Political thought

Visions of the Kantian world-state

by kurto

European nation-states survived 19th- and 20th-century ideologies (e.g., Marxism, racism) competing with Hobbesian sovereignty for the loyalty of citizens. World War I marked the high watermark of their cohesion. Visions of the Kantian world-state predominate.

Today, even more than in Hobbes’s time, sovereignty is commonly rejected as an expression of selfish particular interests, and today’s aspirations for political salvation have been invested in the power of international organizations.

Hobbes juxtaposed the demands of freedom against the passion for justice, and he lost. The most powerful enthusiasm of all has turned out to be the supposedly critical belief that our loyalties must not be constrained by the merely accidental fact of being born into some specific society. We must make our own judgments of rationality, and we may appeal beyond the state, to rights, international values, and external bodies. Modern democracy tends to play down the importance of sovereignty. Remarkably, however, it is in these European states, with their Hobbesian echo of pure statehood, that legality and decency survive, and to which the refugees move, in flight from a world that often seems to echo the state of nature Hobbes so much dreaded.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2013/3/swimming-with-leviathan

Locke and Strauss

by kurto

How do these passages reconcile? In the latter essay, there is no suggestion one of Jaffa broke with his teacher

While both schools of Strauss’s followers extol John Locke as America’s political-moral inspiration, Jaffa and his followers regard this English philosopher as a Christian thinker. Locke’s defense of individual rights is an integral part of Jaffa’s understanding of the Tradition and belongs to his picture of the founding.

Jaffa first published in 1952 a book that began as a dissertation under Strauss at the New School for Social Research, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics. It was, as philosopher Alasdair McIntyre observed, a luminous exercise in intellectual history. Much of his subsequent work seems driven by his commitment to his view of the American founding and Lincoln’s redemptive role in purifying this process.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-soul-of-the-claremont-school/

Strauss, famous for distinguishing between the explicit and supposedly hidden meaning of historical texts, persuaded a generation of political theorists that Locke was a closet Hobbesian who used biblical language to cloak a radically individualist, anti-religious agenda.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/10/the-appropriation-of-locke

22. Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (29 Nov 2019)

by kurto

Narrates the life and elucidates the political legacy of Edmund Burke, whose views on constitutional government, political party, and sociopolitical reform are fundamental to Western civic heritage. Though lacking the élan of Rousseau or Johnson, Burke’s wisdom pertains in the mid-20th century. Drawing on numerous Burke scholars, Kirk makes particular use of Peter Stanlis’ summary of Burke’s objectives:

  • To maintain the structure of the British state
  • To define the limits of British monarchy
  • To extend the role of the House of Commons
  • To expound the role of the political party
  • To extend civil rights and economic opportunities to all citizens, including throughout the Empire (according local custom)
  • To defend the historical traditions and order of Europe (i.e., Greco-Christian West) versus the Enlightenment
  • To solve problems (i.e., to do justice) with an eye to custom (often ‘prudence’) and equally the ethics of prevailing legal norms

As early as 1746, Burke worried that decadent Western elites would succumb to leveling rationalism. As a parliamentarian, his initial impact owed to advocating self-government in Ireland and America, restraint of the British monarch (‘economy’) and simultaneously promotion of the political party, and social justice in India. His moral imagination and literary genius revealed his approach: ability to reform, disposition to preserve. Thoughts on Our Present Discontents first propounded the role of party harnessed to national interest (i.e., accountability to the public), because rising ‘popular interests’ would no longer abide conventional monarchy or aristocracy; but party needed to surmount the taint of faction. Burke always opposed arbitrary power and so the turn to opposing Jacobinism evidenced his recognizing rationalism’s inciting a European civil war. Reflections on the Revolution in France demonstrated the natural ends of Enlightenment government: the destructive energy of all radicals and the insistence on absolute submission to will. Contesting the notion that Burke ‘gave to party what was intended for mankind’, Kirk shows Burke’s political philosophy in fact formed the initial and most enduring defense of Western civilization. Meanwhile, the defection of the Old Whigs to the Tories created the first and oldest political party (contra Jones, Invention of Modern Conservatism). Elsewhere Kirk is concerned to demonstrate Leo Strauss’ misreading, in Natural Right and History, of fatalism: though seeming to concede he could do no more, in fact Burke’s works during the 1790s anticipate Churchill in locating perseverance in the English public and rallying them to it. Valuable as one of the clearer biographies, Kirk settled the debate over whether Burke was a conservative.

