I squarely come down on the communitarian side, it is extremely hard to see how liberty can mean or exist outside a strong, healthy society, culture and social associations. Society is a complex and varied organism and though localism and decentralism is important there needs to be a balance of levels of society and gov’t and these cannot be accomplished by a complete localist-fundamentalism(which I once supported myself.). By being too localist or individualist we undermine a proper localism and decentralism.

“Since, however, nonreality has no power of salvation, and Hegel’s true self knows this quite well, the false self must take the next step and, by “the energy of thinking,” transform the reality of God int the dialectics of consciousness: the divine power accrues to the “Subjekt” that in self-salvation through reaching the estate of reflective self-consciousness. If the soul can not return to God, God must be alienated from himself and drawn into the human state of alienation. And finally, since none of these operations in Second Reality would change anything in the surrounding First Reality, but result only in the isolation of the sorcerer from the rest of society, the whole world must be drawn into the imaginary Secondary Reality. The sorcerer becomes the Savior of the “age” by imposing his System of Science as the new revelation on mankind at large. All mankind must join the sorcerer in the hell of his damnation.”

I suppose that I recommend Elie Kedourie’s Hegel and Marx (it also has an interesting essay on Hegel and the Middle East tacked on at the end). Oakeshott offers a brief exposition of Hegel in On Human Conduct (257-263). Paul Franco has a very good book on Hegel called Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom. Shlomo Avineri’s Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State is pretty good as well. You also might want to look at Roger Scruton’s “Hegel as Conservative Thinker”.

Cheers.

I also finally figured out how to get rid of my face when I post.

But as we politely move on from that, I remain annoyed by your dismissal of Galston, even though I’m with you in your overall critique of “liberal” paternalism. Maybe “liberals” from Dewey/FDR on don’t deserve the label, but is it too much to ask you to at least mention that Galston’s own chosen label is liberal in the midst of your assertion that he’s a leftist?

I think Galston is relevant to my efforts try to prod the Porch conversation into thinking about how its principles might become a political movement of some sort. And if one possible path, that some would want to pursue is creating a Porcher-friendly faction within the Democratic tent, then they will desperately need the pro-life Dems and any remnants of the 90s New Democrats as allies. Galston’s Liberal Purposes remains one of the best ways to articulate capital-D Democrat opposition to the Cult of Rawls and Ever-More Rights Enforced By Ever-More Judge-Rulers. It also is quite strong in supporting a Berry-like view of the connection b/t family-friendly and morals and economics, as well as having a sane view of the establishment clause. Now, Galston is not with the Porchers on the localist emphasis, but I know of nothing in his work inherently hostile to policy of fostering more federalism state and localist. Thus, Galston, and more importantly, what I would call the Galstonian Persuasion, are potential allies. And no, I do not think Political theorists are issued a license that allows them to wave aside such considerations.

Of course, I think the correct route to go is allying with/partially converting conservatives.

P.S. Ken, I am intrigued by what I take to be your Hegelian Liberalism. Currently I’m working on some books by anti-Progressive Jaffite Straussians, and boy do they have it in for Hegel. Too much so, it seems to me, as my understanding is that he basically advocated liberal democracy, and can only be held so responsible for how the likes of W. Wilson, to say nothing of scores of noxious German thinkers, ran with his thought.

No need to apologize; a little righteous indignation and intellectual zeal never hurt anyone (or hardly ever, anyway).

Your example of positive freedom is telling, however, because proponents of such ideas do in fact necessarily think of their fellow citizens as children or moral/intellectual incompetents who need to be guided by the not-so-friendly hand of the government. Unfortunately for such a way of thinking, children grow up, whereas those pesky, immature, and unreliable adult citizens always have to be led.

A fair point…but let’s unpack it a little bit. The twin assumptions I see carrying your sharp condemnation of my analogy are 1) that yes, there is such a thing as “liberty” conceived in the positive, empowering sense, and 2) that such liberty is a wholly inappropriate aim when it is government doing the “empowering,” because such positive liberty is only sensible when applied to children, and never to citizens, who are adults and are thus, and should be, self-directing. Would you agree, or am I misstating your guiding assumptions? If you agree, then I am led to ask: are you saying that government actions ought never be justified in reference to any possible tutelary or educative role, and rather that all that government actions that involve the restriction of choices must always be described and justified as, in your words, “hard choices [which] inevitably must be made”? If so, then I think we stand on opposite sides of a deep (though perhaps narrow) philosophical divide regarding the nature of human consciousness and the political community, since I do believe that the collective political context, the laws and norms which both sustain and constrain us, do in fact often shape and educate us, sometimes every bit as much, for good or ill, as our personal convictions do.

