Defending the West in All Its Amplitude: The Liberal Conservative Vision of Roger Scruton

This article explores the mixture of conservatism and liberalism that informs Roger Scruton's political and philosophical reflection. It highlights his response to the “culture of repudiation,” his resistance to totalitarianism, his defense of national loyalty (as opposed to ideological nationalism), his conservative-minded environmentalism, and his defense of order—and government—against libertarian and leftist assaults on legitimate authority. In particular, it explores a fruitful tension in Scruton's thought between a robust acknowledgment of the Christian features of Western civilization (a civilization that is unthinkable without a Christian emphasis on confession and forgiveness) and Scruton's forthright defense of the secular state against Islamist fanaticism. The article also explores affinities and differences between Scruton's understanding of the West's conjugation of Christianity and secularism and Pierre Manent's critique of radical secularism. The article concludes with reflections on Scruton's judicious melding of truth and liberty, and philosophy and Christianity.     

A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing: What We Know about the Role of the Media in State Politics

Abstract

This article explores the intellectual itinerary of the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent. In particular, it highlights his efforts to do justice to the three great “poles” of human existence: philosophy, politics, and religion. Manent is shown to be a philosophically minded Christian, one who thinks politically and who rejects the temptation to “despise the temporal order.” Manent's reservations about the European project in its present form are shown to be rooted in a understanding of politics that emphasizes the need to weave together “communion” and “consent” if Europeans are to avoid administrative despotism and those postpolitical fantasies that prevent them from thinking and acting politically. The article ends with a reflection on Manent's impressive history of “political forms” in the Western world.     

Conservatism,Aesthetic and Active: Reflections on Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent

Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent provide us much to admire, as authors and as men, and much to ponder. They can be seen as collaborators in the defense of the nation-state against the empty universalism of “human rights,” and, more generally, in exposing the boundless arrogance and blindness of modern rationalism insofar as it denies its inheritance from premodern sources. This defense of the nation-state and critique of secular rationalism are of vital interest to moral and political conservatives, and Scruton, for his part, has explicitly taken on the cause and the label of conservatism. But conservatives face an imposing and, I propose here, critically instructive obstacle in appropriating the teachings of these two contemporary giants. For, as soon as we begin to examine the foundations of their respective projects, Scruton's and Manent's approaches appear to be, not only quite different (and therefore, one might hope, complementary) but in an important sense directly opposed to one another. This opposition appears most directly in their respective estimates of the realm of politics: one would exaggerate little in saying that, for Manent, politics is everything, whereas Scruton wishes to constrict the reach of politics to the minimum. Thus, Scruton embraces the title “conservative” but understands it apolitically, whereas Manent declines to identify himself as conservative but fully embraces a political task essential to conservatism. Conservatives must confront this disconcerting opposition and see what can be learned from it.     

Conditionnement economique et conditionnement mental dans le monde du travail parisien a la fin de l'ancien regime: Le privilege corporatif

This essay contests the notion that there was a necessary and fundamental opposition between republicanism and liberalism during the post-Revolutionary period in France. Constant's writings of the Restoration years show his abiding interest in both the construction of viable political institutions and the promotion of a vibrant political life. Worried about what he saw as growing authoritarian trends within the liberal camp, Constant wrote about the need to keep political liberty alive in commercial republics. His refutations of Auguste Comte and the Saint-Simonians, and his writings on religion, should be seen as offering pointed lessons to fellow liberals about the crucial importance of both politics and the moral values promoted by religious freedom.     

Kant and the Two Principles of Publicity

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to argue that the principle of “publicity” constitutes a fundamental idea in Kant’s political thought. Publicity provides a central insight that binds together various strands of Kant’s political writings (on issues as diverse as the question of Enlightenment, the right of revolution, historical teleology, reflective judgment, cosmopolitan citizenship, democratic peace, and republican government), and moreover, it offers a much-needed cornerstone for a systematic exposition of his nonexistent political philosophy. Apart from some eminent examples, publicity has been a rather neglected topic in the ever-expanding literature on Kant’s political ideas. Revisiting this notion will make us more attentive to his evocation of the “spirit of republicanism” over and above the letter of the law, and might prompt us to reconsider Kant’s reputation as a classical representative of liberal political thought. Indeed, it should inspire us to situate Kant’s appeal for the “public use of reason” in the vicinity of the republican ideal of political liberty.     