1. Freeman, Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political Radicalism (10 Jan 2021)

by kurto

            Attempts a comprehensive critique of Burke’s view of radical theory and revolution, considering the parliamentarian’s work from the philosophic perspectives of metaphysics, epistemology, sociopolitical theory, and so on. The effort is enlightening but ultimately fails: Burke sought practical results not theoretic coherence. He saw that although public evil might stem from rulers or their agents, you cannot cure it by abolishing power, and that revolution always leads from anarchy to tyranny (i.e., restored order).
            Burke held the political universe is orderly because it is a component of nature, so to revolt is to oppose nature. Reason is sovereign, but divorced from experience it’s dangerous. Therefore Burke’s metaphysics belongs to classical (rationalist) natural law but his epistemology is empiricist, Freeman says, adding that for Burke experience tended to prevail over prescription and further his metaphysics ‘collapsed’ as the French Revolution persisted. But: strictly scientific experience leads to bad politics, since social knowledge does not operate and proceed as scientific knowledge.

            Diving deeper into sociology, Burke differed from Locke, who thought society’s purpose is to protect natural rights, in thinking that it is to improve social knowledge, wealth, and morality. His means of enforcement were Hobbesian and gravitated to aristocratic (i.e., meritocratic) order, accepting the possibility of pathologies because the alternative (revolution dispensing with circumstances of social advantages) was worse. Such sociology is said to contend with metaphysics, the latter seeing ideas and society forming over time, the former shaped by circumstance. The more important point is incrementalism versus sudden change: skepticism undermines order, fanaticism (to principle) kills it. The intellectual, Burke said, tends to land on solutions too big for the problem because there are no practical consequences, on principles in a vacuum.

            The real rights of man are to live in freedom under the law, and a give law should be reformed iff it is working against its ends, not solely because outcomes are unequal. Again, ideology corrodes historical, socially understood, imperfect rights. In a cost-benefit analysis, present conditions outweighs speculation on future effects precisely because they already exists, just as natural morality surpasses dry reason.

Burke distinguishes between reform and revolution as well as change and progress. He foresees the ongoing need for adjustments. Radicalism aims at ideals which can never accommodate all circumstances; rebellion attacks constitutions outright, creating anarchy then tyranny. However, revolution is justified by tyranny and necessity (due to burdens imposed by tyranny), a point at which the people’s rights supersede the state’s interest in order. Revolution may be caused by weak, overly strong, or unwise government, and an interventionist state is more susceptible to revolt because it has put itself in a position to be held responsible for social problems. Conspiracy along is insufficient for a successful revolt. In the French Revolution one sees other necessary conditions: fashionable theory absorbed into the royal court; irresponsible, attenuated ruling classes; and long-term social changes such as economic growth, Enlightenment ideas, and new social classes. (An aside: Freeman several times accuses Burke of fearing social mobility; Burke thought talent should be seasoned.) The monarchy, having depredated the aristocracy, left itself to face the revolutionary will to power, masquerading as good-willed social reform, on its own. That is, when ruling principles are weak, people turn to counter-elites.

            Burke’s theory is sometimes incoherent but superior to modern views, Freeman concludes, in going beyond cause to forecast course and consequences. The central contradiction is between tenets of aristocratic state (i.e., order) and bourgeois civil society (the engine of social change). Yet Freeman overlooks Burke distinction between progress and change. Real problems are solved by limited redress.