The Collapse of Anglo-American Liberalism, or The Genealogy of “Wokism”

A genealogy is here understood as analogous to a genetic analysis or family history. Later thinkers “inherit” or appropriate some genes from one source but some genes from other sources. Earlier thinkers would not necessarily understand, approve of, or agree with what later thinkers did with the original inheritance.

In its intellectual journey, the key question concerns the relation of the moral dimension to the political dimension.

Biblical

The Hebrew prophets made the moral dimension define the political dimension. That is the whole point of being a “prophet.”

Greek Philosophy (Plato vs. Aristotle)

Plato: dualism: reason should control passion; ideal moral world (should) define the political structure. It’s the Laws, not the Republic, stupid. The role of government is negative, restrain the bad guys. Major relevant inheritors of this line of thought are Augustine, Protestant Reformation, Kant, and (yes) J.S. Mill.

Aristotle: monism: the social world is to be understood in the same way we understand the physical world. For Aristotle, this means teleology. Each institution has a goal; (b) institutions form a hierarchy; (c) the state is the supreme institution because it aims at the highest and most comprehensive collective goal. By making the state (the polity) the supreme institution, the political dimension defines the moral dimension: to be good is to conform to the natural goal of an institution. The political institution (state) has a positive/therapeutic role – to promote fulfillment; utopia (achieving fulfillment) is possible because the “form is in the matter.” Inheritors of this genetic line include Aquinas, Bentham, Reich, modern liberals, socialists, Marxists, and “wokists.”

Christianity (Augustine vs. Aquinas)

Augustine “Platonized” Christianity: As a dualist, he argued that we lived in two worlds: “passion” is the product of original sin and free will; “reason” becomes the insight or vision of the “whole” imparted to some by the mystery of God’s grace. Augustine’s “dedivinized the state,” detaching the spiritual/moral dimension from the political and legal dimensions. The moral dimension defines the political dimension. Personal (positive) fulfillment comes by participation in the spiritual/moral realm (Church). Public life (politics) is a necessary evil wherein the role of government is negative to inhibit or punish the bad guys.

Aquinas reconceptualized Christianity from an Aristotelian point of view. He transformed Augustine’s subordination of politics to morality to the subordination of politics to law understood as deriving in hierarchal and teleological fashion from divine law. The earth and all of its inhabitants are members of a divine community. The Church claimed leadership of the world by appropriating the Aristotelian notion of a totalizing and encompassing institution. The Church asserted its independence of and the subordination of political institutions to itself by claiming access to a natural law derived ultimately from divine law, codified as canon law. This sounds like Augustine but it is significantly different. The Roman Catholic Church offers therapeutic salvation through habitual practices such as the sacraments including confession and penance.

Institutionally, the hierarchical/monarchical structure of the Church terminates logically and historically in a Pope who eventually claims infallibility. Alternatively, some lay Catholics advocate integralism. This is but another way of saying the institutional/political structure defines the moral dimension.

Physical Science (a) Plato vs. Aristotle; (b) Newton vs. Descartes

(a) Modern 17th-century physics is totally Platonic, rejecting Aristotle’s naturalism and teleology. In its place we get mathematical models (Descartes, Leibniz, Galileo, Newton). Despite the popular distinction between empiricists and rationalists, every modern philosopher from Descartes onwards presumed that the mind in some way or other constructs our experience.

(b) The directly relevant contrast is between Newtonian atomism and Cartesian holistic plenum (denial of empty space and action at a distance).

The fundamental Anglo-American orientation is, historically speaking, a fundamental opposition to the concentration of power. This is originally directed against government. British Enlightenment philosophers conceptualize this opposition by opting for Galileo and (anti-teleological deterministic/mechanized) Newtonian atomism. Ethics (teleological) is replaced by moral philosophy. Initially, classical liberalism seems to be a political stance seeking a moral grounding.

Human beings are understood as atomistic strivers [Galilean Hobbes] wherein reason does not overrule passion [first law of motion, Hume] but operates, when properly contextualized (second law of motion), within a contractually harmonious social context [Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville; Hume and Smith on sympathy] sometimes guaranteed by God [Locke]. In political economy [joined by French Anglophiliac acolytes such as Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville], the non-teleological moral dimension seemingly overrules the political dimension by demanding negative liberty on the assumption that self-interest is rightly understood (Bentham’s felicific calculus).

Hume will have misgivings and revert to a quasi-historical understanding. Absent Macaulay historicism, this is where the evolution and collapse of liberalism will be initiated.

French Enlightenment philosophers were not part of the liberal tradition because they were generally influenced by Descartes’ physics with its emphasis on a holistic plenum rather than atomism and hence its commitment to a kind of collectivism. This is clear in the philosophes, Rousseau, Comte but also in Marx who was swayed by the Comtean notions of sociology and scientism. The operative position was that the political (whole) defined the moral and thereby authorized a social technology. These theorists opted for social technology within a (nationalism-socialism) framework and/or fascism {totalitarian democracy (Talmon on why this is different from authoritarian conservatism)}, or (internationalist) Marxism but not “wokism.”

The German Enlightenment and its romantics were influenced by the Platonic and religious (Reformation) cultural inheritance with its emphasis on the individual control of desire as in Kant. This required Kant to reinterpret the whole of human knowledge from a transcendental Platonic perspective invoking alleged synthetic a priori guarantees for God, freedom, and immortality.

Curiously, both Kant and Hegel (Kojeve, Fukuyama) provided a moral foundation for political liberalism only recently recognized and appreciated.

Neither Kant, nor Hegel, nor Nietzsche has anything to do with Nazism. Nazism is the German version of (anti-semitic) nationalist-socialism eventually theorized as fascism (Schmitt) in opposition to liberalism and internationalist Marxism. Post-WWII Germany reverts to gemeinschaft-moral demands on their constitution as opposed to gesellschaft ones.

The Degradation of Liberalism

All modern moral philosophy began with the Renaissance (Mirandola) postulation of an individual human being choosing and pursuing his/her own directions of activity. What needs to be explained is what obligations we have to others. The negative liberty of the British Enlightenment presupposes a self (selves) pursuing its (their) self-interest properly understood. In a deterministic (Newtonian) world there is no telos that guarantees that any individual possesses an individual homeostasis or that a group of individuals has such a homeostasis that would enable proper understanding. This lack of a guarantee becomes all the more problematic in democratic societies (threat of the “tyranny” of the majority in Tocqueville and in J.S. Mill). Whatever the shortcomings of other positions, there is no knock-down argument that any individual is better off always respecting the interests of others (Hume’s sensible knave).

Absent such a guaranteed convergence, other alternatives arise. First, the British Idealists (T.H. Green, Bradley, Bosanquet) rejected the “atomistic” form of individualism. Instead, they argued that humans are fundamentally social beings who by their very nature owed obligations to help others. The British Idealists did not, however, reify the State but became what we know as Modern Liberals promoting a welfare state version of the felicific calculus in opposition to classical liberals. Other writers such as G.B. Shaw and the Fabians (Webb) promoted this view in popular culture

Second, (A.V. Dicey), socialistic ideas were in no way a part of dominant legislative opinion earlier than 1865, and their influence on legislation did not become perceptible until 1868 or dominant until 1880. Moreover (Dicey) the opposition between the individualistic liberalism of 1830 and the democratic socialism of 1905 conceals the heavy debt owed by English collectivists to the utilitarian reformers. From Benthamism the socialists inherited a legislative dogma [principle of utility], a legislative instrument [parliamentary sovereignty], and a legislative tendency [constant extension of the mechanism of government]. The specific ends of Benthamite legislation were subsistence, abundance, security, sexual equality, environmentalism, and animal rights “each maximized, in so far as is compatible with the maximization of the rest.” The principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is inimical to the idea of liberty and to the idea of rights (Himmelfarb). Socialists acknowledge social dysfunction and even moral depravity as the product of the market economy’s threatening concentration of great power which requires, in response, using the political institution to correct or counterbalance the perceived degradation of the moral domain.

The third significant feature is the sexualization of liberalism, socialism, and Marxism. Enter Wilhelm Reich, incorporating his version of psychoanalysis into dialectical materialism. The most powerful and potentially self-destructive and socially disruptive drive in human beings is sex. In his mis-appropriation of Freud, Reich argued that neurosis (and all other dysfunction) could only be cured by having a proper orgasm understood as the full discharge of the libido in which you lose your ego and embrace your social self. Reich is the “founder of a genital utopia” (Sharaf). Reich has had a remarkable influence on popular culture from Foucault to Norman Mailer to films and pop music.

Liberalism in general has always known what it is against but not what it favors. It inherited a moral compass but it philosophically rejects custom and tradition and history as sufficient grounds. The consequence is no moral compass. Hence, the modern liberal welfare state does not have a clear conception of the nature and limits of the use of social technology. Instead, it has used social technology to redefine morality. It struggles to design education as a way of dealing with the challenges of parliamentary democracy, and continually expands the role of government until it becomes indistinguishable from democratic socialism. The perceptive Marxist critique of democratic socialism ultimately nudges it to discard the “democratic” qualifier as inhibiting long-term planning. Hence the embrace by some of “wokism” indistinguishable in practice from totalitarian Marxism and fascism.