A Once and Future Greatness: Raymond Aron,Charles de Gaulle andthe Politics of Grandeur

Charles de Gaulle devoted his life to cultivating French grandeur, a politics that attempted to carve out an equal and independent role for France among the great powers of the world. One who frequently criticized de Gaulle's ideas of grandeur was the eminent social theorist, Raymond Aron. Although Aron was generally supportive of de Gaulle and supported him ‘every time there was a crisis’, he never hesitated to criticize de Gaulle, sometimes quite sharply. Aron's lifelong friendship with de Gaulle was thus marked by alternating bouts of mutual irritation and respect: Aron worried that de Gaulle's theatrics were sometimes detrimental to French national interests while de Gaulle fretted that Aron's commitment to French greatness was less enthusiastic than it should havebeen.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Aron's reaction to de Gaulle's politics of grandeur. Despite his reputation for ‘lucidity’, Aron was often ambivalent about de Gaulle's ambitions for France. We argue that Aron's ambivalence stemmed from his political creed, or from his commitment to a political philosophy that - as de Gaulle sensed - allowed for few settled convictions. This paper reviews Aron's assessment of two issues at the heart of de Gaulle's politics of grandeur, namely, the effort to promote a sense of national unity and the effort to create a nuclear force. In both areas, we witness a remarkably ambivalent Aron, one who struggled to soften the harsher edges of the excesses of what he considered to be the excesses of grandeur and find his way to a more moderate and coherent position.     

Reappraising Walter Bagehot's Liberalism: Discussion,Public Opinion,and the Meaning of Parliamentary Government

Summary

This article offers a novel and comprehensive account of Walter Bagehot's political thought. It ties together an interpretation of Bagehot's liberal commitment to norms of discussion and deliberation, with an analysis of Bagehot's extensive arguments about the institutions of representative government. We show how Bagehot's opposition to American-style presidentialism, to parliamentary democracy, and to proportional representation were profoundly shaped by his conceptions of government by discussion, and the rule of public opinion. Bagehot's criticisms of English parliamentarianism, both of its pre-1832 and post-1832 varieties were also motivated by those principles, as was his own proposal for parliamentary reform. By examining the whole range of Bagehot's writings on representative government (not merely his preference for parliamentarianism over presidentialism) and by connecting his institutional recommendations to his liberal principles, we are also able to better clarify Bagehot's position in Victorian political thought. The article concludes with a discussion of the debate leading up to the Second Reform Act, in which we elucidate Bagehot's disagreements with other prominent exponents of liberalism including John Stuart Mill, the “university liberals,” and Robert Lowe.     

Revolution,Reaction, Restoration: The Meanings and Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Political Thinking of Benjamin Constant,c.1797–1830

Comparisons, juxtapositions or analogies between France's recent Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history and England's experiences of Revolution, Civil War and Restoration between the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were a common but controversial feature of political discourse dealing with France's contemporary situation in the decades following the Revolution of 1789. The present article probes this dimension of post-Revolutionary political debate, by tracking the shifting meanings and uses of seventeenth-century English history in the published and unpublished political writings of the leading liberal thinker and politician Benjamin Constant, from the 1790s through to his death in 1830. Such an analysis reveals the sometimes striking reversals and inconsistencies to which Constant was driven in his effort to adjust his historical readings to France's rapidly changing political conditions, but it also reveals underlying continuities in his historical and political thinking. The exemplarity of England's case lay, for Constant, less in the provision of a constitutional model that France might hope to appropriate than in the historical spectacle of a nation's struggle for liberty, and the value of this spectacle lay as much in its cautionary messages—focused on the sterile brutality of the Stuart Restoration—as in its eventually progressive outcomes.     

