Archive for the ‘Scholarship’ Category
Allen Mendenhall and Josh Herring Discuss Richard Weaver
In American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, History, Humanities, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature on September 15, 2022 at 6:00 amReview of Benjamin and Jenna Storey’s “Why We Are Restless”
In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Conservatism, Historicism, History, Humanities, Philosophy, Scholarship on May 26, 2022 at 6:45 amReviewed by Allen Mendenhall
This review originally appeared here in the Journal of Faith & The Academy.
Almost 2500 years ago, Aristotle posited that what distinguishes humans from the animals is not only our judgment and rationality, but also our unique capacity for love, affection, and bonding. The coronavirus pandemic is frustrating because, among other things, it forces us to suppress and neglect the very qualities that set humans apart from the rest of creation. Enforced isolation and social distancing deprive us of the opportunity to gather and fellowship, hug and touch, cultivate community and family. Alienation and quarantine are contrary to our nature as free and social beings.
For over a year I wondered whether I would embrace my 85-year-old grandmother again. She was confined to a nursing home just outside Atlanta; no family could visit her until recently. Restricting guests was for her own protection, but it didn’t feel right or good. Because the coronavirus isn’t sentient, doesn’t possess moral properties or exercise an agency of its own, we can’t get angry at it, punish it, argue with it, or condemn it as wrong or unfair. Hence our anxiety multiplies.
The pandemic only worsened an already pervasive problem, namely a growing sense of restlessness and unhappiness even as we in the United States enjoy widespread economic opportunity and astounding material prosperity. Benjamin and Jenna Storey, married professors who run the distinguished Tocqueville Forum at Furman University, diagnose this condition—societal malaise—in Why We Are Restless, the latest in a fascinating book series edited by Robert P. George and published under the imprint New Forum Books of Princeton University Press.
Their answer to this question about restlessness? It’s complicated.
Short-term thinkers might point to the opioid crisis, social media, political parties, climate change, work hours, around-the-clock news, police brutality and so on to pinpoint root causes. These are merely symptoms of larger problems, however. Long-term thinking, an understanding of centuries of philosophical and historical trends, free inquiry, a willingness to adapt when new evidence presents itself, facility with foreign languages and difficult texts from different times and traditions—these make for a rational and dispassionate examination of the social ills of our moment. And the Storeys are adequately equipped and prepared for the task. They have selected four modern French intellectuals—Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)—to guide readers on a “quest” (the Storeys’ term) for contentment, which is, according to the Storeys, antithetical to restlessness or malaise.
The narrative goes something like this: Montaigne’s ponderous essays are, on the whole, about learning how to die, or coming to terms with the irrefutable reality of mortality. He developed the concept of “immanent contentment” to refer to the good life to which reasonable and thoughtful people should aspire. “Immanent contentment” involves “moderation through variation,” affirmation and friendship, and stability or equilibrium with some diversity of experience thrown in for good measure. Pascal came along to refute “immanent contentment,” suggesting that humans by their sinful nature are, unhappily, divorced from God. A proper life, in his paradigm, seeks reunion with the divine, or wholeness. Rousseau wasn’t much cheerier, acknowledging as he did the inevitable sadness of the human condition as well as the unavoidable futility of the relentless pursuit of happiness. His so-called “sentiment of existence,” however, posited ways we can enjoy the experience of being alive without despairing. Tocqueville, alas, located the industrious chase for immanent contentment within democracy and majoritarianism, social and political categories connected with labor and materialism. The Tocquevillian risks much suffering from the constant drive for happiness. Why? Because that drive makes the lack of contentment feel like failure, as if we tried but couldn’t succeed when in fact no amount of effort would have changed our lot.
So where does that leave us? Perhaps with an amalgamation of instructive perspectives. Montaigne teaches us “to learn to be at home within ourselves and within our world, and to cease measuring our lives against any transcendent goal or standard.” Pascal renders the “restless unhappiness at the core of the modern soul, sadly seeking to absorb itself in a form of contentment not capacious enough to meet the demands of its self-transcending nature.” Rousseau imparts that “we cannot quiet our restlessness by going to either extreme”—the “natural and solitary” on the one hand and the “social and artificial” on the other—because “both are only parts of what we are: human beings are as social as we are solitary, as historical as we are natural.” Studying Tocqueville, we discover that we’re “[g]eographically transient, and never knowing what to expect from others in a social world always in flux.” Moreover, we “crave the reassurance” of our “fellows’ approbation, which proves to be as allusive as their whereabouts.”
The Storeys’ analysis of these four Frenchmen doesn’t lead inexorably to any one political platform or position. Conservatives and liberals, right and left, are equally wrong, reductive, and simplistic, according to the Storeys, because human complexities defy crude caricature. “Conservatives,” they tell us, “see liberals not as people earnestly if misguidedly working to alleviate entrenched injustice but as insular cultural elites signaling their virtue; liberals see conservatives not as people sincerely if mistakenly working to preserve traditional morality but as rich white men perpetuating their privilege.” Elsewhere the Storeys state, “The case our right makes for free-market economics assumes that perpetual economic growth is self-evidently good, an assumption little challenged by human beings accustomed to thinking of happiness in terms of immanent contentment, to which an ever-proliferating variety of goods and services is useful.” By contrast, “[w]hen our left argues for the redistribution of the same kind of resources, its position often rests on similar assumptions about the kind of flourishing our political arraignments should support.” The Storeys add that “the social aim of unmediated approbation frequently underlies both the celebrations of familiar intimacy dear to the right and the defenses of free erotic connection dear to the left.”
The Storeys’ copious endnotes are a store of knowledge and wisdom. One could spend an entire decade following the numerous lines of inquiry drawn here. That’s before one exhausts the extensive bibliography that rounds out this handsome hardback.
There are no throwaway lines in Why We Are Restless. In fact, this book is difficult to review because each of its sentences is carefully crafted, and each of its chapters contains memorable axioms and nuggets of insight. For instance, from the chapter on Montaigne: “The human problem lies not in our failure to cultivate our distinctly human faculties but in our misbegotten and doomed attempts to rise above ourselves.”
From the chapter on Pascal: “Modern human beings can follow their passions and pleasures, indulge idle or even voyeuristic curiosities, accumulate wealth and achieve ambitions with less shame or need for apology than their forbears. But doing so seems only to add to the mounting pile of evidence that the decisive obstacles to immanent contentment do not lie in the laws and moral norms modern peoples so relentlessly critique and overturn. The unhappiness that remains when such liberations have succeeded must have its source not in our laws but in ourselves.”
From the chapter on Rousseau: “Man’s fall is an accident of history; indeed, it is the accident that brings history into being. Our misery is of our own making; we are wicked only because we have adulterated ourselves. And yet we knew not what we did.”
From the chapter on Tocqueville: “The very hold the sentiment of human resemblance has over democratic human beings often prevents them from noticing just how remarkable it is. Human difference, after all, is more visible than human resemblance: our eyes see big human beings and small human beings, males and females, dark-skinned and light-skinned, the fine tailoring of wealth and the dishevelment of poverty. We never see a human being simply, which is an abstraction; we always see this or that human being, who has qualities that differentiate him or her from others.”
Some of these lines are summaries of the subject author’s texts or claims but articulated in the Storeys’ unique voice and vocabulary. That these passages are unoriginal—restating established sagacity—does not make them any less profound.
If you’re looking for self-help therapy, specialized research, pop-psychology, or easy-step prescriptions for success, grab another book. The contentment that is the Storeys’ subject is elusive, achievable only through difficult work, deliberate solitude, serious contemplation, deep learning in the liberal arts, and the kind of hard-won discernment that enables one to make good choices.
The Legacy of Nathaniel Branden
In American History, Arts & Letters, Epistemology, History, Humanities, Philosophy, Scholarship, Western Philosophy on April 15, 2020 at 6:45 amThis post originally appeared here at the Atlas Society.
The idea for a symposium on the life and thought of Nathaniel Branden came in 2012, two years before Branden’s death. Branden himself knew about and approved of the symposium but never saw it completed before he passed away.
The editorial board of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies conceived of this symposium as a wide-ranging, probing treatment of Branden’s vast and complex career, not just of his years with Ayn Rand. The response from potential contributors exceeded their expectations; they were inundated with submissions. What was supposed to be one volume became two. The once-slender manuscript grew to over 300 pages bearing the title “Nathaniel Branden: His Work and Legacy.” This is the first such work of its kind to assess Branden as a central figure in both philosophy and applied psychology in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Although the contributors to this collection come from various disciplines and represent different, sometimes incompatible positions, the editors received no contributions from the more “fundamentalist” Objectivists, and none from scholars associated with the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). The editors emphasize this fact in their prologue not to display resentment or animus, it seems, but as a sort of disclaimer—and explanation for the largely positive tone that characterizes much of the content here.
I have striven for impartiality regarding the Branden-Rand split and have, I think, made a good-faith effort to maintain the critical detachment necessary to write searchingly and decisively about this collection without sacrificing scholarly rigor or causing needless offense to students of Branden or Rand.
SECTION I
Section I of the collection is devoted to the so-called “Rand Years” of Branden’s career. It contains essays by Duncan Scott and Susan Love Brown and the reproduction of a lecture and question-answer session by Branden himself.
