Plato and Aristotle in that prejudice does admit of first principles.) The 19th century demonstrated economic progress sparked hunger for political innovation at the expense of establishments.
Mansfield suggests Burke was a deist but did not accept Christian revelation, professing its virtue for political benefit. This deity commanded the laws of nature; human nature trumped determinism and established the bases of moral action, of equality before the law. Natural feeling is love of one’s own. Natural law follows Hobbes, is disciplined by honesty, and is not a final, inevitable point as in Aquinas. Consequently when elites forget their obligations they risk not only their own place but the entire social order. Principled behavior in a statesman is not following first principles but defending establishments and prescription. Great men should recognize that honest men of great families (i.e., aristocrats) ordinarily have first call on ruling, because first principles normally fail in politics. It is natural law that is intended to perfect human nature, the standard from which men draw progress.
The conflict between Bolingbroke and Burke is tantamount to rationalism versus empiricism. Rationalism holds liberty (or the basis of natural law) can be discovered in first principles, in freedom from prejudice. It teaches the necessity of seeking security in society, and seeking truth as the path to peace. Empiricism proceeds directly to prejudice and preservation, until the truth can be known; prescriptive right is an inalienable right. Bolingbroke’s patriot party established a new means of statesmanship; Burke instead substituted prudence, or non-principled conservatism, which admits of multiple parties. He did not succeed in substituting prudence for Bolingbroke’s patriotism: he engendered respectable parties but not the party system, for the modern system tolerates fanatics such as Jacobins and Nazis. Nonetheless, modern statesmanship discards the legislator and thus political thought, and accepts popular guidance (as refracted by popular sovereignty). In demoting statesmanship to guarding against theoretical claims which might destroy the establishments, he made party inherently conservative.
Coda: Contemporary political scientists must focus on action and therefore its limits, whereas historians may be tempted by hindsight. Burke, had he known of class and racial parties, would not have advanced party (p. 23).
Machiavelli: ‘To preserve liberty by new laws and new schemes of government, whilst the corruption of a people continues and grows, is absolutely impossible: but to restore and preserve it under old laws, and an old constitution, by reinfusing into the minds of men the spirit of this constitution, is not only possible, but is, in a particular manner, easy to a king’ (p. 73 footnote: Discourses I)

2. Perl, Authority and Freedom (7 January 2024)

by kurto

Art comprises the authority of craftsmanship and the freedom of interpretation, or the reworking of the craft’s tradition. Consequently, art must be subject to its own standards, and ought not subordinate to contemporary sociopolitics. The products of imagination possess an internal logic. The well-made work acknowledges tradition; the artist explores freedom within boundaries. Vocation is sacral: if you’re going to make something, you’d better know how to proceed. Then, truth is expressed in the context of form. Perl thus explains the failure of so-called performance art, which lacks craftsmanship. As the scientist’s work is to be independent, so too the artist’s, Perl writes. But what of ethics? 20th-century art can be characterized by the search for new sources of authority. But modern ‘playfulness’ ought to be more than a bid for attention, and any political opposition which artists engender or encounter tells us nothing of the caliber of their work. Conversely, the distinction between doing and making – roughly, general activity and work within the tradition – allows one to embrace good artists with questionable personal or sociopolitical traits. Perl derives understanding of authority from Hannah Arendt; he might have addressed the contemporary obsession with Foucaldian power. Still, aesthetic theory which restores the distinction between craft and all-embracing politics is welcome.

Isaiah Berlin: ‘Man is a rational being, and to say this is to say that he is able to detect this general pattern and purpose and identify himself with them; his wishes are rational if they aspire such self-identification, and irrational if they oppose it. To be free is to fulfil one’s wishes; one can fulfill one’s wishes only if one knows how to do so effectively, that is, if one understands the nature of the world in which one lives; if this world has a pattern and a purpose, to ignore this central fact is to court disaster. … To be free is to understand the universe. … The well-known Stoic argument that to understand and adapt oneself to nature is the truest freedom, rests on the premise that nature of the cosmos possess a pattern and a purpose; that human beings possess an inner light or reason which is that in them which seeks perfection by integrating itself as completely as possible with this cosmic pattern and purpose (p. 80).

TS Eliot: ‘the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new’ (p. 108).