Perhaps, however, you are not making a normative claim, but only an observation: that the idea of “positive liberty” is psychologically or developmentally inapplicable to citizens, because of their age, perhaps, or because of their social situation. Thus maybe you would disagree with my summarized point 1) above, and prefer instead to say that actually there is no such thing as “positive liberty” anyway, at least not any that can be realized outside of an intimate family setting. But here I would again disagree, and point to some pretty straightforward social science which demonstrates that refusing to democratically constrict individual choice or abstaining from channeling individuals toward certain collective ends determined by the community as a whole, is psychologically harmful, not to mention destructive of the polity. See Barry Schwartz or Juliet Schor–or, for that matter, Wendell Berry–on that point.

Either way, it seems to me that you are implying that politics must abandon arguments which treat the polity as something other than strangers making hard choices, to use Sandel’s formulation. But I find that hard to believe, so surely I’ve missed something in your critique. What is it?

I’m quite aware of Professor Deneen’s fondness for certain Straussian themes. I just don’t share his opinion, nor yours, concerning the importance of Strauss’s scholarship nor that of his students. I am sincerely dubious about the academic value of any of it. I have an essay coming out in the forthcoming edition of the Journal of the Philosophy of History that explains, in part, why I don’t think that Strauss or his epigoni have made any significant contributions to the study of the history of political thought. I’m sure that you won’t agree with my contentions, but I’ll just have to live with that.

Further, though I certainly share some opinions about contemporary politics with certain Straussians like Mansfield (e.g. the opposition to nationalized health care), I think that the involvement of Strauss-influenced neo-cons in politics at the national level has been an unmitigated disaster, both for the cause of limited government and for the country as a whole (though I am well aware that not all Straussians are either neo-cons or eager to participate in the squalor of DC politics).

I would also politely disagree with you concerning the import of Strauss or his students to the existence of this online magazine. I’m not aware of the intellectual pedigree of all the contributors, but I would wager a good amount of money that there are quite a few of them who know Strauss and don’t care much for him (including one former editor-at-large, yours truly).

Russell,

I think that Berlin effectively answered your critique in his introduction to the four essays on liberty (the introduction being an answer to earlier critics). His answer was that it is indeed true that liberty is just one among many values that modern polities hold dear, and that hard choices inevitably must be made which will sometimes involve trading off liberty for other things, e.g. clean air, material equality, etc. However, it does us no good to lie to ourselves and say that we are freer because of the trade-off. Your example of positive freedom is telling, however, because proponents of such ideas do in fact necessarily think of their fellow citizens as children or moral/intellectual incompetents who need to be guided by the not-so-friendly hand of the government. Unfortunately for such a way of thinking, children grow up, whereas those pesky, immature, and unreliable adult citizens always have to be led.

Whether Galston’s purposes are the same as someone like Bill Kristol’s is actually immaterial to me. The commonality is that they both believe that the US is a purposive entity and would happily empower the national government to override the multiplicity of individual and collective purposes of the citizens of the US in order to enact whatever foolish dream they happened to have last evening after dinner.

Sorry for intemperance, but it’s been so long since I posted that I just couldn’t help it.

You do give Dewey’s words and formulations more credit than they deserve. Of course he’s for everything wonderful under the sun, and assumes in advance we can scientifically combine old-time liberty and the new freedoms. Yes, he deluded himself and others.

But Galston ain’t Dewey, but someone who is much more serious about balancing values in the way you envision. I think he is quite wrong to defend Obamacare and to dismiss the Mansfieldian critique of Obama’s technocratic-progressivist-”antipartisan” rhetoric, but I would certainly expect that Galston’s not-quite-Progressive stance of certain-political-ends-rightfully-get-settled might gain a certain amount of respect from left-leaning Porchers, enough so that they would want to keep their ears open to thinkers like him.

Well, Galston v. Mansfield has sort of vanished from view, but that’s okay, since we get Fox and sundry others v. the localist-fundamentalism of Wilson.