Scott, a filmmaker, tells the “truly epic story” of the improbable rise of the Objectivist movement that is attributable in part to Branden’s efforts. Scott met Branden but did not know him well. Filming Branden in 2003 for the Objectivist History Project, however, led him to realize Branden’s seminal role in the proliferation of Objectivism.
Scott credits Branden with popularizing Rand’s work and institutionalizing her lecture series. “The creation of a philosophy and the creation of a philosophical movement,” he says, “are not one and the same.” Undoubtedly Rand achieved the former on her own, but Branden is largely responsible for the latter, having responded to Rand’s fan mail, planned her events, established a newsletter in her honor, and spread her message across the globe to eager students and curious minds. These labors not only increased Rand’s following, but also lifted her spirits. Discouraged by negative reviews of her work, she began, with Branden’s help, to realize the extent of the impact her novels were having.
Branden popularized Rand as a writer of nonfiction and encouraged her to write about “racism as biological collectivism, totally incompatible with individualist philosophy”—a position that drew needed attention during the height of the Civil Rights Era. Scott succeeds in showing that Branden’s singular devotion to Rand during this period made him something of a publicist for, not just a disciple of, her work. He created vehicles for driving her ideas to vast audiences and made possible the formation of groups devoted to her philosophy. Without him, Rand may not have become the towering figure she is today.
In my next installment, I will cover Susan Love Brown’s piece on Branden’s sexuality. Until then, I look forward to a lively discussion of the essays and my analysis online.
Russell Kirk on Higher Education
In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, higher education, History, Humanities, Imagination, liberal arts, Liberalism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on February 12, 2020 at 6:45 am
This piece originally appeared here at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
Russell Kirk isn’t known as a policy wonk. The Great Books, not the mathematical or statistical models of economic technicians, were his organon of choice. He devoted essays to broad, perennial themes like “the moral imagination,” “liberal learning,” and “the permanent things.”
Read his numerous columns about higher education, however, and you might come away with a different impression, one of Kirk as a political strategist with a strong grasp of educational policy.
Kirk wrote on a wide variety of issues involving higher education: accreditation, academic freedom, tenure, curriculum, vocational training, community colleges, adult education, college presidents, textbooks, fraternities and Greek life, enrollment, seminaries, tuition, teachers’ unions, collective bargaining, student activism, British universities, urban versus rural schools, boards of trustees, university governance, the hard sciences, grade inflation, lowering academic standards, libraries, private versus public schooling, civics education, sex education, school vouchers, university presses, and more.
One of his go-to subjects implicates several of those issues: federal subsidies. He believed that federal money threatened the mission and integrity of universities in numerous areas.
For starters, he believed that federal subsidies—and, it must be added, foundation grants—created perverse incentives for researchers, who might conform to the benefactor’s “preferences” and “value judgments.”[1] Recalling the proverb that “[t]he man who pays the piper calls the tune,”[2] he cautioned against financial dependency on outside influences, which, he worried, could impose ideological conditions on grants to advance or purge particular viewpoints.
Moreover, the grantors, whether they were foundations or the government, would, he believed, quantify the value of their funded work according to measurable outcome assessments that were “easily tabulated and defensible.”[3] The intrinsic value of reading Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, or Euripides, however, is not easily assessed in instrumental terms.
More fundamentally, Kirk viewed federal involvement in higher education as a step toward the centralization and consolidation of power at the expense of local variety. He foresaw the creation of the U.S. Department of Education long before it occurred.[4] Fearing the growth of an “educationist hierarchy” or an “empire of educationism” corrupted by “sinecures” and “patronage,”[5] he favored small, private, liberal-arts colleges, which, he believed, flourished when they committed to mission and tradition.[6]
“The American college—the small liberal arts college—is worth preserving,” Kirk wrote, “but it can be preserved, in our time of flux, only if it is reformed.”[7] Kirk’s reform was reactionary, not progressive.[8] It rejected the popular focus on vocation and specialization and sought to train “men and women who know what it is to be truly human, who have some taste for contemplation, who take long views, and who have a sense of moral responsibility and intellectual order.”[9] Even if they can’t be calculated precisely, these vague-yet-discernable qualities of literate people are beneficial to society writ large, in Kirk’s view. In other words, there’s an appreciable difference between literate and illiterate societies.
Kirk decried the alarming escalation of tuition prices. In 1979, he wrote, “Attendance at colleges and universities is becoming hopelessly expensive.”[10] Forty years later, the costs of attending college have risen exponentially. Kirk opposed federal aid or scholarships to students,[11] but not, from what I can tell, for the economic reason that the ready availability of federal funding would enable universities to hike tuition rates to artificially high levels. Perhaps, even in his skepticism, he couldn’t conceive of university leadership as so systematically exploitative.
We continue to hear echoes of Kirk’s observation that the typical college student “oughtn’t to be in college at all: he has simply come along for the fun and a snob-degree, and his bored presence reduces standards at most American universities.”[12] Elsewhere, he claimed that “[w]e have been trying to confer the higher learning upon far too many young people, and the cost per capita has become inordinate.”[13] The question of why students attend college is closely related to that of the fundamental purpose of college.
Uncertainty regarding the point of higher education—whether it’s to develop the inquisitive mind, expand the frontiers of knowledge, equip students with jobs skills, or something else entirely—seems more pronounced today in light of technological, economic, and population changes. Moreover, it remains true that “most of the universities and colleges are forced to do the work that ordinary schools did only a generation ago.”[14] Shouldn’t higher education accomplish more than remedial education? Doesn’t it have a greater end?
Kirk certainly thought so—at least if higher education were properly liberal. “By ‘liberal education,’” he explained, “we mean an ordering and integrating of knowledge for the benefit of the free person—as contrasted with technical or professional schooling, now somewhat vaingloriously called ‘career education.’”[15]
Kirk’s surprising wonkishness, and his facility in policy debates, always submitted to this overarching goal: Defending order against disorder, in both the soul and the larger polity.[16] “The primary purpose of a liberal education,” he said, “is the cultivation of the person’s own intellect and imagination, for the person’s own sake.”[17]
The aspiration of policy wasn’t policymaking. Kirk’s short-term strategies serviced a paramount objective: Namely, to seek wisdom, virtue, truth, clarity, and understanding. You can’t simply quantify the value of that.
[1] Russell Kirk, “Massive Subsidies and Academic Freedom,” Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 28, No. 3 (1963), 608.
[2] Ibid. at 607.
[3] Ibid. at 611.
[4] Russell Kirk, “Federal Aid to Educational Bureaucracy,” National Review, Vol. 10 (February 25, 1961), 116.
[5] Russell Kirk, “The Federal Educational Boondoggle,” National Review, Vol. 5 (March 15, 1958), 257.
[6] See generally Russell Kirk, “The American College: A Proposal for Reform,” The Georgia Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer 1957), 177-186.
[7] Ibid. at 177.
[8] Ibid. (“our age seems to require a reform that is reactionary, rather than innovating”).
[9] Ibid. at 182-83.
[10] Russell Kirk, “More Freedom Per Dollar,” National Review, Vol 31 (April 13, 1979), 488.
[11] Russell Kirk, “Federal Scholarships,” National Review, Vol. 2 (November 24, 1956), 18.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Russell Kirk, “Who Should Pay for Higher Education?” Vol. 23 (May 18, 1971), 534.
[14] Russell Kirk, “Federal Education,” National Review, Vol. 4 (December 28, 1957), 592.
[15] Russell Kirk, “The Conservative Purpose of a Liberal Education,” in The Essential Russell Kirk, edited by George A. Panichas (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2007), 398.
[16] Ibid. at 400.
[17] Ibid.
El Why Liberalism Failed de Deneen ataca una versión falsa del liberalismo
In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Christianity, Conservatism, Historicism, History, Humanities, Liberalism, Modernism, Philosophy, Politics, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on October 2, 2019 at 6:45 am
This post originally appeared here at Mises.org.
Sólo los audaces titulan un libro Why Liberalism Failed. Patrick Deneen, el Profesor Asociado de Ciencias Políticas David A. Potenziani Memorial de la Universidad de Notre Dame, ha hecho precisamente eso, proponiendo que tal fracaso ha ocurrido realmente y estableciendo la expectativa irrazonable de que él pueda explicarlo. Su premisa operativa es que el liberalismo creó las condiciones para su inevitable desaparición, que es una ideología autoconsumidora y autodestructiva que sólo tiene unos 500 años. (p. 1) «El liberalismo ha fracasado», declara triunfante, «no porque se quedara corto, sino porque era fiel a sí mismo. Ha fracasado porque ha tenido éxito». (p.3)
Deneen no define el término liberalismo, que no está en su índice a pesar de que se encuentra en todo el libro. Tengo la certeza de que uno de los revisores del manuscrito pre-publicado recomendó su publicación a los editores de Yale University Press, siempre y cuando Deneen definiera el liberalismo de manera convincente y luego limpiara sus descuidadas referencias a él. Deneen ignoró este consejo, dejando el manuscrito como está. Su genealogía del liberalismo es aún más problemática a la luz de esta negativa a aclarar.