Summary

From Hobbes to Bentham, the liberal view is that human nature is nothing but appetites. The role of liberty is to mediate between appetites unbound and the binding required by other appetitive beings. This requires removing the restrictions on appetites. The politics of emancipation in the Anglo-American world is the dialectical resolution of this role. It incorporates the satiation of one’s appetites, the right of respect for having one’s appetites and determinations (being/identity), control of education to enable the breaking up of traditional/oppressive forms of social reproduction to enable this appetitive self, as well as the political demand that this emancipated self receives the resources (reparations, career and office holding opportunities) distributed on the basis of one’s identity that enable its perpetuity. The emancipation of self requires for its realization a complete overhaul of the entire political, economic, pedagogical, and social spheres.

The alternative view of the self is that liberty is in the service of internal freedom or autonomy (self-control). That is why Mill rejected Bentham, and why he reconstructed utilitarianism to reflect all four versions of Kant’s categorical imperative, and reasserted the Platonic view that the “moral” defines the “political.” As opposed to the other forms of liberalism, Mill, following Kant, maintains that no one can or should promote or have an obligation to promote from the outside the moral perfection of another person because that contradicts and undermines the internal freedom that is a condition of moral perfection. Mill saved liberalism from itself, but it was too late.


Nicholas Capaldi is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University, New Orleans.


Featured: Collapse of the Roof, by Nicholas Evans; painted in 1978.


Some Insights from Carl Schmitt for the 21st Century

In order to interpret the present political situation, Carl Schmitt’s thought is still topical; regardless of the many insights that can be drawn from it, at the present time some theses advocated by the Plettenberg thinker in the late 1920s and early 1960s, well before the contemporary “epoch,” following the collapse of communism, the “rise” of globalization (and the death of the jurist), are particularly interesting.

First, it is appropriate to explain the extraordinary increase, a few years after the collapse of communism, of populo-sovereign-identitarian parties, by recalling what he wrote in his speech, “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierung und Entpolitisierungen” (“The Era of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations“), (of 1929).

Schmitt argues in this text that European spiritual life has developed over the last four centuries (i.e., in modernity) by changing centers of reference (from the theological to the metaphysical, from this to the moral-humanitarian and finally to the economic): “If a domain of thought becomes central, then the problems of other domains are solved in terms of the central domain—they are considered secondary problems, whose solution follows as a matter of course only if the problems of the central domain are solved. In a theological age, everything runs smoothly if theological questions are in order; everything else is “provided” by definition. The same is true of other ages” (86).

This center of reference is decisive and prevalent” “Above all the state also derives its reality and power from the respective central domain, because the decisive disputes of friend-enemy groupings are also determined by it” (87).

He continues: “As long as religious-theological matters were the central focus, the maxim cujus regio ejus religio3 had a political meaning. When religious-theoretical matters ceased to dominate the central domain, this maxim also lost its practical import. In the meantime, however, it moved from the cultural stage of the nation and the principle of nationality (cujus regio ejus natio) to the economic domain, where it came to mean: one and the same state cannot accommodate two contradictory economic systems, i.e., capitalism and communism are mutually exclusive (87-88).

After the collapse of communism, the last exculpatory of the “political” (i.e., that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) disappeared. Fukuyama wrote that after the victory of liberal democracies, the end of history had come. This prediction is wrong because it presupposes the exhaustion of all reason for conflict; which is impossible because the element of conflict and struggle (Machiavelli and Duverger among many) is a presupposition of the political that is connatural to it (Freund). To think that man, zoon politikon, can exist without a political dimension presupposes changing his nature, which is what the young Marx thought he could do and has instead turned out to be impossible.

Rather, the bourgeois/proletarian justification has been replaced by a different one. The transition between one friend/foe justification and the next, Schmitt wrote, has a decisive political effect: “The succession of stages—from the theological, over the metaphysical and the moral to the economic—simultaneously signifies a series of progressive neutralizations of domains whose centers have shifted” (89). In this process, “The former central domain became neutralized in that it ceased to be the central domain,” but at the same time and progressively “in the dialectic of such a development one creates a new domain of struggle precisely through the shifting of the central domain. In the new domain, at first considered neutral, the antitheses of men and interests unfold with a new intensity and become increasingly sharper. Europeans always have wandered from a conflictual to a neutral domain, and always the newly won neutral domain has become immediately another arena of struggle, once again necessitating the search for a new neutral domain” (90; italics mine). Which appears to be precisely what has happened in the last 30 years. After a (brief) phase in which “post-communist” globalization was thought of as a stable and “peaceful” era, given the planetary hegemony of the U.S., the first cracks, evenly distributed in two categories, were glimpsed: humanitarian wars and, even more, the emergence of antagonists—enemies—of the globalized order. Both converged in supporting the thesis that history—and conflicts—were far from over. As for the “humanitarian” wars, mostly denominated as such in English and qualified as international police operations, definitions aside, they remained wars nonetheless; nor even very appreciable according to the intentions expressed, since already four centuries ago Francisco Suarez warned against such wars. As regards the enemy of the “new order,” at first Islamic fundamentalism, the whole thing proved that an order, however desirable, cannot disregard the fact that some group of men do not appreciate it, and to such an intense degree that they go so far (always) as to fight it politically, and in extreme cases, with arms.

It was so evident that the “new order” was dialectically generating new hostilities, new enemies and new conflicts.

It remained, and in part remains, unclear on what spiritual center of reference the opposition, internal to the Euro-Atlantic West, between populists and globalists is based. What is clear, however—and can serve to identify the center of reference—is that sovereign-populist-identitarians on the one hand and globalists on the other refer to opposing pairs of values/ideas that we list below (without claiming to be exhaustive), of which the first column refers to sovereign-populism, the second to globalization:

NATION/HUMANITY
EXISTING/NORMATIVE
COMMUNITY/SOCIETY
NATIONAL INTEREST/GLOBAL INTEREST

It is barely worth mentioning a few examples. For existing/normative, I would refer to what I wrote about the Hungarian Constitution. As for the community/society opposition, it is less obvious but begins to emerge from the constitutional declarations of “sovereigntist” countries (see the Polish and Hungarian Constitutions).

That the term a quo and ad quem of these is the nation and not humanity is quite obvious and needs no explanation.

When it comes to the national interest, it is also evident as a government objective, apart from the recent events of Diciotti and Interior Minister Salvini, which have brought it back to the center of the political debate. And it could be referred to as a “re-establishment” because it has always been the compass of the modern state (and ancient political syntheses).

To find a phrase that sums up the position of the sovereigntists in a few words, one can just go back to Sieyès’ statement: “The Nation is all that it can be by the mere fact of existing.” A statement that would surely shock a globalist.

And continuing the abbot’s quotations, among many: “The nations of the earth are to be regarded as individuals devoid of all social ties, that is, as they say, in the state of nature. The exercise of their will is free and independent of all civil forms…However a nation wills, it is sufficient that it wills; all forms are good, and its will is always supreme law…a nation can neither alienate nor interdict to itself the faculty of will; and whatever its will may be, it cannot lose the right to change it should its interest demand it.”

The second conception to be considered in assessing the contemporary political situation is the one that emerges, among Schmitt’s writings, from Land and Sea (Land und Meer). The foundation of this text is that human existence is determined by the space in which it lives, its perception of it and the opportunities space offers. Therefore, this determines or co-determines political, economic and social relations—in particular, law. Maurice Hauriou wrote that the law known, elaborated, and applied by jurists is that of sedentary societies, based on the relationship with the land (and thus, also with territory as an element of the political institution, particularly—but not only—of the modern state). While the French jurist contrasted sedentary societies with nomadic ones and explained much of the institutions of the former with the relationship with the land and with an existence oriented to regular production, Schmitt deepened the diversity between maritime existence and land existence, and in particular that “universal history is a history of the struggle of the power of the sea against the power of the land.”

What was new in modern history, Schmitt argued, was that Britain, in the 16th century, decided on a maritime existence, far more than maritime powers such as Athens or Venice and to some extent, even Carthage had done in other eras. Hence the English commercial (and industrial) expansion. Hegel also emphasizes certain different types of activities, and tying the development of industry and trade to the sea (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §247).

This fact was considered by Schmitt to be decisive for both international law and the Westphalian European political order. The resulting balance, he derived from that of land and sea (continental powers and maritime power) and between European states. None of which were capable of hegemonizing the others, because they would not have the strength to impose themselves on a coalition of them, somewhat as Machiavelli noted for the Italian states (and the balance among them) of his era. In this sense, the sovereignty of the states, built around the legal equality of the states—disregarding the factual equality, made some sense, precisely because the factual equality among them—or at least among the major ones—was not so far off; and, on the other hand, the disparity could be compensated for by a shrewd policy of alliances (and conversely of neutrality).

This all came into crisis with the 20th century; Schmitt argued that “in international law, generic and universalistic ideas are the typical weapons of interventionism;” and that “A legal conception coordinated with an empire spread over the whole earth (i.e., the British empire) naturally tends toward universalistic arguments.” He continues: “Such a conception does not concern a determined and united space nor its internal order, but in the first instance the security of communications between the scattered portions of the empire” (Völkerrechtliche Formen des modernen Imperialismus).