Wilson, we do await the Aristotle essay with anticipation, and I am glad you’re reading Scruton. I think taking him seriously, along with Pierre Manent’s last two books, will help you shake what I’m unkindly calling your fundamentalism. And, I’d also recommend you balance the rightfully authoritative text of Aristotle’s Politics with accounts more forthrightly attuned to the tragic trade-offs of localist political liberty–i.e., on the practical level, the first twenty or so Federalist papers read together with either Livy’s first seven or eight books or Thucydides. More theoretically, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and perhaps nasty ol’ Machiavelli, and then my two masters–Plato (particularly book VIII of the Republic, the central sections of the Laws, and the Gorgias) and Tocqueville. Oh, and Paul Rahe’s first volume of Republics Ancient and Modern will vividly portray what polis life looked like from the inside.

Less pedantically, what seems necessary to say is that when and if the Porchers become politically significant, one of the big divisions they experience will likely be between those who A) dogmatically demand a return to localist government ASAP, even entertaining secessionist threats as they do, and those who B) have a road-map for returning the USA to a more township-friendly and states-rights friendly polity, so that this return MAY INVOLVE some activist national government programs early on, and which NECESSARILY INVOLVES winning political victories at the national level by in part articulating an agenda that can govern the national mess we’ve inherited in the best possible way for the short term. One version of B) might be Galston-leaning, which even (yeah, major stretch IMO) might include a nationalized health-care policy. Another version of B) might be radical legislation enacted at the national level to empower localities everywhere, or even to reconstruct them, a la Leon Krier, via enlightened “zoning” policies. Similarly, a B) that nationalized certain environmental issues is conceivable.

AND MY VERSION OF B, of course, IS GET THE G.O.P. IN POWER ON THE SHOULDERS OF A PORCH-LEANING, NOT CORPORATE NOR LIBERTARIAN LEANING, COALITION, so as to have basic sanity on federalism, social morays, the Constitution, basic property rights, etc., and most especially on the size and extent of government. A G.O.P. in power in this manner would hopefully convince the mostly-losing Democrats to go the Galstonian New Democrat route, and so the intermitent periods of Democrat electoral ascendancy would not derail the basic vision. (Of course, the Dems in such a situation might go for a new “Liberaltarian” coalition, i.e., a coalition most repellant to every Porcher or Porch-sympathizer.)

I dream, I must be smokin’ something, you say… …maybe so, but not in an all-or-nothing manner as does Wilson. What does he say? Liberty = X. X requires Y, therefore, Z. Uh, no. That’s not political science, as Aristotle knew, and which for our day, Tocqueville expresses more clearly than any other. Unless you are prepared to deal with Democracy, with the Nation-State, with Dogmas Modern and Christian, with the problematic continuum running from individual property/contract rights into corporately-exercised ones, with losing and winning elections, with wars and rumors of wars, and with your likely American electoral allies as-they-are, you simply are not prepared. Impotent bitterness or empowered folly awaits you.

But know that nothing is settled by getting beyond Wilson’s stance, even though one must get beyond it–because how will one get the various Porcher “Bs” to agree? Or how would a Porcher coalition chose which “B” road-map to primarily pursue? It will be most difficult, it will involve some intense debates about means (and some ends too), and, alas, some friends will part ways.

But it is nonetheless noble and necessary work.

John,

I would be willing to start with the Old Northwest Territory as a nation and see how we get along.

A nation the size of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota? I could go with that. I’d be kind of sad to see the United States go, because I confess I like our collective myths. I also wonder if a nation of that size would be able to generate, in this era of modern technologically-enabled transportation and community, the sort of virtues which come along with patriotism. A survey of other nation-states of a similar size shows a mixed record in that regard.

James,

let me be blithe in dismissing the suggestion that ours is not an Aristotelian world: nobody is equal, and to the extent we think we’ve made people equal we lie to ourselves; we have replaced service slavery with the underclass, which helps some of us sleep at night and keeps some of us awake

Your reflections on JPII’s personalist writings intrigue me, and I look forward to learning more, but in regards to this short aside of yours: do you really genuinely believe that there is no substantial difference between service slavery and wage slavery, and that there is no significant difference in the forms of trouble those different forms of slavery pose for the conscience of some individuals? How very…Fitzhughian of you, I guess. Would this mean that you would be open to arguments that the former form of slavery–making, say, African-Americans, or whomever else might fit the appropriate Aristotelian category, into a dependent class–might be better for our citizenship (those who are allowed to have it, that is) than the current form? After all, if there is no substantial difference between the two, than we might as well just compare them on the basis of their respective (utilitarian?) merits.