Deneen presenta una aparente paradoja, a saber, que el liberalismo, bajo la bandera de la libertad y la emancipación, produjo su opuesto: un vasto, progresista y coercitivo Estado administrativo bajo el cual los individuos se han vuelto alienados, amorales, dependientes, condicionados y serviles. «El proyecto político del liberalismo», afirma, «nos está moldeando en las criaturas de su fantasía prehistórica, que de hecho requería el aparato masivo combinado del Estado moderno, la economía, el sistema educativo y la ciencia y la tecnología para convertirnos en: seres cada vez más separados, autónomos, no relacionales, repletos de derechos y definidos por nuestra libertad, pero inseguros, impotentes, temerosos y solos». (p.16)
En esta línea se oyen ecos de Sartre, y el existencialismo recomienda un cierto individualismo: la libertad del agente racional, que ha sido empujado a la existencia sin elección ni culpa propia, a querer su propio significado en un mundo absurdo y caótico. Pero el existencialismo es una especie de individualismo diferente de la que motivó a Hobbes, Locke y Mill: los principales objetivos de la ira de Deneen. Es cierto que a Mill no le gustaba la conformidad dogmática con la costumbre, pero es una costumbre, incluso se podría decir que es una posición conservadora. Hay que mantener o conservar, después de todo, un modo crítico de abordar cuestiones difíciles sin suponer que ya se han encontrado todas las soluciones adecuadas. Cada época debe revisar sus enfoques de los problemas perennes. Hay muchas cosas que no le gustan desde una perspectiva cristiana, pero sus desagradables conclusiones no necesariamente se derivan de su método de indagación o de su apertura a examinar de nuevo los rompecabezas y los problemas con los que nuestros antepasados lucharon.
El liberalismo clásico o libertarismo al que se adhieren los individualistas cristianos promueve la paz, la cooperación, la coordinación, la colaboración, la comunidad, la administración, el ingenio, la prosperidad, la dignidad, el conocimiento, la comprensión, la humildad, la virtud, la creatividad, la justicia, el ingenio, y más, tomando como punto de partida la dignidad de cada persona humana ante Dios y ante la humanidad. Este individualismo prospera en culturas fundamentalmente conservadoras y no cuadra con la caricatura de Deneen de una caricatura de una caricatura de un individualismo «liberal». Este individualismo conservador, una criatura del liberalismo clásico, aboga por la libertad a fin de liberar a los seres humanos para que alcancen su máximo potencial, cultivar una ética y una moral generalizadas y mejorar sus vidas e instituciones mediante el crecimiento económico y el desarrollo. ¿Y quién puede negar que la economía de mercado con la que está vinculada ha dado lugar, en todo el mundo, a mejores condiciones de vida, avances tecnológicos y médicos, descubrimientos científicos, curiosidad intelectual e innovación industrial?
Deneen desea rebobinar el tiempo, recuperar la virtuosa «autogestión» de los antiguos que, según él, se basaba en el «bien común». (p. 99) Ve en la antigüedad un arraigo social que se alinea con el cristianismo tal como lo ejemplifican en el mundo moderno las comunidades amish (p. 106-107) Su celebración de las artes liberales tradicionales adopta, dice, «una comprensión clásica o cristiana de la libertad» (p. 129) que enfatiza las normas y localidades situadas, las culturas arraigadas y las continuidades institucionales. Esta, sin embargo, es una curiosa visión de la antigüedad, que contradice los rasgos anticristianos del pensamiento clásico y antiguo, ensalzada por Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand y Julius Evola, que valoraban los elementos paganos de «la antigua alabanza de la virtud» (p. 165) y menospreciaban el mundo moderno por ser demasiado cristiano.
A Deneen no le interesan los liberalismos, es decir, la multiplicidad de conceptos que vuelan bajo la bandera del liberalismo. Prefiere casualmente agrupar variedades de enfermedades genéricas (desde la agricultura industrializada hasta el enamoramiento con el STEM, la diversidad, el multiculturalismo, el materialismo y la autonomía sexual) como productos del único enemigo común de todo lo bueno que los períodos clásico y medieval tenían para ofrecer. Luego le da un nombre a ese enemigo: liberalismo. Nos sumergiría, si no en la antigüedad, en el tribalismo medieval, en períodos en los que los acusados eran juzgados por la prueba o el combate, cuando los juramentos de sangre y el parentesco, en lugar de la confianza, la buena voluntad o el intercambio económico, determinaban las lealtades y lealtades de uno.
No es correcto que el liberalismo «requiera la liberación de toda forma de asociación y relación, de la familia a la iglesia, de la escuela a la aldea y a la comunidad». Por el contrario, el liberalismo libera a la gente de la coerción tiránica e institucionalizada que les impide disfrutar de las asociaciones y relaciones locales, incluidas las de las familias, las iglesias, las escuelas y las comunidades. El liberalismo bien entendido empodera a la gente para que se agrupe y defina su experiencia según sus propias costumbres y costumbres. Gracias al liberalismo, el propio Deneen goza de la libertad de criticar al gobierno en rápido crecimiento que cada vez más intenta imponerle normas y reglas contrarias a las suyas.
Extender el individualismo que caracterizó al liberalismo clásico al progresismo del siglo XX y a la política de identidad moderna, como hace Deneen, es un error. La política de identidad moderna trata sobre el colectivismo en nombre de la autodefinición, la autoconciencia y la autoconstitución, sobre la elección de qué comunidades (Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, los Socialistas Demócratas de América, los neonazis, etc.) abrazan lo físico (por ejemplo, lo étnico o lo racial), lo ideológico (por ejemplo, lo pannacionalista, marxista, ecosocialista, feminista, anarcosindicalista, supremacista blanco), o características normativas (por ejemplo, justicia social o igualitarismo) en torno a las cuales se forman asociaciones de grupo.
La verdad es que el individualismo prospera en comunidades morales y virtuosas, y que el bien común y las asociaciones de grupos florecen en sociedades que reconocen y comprenden el valor y la dignidad inherentes de cada individuo. De la interdependencia y el fortalecimiento mutuo de la libertad y el orden, del individuo y de la sociedad, Frank Meyer proclamó que «la verdad se marchita cuando la libertad muere, por justa que sea la autoridad que la mata; y el individualismo libre, desinformado por el valor moral, se pudre en su centro y pronto crea las condiciones que preparan el camino para la rendición a la tiranía.1 Para aquellos que insisten en que el individualismo es antitético a la creencia religiosa, que es en sí misma indispensable para el conservadurismo y el bien común, M. Stanton Evans declaró, «la afirmación de un orden trascendente no sólo es compatible con la autonomía individual, sino con la condición de la misma; […] una visión escéptica de la naturaleza del hombre [es decir…] una visión escéptica de la naturaleza del hombre», como intrínsecamente defectuoso y propenso al pecado] no sólo permite la libertad política sino que la exige».2
En una sociedad libre, los empresarios y productores miran a los demás, a las comunidades, para determinar las necesidades básicas que deben satisfacerse. El interés personal racional que motiva la creatividad y la inventiva consiste fundamentalmente en servir a los demás de manera más eficiente y eficaz, en generar recompensas personales, sí, pero recompensas personales por hacer la vida mejor y más fácil para los demás. El Adam Smith de La Riqueza de las Naciones es el mismo Adam Smith de La Teoría de los Sentimientos Morales. Los seres humanos están conectados tanto para cuidar de sí mismos, proteger sus hogares y a sus seres queridos, como para sentir y sentir empatía por los demás. La beneficencia y la generosidad son aspectos principales del individualismo liberal que Deneen calumnia.
La «segunda ola» del liberalismo, en el paradigma de Deneen, es el progresismo. Sin embargo, el progresismo moderno y el Partido Demócrata no tienen casi nada que ver con el liberalismo clásico. Curiosamente y, me atrevo a decir, perezosamente, Deneen desea conectarlos. Sin embargo, no puede trazar una clara línea de conexión entre ellos, porque no la hay. La supuesta conexión es la supuesta ambición de «liberar a los individuos de cualquier relación arbitraria y no elegida y rehacer el mundo en uno en el que prosperen aquellos especialmente dispuestos al individualismo expresivo». (p. 143-44) ¿Debemos interpretar esta afirmación en el sentido de que Deneen preferiría que nuestras relaciones e interacciones fueran arbitrariamente coaccionadas por un poder central en una sociedad cerrada en la que los individuos subordinados siguen habitualmente las órdenes incuestionables de los superiores establecidos?