In the paper, “Great Space against Universalism,” (“Großraum gegen Universalismus“) the Plettenberg jurist reiterated, with reference to the Monroe doctrine, the contradictory nature of the universalist interpretation to the original enunciation of that doctrine. Schmitt writes, “It is essential that the Monroe doctrine remain authentic and not falsified, as long as the idea of a concretely determined great space, in which powers foreign to space cannot meddle, is fixed. The opposite of such a fundamental principle, conceived from concrete space, is a universalistic world principle, embracing the whole earth and humanity. This naturally leads to intrusions of everyone into everything. While the idea of space contains a point of view of delimitation and division and for this reason enunciates an ordering juridical principle, the universalistic claim of world intromission destroys all rational delimitation and distinction” (italics mine).

Schmitt continues: “In effect, the original American Monroe doctrine has nothing to do with the fundamental principles and methods of modern liberal-capitalist imperialism. As a true doctrine of space it stands, on the contrary, in pronounced opposition to a transformation of the earth into an abstract world market of capital without regard to space… That such a falsification of the Monroe doctrine into an imperialistic principle of world trade was possible will remain for all time a striking example of the intoxicating influence of empty buzzwords.” As for the interpretation given it by Woodrow Wilson: “he did not mean roughly a conforming transference of the spatial, non-interventionist thinking contained in the true Monroe doctrine to other spaces, but on the contrary a spatial and unlimited extension of liberal democratic principles to the whole earth and to all mankind. In this way he sought a justification for his unprecedented interference in non-European space” (italics mine).

Scmitt continues that the two Roosevelts and Wilson made “a specifically American spatial thinking a world ideology above states and peoples; they attempted to use the Monroe Doctrine as an instrument of Anglo-Saxon capital’s domination of the world market.”

This has resulted in converting “a spatially conceived principle of non-interference into a general system of delocalized meddling” and thus has become an ideological tool of democracy and “the conceptions associated with it, particularly ‘free’ world trade and ‘free’ world markets, in place of the original and true Monroe principle.” Combining for the purpose status quo and pacta sunt servanda, “that is, a simple contractual positivism,” with the ideological principles of liberal-capitalism.

The overall result is that the Monroe Doctrine, as interpreted in the years between the two world wars, gives the measure “of the contrast between a clear spatial order resting on the fundamental principle of non-intervention by foreign powers in space against a universalist ideology, which turns the whole earth into the battleground of its interventions and stands in the way of any natural growth of living peoples” (italics mine).

The situation today is different: the evolution of the international order with the UN (and the UN Charter), the prohibition of the use of force (see Art. 2, 4 of the UN Charter), the powers of the Security Council, the doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” peacekeeping operations, and especially the “defense of human rights” (and more) have complicated the situation.

What can the lessons of Carl Schmitt and, in particular, the doctrine of “large spaces” be used for?

It seems to be possible to answer that two conceptions (explicit and implicit to the same) and yet intersecting can be usefully applied. The first of which is political realism in relation to the concept of sovereignty. As the German jurist writes, the problem of sovereignty, arguably the main one, is to reconcile the political aspect with the legal aspect. For if the distinctive feature of sovereignty is legal absoluteness (not being conditioned by law but being “above” it), it must be combined with factual limits (with the familiar problematic issue of how much absoluteness applies internally and how much absoluteness can apply externally, i.e., with respect to subjects of international law (states and “order in fieri” distinguished by Bodin early on). As Schmitt writes “In political reality there is no supreme power, that is, greater than all, irresistible and functioning with the security of the law of nature… The reconciliation of supreme power in fact and in law constitutes the basic problem of the concept of sovereignty. Hence all difficulties arise” (italics mine). For another is the sovereignty of the U.S.A. or China, another that of San Marino or Liechtenstein. Transposed to the contemporary situation, this means that while one censures—rightly—violations of “human rights” or genocide (e.g., of the Kurds in Iraq) and goes off to wage a “just war” on the Rwandans or Saddam, one is careful not to wage war on Putin over the Donbass or Crimea, nor on China over Hong-Kong. It should be noted that while Hong-Kong is under Chinese sovereignty—and at least the classical territorial character of this may apply—this is not the case for the aforementioned territories in Eastern Europe, both of which—prior to annexations and occupations—were part of Ukraine; which has thus suffered a violation of (its own) sovereignty—as opposed to China. At this point, given the “double standards, double measures,” one wonders whether the criterion of “big space” does not apply as a concrete criterion of behavior and decision: while Russia was (in fact) granted intervention in a republic formerly part of the USSR, i.e., its own “big space,” the same was not exercised to protect populations, human rights, and in the case of Ukraine, territorial integrity. Hence the realism intrinsic to the Schmittian conception (registers) and rules much more than the idealism of such. (Idealism, which in practice, is often the fusion of interests and patronage).

The second conception that appears to underlie the concept of “great space” is one that links Max Weber’s concept of power (and of authority) and “law” understood here as “order.” Weber writes in defining it, that “power designates any possibility of asserting within a social relation, even in the face of opposition, one’s will.” Shortly thereafter, he writes: “The State should be understood to mean an institutional enterprise of a political character in which, and to the extent that, the administrative apparatus successfully advances a claim to a monopoly of legitimate physical coercion, with a view to the implementation of orders” (Economy and Society).

In current usage, until a few decades ago, states were called powers, at least those capable of exercising command internally and thus protecting their independence, even without (or with minimal) external political hegemony. In factual terms, it is the ability to assert one’s will that determines being a power. Which by applying Spinoza’s formula, tantum juris quantum potentiae, determines the factual limits of powers and thus of the legal capacity to exercise them. As the Dutch philosopher wrote, “If therefore the power by which natural things exist and operate is the same power as God, it is easy to understand what natural law is…. By natural right I therefore mean the same laws or rules of nature, according to which everything happens, that is, the same power of nature; therefore, the natural law of the whole of nature, and consequently of each individual, extends as far as its power” (Theologico-Political Treatise; italics mine). And within the “great space” it is relatively easy for the hegemonic power to exercise it. Likewise, for the most part, it has an interest in doing so because of the connections and relationships that join it to its neighbors or satellites. Respecting them is the condition for a state of peace to be easily achieved. Far more than trying to impose a unity of the world, without that unity being achieved in peace by the only historically possible way: by maintaining the pluriverse, conforming to the arrangement of interests, powers and borders; that is, by limiting and determining it with objective criteria that can be easily perceived and applied. For as Schmitt wrote, the unity of the world is not the unity of the ecumene, but “of the unitary organization of human power, the purpose of which would be to plan, direct and dominate the earth and the whole of humanity. It is the great question whether humanity is already ripe to endure a single center of political power” (Concept of the Political).

That there is a religion, a theology supporting such a hypothetical center, which has the capacity to resist elementary objections and criticism, Schmitt does not believe so. Certainly not the ideology of progress, since technical and moral progress “do not walk together” (neither among the rulers nor the ruled). Nor can rationalism bring us comfort, if only, I would add, because De Maistre’s judgment that man “by the fact of being simultaneously moral and corrupt, just in intelligence and perverse in will, must necessarily be governed” (so that reason is not enough) still applies; moreover, technical progress has the drawback of increasing the power of government. As Goethe wrote, “it is dangerous to man that what makes him more powerful, without making him better.

Nor do we see it today in that (attempt/project) of world unity in which still find ourselves, even though it now seems to be drawing to a close. Behind the unity of a world, dominated by the victorious power in the bourgeois/proletarian opposition, it must be acknowledged that the Plettenberg thinker saw the political future well: a new friend-enemy opposition, a constant land/sea dichotomy, a peace through the balance of (and between) large spaces. That is, everything opposite of what mainstream propaganda spreads.


Teodoro Katte Klitsche de la Grange is an attorney in Rome and is the editor of the well-regarded and influential law journal Behemoth.


The Four Reformers

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), the famed Scottish writer, in his leisure hours also turned out some remarkablle fables. One of them, The Four Reformers, speaks to our own era rather precisely. It is difficult to say when it was written, but likely before 1888. His fables were collected and published postumously, in 1896.

IX. The Four Reformers

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”


Featured: Four Men at a Cafe, by Yiannis Tsaroychis; painted in 1927.


What is Dictatorship?

In politics, whether we know it or not, we are always fighting against an enemy, whether stationed on our borders or camouflaged within the city. But there is also another form of enmity, much more subtle than the one that bubbles at ground level, incarnated by men who have an ideology or a culture, perhaps a religion or a barbaric anthropology, incompatible with our own. It is the enmity derived from political concepts, polemically handled and exploited against the “moral element,” the criterion by which the true capacity of resistance to the hostility and offenses of the enemy is measured.

What I want to say, now by way of example, is that certain assumed definitions, transformed into taboos, enervate the will, having previously worked the intelligence by “brainwashing,” an expression that, suspiciously, has ceased to be used at a time when political pedagogy is dedicated only to that. Some pontificate on the benefits of ethnic, religious and cultural pluralism—the pluralism of values, in short—and others suffer its consequences: loss of cultural identity, social conflict, babelization. Nor is it strange that the same people who praise “miscegenation”—vaguely in the legal system, but with more determination in public universities and in the Press and Propaganda Section of the mass media—then maintain that races (or cultures) do not exist. It has also become normal for the zealots of “defensive” pan-Melanism—Black Lives Matter is not new, it was previously invented in the 1920s—to promote as just and necessary an anti-white racism and to demand that we finance our own re-education.