Pierre Manent and the Politics of the Possible

Pierre Manent's recent works are marked by what he describes as a sense of realistic political possibility, which he uses to form a political response to the challenge of Islamic radicalism. Manent's “politics of the possible” differs from the usual alternatives that propose to integrate Islamic communities on liberal-individualist terms, or to repatriate Islamic immigrants to their countries of origin. Neither of those alternatives involves “politics” in the sense of articulating a political form within the polity given to us—a polity that now includes a sizable antiliberal minority. Manent's proposal to incorporate Muslim communities formally into the French polity by way of a certain social contract is thus a “politics of the possible” even if it is unlikely to be pursued. This article outlines Manent's account of political possibility and discusses two difficulties with his approach. First, the modern state's success and account of its legitimacy have distanced it from the foundational experiences in which it was capable of addressing the question of religion. Second, the situation caused by the radicalization of existing and new Muslim communities occurs at a different juncture in European political history from that which gave rise to the modern state.     

Pierre Manent's Montaigne

Pierre Manent's Montaigne: la vie sans loi is at once a profound reading of Michel de Montaigne's notoriously elusive Essays and an ambitious effort to reshape our understanding of the meaning of modernity. Manent argues that Montaigne brings a distinctively modern conception of life itself into being in his writing, a conception now so pervasive that its novelty is difficult for us to discern. He makes a compelling case for according Montaigne a central place in any modern attempt at self-understanding, but also shows that the modern self-conception Montaigne helped bring into being is highly questionable.     

Civil Liberty in Hobbes's Commonwealth

Hobbes has been long accused of providing a political philosophy that threatens individual liberty. While some commentators have tried to rescue him from this criticism, little attention has been paid to the specifics of his statements on such topics as freedom of speech, censorship, and property rights. In this paper, I examine what Hobbes says on these issues and conclude that his overwhelming priority is to defend liberty once peace has been secured. I conclude by suggesting that Hobbes's political project has some similarities with current liberal proceduralist theories of justice.     

Tradition and Reform: Aristotle’s Response to Modern Alternatives

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to articulate an Aristotelian alternative to two prominent contemporary ways of understanding human freedom and dependence on the past, and to the implications these understandings have for political life. While a liberal tendency, following Machiavelli’s emphasis on new modes and orders, understands political life to begin with breaking from the past, the more conservative camp in modern thought, following Burke in his emphasis on tradition, understands political life to begin with laws and customs inherited from the past. Aristotle’s teaching in his Nicomachean Ethics on the freedom and responsibility that make human beginnings possible points us, I propose, to a better understanding of political founding than either modern alternative. In the Politics, he connects the city to natural beginnings in the family but also calls the first who founded a city one “responsible for the greatest of goods” (Pol. 1253a31-32). And in the Ethics, he offers his own founding of a way of inquiring about politics, which engages with his predecessors, as a model for politics itself. In this way, Aristotle offers us a deeper understanding of political founding and change, even presenting his own philosophic inquiry in the Ethics as its ground and model.     

THE DIALECTICS OF JAMESON'S DIALECTICS

This review essay attempts to understand the book under review against the background of Jameson's previous writings. Failing to do so would invite misunderstanding since there are few contemporary theorists whose writing forms so much of a unity. Jameson's book can be divided into three parts. The first and most important part deals with dialectics, the second with politics, and the third with philosophy of history. In the first part Jameson argues that dialectics best captures our relationship to the sociocultural and historical world we are living in. The second part makes clear that Jameson is not prepared to water down his own Marxist politics in order to spare the liberal sensibilities of his political opponents. In the third part Jameson develops his own philosophy of history, mainly in a dialogue with Ricoeur. Dialectics is his main weapon in his discussion with Ricoeur, and it becomes clear that the Spinozism of dialectics allows for a better understanding of history and of historical writing than does Ricoeur's phenomenological approach. The book is an impressive testimony to the powers of dialectical thought and to its indispensability for a proper grasp of historical writing.     

