Anamnesis Journal

Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness--namely, to treat various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraven upon it.

--Leo XIII, Libertas praestantissimumⁱ

Secularism is not an aberration, but the working out of founding principles in which the Deist with his clockmaker God, the Puritan with his transcendent God, and the unbeliever with no God agreed to "articles of peace," creating a social order open to God for those who wished, but with a government defined by a claimed religious neutrality.

--Glenn Olsenⁱⁱ

In the essay “Statesmanship, Leadership, and Civil Society in the Age of Mass Democracy,” Lee Trepanier portrays and analyzes three distinct political strategies for effectively negotiating and mitigating the evils of the “age of mass democracy,” that is, the historical rise in the West of the federalized, then centralized, bureaucratic, managerial nation-state, including its contemporary globalizing transformations. He argues that although Tocqueville keenly observed the dangers of equalitarianism, majoritarianism, and individualism that were inherent in early American political culture, his prescriptive antidotes of robust family and religious life, and the citizenry’s political engagement in “civil society” could not sufficiently counteract the anti-political and massifying tendencies of the early republic’s Cartesianism, materialism, and pragmatism.  As Trepanier notes in his presentation of the views of Max Weber, by the late nineteenth century, civil society had become virtually absorbed into the “federal bureaucratic state,” with genuinely moral values rendered sub-political and irrational due to the public triumph of instrumental reason and its authoritative agents, the bureaucrat and expert.  For Weber, the “charismatic” professional politician became the sole “moral agent” in the newly bureaucratized political sphere, because only he could effectively counteract the amoralism and technocracy of the “rational-legal legitimatization of politics.” Being authorized by “plebiscitary democracy,” as opposed to mere bureaucratic expediency, he served as a balancing force preventing the total technocratization of politics. However, as Trepanier notes, according to Weber, the “moral” values imposed by the professional politician are, nevertheless, arbitrary and thus ultimately subordinated to rational-legal, that is, amoral criteria. The third strategy, which is the one favored by Trepanier, is “statesmanship,” informed by an Aristotelian notion of prudence that is flexible, morally charged, and capable of strengthening the genuinely political institutions that most effectively preserve tradition, place, and the divine. Most importantly, the statesman is to do this good political work in the very midst of the “federal bureaucratic state,” which Trepanier claims is an inexorable and permanent feature of modern politics.

While I am sympathetic to Trepanier’s statesmanship strategy, what is missing in Trepanier’s analysis is sufficient attention to the precise reasons that family, religion, and civil society failed as counters to the anti-political and anti-social features of early American culture, and why the bureaucratized, centralized state, informed by instrumental reason and predicated on what Alasdair MacIntyre identified in After Virtue as emotivism, triumphed as it did. Moreover, as MacIntyre has persuasively argued, it is doubtful that true statesmanship is possible in any political order in which the nation-state is the main locus of authority and community. In short, if Trepanier is correct that the modern state is here to stay (and here he is in accord with MacIntyre), I do not see how anything but its careful dismantling through secession, or its withering away by pure incoherence and implosion, a la the Soviet Union, could prevent it from growing ever more global, tyrannical, dehumanizing, and destructive of tradition, place, and the divine.  In other words, I shall argue that the prudential statesman has no home in the contemporary, secular, liberal state, and before we can build him a home, the landscape must be cleared and rendered livable.

At first glance, the injection of mass suffrage into the modern liberal polity seemed to have expanded and solidified the principle of democratic legitimacy with most citizens being able to participate in their own self-governance. However, the rise of the bureaucratic state, along with the notion of democratic equality, not only threatened the principles of political accountability and responsibility but also the need to anchor the regime in a communal tradition and a sense of place that was scaled to local communities. In this essay, I will explore some of the problems that mass liberal democracy posed to these values of tradition, place, and political legitimacy by looking at three thinkers who had wrestled with these issues themselves: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Aristotle.

G.K. Chesterton once said that conservatives are always trying to keep things from getting better and that progressives are always trying to make things worse. Like many of his paradoxical claims, this one is not only humorous but penetrative: the implication is that the point of departure for political activity is some notion of the good. Both political preservation and political change depend upon some standard of better and worse; otherwise, neither preservation nor change is intelligible. Whether there is more than one such good, however, and whether there are any that persist through time and place are among the most difficult questions in political philosophy.

It is no accident that for Plato and Aristotle wonder is the beginning of philosophy, for wonder is a type of reverence towards the real, a realization that things ought to compel us, that we ought to attend to them, given their own status, their own interior principle, and not simply their usefulness to us. Wonder is, in a strange way, a response of justice.[i] When the pre-Socratics sought for the origin of things (archê) they were looking for the ordered whole, and in fits and starts they discovered that this cosmos had a kind of cosmic justice or value to it—the intrinsically ordered cosmos had intelligibility, pattern, structure, integrity, and value.[ii] These early attempts reach a culmination in Plato and Aristotle and the neo-Platonists, for despite their differences they did agree that Being was not a mere fact of having existence, it was not just being there as a factical entity. To be was to be good, and the human was to live in accordance with nature by following right reason, especially the right reason enabled by theory.

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2012 Ciceronian Society Annual Meeting.

Most people would regard Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in the auspicious year of 1776, to be the foundational text for modern economics. Yet 70 years before, Bernard de Mandeville published a text that, though far less scholarly, was far more foundational. That text was first called, The Grumbling Hive; or Knaves Turned Honest. It was a short doggerel poem, but so popular that it was expanded into the combination poem and essay, The Fable of the Bees. You can learn pretty much the whole point of the poem from its subtitle: Private Vices; Publick Benefits, that is to say, our prosperity depends upon our vices, and not upon our virtues. Thus at the beginning of the modern age, we see the split between the world of business, and the world of ethics.