War, even in its current “pacifist” variants, takes place in space, that is to say, on the earth, because to control it and to reasonably order life on it is the primary object of politics. The much more decisive and brutal quarrels over concepts are settled in time. The struggle for the meaning of words, for the “story” that obsesses all modern princely counselors—today called “political analysts” or “advisors,” young people with no experience of life, generally coming, as Jules Monnerot used to say, from an educational system dedicated to “the mass production of artificial cretins”: as opposed to those who are so by a natural disposition; those who flourish massively today are “cultivated cretins, like a certain type of pearl.” Once the political logos and dictionary have been colonized, that is, the national “political imaginary,” any capacity for resistance is radically diminished. Then, and only then, the defeat of the external or internal enemy can be presented as a victory or a political and cultural “homologation” with the executioners. Indeed, a few days ago we in Spain spoke, with a sense of opportunity, of the “afrancesados,” Spanish archetype of a colonized political imaginary.

It is therefore necessary, in a certain sense, to “decolonize the imaginary” and give back to political concepts their precise meaning, which is neither invented nor developed in a Think Tank, but is part, however modest its aliquot, of the truth of politics. It is necessary, in order to know where we stand. I do not know if “political realism” has a specific mission; perhaps, some would say, the elaboration of a “decalogue” or program that can be implemented by a political party, a faction or a movement, but I do know that its raison d’être lies in the demystification of political thought. One of the concepts that needs this mental cleansing is “dictatorship,” a frightening notion about which the greatest confusion reigns—a self-interested Confusionism, exploited by those aspiring to power, presenting their rivals as vulgar supporters of authoritarian regimes and themselves as “democrats”—as if that term had a precise meaning beyond the mental tropisms that adorn the demo-liberal right.

Everything conspires against the reputation of political demystifiers. However, writing about the war-phenomenon does not presuppose a bellicose personality; probably only a meek man can write a theory or a sociology of war. A theory of decision… an indecisive one. And a theory of dictatorship is perhaps only within the reach of someone incapable of exercising it.

It is not easy to look “dictatorship” in the face, a highly inflammable political concept that gravitates over particularly intense political situations and which is entangled with legislation of exception, states of necessity and coups d’état. People believe that a dictatorship is what the “anti-Franco vulgate” teaches, but they do not lose sleep over a government that can illegally shut down Parliament and deprive the whole nation of freedom of movement. Anti-parliamentarism has many forms and those of today are nothing like those of a century ago. It would be very interesting to write a palingenesis of dictatorship, for it is periodically reborn and its singularity should be recognized. To turn one’s back on its reality is to culpably ignore the momentary concentration of power, a reality that happens outside our moral or ideological prejudices, independently of our will. Not knowing what it consists of compromises our position vis-à-vis the enemy who does know what it is and how to use it.

Dictatorship is a fundamental institution of Roman public law. It consists of a lifting or suspension of the juridical barriers in order that the dictator, generally pro tempore, faces the exceptional political situation (sedition, civil war, foreign invasion) and restores the public tranquility to the city. Once restored the order or expired the foreseen period, the extraordinary powers of the dictator are cancelled, whose prototype is Cincinnatus. But there are also in Roman history examples of dictators of undefined undertaking (Sila) and those lifelong (Caesar), even omnímodo or, as we would say today, constituent (lex de imperio vespasiani).

Roman pragmatism had grasped the political essence of dictatorship: it is a concentration or intensification of power that opposes the pernicious effect of the impotence of the established power, besieged by the enemy, generally internal. From a conceptual point of view, it is not strictly speaking a “political regime,” but a “political situation,” transitory by definition. Any manifestation of power always generates criticism from rival parties or factions, but in a particularly intense way criticism is aroused by dictatorship, secularly associated with the personal usufruct of command.

Every dictatorship constitutes a political fact, imperfectly subjected to a legal status. Jean Bodin’s notion of sovereignty is, in this sense, the attempt to make normative a particularly intense moment of command. Such is the glory of Bodin and of the French legists of the 16th century.

During the 19th century, dictatorship gradually lost all its former respectability, as a consequence of the generalization of a new juridical ideology: constitutionalism. Liberal historiography, in its fight against the “enemy,” the absolute monarchies, reworked the classical political tradition and generalized the denigration of the dictatorial institution, arbitrarily associated with tyranny and despotism.

However, the constitutional movement has always recognized, implicitly, that political necessity knows no law when it modulates states of exception, siege and war, denominations which push dictatorship into the background. Dictatorship became a political taboo after the coup of Louis Napoléon (December 2, 1851), the most important coup of the 19th century. But the technical meaning of dictatorship remained and developed in the constitutional states of exception. For the first time, the raison d’être of the classic dictatorship was legally enunciated, but without mentioning it by name: the suspension of law to allow its subsistence. Otherwise, liberalism, which at the time was never, to a certain extent, a “neutral and agnostic” doctrinarism—a legend spread by conservative illiberalism—would never have built the prepotent European nation-states.

Dictatorship formally denies the rule it wants to ensure materially, a doctrine established by Carl Schmitt in his research on the evolution of the institution: Dictatorship (1921), a book of conceptual history, diaphanous and without equivocation, whose non-readers (a very interesting intellectual fauna) figure, against all odds, that it is an apology for Nazism. According to the German jurist, “the essence of dictatorship from the point of view of the philosophy of law consists in the general possibility of separating the norms of law and the norms of the realization of law.” At the same time, dictatorship also implies an effective suppression of the division or separation of powers. Schmitt, being in need of the necessary conceptual demarcation as a jurist, contrasts commissariat dictatorship with constituent dictatorship, categories currently received in the healthiest part of the theory of the State and constitutional theory. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will plays a crucial role in the transition from one to the other.

Hermann Heller, a brilliant jurist, like Carl Schmitt, politicized by his leftist militancy and also committed to national socialism—but the opposite side of the other national socialism—was equally concerned about legal taxonomies. Less perspicacious than his colleague, rival and friend when political or juridical realism (concepts) come into conflict with ideology (positions), for Heller, dictatorship, condemned en bloc, is nothing more than a personalistic and corrupt government (“individuality without law”) opposed to the rule of law (“law without individuality”); in short, “a political regime manifestation of anarchy.” Simplifying a lot, this is the idea of dictatorship generalized among constitutionalists since 1945, the heyday of the “Potsdam democracies.” Carlos Ollero Gómez explained very effectively the constitutional “archaism” that weighed down these regimes.

The commissariat type of dictatorship, an updated formula, at the beginning of the 20th century, of the Roman dictatorship, presupposes a prior mandate or commission, spontaneous (royal call or invitation of a parliament or national assembly to assume extraordinary powers), or forced (pronunciamiento, coup d’état). The commissioned dictator’s mission is to restore the violated constitutional order without going outside the constitution or questioning its essential decisions (form of government). A good example of this is the Spanish dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, the “iron surgeon” expected by all. Have political and legal historians ever stopped to think why dictatorship got such a good press after World War I? They should read more Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, for example, a left-liberal constitutionalist, and think less about the ANECA, cancer of the Spanish university.

Sovereign dictatorship, on the other hand, pursues the establishment of a new political order, using for this purpose a power without legal limitations and operating as a constituent power. Charles de Gaulle in 1958 (dictator ad tempus). This type of dictatorship is associated in the 20th century with totalitarian regimes (total states and popular democracies), while the commissariat dictatorship falls more into the field of authoritarian regimes (Boulangism, authoritarian states and, however bizarre the term may sound, “Catholic dictatorships”). The possible effects of revolution having been limited by the experience of the Paris Commune, the lessons of which led to a turning point in insurrectionary techniques, the alternative to violent subversion is from then on the surgical coup d’état or legal revolution.

In its modern (Baroque) meaning, coups d’état are “audacious and extraordinary actions that princes are forced to undertake, against common law, in difficult and desperate affairs, relativizing the established order and legal formulas and subordinating the interest of individuals to the public good.” Thus speaks, in a secret book, Gabriel Naudé, so mistreated by political ignorance. Naudé, a librarian by profession and a harmless spirit, considers coups legitimate and defensive. Their usefulness depends on the prudence of the prince and, above all, on his ability to anticipate, for “the execution always precedes the sentence”: thus “the coup is received by the one who weighs to give it.” The reputation of a coup d’état depends on those who exploit it: it will be beneficial if it is carried out by friends or allies (salus populi suprema lex esto) and disturbing if it is plotted by enemies (violation of the constitution, counter-coup). Judgment thus depends on the relative position of the observer and his commitments and objectives.

The contemporary sequel to Naudé’s Considerations politiques sur les coups d’Estat (Political Considerations on Coups d’Etat), (1639), is Curzio Malaparte’s Tecnica Del Golpe De Estado (Technique of the Coup d’Etat), (1931). Malaparte, on whom the opprobrium of the right and the left falls indiscriminately, discusses the nature of coups in order to teach how to defeat them with a paralyzing “counter-coup” (coup d’arrêt) and defend the State.