18. Roberts, Last King of America (10 September 2022)

by kurto

George III was a custodial not a tyrannical monarch, demonstrating a principled constitutionality and remaining above faction without undermining those in power. Initially unpopular and enduring a series of irresolute or unprepared prime ministers, during the French Revolutionary era he showed himself determined and muchly helpful to Pitt the Younger’s success. The recasting of the British monarchy as constitutional head of state commenced with him, not Victoria.
George’s education was superior to public schooling but reclusive. He learned to value the balanced constitution while developing lifelong hostility to Whig oligopoly. Self-denying for the sake of country, he was the first Hanover to see himself as primarily British. He was kindly and at ease among the populace; many less flattering characteristics aspects of his character are attributable to the salacious Horace Walpole, an entertaining but often misleading diarist.
Just prior to reaching his majority, Parliament entered the Seven Years War having sacked Pitt the Elder, its best strategist, in favor of the corrupt Henry Fox. (George II, though conscious of his rights, did so at the Duke of Cumberland’s urging; he merely agreed with the Old Whigs.) Bute’s tutelage of George was held against his ministry, and the king was at first seen as grasping both by contemporaries and historians, wrongly in Roberts’ view.
At the French war’s denouement, Bute ceded the sugar island Guadeloupe, after having instead considered Canada on grounds that French pressure would have kept the American colonies loyal to Britain. Once safe, economic matters were a pretext for the real issue of self-government. Bute and Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765) fashioned George’s opinion that American claims to self-government had no standing in English law. In addition to the strategic error of tethering the Americans to the Atlantic seaboard (the Proclamation of 1763), this conservative view propelled Britain toward losing the colonies.
George tended to appoint prime ministers and leave them to legislate and execute, notwithstanding the unwonted predominance of the Grenvilles (George and his brother Richard Temple) and the Pitts (the elder being married to Temple’s sister). The Stamp Act was Grenville’s responsibility, and having insisted on dismissing Stuart-Mackenzie as Lord Privy Seal of Scotland, forcing George to break a promise, Grenville alienated George to the family for making him subject to factional interests. Lasting but two months, Grenville was replaced by Rockingham, who had never sat in Commons nor anyone else’s cabinet. Contra Conor Cruise O’Brien, on his return Pitt the Elder (now Lord Chatham) was given more scope than Rockingham, one of several occasions on which Roberts disagrees with the Irish historian. Later the sons of Pitt and Grenville would become PMs, indicating George’s essential forbearance.
In the years following the Stamp Act’s repeal, George contended with keeping Grenville out as PM, Wilkes out of the Commons, Parliamentary review of royal finances and appointments, and France out of the West Indies. Historians who contend George tried to gather power ignore the politicians who wished to avoid responsibility – including Lord North, who had otherwise ended the merry go round. Relatedly, contemporary European governments often resorted to genuine tyranny (e.g., mass arrests, execution of civilians without trial) whereas there had been arrests at all following the Boston Tea Party. George behaved with constitutional propriety during the American unrest, going along with hawkish ministries (admittedly to his liking) rather than driving policy. Of the 28 charges laid against George in the Declaration of Independence, only 2, regarding taxation and parliamentary authority to legislate for the colonists, are logical.
In post facto war gaming, the UK wins the war 45 percent of the time. Even as the war deteriorated, George, stepping back from hopes of an outright win, was determined to hold Canada, Nova Scotia, and Florida. The stakes were more patriotic than economic: circa 1776, imports from the British Windies totaled £4.5 million, versus 1.5 million from India, while the Americans were far below.
1779 marked existential danger for Britain. A French fleet of 63 ships and 30,000 regulars gained control of the English Channel. George showed a decisiveness that North lacked, pressing for attack in the Windies, Gibraltar, and Minorca, recognizing that France and Spain’s joining the war converted the conflict from a domestic question of Parliament’s constitutional rights in the colonies to the UK’s survival as a great power. Colonial possessions had to be defended, even at the risk of the homeland’s invasion, because of the sugar islands’ revenue. However, he was less clear sighted about responsibilities for the American war’s military losses. (NB: ‘Hessians’ werer from several small principalities, representing one-third of the soldiery. Not mercenaries, they were paid by the German states. Though effective they made for poor propaganda, especially during the New Jersey winter of 1777-78.)
Though not ignoring the denouement, Roberts’ current thus turns toward domestic matters. Thinking George a moderate, he is generally unsympathetic to Burke, described as a ‘radical Whig’ (e.g., pp. 417, 445, 486, 490). Pitt on Burke: ‘much to admire, nothing to agree with’ (p. 526). Irish repeal of the Declaratory Act demonstrates Westminster had learned from America, rather panic in the Rockingham administration. Whig attempts to arrogate East India Company patronage to Parliament in 1778 seemed an oligarchical revival to George; parallels to the Whigs’ 1766’s repeal of the Stamp Act make them seem hypocritical.
1784’s dismissal of the Fox-North coalition stemmed from the East India Bill, and was quite constitutional of George. The subsequent election, a hotly contested affair which produced ‘Fox’s martyrs’, indicated that the Whig leader had overplayed his hand regarding East India, the loss of America, and near-republican critique of the monarch. Pitt’s rout result in George’s having a genuine ally for the first time, at time when the king could still have his choice of ministers. Had he died in 1783, he might have been lumped together with his Hanoverian predecessors; but instead he and Pitt saw off the French revolutionaries and Bonaparte. By 1792, Pitt as PM was no longer immediately responsible to the king, but to Parliament; he, Dundas, and Grenville were a united front in dealing with the monarch; Addington extended the trend. Pitt’s success was muchly due to George’s support.
As when recovering from illness, so with the initial period of the Revolutionary wars. Evident homeliness, piety, and commitment to national victory established his bona fides. Whereas during the American revolution George’s principled stance was unhelpful, in the French wars it was invaluable. Ironically, he traveled little, never visiting Scotland, Wales, or Ireland; nor Hanover; nor the American colonies or Windies. Indeed, did he travel north of Worcester or west of Plymouth. He never went to see the newly industrializing Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds.
In Ireland, George supported toleration of the Catholic Church but not equality, for he was head of the Church of England (and of Ireland), and so was unhappy with the Earl of Fitzwilliam’s concessions. His successor, Earl of Camden, confiscated 50,000 muskets and 70,000 pikes – indicative of 1798. Neoclassical architecture, already underway, reached its apogee during his reign as he frequently paid interest in public projects.
(NB: amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.)
(NB: as an insult, a XXX husband, rather than not remarry, should as condign punishment marry the devil’s daughter. The riposte: the law prohibited marrying one’s deceased wife’s sister – p. 407)