Ken and Scott,

I’d rather not get into an argument about Strauss or Straussianism, both of which I have a fair amount of respect for, though some sincere disagreements as well. However, I’d like to make it clear that I was not saying that I believed Strauss = neoconservatism. I was asking Ken to elaborate upon his claim that Galston’s belief in “the political community as an enterprise association in the service of some sort of notion of virtue” is something that he “he shares with the neo-cons,” as I don’t see Galston making that argument in any way similar to how, for example, Kristol makes it. But again, perhaps I am missing something important.

However, since TH Green and Mr. Dewey hijacked the term ‘liberalism’, there has been a tendency to conflate paternalism with liberty among so-called progressives like the benighted Galston. It is true that bracketing off some areas of human activity from political decisions can increase liberty, but only if those areas bracketed off allow for actual human choice. To say that centralizing all decision-making about a policy area like health care at the federal level increases liberty is like saying the Chinese ‘one-child’ policy increases liberty. Oh, sure, those Chinese no longer have to worry about their ‘reproductive decisions’ because they have been bracketed off, so to speak.

Your contempt for the conclusions you associate with Green and Dewey comes through, but not how you actually connect the dots to associate them with said conclusions. You’re correct, of course: liberty–in the positive, defining and empowering sense–does have an element to paternalism to it; while it took our oldest daughter years to recognize it, her liberty was increased by our requirement that she practice the piano daily (that, our removal from her of any free choice in the matter), in that it enabled her become skilled and thus free to use her skills more broadly. In the same way, a government–say the state, if you prefer–acts in a paternalistic way when it realizes that liberty (or at least many peoples’ liberty) can arguably be increased through any number of paternalistic acts: taking from people the free choice of dumping garbage in the local creek (thus helping to insure the chemical pollutants are not being introduced into someone else’s drinking water), removing from drivers the free choice of owning and using an automobile without care insurance (thus helping to insure that taxpayers will not be overly burdened with the many incidental costs of accidents on the road), etc.

What is to prevent this logic from leading to Chinese family policy levels of paternalism? Well, nothing–assuming that is the only value in the mix. But of course it isn’t; on my reading, at lease, both Green and Dewey, and many others of their ilk, value many things alongside and beyond the collective increase of positive liberty. They valued democracy, for one, and communities of mutual respect, for another. You could argue, of course, that their appreciation for those values was flawed or lacking, but you should not argued that such never occurred to them.

This is, I think, exactly the point which Berlin also misses in his aforementioned essay; he makes the assumption that the struggle over liberty–couched in individual terms–is the be-all and end-all of political life, and so any effort to collectively vouchsafe the empowering aspects of liberty is simply terminologically confused, and at best a tragic necessity. But of course real political life involves multiple values, seeking concurrent expression. Even if I recognize the conceptual similarity between the procedural justifications for national health insurance reform on the one hand and China’s one-child rules on the other (and, in the realm of pure ideas, I do), that hardly means that I think the one equals or is in any conceivable way going to lead to the other. I don’t believe that, because I see so many other things, so many other values, in play alongside it…not the least of which is a respect for the family and natality (and keeping that respect strong is another argument entirely!), the constitutionally secure right to privacy (a right which, in my view, has done much wickedness, but also serves some moral purposes), and so on and so on.

Using the power of government to bracket off certain choices (and, pace my exchanges with John and James, determining which level of government is appropriate for any such bracketing), all in the name of increasing the overall liberty to establish the broadly held beliefs and norms of the community in question, is always going to be a difficult matter, one which ought to be attended my significant democratic debate, because it opens up many potential abuses. But I don’t see any good reason to assume that the logic behind such actions inherently implicates any use of that logic in any or all of those potential abuses. Maybe the association is clear to you, but it isn’t to me.

But, knowing as I do that I speak in anger, I nonetheless do offer the following advice in a sincere spirit of objectivity. Because Strauss simply will be recognized in the future as one of the two or three greatest minds of the 20th century, who made breakthroughs in the study of Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Locke, among other greatest minds of centuries past, and whose students have gone on to make breakthroughs in an innumerable number of areas and upon virtually every great thinker, really a vast majority of those who aspire to wisdom in the future will be in some way Strauss-influenced, that is, categorizable as “Straussian” by lazy dismissers such as yourself. But by then, such statements as you made above will seem largely ridiculous. For now, though, folks like you get to momentarily surprise folks like Fox, who apparently has been saddled by other purveyors of nonsense that Straussian = neoconservative. But guys like Fox, upon reading Deneen and especially McWilliams more deeply, and thus recognizing that even certain positive aspects of the Porch wouldn’t exist w/o Strauss’s help, are not going to be fooled indefinitely. And Ken, you shouldn’t fool yourself. I am in agreement with the basic thrust of your critique of Galston, as hopefully I will be able to voice below.