Triumphs like Mussolini’s March on Rome (1922), wrapped in an aura of political romanticism, may never happen again… in the same way. After World War II the general impression was that the coup d’état is an infertile technique. All the more reason why, because of its congenital romanticism, the pronunciamiento can no longer have any effect. From all this we can only expect, as the theoretician of the State Jesús F. Fueyo used to say, an “acceleration of disorder.”

The violence of the coup is logically unacceptable to public opinion in pluralist constitutional regimes. However, that same “public opinion,” by inadvertence or by seduction, can willingly accept what Malaparte calls a “parliamentary coup,” in the style of the one executed by Napoleon Bonaparte on the 18th Brumaire (1799). Carl Schmitt calls it “legal revolution” in a famous article of 1977, written against the non-violent and electoral strategy of the Western communist parties (the Eurocommunism of Santiago Carrillo, a senile disease of Marxism-Leninism, a political religion then beginning to decline, although they, the Western communists, do not yet know it). In reality, the same result can be reached without going through the “legal revolution.” For this, it is necessary to count on the artful political strategy of occupying the constitutional courts—much more than a “negative legislator”—to turn them into the architects of an unnamed constitutional mutation, the greatest danger for the constitutions they are supposed to defend.

But it was not these communists, neither the Soviets nor those of the West, but Adolf Hitler, who, almost half a century before the publication of Eurocommunism and the State, set up the leverage to build a constituent dictatorship with totalitarian roots. Unlike dictatorships of the other species, the authoritarian, the totalitarian dictatorship pretends to have a mission not only political, but also moral, even religious: to give birth to the new man—Bolshevik, Aryan or Khmer Rouge—by disenfranchising the old.

The futility of the Munich coup of 1923 instructed Hitler on the tactical convenience of the electoral struggle and the possibility of legally attaining power in order to activate from the government the de facto abrogation of the constitution. It is a matter of exploiting the “legality premium” to revoke legitimacy. It is precisely against this process of constitutional subversion that Carl Schmitt warned, once again the Cassandra, in the summer of 1932.

The history of the Weimar system is well known and its last gasps have a name: the Authorization Law or Ermächtigungsgesetz (1933), a bridging constitution that suspended and emptied the Weimar constitution of content, opening the door to a constituent (totalitarian) dictatorship that ended up becoming a political oxymoron: a permanent regime of exception.

One of these bridge-constitutions, the Law for Political Reform of 1977, also served as a fuse for the “controlled explosion”—as it was called during the Transition—of the regime of the Fundamental Laws. The truth is that in Spain no one was fooled at that time; or, to be more exact, only those who allowed themselves to be fooled were fooled: “From the law to the law, passing through the law.” It portrays a generation of constitutionalists that no one has dealt with that bridging constitution. In reality, these jurists have powerful reasons to avoid it, since in very few European constitutional processes its character of supreme political decision is so evident, beyond the Kelsenian supercheries and fictions about the Grundnorm or fundamental normal on which everything hypothetically depends. Another fantastic exception to constitutional normativism is found in De Gaulle, playing, for the love of France, the Solon of the Fifth Republic.

The same school as the German National Socialist law of 1933 has held the Hispanic American populism since the end of the 1990s. The case of Hugo Chavez is a paradigm that transcends Venezuelan politics: from the failure of his 1992 “coup d’état” to the success of the “legal revolution” that began with his victory in the 1998 presidential elections and his famous oath of investiture on “the dying constitution” by virtue of which he had been elected.

The politically neutralized constitutionalist has no answer to this political challenge exported to almost all Latin American republics. He is paralyzed by the paradox. It is the ankylosis of Karlsruhe.


Jerónimo Molina Cano is a jurist, historian of political and legal ideas, translator and author. He is a corresponding member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas in Madrid. This article appears through the kind courtesy of La gaceta de la Iberosfera.


Featured: Cincinato abandona el arado para dictar leyes a Roma (Cincinnatus Leaves the Plough to Dictate Laws to Rome), by Juan Antonio Ribera; painted ca. 1806.


Why Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Matters

1. A Brief Intellectual Biography

I wrote the second part of this essay for the annual meeting of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund, on the Commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of the German-American thinker, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888—1973). That part was originally written for those who already know of his work, which is a very small group indeed. The voice it is written in reflects not only the circumstances and interests of the audience for whom it was written, but it reflects the emphasis, which I think might be of value to those who know nothing of him. Hence for those who have never heard of Rosenstock-Huessy before, a few biographical details may be warranted.

He was born in 1888 into a family who were of Jewish blood but had no interest in their tradition. His mother was as little moved by her son’s conversion to Christianity as she was by the tradition of her ancestors. Of his conversion, Rosenstock-Huessy said that there was no road to Damascus; his baptism seemed a natural progression from his interest in philology and history, and he simply thought that every word of the Nicene Creed was true. He received a doctor of laws at the age of 21, with the inaugural dissertation, “Landfriedensgerichte und Provinzialversammlungen vom 9.-12. Jahrhundert, (Courts of Peace and Provincial Assemblies from the 9th to the 12th Centuries).” And few years later, he completed his Habillitation (the German degree that is usually a prerequisite for becoming a university lecturer), with the deesertation, “Ostfalens Rechtsliteratur unter Friedrich II (East Westphalian Legal Literature under Friedrich) .”

By the age of 24, he was a private lecturer, teaching German Private Law and German Legal History at the University of Leipzig, before joining the German war effort. He served as an officer, and while fighting in the Battle of Verdun he had, what he himself called, a vision of the providential nature of war and revolutions and their indispensable role in making us and the world we now inhabit. That idea would first take preliminary form in 1920, in the work, “Die Hochzeit des Kriegs und der Revolution (The Wedding of War and Revolution).” This was followed by more complete versions, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (1938) and Die europäischen Revolutionen und der Charakter der Nationen (The European Revolutions and the Character of Nations) (1951).

These works focussed upon the unity of the European revolutions, which he derived from what he saw as the first total revolution in the West—the Papal revolution, an event involving a complete rejuvenation of the Church that led to Pope Gregory VII’s excommunication of Emperor Henry VI over the practice of lay investiture. The popular support for the Gregorian position was perhaps most evident in the Church ridding itself of married clerics. The central argument of the works was that the Western revolutions that followed—the Italian Revolution (the Renaissance), the German Revolution (the Reformation), the English Revolution, the American Revolution (which he depicts as a half-way house revolution), the French and Russian Revolutions—were not only decisive in the formation of the modern European nations and their character, but gave birth to the social materials and commitments/ the faith that would flow into the world wars, and thereby draw the entire world into an unstable unity.

The story he tells is one in which providence (and not the wills of men) forces us into a condition where we must confront each other in dialogue, draw upon our respective traditions as we seek to navigate a common future—or what he called a metanomic society—if we are to achieve any lasting peace. A metanomic society is not to be confused with the progressive, globalist order that asphyxiates living spirits in conflict so that they may all be presided over by an elite of the good, the true and the beautiful—and the extremely wealthy. Rather it is one of persistent tensionality, as nations and peoples meet at the crossroads of a universal history of faith and war and revolt (sin and disease). On that cross road we encounter the various pathways and epochs (“time-bodies”) opened by founders who often stand for inimical life-ways, and yet we have to find a way to stand or perish together.

The works on revolution were themselves but parts of a more complete attempt to outline his vision of a metanomical society, Die Vollzahl der Zeiten (“The Full Count of the Times”), which would almost take him fifty years to complete. There he formulates the problem confronting the species, as one of making contemporaries of distemporaries—for we all come out of different “times.” Die Vollzahl originally appeared as the second volume of the work published in 1956—1958 as Soziologie, and has more recently appeared under the title he intended as, Im Kreuz der Wirchlichkeit: Soziologie in 3 volumes (Vollzahl appears as volumes 2 and 3 in that edition.) The two parts of the work are divided into one dealing with spaces—it is called Die Übermacht der Räume, which Jurgen Lawrenz, Frances Huessy and myself have translated and edited as The Hegemony of Spaces. The second, as I have indicated, deals with “the times.” The plurality adopted in the titles is important—for much of what Rosenstock-Huessy sees as destroying the human spirit is the adoption of the metaphysical and mechanical ideas of time and space as blinding us to living processes and the role of spaces and times in our lives, especially the opening up new paths of the spirit, involving a new partitioning of time.

The first volume of Soziologie/ Im Kreuz der Wircklichkeit is devoted to laying down Rosenstock-Huessy’s methodological critique of what he sees as the philosophical disaster that has culminated in what he calls, in the culminating section, “The Tyranny of Spaces and their Collapse,” the triumph of the Cartesian dissolution of all life into mechanical space paired with Nietzsche’s aestheticization of life which leaves the more fundamental tyranny untouched. That tyranny comes from the failure of a world increasingly dependent upon professionals devoted to ideas and ideals to understand the living powers of social cultivation and us substituting abstractions for living processes. The key idea of that volume is that play had always been conceived as a preparation for life, by sequestering spaces for play which enable people to focus upon the requisite undertaking we are engaged in. Play enables us to develop a more controlled, a more distanced and hence abstract understanding of life. It also aids us in developing our focus and capacities that may assist us in the tribulations that befall us in “real” life. Play is the species’ greatest source of education. It is thus not a mere afterthought to survival but as intrinsic to our nature as to our social formation and history.