1. Brauer, Education of a Gentleman (4 January 2024)

by kurto

Studies Restoration and Georgian views of upper-class education, finding the debate between advocates of private tutoring and nascent public schooling encapsulated its main goals: individual virtue, public service, scholarly and worldly knowledge, and sociability (good breeding). Of these, virtue was most valued. The Middle Ages had looked to nobles and gentry for military service; in the Renaissance (i.e., the Tudor era), statesmanship came to the fore. Though the Puritans had unsuccessfully attempted to introduce vocational training and the Reformation retreated toward the old tradition of indifference – pedantry was to be feared – upper-class men in the 18th century nonetheless relied on education to buttress their forming the social elite. Patriotic content was expected: history, government, law, political thought running along English lines. Much of the monograph is given to contemporary exposition, notably from Locke and 4th Earl of Chesterfield as well as clergy and schoolmasters. Contemporaries address the nature and extent of English ignorance, comparison with the continent, the value of the grand tour, and so on. Tutors remained most fashionable though the advantage of schools competition with peers was beginning to surface.

The Premiership’s 3pm blackout

by kurto

The gross value of Premiership broadcast rights has continued rising, but includes more contests, raising the possibility that additional games might be shown in the 1500h window when lower-division clubs play. As these clubs depend on match-day revenues, violating the window may put lower division sides out of business.

Meanwhile, having cracked the US market, the Premiership’s overseas rights dwarf the continental leagues. The lowest English club makes more from TV’s league rights, approximately £150 million per annum – than Bayern Munich, AC Milan or Paris St Germain – all but Barcelona and Real Madrid.

The overall sense one gets is that the revenue squeeze is replacing three decades of a rising tide that lifted all footballing boats with a winner-takes-all environment in which the highly competitive and expertly marketed Premier League is the clear winner. At home that may endanger smaller English clubs. Abroad it jeopardises viable competition in continental tournaments, and will only put a tighter squeeze on other European clubs and leagues as international broadcasting revenues become the scarce resource.

In a market economy, runaway success creates its own problems.

https://www.ft.com/content/a0430c7a-c8b8-4ca4-b86f-803b369a3f46?segmentId=114a04fe-353d-37db-f705-204c9a0a157b