F. A. Hayek dijo una vez que, «hasta el ascenso del socialismo», lo opuesto al conservadurismo era el liberalismo pero que, en Estados Unidos, «el defensor de la tradición estadounidense era un liberal en el sentido europeo».3 ¿Está Deneen tan inmerso en la cultura estadounidense que no puede reconocer esta distinción básica? Deneen premia el bien común y colectivo que se manifiesta en las comunidades locales, culpando al interés propio racional de la supuesta tendencia universalizadora del liberalismo a erradicar las venerables costumbres y normas culturales. Pero parece confundido por la taxonomía norteamericana en la que ha caído el liberalismo y haría bien en revisar las obras de Ludwig von Mises, quien explicó: «En Estados Unidos, “liberal” significa hoy en día un conjunto de ideas y postulados políticos que en todos los aspectos son lo opuesto de todo lo que el liberalismo significó para las generaciones precedentes. El autodenominado liberal estadounidense apunta a la omnipotencia del gobierno, es un enemigo resuelto de la libre empresa y defiende la planificación integral por parte de las autoridades, es decir, el socialismo».4
Una comparación de la teoría política especulativa de Deneen y su narrativa abstracta de la decadencia con la de Larry Siedentop, profundamente histórica e ideológicamente neutra, Inventing the Individual (Belknap/Harvard, 2014), revela fallas críticas en el argumento de Deneen, comenzando con la proposición de que la clave del individualismo para el liberalismo tiene apenas 500 años. Siedentop menoscaba la imagen común de una Europa medieval asediada por la pobreza y la superstición, la monarquía y la tiranía, la corrupción generalizada y la muerte temprana de la que supuestamente nos rescataron el Renacimiento y, más tarde, la Ilustración. Siedentop ve, en cambio, el ascenso del cristianismo —mucho antes del medievalismo— como la causa del ascenso del individualismo liberal, que, de hecho, tiene sus raíces en las enseñanzas de San Pablo y de Jesucristo. Mientras que Deneen teoriza que el individualismo es reciente y anticristiano, Siedentop traza su historia actual como claramente cristiana, trazando sus características concretas a lo largo del tiempo a medida que proliferaba y sustituía a las antiguas culturas y costumbres paganas que carecían de una comprensión estructural de la dignidad y primacía de la persona humana.
Siedentop atribuye el individualismo liberal al cristianismo; Deneen trata el individualismo liberal como contrario al cristianismo. Ambos hombres no pueden corregir, al menos no completamente.
Caminando hacia atrás en algunas de sus grandes afirmaciones, Deneen reconoce en sus páginas finales que el liberalismo, en ciertas manifestaciones, ha existido por más de 500 años y que tiene mucho en común con el cristianismo:
Mientras que el liberalismo pretendía ser un edificio totalmente nuevo que rechazaba la arquitectura política de todas las épocas anteriores, se basaba naturalmente en largos desarrollos desde la antigüedad hasta la Baja Edad Media. Una parte significativa de su atractivo no era que se tratara de algo totalmente nuevo, sino que se basara en reservas profundas de creencia y compromiso. La antigua filosofía política se dedicaba especialmente a la cuestión de la mejor manera de evitar el surgimiento de la tiranía, y la mejor manera de lograr las condiciones de libertad política y autogobierno. Los términos básicos que informan nuestra tradición política —libertad, igualdad, dignidad, justicia, constitucionalismo— son de origen antiguo. El advenimiento del cristianismo, y su desarrollo en la filosofía política de la Edad Media, ahora muy descuidada, puso de relieve la dignidad del individuo, el concepto de persona, la existencia de derechos y deberes correspondientes, la importancia primordial de la sociedad civil y de una multiplicidad de asociaciones, y el concepto de gobierno limitado como el mejor medio de prevenir la inevitable tentación humana de la tiranía. El atractivo más básico del liberalismo no era su rechazo del pasado, sino su dependencia de conceptos básicos que eran fundamentales para la identidad política occidental. (págs. 184 a 85)
Perdóneme por estar confundido, pero pensé que Deneen se había propuesto criticar el liberalismo y trazar su fracaso, no exaltarlo ni defenderlo, y ciertamente no vincularlo a un antiguo linaje asociado con el cristianismo. Este pasaje representa la desorganización en el corazón del libro de Deneen. El liberalismo no tiene la culpa del estado administrativo masivo y sus redes de agentes y funcionarios que coaccionan a las comunidades locales. Deneen es parte del problema que describe, defendiendo formas de pensar y organizar el comportamiento humano que socavan su esperanza de que se reaviven los valores tradicionales y los lazos familiares o de vecindad a nivel local.
Deneen expresa sus opiniones con una certeza tan enloquecedora que parece altivo y tendencioso, como un manqué celosamente anti-libertario con un hacha que moler. Carece de la delicadeza y la caridad con que los eruditos razonables de buena fe se acercan a sus oponentes ideológicos. No tiene en cuenta la posición de quienes, como yo, creen que el individualismo liberal es una condición necesaria para el florecimiento de las comunidades locales, el cultivo de la virtud y la responsabilidad, la formación de instituciones mediadoras y asociaciones políticas de abajo hacia arriba, y la descentralización y difusión del poder gubernamental. Simplemente no puede entender la posibilidad de que el individualismo liberal cree un vehículo para la preservación de las costumbres y el patrimonio, la unidad familiar y los vínculos sociales a nivel local.
«El estatismo permite el individualismo, el individualismo exige el estatismo» (p. 17), insiste Deneen con pocas pruebas más allá de sus propias teorías ahistóricas especulativas, irónicamente dado su llamado a «formas locales de resistencia más pequeñas: prácticas más que teorías». He aquí una propuesta alternativa: el individualismo liberal y los lazos comunitarios que genera se protegen mejor en una sociedad cristiana que es solemnemente consciente de la falibilidad de la mente humana, de las tendencias pecaminosas de la carne humana y de la imperfección inevitable de las instituciones humanas.
Leyendo Why Liberalism Failed, uno podría salir cuestionando no si Deneen tiene razón, sino si es lo suficientemente culto en la historia del liberalismo como para juzgar esta amplia y centenaria escuela de filosofía que surgió del cristianismo. Qué impresión tan desafortunada para alguien que escribe con tanto estilo sobre tendencias y figuras tan importantes! La realidad, creo, es que Deneen es erudito y culto. Su descripción tendenciosa del liberalismo es, por lo tanto, decepcionante por no poner en evidencia su erudición y su aprendizaje, por promover una visión idiosincrásica del liberalismo que, en última instancia, podría socavar el compromiso clásico y cristiano con la libertad que desea revitalizar.
- 1.Frank Meyer, «Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism», en What is Conservatism? (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2015), pág. 12.
- 2.M. Stanton Evans, «A Conservative Case for Freedom», en What is Conservatism? (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2015), pág. 86.
- 3.F.A. Hayek, «Why I Am Not a Conservative», The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Editio, Vol 17, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek(Routledge, 2013), p. 519.
- 4.Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (1927) (The Foundation for Economic Education y Cobden Press, 2002) (Ralph Raico, trans.), pgs. xvi-xvii.
Review of Stephen Budiansky’s “Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.”
In Academia, America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Historicism, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, liberal arts, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Philosophy, Pragmatism, Scholarship, Western Philosophy on September 25, 2019 at 6:45 am
This review originally appeared here in Los Angeles Review of Books.
Do we need another biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who served nearly 30 years as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court and nearly 20 years before that on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court? He has been the subject of numerous biographies since his death in 1935. We have not discovered new details about him since Harvard made his papers available to researchers in 1985, so why has Stephen Budiansky chosen to tell his story?
The answer may have to do with something Holmes said in The Common Law, his only book: “If truth were not often suggested by error, if old implements could not be adjusted to new uses, human progress would be slow. But scrutiny and revision are justified.”
Indeed, they are — both in the law and in the transmission of history. Holmes has been so singularly misunderstood by jurists and scholars that his life and thought require scrutiny and revision. Because his story is bound up with judicial methods and tenets — his opinions still cited regularly, by no less than the US Supreme Court as recently as this past term — we need to get him right, or at least “righter,” lest we fall into error, sending the path of the law in the wrong direction.
A veritable cottage industry of anti-Holmes invective has arisen on both the left and the right side of the political spectrum. No one, it seems, of any political persuasion, wants to adopt Holmes. He’s a giant of the law with no champions or defenders.
For some critics, Holmes is the paragon of states’ rights and judicial restraint who upheld local laws authorizing the disenfranchisement of blacks (Giles v. Harris, 1903) and the compulsory sterilization of individuals whom the state deemed unfit (Buck v. Bell, 1927). This latter decision he announced with horrifying enthusiasm: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” For other critics, he’s the prototypical progressive, decrying natural law, deferring to legislation that regulated economic activity, embracing an evolutionary view of law akin to living constitutionalism, and bequeathing most of his estate to the federal government.
The truth, as always, is more complicated than tendentious caricatures. Budiansky follows Frederic R. Kellogg — whose Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Legal Logic appeared last year — in reconsidering this irreducible man who came to be known as the Yankee from Olympus.
Not since Mark DeWolfe Howe’s two-volume (but unfinished) biography, The Proving Years and The Shaping Years, has any author so ably rendered Holmes’s wartime service. Budiansky devotes considerable attention to this period perhaps because it fundamentally changed Holmes. Before the war, Holmes, an admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, gravitated toward abolitionism and volunteered to serve as a bodyguard for Wendell Phillips. He was appalled by a minstrel show he witnessed as a student. During the war, however, he “grew disdainful of the high-minded talk of people at home who did not grasp that any good the war might still accomplish was being threatened by the evil it had itself become.”
Holmes had “daddy issues” — who wouldn’t with a father like Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the diminutive, gregarious, vainglorious, and sometimes obnoxious celebrity, physician, and author of the popular “Breakfast Table” series in The Atlantic Monthly? — that were exacerbated by the elder Holmes’s sanctimonious grandstanding about his noble, valiant son. For the aloof father, the son’s military service was a status marker. For the son, war was gruesome, fearsome, and real. The son despised the father’s flighty ignorance of the on-the-ground realities of bloody conflict.
