A Liberal and a Classic: Pierre Manent's Neo-Aristotelian Reading of Raymond Aron

The contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent is, by his own account, deeply influenced by the Christian tradition, by Leo Strauss, and by his teacher Raymond Aron. This article explores Manent's indebtedness to Raymond Aron (1905–1983), one of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century. In a series of writings about Aron over the past thirty-five years, Manent presents a public man who spoke with “authority and competence of the things of the city, whose eloquence was able to instruct the public as it retained the ear of princes, of whom the sovereign reason seized, in each situation, the essential.” Manent has thought long and hard about Aron's lucid and courageous opposition to totalitarianism, his defense of human liberty and political reason, and his affinities with the prudence and sobriety of the first great political scientist, Aristotle. Manent's Aron is a liberal classic more than a classical liberal. His defense of modern liberty never forgot that even a free society must cultivate virtue and respect for the common good. This article shows the affinities between the later Aron in particular and Manent's own political writings. Manent's own turn to the chose publique owes much to Aristotle as indirectly mediated by Aron.     

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.     

Feature Review

Abstract

The emergence of the Tea Party has set off a new round of speculation on the “future” of the conservative movement. This essay discusses two issues, defense spending and immigration, on which the Tea Party may fuse a conservative-libertarian approach that might distinguish it from earlier conservative political movements. The essay notes that the twenty-first century has a developing school of conservative thought that can provide the intellectual groundwork for such a political combination between conservatives and libertarians. This school opposes both mainstream liberalism and mainstream conservatism and attempts to rework the conservative tradition to face contemporary challenges.     

The Conservative Critique of the Enlightenment: The Limits of Social Engineering

The conservative, mainly Anglo-Saxon, critique of “social engineering” in Enlightenment thinking, which goes back to Edmund Burke and David Hume, among others, has recently resurfaced in the works of Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and Friedrich Hayek. This article focuses on their conservative critiques and more specifically on two common issues: the unintended negative consequences of political planning, and the institutions in civil society that act as a positive counterpart to this form of engineering.     

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.     

Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu

In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu.     

The Arab Opposition Molehill

Arab Islamic oppositions have proven largely ineffectual in molding regime outcomes since the liberalizations of the 1980s and 1990s, although many continue to overestimate their potential for propelling reform. This article argues that a keen sense of the past is necessary when evaluating whether or not an opposition matters for political reform. Section I introduces noted scholar Juan Linz's notion of “semi‐opposition”—limited and “semi‐free” opposition groups that may sustain authoritarian regimes as much as repression. Using interviews and English and Arabic sources, Section II demonstrates historical correspondences between semi‐opposition and the Jordanian and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) organizations concerning origins and support, ideology and approach to politics, regime tolerance and political environment, and political behavior. Section III develops Linz's hypothesis on the links between semi‐opposition and authoritarian persistence by examining how the MB marginalizes and raises the costs of dissent for other opposition groups and actors. The MB is briefly contrasted with the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) opposition party of 1989–1992 in Section IV . Decidedly not a semi‐opposition, the FIS proved far more transformative than either the Jordanian or Egyptian MB, inducing centrifugal politics and the collapse of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) state that governed Algeria from 1962.     

The nation as seen from below: Rome in 1870

When Rome joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, its symbolic importance played a large part in its role as the new capital of the nation-state. That very symbolic weight, though, left but a small space for the Romans themselves, particularly the lower classes. While recent scholarship on Italian nation-building has explored the cultural project underlying its political developments, it still remains to be understood how the lower classes first experienced and responded to their incorporation into the nation. Courted by the new nation-state, its clerical opposition and its radical opposition alike, their Risorgimento was different from that of the Romantic tropes informing the new national politics.     

Conservative Journalists’ Myth Making in South Korea: Use of the Past in News Coverage of the 2008 Korean Candlelight Vigil

This article explores the role of three conservative newspapers in South Korea as storytellers that create and maintain the collective memory of Korean conservatives through textual analysis of news stories on one particular recent event, the 2008 Korean Candlelight Vigil. Several protests since the 1980s in which the democratic-progressives were a leading force have been used as a source of historical analogies that have helped conservative journalists to interpret contemporary events and issues, including the 2008 vigil. These past protests were framed as anti-American, pro-North Korean leftist actions in the news stories. Some aspects of these past events were omitted – for example, former democratic-progressive activists’ contribution to the democratisation process – while other aspects were emphasised, notably the violent nature of the earlier generation of activists. In addition, conservative journalists constructed a revisionist version of one particular past protest, the 2002 Korean Candlelight Vigil, and used it to serve present political purposes, conflating the rhetoric and language of the earlier protests into their reporting of the current protest. These discourse strategies helped to incorporate the current protest into a larger discourse of “the threat posed by the leftists”, which is embedded in the collective memory of Korean conservatives.     