Those familiar with Johan Huzinga’s Homo Ludens will be familiar with how play forms the basis of reflective life, though I think Rosenstock-Huessy makes this the basis of sociology, and human social roles, and by doing so does far more with it, especially in how he identifies the way in which the reflective consciousness has generally downplayed the more primordial social emotions and priorities required for developing pathways of life, in which we find our place and commitments in the world. Lifeless essences—“the individual,” “man,” “free will,” and such like—which can be moved about by the mind of the intellectual on a blank canvas of mental space are treated as real, while real forces of shame, admiration, gratitude, behests, affirmation, negation (I am taking a random selection from powers Rosenstock-Huessy denotes within a larger sociological breakdown) whilst still socially operative are not even noticed by most scholars and researchers.

It would be remiss of me not to mention another preliminary aspect of his intellectual biography. Prior to the First World War, Rosenstock-Huessy was the teacher of the most important Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig. Their friendship and his lectures led to Rosenzweig considering to follow his cousins (the philosopher, Hans and author, Rudi Ehrenberg) and Rosenstock-Huessy into the Christian faith. At the last minute, after attending a Yom Kippur service, as a farewell gesture to the faith of his ancestors, Rosenzweig decided that he would “remain a Jew.” Rosenzweig’s “conversion” experience led him to seek out Rosenstock-Huessy again and enter into a dialogue about Christianity and Judaism.

In 1916, the two friends engaged in a heated but brilliant exchange, in which each defended his own faith and criticized that of the other. The correspondence has been translated into English and edited by Rosenstock-Huessy in Judaism Despite Christianity. It is the most important Christian-Jewish dialogue ever written. Rosenstock-Huessy left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, but he did return in 1935 to help launch Rosenzweig’s Collected Letters. Rosenzweig, by then was deceased, and the correspondence between him and Rosenzweig played a special part in that collection. In my book, Religion, Redemption, and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I have written the only extensive account of the intellectual relationship between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, that draws attention to how they believed that they were, in spite of irreconcilable differences of faith, fighting on a common front against the kind of abstract and philosophical thinking that has dominated the West and is now destroying it. Both, in different ways, undertook to explicate the power of their respective traditions and what those traditions uniquely brought to our understanding of experience. Whereas Rosenzweig has a small audience in the academy (and I make no excuse for the fact that I find the academic reception of Rosenzweig in the US and Germany to be a bowdlerisation of his thinking so he can fit the “ethical” and “political” prejudices that now dominate the academy), Rosenstock-Huessy is almost completely unread today.

Before coming to the United States Rosenstock-Huessy had played an important role in seeking to build bridges between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. He wrote, Das Alter der Kirche (The Age of the Church) with Joseph Wittig and collected a mountain of material arguing against Wittig’s excommunication—the excommunication would subsequently be overturned. He also played a leading role in the formation of the Patmos publishing house and the setting up of the journal Die Kreatur, both ventures in religious cooperation directed against the forces of resentment that were fuelling the Marxist and Nazi ideologies. In addition to his academic work and writing, after the First World War, he worked for a while with Daimler Benz, editing a magazine for the firm and its workers. He would also play a leading role in fostering cooperation between students, farmers and workers. In the United States he would continue that aspect of his work by helping set up Camp William James, which has been said to have inspired the Peace Corps. He was also the first director of the adult education initiative of the Academy of Labour in Frankfurt, and then between 1929 and 1933, vice-chairman of the World Association for Adult Education. I mention this just to emphasize that just as Rosenstock-Huessy did not belong to one discipline, (he was not a legal scholar, philosopher, sociologist, historian, nor philologist, classicist, nor theologian) yet every work he wrote storms through these and other disciplines, he was also not simply an academic. Like Goethe, whom he quotes incessantly, his focus was life itself, not just ideas.

Admired by Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich with whom he corresponded, and W.H. Auden, who wrote a preface to his I am an Impure Thinker, but unlike so many other German emigres to the US, settling in Dartmouth, he had no doctoral students, and was essentially living and writing as an exile.

2. Commemorative Essay

Unlike every other essay I have ever written on Rosenstock-Huessy, this commemorative one is written for an audience who already knows who he is. Each member of this audience has encountered Rosenstock-Huessy in his or her own way: some are family members, some were his students, others, like myself, simply stumbled onto him. Each member of the audience also has his or her own reasons for how Rosenstock-Huessy’s teachings have mattered in their own lives. Further, there is also a common desire to see his work gain a wider readership and larger influence.

In spite of the indefatigable efforts of Freya von Moltke, Clinton Gardner, Harold Stahmer, Frances and Mark and Ray Huessy, Lise van der Molen, Michael Gormann-Thelen, Eckhart Wilkens, Norman Fiering, Russ Keep, and many, many others (I apologize to the many I have not included here) to gain the audience his great corpus deserves, he remains almost unknown to university professors and teachers and their students, as well as the rest of the population. The efforts of his family, former students and friends have also contributed to preserving his work digitally, which means that scholars in the future have a vast treasure trove of materials to explore, if ever his name does catch fire. Those who contributed to this effort, and those who invented and made available the technology, belong to a common time. Rosenstock-Huessy was a man of his time, who reached back into times usually only of interest to historians and anthropologists, whilst thinking forward both to warn us of the dangers of our time, and to galvanize our faith in a time of greater concordance, one in which love, faith and hope converge so that we may better be able to achieve tensional bodies of solidarity—what he called a “metanomic society”—rather than persist in the cycles which lead us periodically back into hell.

Some of the people I have mentioned have now passed, others are still doing what they can to see his work take on a larger body of those who hear the urgency and respond to the perspicacity and grand sweep of his analysis of what being alive means, how it matters, and how lives over multiple generations have been formed.

Those of us who are party to this commemoration, irrespective of personality differences and styles of what we think may be the best tactic to gain a larger audience, irrespective of what we even think of each other, we are together because the trails and encounters of our individual lives have awoken in us a common appreciation of the “genius” of a man who has brought us together so that what we say, to each other and about each other, in his name, matters. Rosenstock-Huessy fought his entire life against the one-sided polarities which have divided philosophers into idealists and materialists, and thereby led them into metaphysical entrapments where pride in purporting to know the All subsists alongside a litany of errors which prevent us from knowing what really is important, what really matters, what really bears fruit.

It was Rosenstock-Huessy who most schooled me in the importance of our responses to the contingent circumstances that befall us, to the loves that move us, to the faith that focusses our observational powers about what matters in our lives, to the power of speech to bind or divide us, and to the times which flow around and through us, and how times are socially formed.

Each person here will know the major moments in the trails of their lives, even if not the countless trails of their ancestors whose offshoots they are, which led them to Rosenstock-Huessy. In my case, it was coming across Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution, while simply running my fingers across a library shelf in the library at the University of Adelaide, just as I had completed my PhD, which would become my first book, The Metaphysics of Science and Freedom: From Descartes to Kant to Hegel. Had I not been attending that university, had I not been at that section in the library, randomly walking by shelves, had the university not existed, Australia not been discovered, the printing press not invented, had that title not caught my attention (I had just taken up a job involving teaching a subject I had designed, called “Justice, Law, and the State”), had its position on the shelf rendered the book invisible, I may have never heard of Rosenstock-Huessy. And Harold Berman would never have written that book had he not been Rosenstock-Huessy’s student in Dartmouth. And my life would never have taken the trajectory it has had I not picked up that book, and you would not be reading this essay.

I may have remained caught up in the metaphysical grip of a way of thinking that has been as pernicious as it has been influential. I was certainly in the grip of that thinking when I encountered him. But I had already reached a stage where I was finding philosophy far closer to spiritual death than most ever realize. In my case, I can truthfully say philosophy was killing me when I encountered Rosenstock-Huessy. On that point, along with his friends Rudi Ehrenberg, Viktor von Weiszäcker, and Richard Koch, Rosenstock-Huessy always saw that the severance between nature and spirit was a life-threatening disease—and, for those who do not know it, and who have some German, I cannot recommend strongly enough his Introduction to the edition, with Richard Koch, of writings by Paracelsus—Theophrast von Hohenheim. Fünf Bücher über die unsichtbaren Krankheiten, whose subtitle in English reads, Five Books on Invisible Diseases, or Chapter 8, “Das Zeitenspektrum” (“The Time Spectrum”), from Heilkraft und Wahrheit (Healing Power and Truth).

When, thanks to Berman’s book, I picked up Out of Revolution, the opening sentences of Chapter One, “Our passions give life to the world. Our collective passions constitute the history of mankind,” struck me with such power that I was stunned. I suspect others in this audience may have experienced a similar feeling when they first read something by Rosenstock-Huessy, that feeling of being overwhelmed by an insight and how it is expressed, and feeling that this is someone who sees and knows important things. I know that not everybody responds this way to Rosenstock-Huessy. That is especially so with university people. I have had almost no success in sharing my enthusiasm and love of Rosenstock-Huessy.