Holmes fought alongside Copperheads as well, a fact that might have contributed to his skepticism about the motives of the war and the patriotic fervor in Boston. His friend and courageous comrade Henry Abbott — no fan of Lincoln — died at the Battle of the Wilderness in a manner that Budianksy calls “suicidal” rather than bold. The war and its carnage raised Holmes’s doubts regarding “the morally superior certainty that often went hand in hand with belief: he grew to distrust, and to detest, zealotry and causes of all kinds.”
This distrust — this cynicism about the human ability to know anything with absolute certainty — led Holmes as a judge to favor decentralization. He did not presume to understand from afar which rules and practices optimally regulated distant communities. Whatever legislation they enacted was for him presumptively valid, and he would not impose his preferences on their government. His disdain for his father’s moralizing, moreover, may have contributed to his formulation of the “bad man” theory of the law. “If you want to know the law and nothing else,” he wrote, “you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.”
Budiansky’s treatment of Holmes’s experience as a trial judge — the Justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in those days presided over trials of first instance — is distinctive among the biographies. Budisansky avers,
[I]n his role as a trial justice, Holmes was on the sharp edge of the law, seeing and hearing firsthand all of the tangled dramas of the courtroom, sizing up the honesty of often conflicting witnesses, rendering decisions that had immediate and dramatic consequences — the breakup of families, financial ruin, even death — to the people standing right before him.
Holmes’s opinions as a US Supreme Court Justice have received much attention, but more interesting — perhaps because less known — are the salacious divorce cases and shocking murder trials he handled with acute sensitivity to evidence and testimony.
Budiansky skillfully summarizes Holmes’s almost 30-year tenure on the US Supreme Court, the era for which he is best known. He highlights Holmes’s dissenting opinions and his friendship with Justice Louis Brandeis, who was also willing to dissent from majority opinions — and with flair. For those looking for more detailed narratives about opinions Holmes authored as a Supreme Court Justice, other resources are available. Thomas Healy’s The Great Dissent, for example, dives more deeply into Holmes’s shifting positions on freedom of speech. Healy spends a whole book describing this jurisprudential development that Budiansky clears in one chapter.
Contemptuous of academics, Budiansky irrelevantly claims that “humorless moralizing is the predominant mode of thought in much of academia today.” He adds, “A more enduring fact about academic life is that taking on the great is the most reliable way for those who will never attain greatness themselves to gain attention for themselves.” Harsh words! Budianksy accuses the French historian Jules Michelet of rambling “on for pages, as only a French intellectual can.” Is this playful wit or spiteful animus? Is it even necessary?
Budiansky might have avoided occasional lapses had he consulted the academics he seems to despise. For instance, he asserts that the “common law in America traces its origins to the Middle Ages in England […] following the Norman invasion in 1066,” and that the “Normans brought with them a body of customary law that, under Henry II, was extended across England by judges of the King’s Bench who traveled on circuit to hold court.” This isn’t so. Writing in The Genius of the Common Law, Sir Frederick Pollock — “an English jurist,” in Budiansky’s words, “whose friendship with Holmes spanned sixty years” — mapped the roots of the common law “as far back as the customs of the Germanic tribes who confronted the Roman legions when Britain was still a Roman province and Celtic.” In other words, Budiansky is approximately one thousand years off. Rather than supplanting British customs, the Normans instituted new practices that complemented, absorbed, and blended with British customs.
The fact that Budiansky never mentions some of the most interesting researchers working on Holmes — Susan Haack, Seth Vannatta, and Catharine Wells come to mind — suggests willful ignorance, the deliberate avoidance of the latest scholarship. But to what end? For what reason?
It takes years of study to truly understand Holmes. The epigraph to Vannatta’s new edition, The Pragmatism and Prejudice of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., aptly encapsulates the complexity of Holmes’s thought with lines from Whitman’s Song of Myself: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Budiansky recognizes, as others haven’t, that Holmes was large and contained multitudes. Holmes’s contradictions, if they are contradictions, might be explained by the famous dictum of his childhood hero, Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Holmes was consistently inconsistent. His mind was expansive, his reading habits extraordinary. How to categorize such a wide-ranging man? What were the defining features of his belief? Or did he, as Louis Menand has alleged, “lose his belief in beliefs”? Budiansky condenses Holmes’s philosophy into this helpful principle: “[T]hat none of us has all the answers; that perfection will never be found in the law as it is not to be found in life; but that its pursuit is still worth the effort, if only for the sake of giving our lives meaning.”
Holmes was intellectually humble, warning us against the complacency that attends certainty. Driving his methods was the sober awareness that he, or anyone for that matter, might be incorrect about some deep-seated conviction. During this time of polarized politics, self-righteous indignation, widespread incivility, and rancorous public discourse, we could learn from Holmes. How civil and respectful we could be if we all recognized that our cherished ideas and working paradigms might, at some level, be erroneous, if we were constantly mindful of our inevitable limitations, if we were searchers and seekers who refuse to accept, with utter finality, that we’ve figured it all out?
On Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed”
In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Christianity, Conservatism, Historicism, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Law, liberal arts, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Politics, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on August 28, 2019 at 6:45 am
The original version of this piece appeared here in the Journal of Faith and the Academy. A later version appeared here at Mises Wire.
Only the bold would title a book Why Liberalism Failed. Patrick Deneen, the David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, has done just that, proposing that such failure has actually occurred and setting the unreasonable expectation that he can explain it. His operative premise is that liberalism so called created the conditions for its inevitable demise—that it is a self-consuming, self-defeating ideology only around 500 years old. (p. 1) “Liberalism has failed,” he declares triumphantly, “not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded.” (p.3)
Deneen doesn’t define the term liberalism, which isn’t in his index even though it’s littered throughout the book. I have it on reliable authority that one of the peer reviewers of the pre-published manuscript recommended publication to the editors at Yale University Press, provided that Deneen cogently defined liberalism and then cleaned up his sloppy references to it. Deneen ignored this advice, leaving the manuscript as is. His genealogy of liberalism is all the more problematic in light of this refusal to clarify.
Deneen presents a seeming paradox, namely that liberalism, under the banner of liberty and emancipation, produced their opposite: a vast, progressive, and coercive administrative state under which individuals have grown alienated, amoral, dependent, conditioned, and servile. “[T]he political project of liberalism,” he claims, “is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” (p.16)
One hears in this line echoes of Sartre, and indeed existentialism recommends a certain kind of individualism: the freedom of the rational agent, having been thrust into existence through no choice or fault of his own, to will his own meaning in an absurd and chaotic world. But existentialism is a different species of individualism from that which motivated Hobbes, Locke, and Mill: chief targets of Deneen’s ire. It’s true that Mill disliked dogmatic conformity to custom, but that is a customary—one might even say conservative—position to take. One must preserve, or conserve, after all, a critical mode for undertaking difficult questions without assuming to have already ascertained all suitable solutions. Every age must rework its approaches to perennial problems. There’s plenty of Mill to dislike from a Christian perspective, but his unlikable conclusions do not necessarily follow from his method of inquiry or openness to examining afresh the puzzles and issues with which our ancestors struggled.
The classical liberalism or libertarianism to which Christian individualists adhere promotes peace, cooperation, coordination, collaboration, community, stewardship, ingenuity, prosperity, dignity, knowledge, understanding, humility, virtuousness, creativity, justice, ingenuity, and more, taking as its starting point the dignity of every human person before both God and humanity. This individualism prospers in fundamentally conservative cultures and does not square with Deneen’s caricature of a caricature of a caricature of “liberal” individualism. This conservative individualism, a creature of classical liberalism, advocates liberty in order to free human beings to achieve their fullest potential, cultivate widespread ethics and morality, and improve lives and institutions through economic growth and development. And who can deny that the market economy with which it is bound up has, throughout the globe, given rise to improved living conditions, technological and medical advances, scientific discovery, intellectual curiosity, and industrial innovation?
Deneen wishes to rewind the clock, to recover the virtuous “self-governance” of the ancients that, he believes, was predicated on “the common good.” (p. 99) He sees in antiquity a social rootedness that aligns with Christianity as exemplified in the modern world by Amish communities.(p 106-107) His celebration of the traditional liberal arts adopts, he says, “a classical or Christian understanding of liberty” (p. 129) that emphasizes situated norms and localities, embedded cultures, and institutional continuities. This, however, is a curious take on antiquity, one that flies in the face of the anti-Christian features of classical and ancient thought extolled by Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Julius Evola, who valued the pagan elements of “the ancient commendation of virtue” (p. 165) and disparaged the modern world as being too Christian.
Deneen is not interested in liberalisms, i.e., the multiplicity of concepts that fly under the banner of liberalism. He prefers casually to lump together varieties of generic ills (everything from industrialized agriculture to the infatuation with STEM, diversity, multiculturalism, materialism, and sexual autonomy) as products of the one common enemy of everything good that the classical and medieval periods had to offer. He then gives that enemy a name: liberalism. He would plunge us back, if not into antiquity, then into medieval tribalism, into periods in which the accused were tried by ordeal or combat, when blood oaths and kinship rather than trust, goodwill, or economic exchange determined one’s loyalties and allegiances.