Identity Politics and the Religious Right: Hiding Hate in the Landscape

Identity theory has had important theoretical implications for analysis of political action, but has tended mostly to examine identity formation and political action on the left. Any theory concerned with eradicating oppression must also analyze identity formation and political action of groups on the right whose politics are often based on exclusion and hate. Thus the empirical part of this paper focuses on the religious right, specifically Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia. The potency of the religious right lies in an identity politics which simultaneously asserts that fundamentalists are essentially different from those "of the world" but should nonetheless equate themselves politically with economic conservatives. This allows Liberty to borrow freely from the symbols and trappings of economic conservatism while blurring the hate and antagonistic othering inherent in essentialist notions of fundamentalist identity.     

The Paradox at the Heart of American Conservatism

Abstract

This essay considers the state of American conservatism focusing initially on social and political institutions and concluding with a few comments on conservatism as an intellectual movement. A paradox is described as lying at the heart of American conservatism: the economic policies supported by conservatives promote economic conditions that are the main causes of the social problems conservatives lament most loudly.     

Qian Mu’s Guoshi dagang : Reflections on a Modern Chinese Conservative

This paper examines the predicament of modern Chinese conservatism. I use the eminent historian Qian Mu (1895-1990) as an example to show that under the influence of modernity and in an effort to preserve tradition, a prominent conservative like Qian needed to “modernize” Chinese tradition so that it could be saved. I will examine Qian’s reconstruction of Chinese history, which was not just a reiteration of China’s past, but a new type of understanding of Chinese tradition influenced by modern Western concepts. By focusing on Qian’s most prominent work, Guoshi dagang, we can get a sense of the struggle of modern Chinese conservatives as they tried to fend off the detractors of Chinese tradition.     

Islands,extraction and violence: Mining and the politics of scale in Island Melanesia

Set against the backdrop of past, contemporary and possible future mining-related violence on islands in the western Pacific, this article explores how scholarship on the politics of scale, as well as strands of the burgeoning island studies literature, might sharpen our understanding of the political economic and violent effects of extractive resource enclaves in Island Melanesia. Drawing upon field research in Bougainville and Solomon Islands, I argue that just as Melanesian islands were produced as a scale of struggle in the context of the introduction of capitalist social relations under colonialism, so too have they emerged as a critical, albeit problematic, scale of struggle in contemporary contestations around extractive resource capitalism under the current round of globalisation and accumulation by dispossession. I suggest that this politics of scale lens enriches our understanding of how “islandness” can be an important variable in social and political economic processes. When the politics of scale is imbricated with the well-established idea of the island as the paradigmatic setting for territorialising projects, including the nation-state and sub-national jurisdictions, islandness emerges as a potentially powerful variable in the political economic struggles that attend extractive resource enclaves. I also highlight, in the cases considered here, how islands can become containers for internal socio-spatial contradictions that can be animated by extractive enclaves and can contribute to the island scale becoming violent and “ungovernable”. The article advances recent efforts to bring the island studies literature into closer conversation with political and economic geography.     

Peering in from the window ledge of the Union: the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the attempt to bring British Conservatism to Northern Ireland

In this article I examine one particular way in which the Anglo-Irish Agreement redefined unionist politics in the late 1980s. While the operation of “direct rule” had drawn the unionist middle classes ever closer to Britain in economic and cultural terms, it had also left them in a precarious position politically. The nature and scale of this political subservience was brought home dramatically in 1985 when the British government signed an international agreement giving the Dublin government the right to be consulted on Northern Irish affairs. In the period of political flux summoned by the Hillsborough Accord, elements of the unionist middle classes were drawn to the previously marginal ideas of a small leftist organisation that argued for the British political parties to organise in the region. Given the material interests and social conservatism of those attracted to it, the call for “equal citizenship” would inevitably take the form primarily of a movement seeking to bring British Conservatism to Northern Ireland.     

Provincializing European responses to the refugee ‘crisis’ through a Hungarian lens

This paper engages with state, citizen, and civil society responses to refugees in Budapest and Hungary more widely in order to ‘provincialise’ European migration policy and politics. We introduce grounded, eastern ‘frontline’ realities and histories to complicate European claims to universality and hierarchies of “goodness”. Through ethnographic work that documents and analyses refugee reception after the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, we shed light on the diverse forms of existing crises affecting the EU. These conflicts involve contestations over i) who is deemed European (questions that have been asked both of migrants and East Europeans), and ii) the ‘Europeanisation’ project as it has entailed new governance and funding arrangements for the development of civil society organisations. These new governance modes have attempted to re-shape city-state-EU dynamics, purposefully eliding problematic nation-state responses to refugees. These have heightened opposition to EU power-creep from conservative governments. Through an empirically rich discussion of the Hungarian context in relation to Europe, this paper speaks to the broader spectrum of grounded and politicised populist responses that have challenged the EU's governance and future.     