Apart from my own failures to interest people in his work, the question of why he has not received a larger academic audience has to do with many things. First there is his style. His writing is sprawling and associative, connecting things specialists do not connect. His voice teeters on the conversational and it is laced with anecdotes drawn from every-day experience that do not resonate with an academic audience. His writing rarely, if ever, fits into a discipline—and hence, as he recounts in Out of Revolution, the university did not know where to put him, or what to do with him. His Sociology is many things, but it is most definitely not a traditional Sociology. He dismisses Weber and Pareto with barely a sentence each, but he connects himself with Henri de Saint-Simon, and proceeds to hail him as the founder of Sociology. He writes constantly about language, but he does not do Linguistics, and he almost only ever mentions linguists to rebuke them. Likewise, his writings on Christianity barely engage with theologians, and he finds theology as a discipline to be barren. That he disparages the importance of the mainstream (quasi-Platonist) understanding of the soul’s survival after death makes even his Christian faith look suspect to theologians.

The academic mind is inducted into an area of specialization, and that comes with being confronted with, and being required to participate in, various disciplinary debates and consensuses. He never agrees with any of them, whether it be the Q hypothesis in biblical studies, or the dual Homer of classicists. And he bypasses almost completely what Egyptologists have to say about ancient Egypt, with the odd expression of disapproval, relying for his interpretation of ancient Egypt on the basis of his own readings of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He frequently draws attention to the shortcomings of Philosophy. Where he does engage with philosophers, as in, say, his concluding chapter on Descartes and Nietzsche, in The Hegemony of Spaces, Volume One of In the Cross of Reality: Sociology, or with Descartes in Out of Revolution, he has such an original take that it also falls on deaf academic ears.

Then there is the overall vision. He has a providential reading of history, and the role played by wars and revolutions as the great powers of providence, at a time when providential history has almost no academic representatives. Even the Marxists have largely dropped the teleologism in Marx. But teleological history is not the same as providential history. The key point about his providentialism and how that differs from the progressivist academic orthodoxy of today is perhaps most easily understood if we distinguish between a cast of mind which looks to ideas and ideals, and attempts to rebuild society around the normative claims it makes. This is the standard way in which the philosophically influenced mind works—to be sure Marx transferred the site of development to the material plane, but, for all that supposed break with idealism, his position was still one of postulating what he already knew to be the best (ideal!) society (communism) and looking for how it would be realized. He missed two things that are intrinsic to Christian doctrine and to Rosenstock-Huessy.

First, reality is revealed, and not the result of thinking it through to its end. Secondly, our reality is inseparable from our sins. It is how we build with that that matters. The philosophers teach ethics. They do so because they believe that if we can act without error we will make ourselves and our world much better. This is idealism pure and simple. The difference between Christianity and philosophy and its predilection to instruct us in ethics and designing laws to make a better world stands in sharp relief to what Christianity is doing when we think about Peter and Paul, the two pillars of Christ’s Church. One was a weakling and a liar; the other a zealot and witness to murder. The Church is a creation of sinful flawed creatures. That is why Rosenstock-Huessy saw it as a miracle, and its very existence a confirmation that Jesus was the Son of God. It is the recognition of the salvation of the fallen, the forgiveness of sin, redemption through grace not the potency of our virtue and intelligence that is constantly at work in Rosenstock-Huessy’s writings. Thus too, Rosenstock-Huessy sees war and revolution as the greatest creative occasions not because they are good things, not because he is calling for a revolution in which we implement what we think will be the better future, but because they are symptoms and signs forcing us to recognize the dead ends we have reached: they are spiritual diseases. They reveal us at the end of our tether, and are the preconditions of our ways of dying into a new form of life. One of the inner secrets Rosenstock-Huessy sees in Christianity is that it teaches how we must die into new life.

Rosenstock-Huessy also makes Christianity the root of the tree of universal history, in a century where the academic mind has largely been devoting itself to a neo-pagan revival, as most evident in the importance of what Rosenstock-Huessy calls the four dysangelists of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, each of whom is involved in destroying the traditional components of every civilization, including Christian civilization. While Rosenstock-Huessy goes deep into why the various pillars of civilization exist and why their modern destroyers are so destructive, he is as little interested in defending tradition for the sake of tradition, as in congratulating those who think that we have simply outgrown traditions because we are smarter and better. But he is interested in the collected learning of the species, of the creative, revelatory and redemptive aspects of life which accompany how we organize our lives, how we orientate ourselves as we command and call, declare, and refuse, and then occupy the different fronts of reality that our lips and hearts and hands have opened up.

We all occupy different positions in the various fronts we encounter through our various social allocations, from the family to the division of labour, to our culture, and so forth. A tradition is only a tradition in so far as it is a living pathway of spirits; pathways can run out of spirit; they can be merely dead ends. The tension between anchorage and dwelling, and the spirit’s movement and growth is one of the most important of the species. Societies can be equally doomed by a refusal to grow spiritually, by idolizing their traditions, and by becoming unhinged as the enticements of our desires and imaginings sever us from sacrificial requirements intrinsic to love’s existence and movement.

Rosenstock-Huessy takes cognizance of the fact that all life is about mutation and transformation (which is why he identifies with the Christian fathers who saw Heraclitus as a Christian before Christ’s birth). The power of the language of religion, he would say in Practical Knowledge of the Soul, lies in it, addressing the secrets of transformation. We can never be alert to mutation and transformation if we neglect the importance of contingent encounters, or the creative opportunity that a moment may call for. The meaning of our actions are only revealed through our responses to the circumstance of the moment—not by our plans and intentions. Thus Rosenstock-Huessy emphasises that responsiveness is a condition we ever find ourselves in—not “cogito ergo sum,” as he famously said, but “respondeo etsi mutabor.”

Knowing when to preserve and when to jettison, how to respond to the requirements of the time and circumstance, how to know whether the powers of the tradition are alive or dead, having a sense for which of the hidden powers of the future are to be fought for and given over to, that is part of the cross of our suffering, the trial of our lives, the test of our faith. This is something that is simultaneously something that we are never sufficiently prepared for but what we most need to be educated for. This is also why Rosenstock-Huessy, in the first volume of his In the Cross of Reality, places such importance on how games or play prefigure in our lives—they are means for preparing us for the serious and the unpredictable contingencies which require on our part an astuteness of observation and a strength of character. Neither of these qualities are particularly highly valued by a modern education system which prioritises principles ostensibly encompassing the sources of all our greatest social problems and their application which will ostensibly solve them. The sporting field, though, is a preparation for the battlefield, and the “battlefield” or “theatre of war” is the most serious space in which life is tested.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s view of life owed much to his experience on the battlefield. His conceived War and Revolution amidst the horror of Verdun. The sense of urgency, of trauma, of the horrors we are capable of unleashing, and of what is required for our survival, as well as what contributed to the nations of Europe killing each other on such a scale are woven everywhere into his writing. They give his voice a sense of reality that comes from being covered in mud and splashed with blood, from watching his comrades killed in combat. It is a voice that does not simply come from the study, which I suspect is why those who live in and from the study and the classroom rarely respond to it. That is also why how he approaches the great task of building a lasting peace has nothing in common with the far more popular figures such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Jacob Taubes (who for a year corresponded with Rosenstock-Huessy), Giorgo Agamben, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, all of whom sought to implicate the modern radical project of emancipation within the theo-political one of the messianic. And they, like their less theologically sensitive contemporaries, such as Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, who have had such an important influence on the ideas circulating in the Arts and Humanities, all view traditions and social roles as if they were explicable through the dyad of oppressor and oppressed, and hence as if what mattered most in a life was that it could be lived according to one’s desires.

But they also want to expose the shaping of desires by the dominant social powers and the ideologies that sustain their privilege, as that very shaping of desires also is a symptom of oppression. Emancipation thus always comes back to appetites, and sociality magically forming some chemical compound to be released in utopia or the “to come.”

However philosophically clever and satisfying the above thinkers are to students and professors who think that ideas exposing who has more, and how much more “power” we will have when emancipated, Rosenstock-Huessy had no time for such vapid analyses that betray the idealistic vapours of their conjuration. Thus he rarely mentions any of the major figures of twentieth century Marxism in his major writings. In some letters, we discover that he thought the revival of 1848 in the age of world wars was a disgraceful failure to read the times. He also lets off steam about Habermas, Adorno and Bloch, while he seems oblivious to the French structuralists and post-structuralists who had started to make a name for themselves in the 1960s and who would go onto play such a large part in the kinds of political narratives coming out of universities in the last forty or so years.

In sum, what the generation who came of age as they were being educated in the 1960s came to see as the great voices of orientation, the very voices which came to play an ever bigger part not only in university curricula, but in policy, were either unnoticed or dismissed by Rosenstock-Huessy. The idea that the greatest problem confronting the species was to overthrow the forces of oppression to emancipate the self we—and those who think just like us—identity with was completely alien to Rosenstock-Huessy. And it is the lack of such a core principle in his work that also continues to alienate him from readers who are of, or trained by the academy.

Whereas the academy has come to play a major role in the narratives which have now come to define the West, neatly now summed up as policy formulations of Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity, Rosenstock-Huessy saw freedom as both a decisive feature of what we are and of the better, more Christ-like, world. It is inseparable from the Holy Spirit, and his take on freedom is yet again an indication of how he diverges from the commonplace distinctions of philosophy which are now so engrained in the mind of the educated public, and the way his faith informs his eyes and ears and throat and heart.