Your attention to my paragraph on subsidiarity is worth immediate attention. I was trying there to prepare a germinal answer to Roger Scruton’s critique of subsidiarity in the EU and in practice: it is always up to the highest political form to determine the power and activities of subsidiary associations, and so the highest political form — whether the national or international State — always ends up absorbing the would-be subsidiary power. A bit of reasonable Carl Schmittian analysis: sovereignty, who decides, is the political and so the highest power is politics per se, everything else beneath subsisting as a gift or a slave.

Now, the social encyclicals from Leo to Benedict do not really provide an adequate answer to Scruton’s criticism — except for John Paul II’s curious (and increasingly, to my mind, compelling) way of simply erasing the State from the personal entities of the world: the individual person, family, and state are all “persons” in JP II’s personalist ethics, but the State exists strictly as functional, a mere instrumental tool of these things. I think this is a problematic claim, but it helps explain how he can suggest robust rights-discourse-based roles for the state (a right to dignified and fruitful employment?! my goodness!). For, John Paul is merely saying how the State might serve; it has no powers of its own. Those powers lies, he thinks, in the three kinds of “person” listed above.

My attempt at a more adequate defense of subsidiarity would be one that does not fail to grant the State, when rightly understood and rightly ordered, as effectively coextensive with the Polis. Like foreign policy, the creation of larger subsidiary associations between poleis (or communities, if you like) should not result in the creation of new sovereignties. To be concrete (a problem of late): I think it’d be great if a bunch of small states wanted to create a congress with authority to act that derives directly from the sovereignty of the small states (the poleis) themselves. If that’s what the U.S. was, I would think it a great subsidiary association. But it’s not: sovereignty actually reposes in the federal government, even though it once derived from the states.

International treaties (which, so far as I’m concerned, is what the Constitution is!) are not extra-political or non-political as you suggest; but their validity as categorically political would be contingent on sovereignty reposing in the individual poleis. Since, as I said above, the federnal government does not exist in this manner, it and all of its actions are technocratic rather than, say, democratic.

I’ve gone on too long, so let me be blithe in dismissing the suggestion that ours is not an Aristotelian world: nobody is equal, and to the extent we think we’ve made people equal we lie to ourselves; we have replaced service slavery with the underclass, which helps some of us sleep at night and keeps some of us awake; but in one key respect your criticism DOES prompt me to clarify: the natural order is divine gift rather than being itself divine and necessary, as Aristotle thought. Insofar as we live in a Christian world, the world understands that much (so it doesn’t . . . but I do, and so accept your point). As I’ll be talking about in a week or two in regarding to Caritas in Veritate, Creation means that divine love and truth proceed the truth — the rational order, which Aristotle took to be “necessary” — of nature. But this underscores rather than undermines the great insight of Aristotle’s metaphysics, from which his politics of course derives: we are driven toward the good by eros, by desire, by a love that precedes us, form us, and completes us. My mind is slowing . . . I guess I just don’t see how this changes the intellectual architecture of Aristotle and I DO see how it and Aristotle together call into question the goodness and validity of the intellectual and political structures of modernity.

I have done. More to follow in me own dern post.

The question came up of what would happen if one would grow a mustache. And although it would entail questions and a visit from the ministry, it still is hard to say exactly what and how it would happen. The reason being it has never happened. If one would grow a mustache, that person would very certainly have other issues with the Ordnung as well. …

This is an interesting example about the nature of Ordnung. It is not so much a set of arbitrary rules and regulations handed down from some authoritative council somewhere, rather it is a set of understandings about expected behavior that is refined and modified by an informal process of practical testing and subtle negotiation. It is a model for a way of life.

And along the same lines, I just finished a remarkable little book this afternoon: “The Nazi Impact on a German Village” (1993) by Walt Rinderle and Bernard Norling. Rinderle has a family connection with the village under study that enabled him to do oral history that would not have been possible for complete outsiders. But his book is about a lot more than the Nazification. One learns in it how community health care decisions and allocations were made in a community where everyone knew everyone else. I won’t try to summarize at this point, other than to say there were a lot of good, Front Porch-like aspects as well as others that might make people say “good riddance”.