Halford Mackinder's “new” political geography and the geographical tradition

This article re-examines Halford Mackinder's conception of geography in general and his practise as a political geographer in particular by placing his work in the context of the history of geography. The nature and politicisation of early modern (c.1600–1850) geography are depicted, and used as a contextual standard against which to assess Mackinder's claims to have propounded a “new” geography and a “new” form of political geography. Mackinder's conception of geography is found to have been a substantial departure from the early modern one, in terms of its definition of geography, its textual format and its placing of geography in a broader educative structure. By contrast, Mackinder's political geography is shown to effect a far less radical break, for whilst Mackinder's rhetoric suggests that geography will drive his political analysis, it is in fact his pre-existent politics as a tariff-reforming conservative which drove his political geography. To the extent that geography acted as a container for politics, Mackinder was still in the tradition of the early modern period, although he did change the form of that argument.     

In Defence of the Secular? Islamisation,Christians and (New) Politics in Urbane Malaysia

Besides the clarion call for a “new politics” by opposition political parties, a significant catalyst that arguably swayed Christian electoral choices in the landmark Malaysian general elections of March 2008 was the counsel by religious leaders to safeguard “the secular state”. This action was prompted by recent high profile controversial legal cases that were perceived to be a serious erosion of the freedom of religion clause guaranteed in the secularist Federal Constitution. In this essay, I not only examine the recent antecedents of this course of action but also delve into the more distant past in order to draw out how the apparently impervious categories of “religion” and “the secular” have been implicated in the structuring of social and political imaginaries in Malaysia.     

The Politics of Carbon Market Design: Rethinking the Techno‐politics and Post‐politics of Climate Change

Carbon markets have provided fertile ground for research on the changing nature of political contestation. MacKenzie locates a “techno‐politics” of carbon markets that creates new possibilities for a “politics of market design”. In contrast, Swyngedouw argues carbon markets are part of a “post‐political” shift that narrows potential pathways through “depoliticisation”. This article engages with these debates by examining three recent attempts to reform the ailing European Union Emissions Trading System: restricting industrial gas offsets, backloading allowance auctions and the 2030 climate and energy package. It conceptualises the respective episodes as contests over the reach, force and priority of value determinations in climate policy, emphasising the contradictory imperatives facing states on each issue. The outcomes of contestation between industry groups and environmental organisations—real but limited reforms and a consolidation of the carbon market over alternatives—demonstrate the constraints facing technocratic campaigning and the ongoing politicisation of climate change.     

An Enlightened path towards conservatism: critical junctures and changing elite perceptions in early nineteenth-century Russia

This article explores the historical roots of Russian conservatism by analyzing the evolution of Russia’s Westernized, Enlightenment-minded nobility to a conservative segment of Russian society in the early nineteenth century. The events of 1789 and 1812 were critical junctures that made the Russian nobility painfully aware of their own deep level of Westernization. The article first describes the reverberations of the French Revolution among the Russian elite. It also discusses the internal and external scrutiny of Russia’s relations with France under Napoleon, which made Russian conservatism a contingency. It then describes the evolution between 1789 and 1812 of a corpus of conservative ideas ranging from traditionalism to ardent patriotism and xenophobia. Napoleon’s 1812 campaign against Russia overshadowed the generational gap and diverging political and literary preferences among the elite. The reaction to it illustrates the intrinsic duality of the Russian elite: culturally Westernized, yet politically conservative. Yet the influence of several Western defenders of the ancien régime on Russia’s conservatives shows that the essentially conservative Russian identity as propagated by Putin these days originally might have been more pan-European than purely Russian.     

战后美国保守主义思想重构

20世纪50、60年代,美国保守派在民主党自由派独步美国政坛的形势下对保守主义思想进行了重构,以便为自己重掌美国政治大权做好思想方面的准备。这一思想重构主要表现在两个方面:保守派外交思想的重构和保守派内政思想的重构。第一种重构使得保守派走出孤立主义的思想阴影,接受和支持干涉主义政策;第二种重构使得保守派在坚持自由市场和个人主义的同时,认同联邦政府对国民经济某种程度的干预及为此而推出的一部分福利政策,以张扬社会公正、维护道德秩序。战后保守主义的思想重构意义重大,其影响和作用贯穿于20世纪的最后30年,直至今日。