Roger Scruton's Conservatism and the Liberal Regime

Although Roger Scruton insists on the incompatibility of his conservatism and the fundamental liberal principles of individualism and consent, his political thought has much in common with classical liberal constitutionalism. This essay explores these relationships while arguing that particularly Locke's constitutionalism is more compatible with Scruton's ideas than he allows. Specifically, Scruton argues that authority necessarily precedes any individual claims, but Locke's civil society, in fact, subordinates individual rights to political authority and common goods. Similarly, Scruton's insists that the state is an end rather than a means, but his own account of the conditionality of allegiance approaches Locke's understanding of legitimacy in the practice of civic association. This narrowing of the differences suggests that a conservative teaching could begin with an education in liberal constitutionalism rightly understood.     

Montaigne: Founder of Modern Liberalism

In this essay David Lewis Schaefer summarizes and defends the argument set forth in his book The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Cornell University Press, 1990; second edition 2019) that Michele de Montaigne's Essays (first edition, 1580) merits consideration as a founding text of modern political liberalism. After responding to the most extensive published critique of his interpretation (by James Supple) and citing other recent studies that harmonize with his argument, Schaefer compares his analysis of Montaigne's political aims and political-ethical teaching with those set forth in two other recent studies: Philippe Desan's Montaigne: A Life and Pierre Manent's Montaigne: La Vie sans loi.     

Existential Failure and Success: Augustinianism in Oakeshott and Arendt

That Oakeshott and Arendt's political works contain Augustinian references is well known. What historians of political thought have had difficulty in is assessing the consistency and importance of the Augustinian themes within their work. It transpires that the traces of existentialism and personalism in Augustine are amplified and clarified by their use in Oakeshott and Arendt, to the extent that they form an important subtext to their work. One stumbling block for scholars attempting to link the ‘mature’ works of Oakeshott and Arendt to Augustine has been a sense of disparity between the eschatological character of Augustine's writings and the civic worldliness of Oakeshott's associations and Arendt's public realm. Returning to several strands of twentieth-century Augustinianism, from the personalist to the existentialist to the liberal, reveals an Augustinianism that is much more credibly linked to the whole of Oakeshott and Arendt's writings.     

1. CARL SCHMITT BETWEEN HISTORY AND MYTH

Carl Schmitt's work defines the history and theory of political myth. But analyzing it represents a challenge to historians and theorists alike. For many historians, Schmitt should be analyzed in his own context, whereas theorists study his writings without enough consideration of the specific context in which he conceived his texts. In this essay, I argue that Schmitt not only contributed to the fascist glorification of the mythical and its novel enactment as the driving force of fascism, but he also represents one of the most intriguing and influential interpreters of the political theory of myth, challenging in turn theories of democracy and the role of reason and secularism in historiography.     

Political History and Political Philosophy: Making Sense of the West

Abstract

The old Western synthesis, the coming together of self-government, the Christian proposition, modern equality, and the commitment to relieving man's estate, appears to be unraveling. In the European context, it is being replaced by a “pure democracy” that cannot do justice to the continuity of Western civilization. Rejecting the twin temptations of Progress and Decline, Pierre Manent recovers the perspective of the human agent. While the polis or classical city is no longer available to us, the self-government of free human beings remains at the heart of the Western enterprise. Manent shows that the Christian notion of conscience preserved the classical analogy between the soul and the political association and is at the hear of Western liberty. The West as a whole rests on the synthetic and mediating notion of conscience.     

The Secularization of Providential Order: F. A. Hayek's Political-Economic Theology

In this article I argue that the concept of spontaneous order that underlies F. A. Hayek's political-economic thought is a secularized version of classical liberalism's understanding of order as providential. In Adam Ferguson's writings on history and social order, from which Hayek draws the notion of spontaneous order, the classical liberal paradigm reveals its intimate connection to providential theology. It is in three features of Ferguson's thought, namely his understanding of order, the politics of laissez-faire he dictates, and his providential optimism, that a providential theology reveals itself. Hayek's restatement of liberalism involves the secularization of this notion of order, which forces him both to ground his thought in a different ontology and to formulate a different politics. By contrasting Hayek's political economy to Ferguson's thought I trace the implications of this secularization. In the conclusion I contend that despite his secularizing gesture, Hayek does not succeed at emptying his understanding of order of all theological traces. Consequently, his notion of “spontaneous order” still carries a distinct theological charge, making it impossible for Hayekian political economy to countenance the destruction wrought by markets.