It isn’t correct that liberalism “requires liberation from all forms of associations and relationships, from family to church, from schools to village and community.” (p. 38) On the contrary, liberalism frees people from the tyrannical and institutionalized coercion that prevents them from enjoying local associations and relationships, including those in families, churches, schools, and communities. Liberalism properly understood empowers people to group themselves and define their experience by their own customs and mores. Thanks to liberalism, Deneen himself enjoys the freedom to critique the rapidly growing government that increasingly attempts to impose on him standards and rules at odds with his own.
Extending the individualism that characterized classical liberalism to twentieth century progressivism and modern identity politics, as Deneen does, is misguided. Modern identity politics is about collectivism in the name of self-definition, self-awareness, and self-constitution, about choosing which communities (Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, the Democratic Socialists of America, neo-Nazis, etc.) embrace the physical (e.g. ethnic or racial), ideological (e.g., pan-nationalist, Marxist, ecosocialist, feminist, anarcho-syndicalist, white supremacist), or normative characteristics (e.g. social justice or egalitarianism) around which one forms group associations.
The truth is that individualism thrives in moral, virtuous communities, and that the common good and group associations flourish in societies that acknowledge and understand the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. Of the interdependence and mutually strengthening nature of freedom and order, of the individual and society, Frank Meyer proclaimed that “truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”1 To those who insist that individualism is antithetical to religious belief, which is itself indispensable to conservatism and the common good, M. Stanton Evans stated, “affirmation of a transcendent order is not only compatible with individual autonomy, but the condition of it; […] a skeptical view of man’s nature [i.e., as inherently flawed and prone to sin] not only permits political liberty but demands it.”2
In a free society, entrepreneurs and producers are looking to others, to communities, to determine basic needs to satisfy. The rational self-interest motivating creativity and inventiveness is fundamentally about serving others more efficiently and effectively, about generating personal rewards, yes—but personal rewards for making life better and easier for others. The Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations is the same Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Human beings are wired both to look out for themselves, protecting their homes and loved ones, and to feel for, and empathize with, others. Beneficence and generosity are principal aspects of the liberal individualism that Deneen maligns.
The “second wave” of liberalism, in Deneen’s paradigm, is Progressivism. (p. 142) Yet modern progressivism and the Democratic Party have almost nothing to do with classical liberalism. Curiously and, I daresay, lazily, Deneen wishes to connect them. He cannot draw a clearly connecting line between them, however, because there isn’t one. The alleged connection is the supposed ambition “to liberate individuals from any arbitrary and unchosen relationships and remake the world into one in which those especially disposed to expressive individualism would thrive.” (p. 143–44) Should we take this assertion to mean that Deneen would prefer our relations and interactions to be arbitrarily coerced by a central power in a closed society where subordinated individuals habitually follow the unquestioned commands of established superiors?
F. A. Hayek once stated that, “[u]ntil the rise of socialism,” the opposite of conservatism was liberalism but that, in the United States, “the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.”3 Is Deneen so immersed in American culture that he cannot recognize this basic distinction? Deneen prizes the common, collective good as manifest in local communities, blaming rational self-interest for the allegedly universalizing tendency of liberalism to stamp out venerable customs and cultural norms. But he seems befuddled by the American taxonomy into which liberalism has fallen and would do well to revisit the works of Ludwig von Mises, who explained, “In the United States ‘liberal’ means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations. The American self-styled liberal aims at government omnipotence, is a resolute foe of free enterprise, and advocates all-round planning by authorities, i.e., socialism.”4
A comparison of Deneen’s speculative political theory and its abstract narrative of decline with Larry Siedentop’s deeply historical, ideologically neutral Inventing the Individual (Belknap / Harvard, 2014) reveals critical flaws in Deneen’s argument, starting with the proposition that the individualism key to liberalism is merely 500 years old. Siedentop undercuts the common portrayal of a medieval Europe gripped by poverty and superstition, monarchy and tyranny, widespread corruption and early death from which the Renaissance and, later, the Enlightenment allegedly rescued us. Siedentop sees, instead, the rise of Christianity—long before medievalism—as the cause of the rise of liberal individualism, which, in fact, has roots in the teachings of St. Paul and Jesus Christ. Whereas Deneen theorizes individualism as recent and anti-Christian, Siedentop traces its actual history as distinctly Christian, mapping its concrete features over time as it proliferated and supplanted ancient pagan cultures and customs that lacked a structural understanding of the dignity and primacy of the human person.
Siedentop attributes liberal individualism to Christianity; Deneen treats liberal individualism as inimical to Christianity. Both men cannot correct, at least not fully.
Walking back some of his grand claims, Deneen acknowledges in his final pages that liberalism, in certain manifestations, has in fact been around longer than 500 years and that it has much in common with Christianity:
While liberalism pretended to be a wholly new edifice that rejected the political architecture of all previous ages, it naturally drew upon long developments from antiquity to the late Middle Ages. A significant part of its appeal was not that it was something wholly new but that it drew upon deep reservoirs of belief and commitment. Ancient political philosophy was especially devoted to the question of how best to avoid the rise of tyranny, and how best to achieve the conditions of political liberty and self-governance. The basic terms that inform our political tradition—liberty, equality, dignity, justice, constitutionalism—are of ancient pedigree. The advent of Christianity, and its development in the now largely neglected political philosophy of the Middle Ages, emphasized the dignity of the individual, the concept of the person, the existence of rights and corresponding duties, the paramount importance of civil society and a multiplicity of associations, and the concept of limited government as the best means of forestalling the inevitable human temptation toward tyranny. Liberalism’s most basic appeal was not its rejection of the past but its reliance upon basic concepts that were foundational to the Western political identity. (pp. 184–85)
Forgive me for being confused, but I thought Deneen had set out to criticize liberalism and chart its failure, not to exalt or defend it, and certainly not to tie it to an ancient lineage associated with Christianity. This passage represents the discombobulation at the heart of Deneen’s book. Liberalism is not to blame for the massive administrative state and its networks of agents and functionaries that coerce local communities. Deneen is part of the problem he describes, championing ways of thinking and organizing human behavior that undercut his hope for the reawakening of traditional values and familial or neighborly bonds on local levels.
Deneen airs his opinions with such maddening certitude that he comes across as haughty and tendentious, as a zealously anti-libertarian manqué with an axe to grind. He lacks the delicacy and charity with which reasonable scholars of good faith approach their ideological opponents. He does not entertain the position of those who, like me, believe that liberal individualism is a necessary condition for the flourishing of local communities, the cultivation of virtue and responsibility, the forming of mediating institutions and bottom-up political associations, and the decentralization and diffusion of government power. He just can’t grasp the possibility that liberal individualism creates a vehicle for the preservation of custom and heritage, the family unit, and social bonds on local levels.
“Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism,” (p. 17) Deneen insists with little proof beyond his own ahistorical speculative theories—ironically given his call for “smaller, local forms of resistance: practicesmore than theories.” (pp. 19–20) Here’s an alternative proposition: liberal individualism and the community bonds it generates are best protected in a Christian society that is solemnly mindful of the fallibility of the human mind, the sinful tendencies of the human flesh, and the inevitable imperfection of human institutions.
Reading Why Liberalism Failed, one might come away questioning not whether Deneen is right, but whether he’s even sufficiently well-read in the history of liberalism to pass judgment on this wide-ranging, centuries-old school of philosophy that grew out of Christianity. What an unfortunate impression to impart for someone who writes with such flair about such important trends and figures. The reality, I think, is that Deneen is erudite and learned. His tendentious depiction of liberalism is thus disappointing for not putting his erudition and learning properly on display, for promoting an idiosyncratic take on liberalism that could ultimately undermine the classical and Christian commitment to liberty that he wishes to reinvigorate.
- 1.Frank Meyer, “Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism,” in What is Conservatism? (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2015), p. 12.
- 2.M. Stanton Evans, “A Conservative Case for Freedom,” in What is Conservatism? (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2015), p. 86.
- 3.F. A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition, Vol 17, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek(Routledge, 2013), p. 519.
- 4.Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (1927) (The Foundation for Economic Education and Cobden Press, 2002) (Ralph Raico, trans.), pgs. xvi-xvii.
A (Mostly) Misbegotten Attempt to Take Scalia’s Measure
In Academia, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, Essays, Humanities, Judicial Activism, Judicial Restraint, Jurisprudence, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, liberal arts, Politics, Scholarship on May 15, 2019 at 6:45 am
This review originally appeared here at Law & Liberty.
On Wednesday [editorial note: this review was published on February 11, 2019] it will be exactly three years since Justice Antonin Scalia passed away, yet his towering presence is still felt. Given the extent of his influence on legal education and his popularization of both originalism and textualism, it is no surprise to see a growing number of books and conferences addressing the importance of his legacy. One such book is The Conservative Revolution of Antonin Scalia, a collection of disparate essays edited by the political scientists David A. Schultz of Hamline University and Howard Schweber of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and published by Lexington Books.
No consensus view emerges from these wide-ranging essays on everything from Scalia’s contributions to administrative law to his Senate confirmation hearings. Nor are the essays universally admiring. On the contrary, most of them are critical. “Was Antonin Scalia a sissy when it came to administrative law?” Schultz asks—unprofessionally, in my view. Mary Welek Atwell of Radford University scrutinizes Scalia’s opinions in cases about race and gender, highlighting his apparent “comfort” with the “patriarchal, hierarchical” elements of the Roman Catholic Church, and grandly declaring that Scalia “sympathized more with those who were trying to hold on to their privilege by excluding others than with those who sought to be included.”
Is that so? And is it so that Scalia, in the words of contributor Henry L. Chambers, Jr., of the University of Richmond School of Law, “read statutory text relatively simply”? What a relatively simple claim! Scalia’s Reading Law (2012), coauthored with Bryan Garner, outlines principles or canons for interpreting statutes and legal instruments; it has become a landmark in the field, having been cited in hundreds of cases and over a thousand law review articles in the seven years since its release. While it aims to simplify hermeneutics, providing sound methodological guidance to interpreters of legal texts, it is by no measure simple.
Scalia “might be our most Machiavellian Supreme Court justice,” the University of Wyoming law professor Stephen M. Feldman submits. “Scalia sneered, as was his wont,” he writes in an aside. Less ad hominem but equally breezy assertions by Feldman: that originalism “is most often applied in practice as a subterfuge for conservative conclusions,” and that, in any case, “Scalia’s implementation of originalism failed on multiple grounds.”
Most of the critiques in this book, in contrast to those just cited, are responsibly researched and tonally reserved. No reasonable person expects scholarly assessments of a controversial jurist’s legacy to be an exercise in hagiography. On the other hand, such assessments should avoid coming off like intemperate outbursts.
The 18 contributors come from a range of disciplines. Only three are law professors; two are professors of criminal justice; two are doctoral candidates; and one clerks for a federal judge. Equally diverse are the essays’ methodological approaches. The most distinctive belongs to Timothy R. Johnson, Ryan C. Black, and Ryan J. Owens, who in a coauthored chapter attempt to examine empirically—with graphs and figures—Scalia’s influence on the behavior of his Court colleagues during oral argument. Whether they succeed is a determination better left to experts in quantitative research.
Scalia the Liberal?
Coauthors Christopher E. Smith of Michigan State University and Charles F. Jacobs of St. Norbert College consider Scalia’s conservatism in the context of the criminal law. They do not define what they mean by “conservatism.” Before long one gathers that their understanding of it is woefully limited. They conclude, with apparent surprise, that “in nearly 1 in 6 decisions, Scalia cast his vote in support of criminal rights.” If Scalia’s method involved choosing results and then supplying reasoning to justify them, then perhaps some of his opinions regarding the Fourth Amendment might seem uncharacteristically “liberal.” Of course, Scalia’s originalism and textualism do not presuppose conclusions; they demand, instead, a rigorous process of determining the meaning and semantic context of written laws. This process may lead to “liberal” or “conservative” outcomes that do not align with a judge’s political preferences but that the words of the law necessarily require.
The process is conservative even when it yields “liberal” results.
“One might expect,” the editors say of the Smith-Jacobs chapter, “that as a political conservative Justice Scalia would have authored opinions that gave the greatest possible latitude to agents of government.” Such an obtuse claim is enough to cast doubt on Schultz and Schweber’s understanding of conservatism and, hence, of their ability to critique the claims about conservatism that one comes across throughout the book.
By contrast, the essay by Jesse Merriam of Loyola University Maryland, “Justice Scalia and the Legal Conservative Movement: An Exploration of Nino’s Neoconservatism,” stands out as historically informed on matters of conservatism—including the relationship between Scalia’s jurisprudence and the so-called conservative movement as represented by think tanks, politicos, journalists, and academics.
James Staab of the University of Central Missouri asks in the final chapter whether Antonin Scalia was a great Supreme Court justice. Staab answers no, basing his finding on seven factors:
- “length of service, including the production of a large body of respected judicial work”;
- “judicial craftsmanship, or the ability to communicate clearly and memorably in writing”;
- “influence, or whether the judge left an indelible mark on the law”;
- “judicial temperament, or the qualities of being dispassionate and even-tempered”;
- “impartiality, or the qualities of disinterestedness and maintaining a strict detachment from partisan activities”;
- “vision of the judicial function, or the proper role of judges in a constitutional democracy”; and
- “game changers, or whether the judge foreshadowed the future direction of the law and was on the right side of history.”
This factoring raises the expectation of a quantitative methodology, yet the chapter lacks any mathematical analysis. Regarding the first criterion, Staab simply offers several paragraphs about Scalia’s years of service and many opinions, discusses the jurist’s extrajudicial writings, and then declares: “In sum, the body of judicial work produced by Scalia is truly impressive. It is safe to say that he easily satisfies the first criteria [sic] of what constitutes a great judge.”
Regarding the second criterion, Staab mentions Scalia’s oft-celebrated writing skills and then lists some of the many memorable Scalia opinions, deducing from this evidence that “Scalia again receives the highest of remarks.” He adds that the quality of Scalia’s opinions “has sometimes been compared to those of Holmes, Cardozo, and Robert Jackson—a comparison I would agree with.” Why should Staab’s agreement or disagreement have any bearing? Where are the statistical and computational values that back up his personal judgments? Staab sounds like someone unconvincingly pretending to do quantitative research. Are his factors the best measure of greatness?
The Vagaries of Balancing Tests
What of Staab’s negative verdicts? He questions Scalia’s temperament and collegiality, pointing to his “strident dissenting opinions” and “no-holds-barred opinions.” These opinions, says Staab, “struck a partisan tone,” and the jurist’s association with the Federalist Society (gasp!) “compromised his impartiality.” Staab suggests that Scalia should have recused himself in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) and Cheney v. United States District Court (2004). He qualifies as “unprincipled” Scalia’s opinions in the areas of the veto power, state sovereign immunity, the incorporation doctrine, regulatory takings, and affirmative action. He alleges that a “major problem for Justice Scalia’s legacy is that his originalist jurisprudence was on the wrong side of history” in the sense that several of his views did not win out. Scalia was forced to dissent in controversial cases with sweeping results for the country.
Staab’s checklist reminds me of the Scalia line about the utility of balancing tests, or the lack thereof. “The scale analogy is not really appropriate,” he wrote in Bendix Autolite Corporation v. Midwesco Enterprises(1988), “since the interests on both sides are incommensurate. It is more like judging whether a particular line is longer than a particular rock is heavy.”
Whatever criteria you use to evaluate greatness, this edition is unlikely to qualify.
What Can Libertarians Contribute to the Study of Literature?
In Arts & Letters, higher education, Humane Economy, Humanities, liberal arts, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Scholarship, Western Philosophy on April 10, 2019 at 6:45 am
Cultural Marxism is Real
In Academia, Arts & Letters, Books, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Scholarship, The Academy, Western Philosophy on March 27, 2019 at 6:45 am
This piece originally appeared here at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Samuel Moyn, a Yale law professor, recently asked, “What is ‘cultural Marxism?’” His answer: “Nothing of the kind actually exists.” Moyn attributes the term cultural Marxism to the “runaway alt-right imagination,” claiming that it implicates zany conspiracy theories and has been “percolating for years through global sewers of hatred.”
Alexander Zubatov, an attorney writing in Tablet, countered that the “somewhat unclear and contested” term cultural Marxism “has been in circulation for over forty years.” It has, moreover, “perfectly respectable uses outside the dark, dank silos of the far right.” He concluded that cultural Marxism is neither a “conspiracy” nor a “mere right-wing ‘phantasmagoria,’” but a “coherent intellectual program, a constellation of dangerous ideas.”
In this debate, I side with Zubatov. Here’s why.
Despite the bewildering range of controversies and meanings attributed to it, cultural Marxism (the term and the movement) has a deep, complex history in Theory. The word “Theory” (with a capital T) is the general heading for research within the interpretative branches of the humanities known as cultural and critical studies, literary criticism, and literary theory—each of which includes a variety of approaches from the phenomenological to the psychoanalytic. In the United States, Theory is commonly taught and applied in English departments, although its influence is discernable throughout the humanities.
A brief genealogy of different schools of Theory—which originated outside English departments, among philosophers and sociologists for example, but became part of English departments’ core curricula—shows not only that cultural Marxism is a nameable, describable phenomenon, but also that it proliferates beyond the academy.
Scholars versed in Theory are reasonably suspicious of crude, tendentious portrayals of their field. Nevertheless, these fields retain elements of Marxism that, in my view, require heightened and sustained scrutiny. Given estimates that communism killed over 100 million people, we must openly and honestly discuss those currents of Marxism that run through different modes of interpretation and schools of thought. To avoid complicity, moreover, we must ask whether and why Marxist ideas, however attenuated, still motivate leading scholars and spread into the broader culture.
English departments sprang up in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in increasingly professionalized studies of literature and other forms of aesthetic expression. As English became a distinct university discipline with its own curriculum, it moved away from the study of British literature and canonical works of the Western tradition in translation, and toward the philosophies that guide textual interpretation.
Although a short, sweeping survey of what followed may not satisfy those in the field, it provides others with the relevant background.
The New Criticism
The first major school to establish itself in English departments was the New Criticism. Its counterpart was Russian formalism, characterized by figures like Victor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson, who attempted to distinguish literary texts from other texts, examining what qualities made written representations poetic, compelling, original, or moving rather than merely practical or utilitarian.
One such quality was defamiliarization. Literature, in other words, defamiliarizes language by using sound, syntax, metaphor, alliteration, assonance, and other rhetorical devices.
The New Criticism, which was chiefly pedagogical, emphasized close reading, maintaining that readers searching for meaning must isolate the text under consideration from externalities like authorial intent, biography, or historical context. This method is similar to legal textualism whereby judges look strictly at the language of a statute, not to legislative history or intent, to interpret the import or meaning of that statute. The New Critics coined the term “intentional fallacy” to refer to the search for the meaning of a text anywhere but in the text itself. The New Criticism is associated with John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, I. A. Richards, and T.S. Eliot. In a way, all subsequent schools of Theory are responses or reactions to the New Criticism.
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism
Structuralism permeated French intellectual circles in the 1960s. Through structuralism, thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Louis Althusser imported leftist politics into the study of literary texts. Structuralism is rooted in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist who observed how linguistic signs become differentiated within a system of language. When we say or write something, we do it according to rules and conventions in which our anticipated audience also operates. The implied order we use and communicate in is the “structure” referred to in structuralism.
The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss extended Saussure’s ideas about the linguistic sign to culture, arguing that the beliefs, values, and characteristic features of a social group function according to a set of tacitly known rules. These structures are “discourse,” a term that encompasses cultural norms and not just language practices.
Out of structuralism and post-structuralism emerged Structural Marxism, a school of thought linked to Althusser that analyzes the role of the state in perpetuating the dominance of the ruling class, the capitalists.
Marxism and Neo-Marxism
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Frankfurt School popularized the type of work usually labeled as “cultural Marxism.” Figures involved or associated with this school include Erich Fromm, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. These men revised, repurposed, and extended classical Marxism by emphasizing culture and ideology, incorporating insights from emerging fields such as psychoanalysis, and researching the rise of mass media and mass culture.
Dissatisfied with economic determinism and the illusory coherence of historical materialism—and jaded by the failures of socialist and communist governments—these thinkers retooled Marxist tactics and premises in their own ways without entirely repudiating Marxist designs or ambitions.
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars like Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson were explicit in embracing Marxism. They rejected the New Critical approaches that divorced literature from culture, stressing that literature reflected class and economic interest, social and political structures, and power. Accordingly, they considered how literary texts reproduced (or undermined) cultural or economic structures and conditions.
Slavoj Žižek arguably has done more than any member of the Frankfurt School to integrate psychoanalysis into Marxist variants. “Žižek’s scholarship holds a particularly high place within cultural criticism that seeks to account for the intersections between psychoanalysis and Marxism,” wrote the scholar Erin Labbie.[1] She added, “Žižek’s prolific writings about ideology, revealing the relationships between psychoanalysis and Marxism, have altered the way in which literary and cultural criticism is approached and accomplished to the extent that most scholars can no longer hold tightly to the former notion that the two fields are at odds.”[2] Žižek is just one among many continental philosophers whose Marxist and Marxist-inflected prognostications command the attention of American academics.
Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida is recognized as the founder of deconstruction. He borrowed from Saussure’s theory that the meaning of a linguistic sign depends on its relation to its opposite, or to things from which it differs. For instance, the meaning of male depends on the meaning of female; the meaning of happy depends on the meaning of sad; and so forth. Thus, the theoretical difference between two opposing terms, or binaries, unites them in our consciousness. And one binary is privileged while the other is devalued. For example, “beautiful” is privileged over “ugly,” and “good” over “bad.”
The result is a hierarchy of binaries that are contextually or arbitrarily dependent, according to Derrida, and cannot be fixed or definite across time and space. That is because meaning exists in a state of flux, never becoming part of an object or idea.
Derrida himself, having re-read The Communist Manifesto, recognized the “spectral” furtherance of a “spirit” of Marx and Marxism.[3] Although Derrida’s so-called “hauntology” precludes the messianic meta-narratives of unfulfilled Marxism, commentators have salvaged from Derrida a modified Marxism for the climate of today’s “late capitalism.”
Derrida used the term diffèrance to describe the elusive process humans use to attach meaning to arbitrary signs, even if signs—the codes and grammatical structures of communication—cannot adequately represent an actual object or idea in reality. Derrida’s theories had a broad impact that enabled him and his followers to consider linguistic signs and the concepts created by those signs, many of which were central to the Western tradition and Western culture. For example, Derrida’s critique of logocentrism contests nearly all philosophical foundations deriving from Athens and Jerusalem.
New Historicism
New Historicism, a multifaceted enterprise, is associated with Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt. It looks at historical forces and conditions with a structuralist and post-structuralist eye, treating literary texts as both products of and contributors to discourse and discursive communities. It is founded on the idea that literature and art circulate through discourse and inform and destabilize cultural norms and institutions.
New historicists explore how literary representations reinforce power structures or work against entrenched privilege, extrapolating from Foucault’s paradox that power grows when it is subverted because it is able to reassert itself over the subversive person or act in a show of power. Marxism and materialism often surface when new historicists seek to highlight texts and authors (or literary scenes and characters) in terms of their effects on culture, class, and power. New historicists focus on low-class or marginalized figures, supplying them with a voice or agency and giving them overdue attention. This political reclamation, while purporting to provide context, nevertheless risks projecting contemporary concerns onto works that are situated in a particular culture and historical moment.
In the words of literary critic Paul Cantor, “There is a difference between political approaches to literature and politicized approaches, that is, between those that rightly take into account the centrality of political concerns in many literary classics and those that willfully seek to reinterpret and virtually recreate class works in light of contemporary political agendas.”[4]
Cultural Marxism Is Real
Much of the outcry about cultural Marxism is outrageous, uninformed, and conspiratorial. Some of it simplifies, ignores, or downplays the fissures and tensions among leftist groups and ideas. Cultural Marxism cannot be reduced, for instance, to “political correctness” or “identity politics.” (I recommend Andrew Lynn’s short piece “Cultural Marxism” in the Fall 2018 issue of The Hedgehog Review for a concise critique of sloppy and paranoid treatments of cultural Marxism.)
Nevertheless, Marxism pervades Theory, despite the competition among the several ideas under that broad label. Sometimes this Marxism is self-evident; at other times, it’s residual and implied. At any rate, it has attained a distinct but evolving character as literary scholars have reworked classical Marxism to account for the relation of literature and culture to class, power, and discourse.
Feminism, gender studies, critical race theory, post-colonialism, disability studies—these and other disciplines routinely get pulled through one or more of the theoretical paradigms I’ve outlined. The fact that they’re guided by Marxism or adopt Marxist terms and concepts, however, does not make them off-limits or unworthy of attention.
Which brings me to a warning: Condemning these ideas as forbidden, as dangers that corrupt young minds, might have unintended consequences. Marxist spinoffs must be studied to be comprehensively understood. Don’t remove them from the curriculum: contextualize them, challenge them, and question them. Don’t reify their power by ignoring or neglecting them.
Popular iterations of cultural Marxism reveal themselves in the casual use of terms like “privilege,” “alienation,” “commodification,” “fetishism,” “materialism,” “hegemony,” or “superstructure.” As Zubatov wrote for Tablet, “It is a short step from Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ to the now-ubiquitous toxic memes of ‘patriarchy,’ ‘heteronormativity,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘white privilege,’ ‘white fragility,’ ‘and whiteness.’” He adds, “It is a short step from the Marxist and cultural Marxist premise that ideas are, at their core, expressions of power to rampant, divisive identity politics and the routine judging of people and their cultural contributions based on their race, gender, sexuality and religion.”
My brief summary is merely the simplified, approximate version of a much larger and more complex story, but it orients curious readers who wish to learn more about cultural Marxism in literary studies. Today, English departments suffer from the lack of a clearly defined mission, purpose, and identity. Having lost rigor in favor of leftist politics as their chief end of study, English departments at many universities are jeopardized by the renewed emphasis on practical skills and jobs training. Just as English departments replaced religion and classics departments as the principal places to study culture, so too could future departments or schools replace English departments.
And those places may not tolerate political agitations posturing as pedagogical technique.
The point, however, is that cultural Marxism exists. It has a history, followers, adherents, and left a perceptible mark on academic subjects and lines of inquiry. Moyn may wish it out of existence, or dismiss it as a bogeyman, but it is real. We must know its effects on society, and in what forms it materializes in our culture. Moyn’s intemperate polemic demonstrates, in fact, the urgency and importance of examining cultural Marxism, rather than closing our eyes to its meaning, properties, and significance.
[1] Erin F. Labbie, “Žižek Avec Lacan: Splitting the Dialectics of Desire,” Slovene Studies, Vol. 25 (2003), p. 23.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Peggy Kamuf, trans.) (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 3-4.
[4] Paul Cantor, “Shakespeare—‘For all time’?” The Public Interest, Issue 110 (1993), p. 35.
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 