Please indulge me the following excursus into the history of modern philosophy. For if we understand the underlying connections between the modern elevation of the value of freedom, the specific meaning that freedom takes on in the modern context (one very different even from classical philosophy), and the underlying metaphysical parameters within which it emerged, we are in a far better position to appreciate how we are still very much entrapped in the mental prison that Rosenstock-Huessy was trying to break open. We will also better appreciate why Rosenstock-Huessy’s Christian solution is a genuine solution to what commenced as a dream (Descartes’ dream) and has become a living nightmare.

The modern philosophical view of freedom emerges in the broader metaphysical dualism of determinism and voluntarism. They are the polarities which Descartes appealed to in his claim that there were two fundamental substances which provide the basis for all of our understanding of reality—one is immaterial (the mind), the other is defined by virtue of it being extended (the body). Mind, though, in Descartes solely consists of cognitive operations, so the voluntarism in Descartes is strictly limited to acceptance or negation, while the body is construed entirely deterministically. While the particular means identified by Descartes as required to explain causation was abandoned thanks to Newton’s demonstration of the fact (not hypothesis as he proudly declared) of action at a distance, the far more important philosophical contribution made by Descartes was the metaphysical redefining of the world as a totality of laws operating through causal mechanisms, i.e. determinism.

The German idealists (though not Hegel), but especially Kant, the young Schelling, and J.G. Fichte developed the voluntarist metaphysics that is so widely embraced today. In Kant that voluntarism was purely limited to our moral claims, but it finds it most complete form in J.G. Fichte, the major philosophical figure in the Romantic and nationalist movements in Germany, who is barely read today. Fichte had taken the Kantian and Rousseauian idea of freedom being submission to a law which we give to ourselves and extends it to any and every activity where there is human involvement. Thus life itself as we fathom it and participate in it through our consciousness of it and ourselves, for Fichte, is but the self-conscious postulation of the ego. Hence the world is but a fact-act, and our relations are all potentially contractually formed, albeit on the basis of some intrusions by the non-I, which are, inter-alia, racially determined (hence his nonsense on the German character.)

The highpoint of Fichte’s fame was in 1806, when he delivered his Addresses to the German Nation, which was a call for the unification of the German people into one nation to counter the Napoleonic conquests. By the 1830s his fame had dropped away, but his influence had impacted indirectly upon the romantic radicalism of the young or neo-Hegelians. In spite of their name, the young/neo-Hegelians were generally radically anti-tradition and anti-institutionalist and in this respect deeply opposed to Hegel’s philosophy of the reconciliation of the Enlightenment spirit of diremption. They are mainly remembered today because its “members” included Karl Marx. The most philosophical amongst them was probably Ludwig Feuerbach whose critique of Hegel was to be repeated by the young Marx. The two figures in that group that are most conspicuously Fichtean in their philosophical formulations were August Cieszkowski, and, Max Stirner. Cieszkowski is all but completely forgotten, but while Stirner’s work of anarcho-individualism, The Ego and Its Own was philosophically light-weight compared to Fichte, his name has survived, in part due to the merciless polemic against him by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, but also because he would be an important influence on Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche, though, was also deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, whose polemics against Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel contain some of the best comic lines in the history of philosophy.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy also proceeds by way of metaphysically uniting determinism and voluntarism. He does this by making the will the underlying creative material power of the universe, which is also inseparable from the representations that accompany its incessant drive. He had, so he claimed, bridged materialism and idealism by uncovering the nature of Kant’s notoriously elusive thing-in-itself—Kant had claimed “the-thing-in-itself” was a necessary postulate of reason, that we could never understand, because it lay beyond the mental strictures of our “experience”—it lay outside the parameters—the a priori elements of what he called the faculty of understanding. Nietzsche would simply appropriate this hybrid of material determinism and the will as the fundamental power of the universe.

But whereas Schopenhauer’s response to this was to seek retreat by withdrawing his mind from the world and the restless tumultuous will that was the source of all our suffering, Nietzsche merged a physiological/ biological (determinist) view of human beings with the more Fichtean and Stirner one of heroic potency. Nietzsche ridiculed “the heroic,” a term being bandied about by Carlyle (also an admirer of Fichte), but his superman is a call for the breeding of just the type Fichte had made the high point of his philosophy.

The same deterministic-voluntarist hybrid, albeit without the philosophical self-consciousness and deliberation of Fichte or Schopenhauer, is also in Marx. He claimed to have demonstrated the necessity of socialism arising from the break-down of the bourgeois mode of production, whose laws he had claimed to identify in Capital. But the movement between bourgeois and socialist society was also predicated upon the revolutionary act by the industrial working class, i.e. that act and class were the sine qua non of socialism. In spite of his constant refrain that consciousness was determined by society and not the other way, Marx himself laid out a theory of ideology which would be essential to the radical thinking of the next century. For without clearing away the ideological distortions which protected the ruling class that action might not occur. The proletariat, in other words, needed to be educated, needed to have their consciousness raised. His theory contained two irreconcilable “absolutes”—one (the reality of the capitalist mode of production) studied by the scientist , the other (a non-existent future socialist and then communist society) appealed to by the revolutionary. Eventually the revolutionary Marx quietly adopted the kind of voluntarism that would define Leninism: that moment came when Russian Marxists asked Marx if they could bypass capitalism taking hold in Russia and leap straight to a socialist society. He replied, Yes—and with that he tactility renounced the deterministic basis of his own theory: consciousness could in fact determine social being.

The one philosopher who grasped the importance of the metaphysical bifurcation that had been playing itself out since Descartes was Hegel. He had argued that the modern metaphysical bifurcation of determinism and voluntarism was but one more unfortunate legacy of the Enlightenment’s division of the world into the finite, and infinite, which, he argued, rests upon a dogmatic (and philosophically false) belief that the finite is not a moment within the infinite, but a separate part of it. That is, it cuts us off from the world that it purports to exhaustively define so that we can understand all its laws. Hegel was correct to see the dialectical relationship between determinism and voluntarism. His mistake was his faith in philosophy itself—and even how he pits faith against philosophy involves the error that explodes his entire edifice. That error is most visible in the key to his entire corpus, his lesser known book, Faith and Knowledge. While it provides a brilliant analysis of the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, it is based upon a completely false understanding of faith.

Although Hegel admired Hamann, and wrote a very positive and lengthy appraisal of him, had he read him more closely he would have realized that faith is not something arrived at when knowledge reaches its end. The idea that faith was required when knowledge reached its end was what the Romantics had in common with Kant, and it was this that Hegel kept finding and criticising not only in Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi, but young Schelling, Schleiermacher, Fries and other contemporaries. His point was like Kant, who had denied any knowledge of the thing-in-itself, only to tell us a lot about it, they all speak of the limits of knowledge only to tell us what they know lies beyond knowledge, and how we too might know it! While Hegel’s argument against the philosophers and theologians is compelling, it, nevertheless, misses the point—that faith is what leads to knowledge and indeed to the life you have, not what takes place outside or beyond it. It is utterly existential, and world-making.

When one sees the ruin of Hegel’s life-time work, a system with nothing but rubble to be picked up by subsequent generations we cannot help see (I at least) the deep failure that incubates within philosophy. For none has done a better job than Hegel in demonstrating that any subject we consider is only what it is because of its predications. The more knowledge we bring to/have about the subject, the more we see what it is. That is a very clever defence of science and the importance of knowledge as a systemic enterprise—but it overstates the importance of reason and ideas and underestimates the things that Rosenstock-Huessy emphasises which are required in knowledge and which I talk about at the end of this paper. Thus it is, for Hegel, that to know the part requires knowing the All that informs the part. That is a brilliant metaphysical insight, and it sends Hegel on the path of writing The Science of Logic and The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Science, and the most magisterial account of the history of philosophy ever given, as it demonstrates how his philosophy is the culmination that recognizes the conceptual development and labour that led to him.

If philosophy from its origin aspired to the God’s eye view, it is Hegel who has the eye of God. Or so it would be the case if he were correct, though we can see how silly it is when we start to look at some of the errors of judgment he displays in his Philosophy of Nature, especially. But our life is not formed in the study, nor by denoting the dynamic of our contradictions. It is formed by the faith that has carried us to where we are as it also moves us to our next action. This by the way was why the deeply religious Hamann liked Hume so much and forgave him for his more enlightened nonsense. Hume understood that faith is a motivation where all our knowing can be sceptically broken down if we pose the right questions to it.

Hegel, aside, the disjuncture between determinism and voluntarism remains very much with us in our confused world. Here Hegel’s genius retains its relevance. For we can see that because the greatest faith in the Western world today is faith in their ideas about the world and they themselves are caught up in the constant oscillation transpiring between the polarities of the metaphysical spectrum upon which their ideas “pop up.” More often than not the oscillation (Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction) transpires within the one narrative. An extremely common one involves being drawn into identifying the determinations of identity (gender, race, ethnicity etc.), whilst at the same time rallying behind the (wilful, i.e. idealist driven actions) overcoming of those determinations by changing our ideology.

The contemporary soul, in sum, in so far as the modern project is to a very large part a philosophical—an ideational—creation is torn between two absolutes, the absolute of the universe and the social forces that are treated as naturalistic variations of ideological social power, and the absolute of emancipation in which the rights of the oppressed subject triumph over the unjust imposition of the privileged. But the concept of emancipation is also implicated in the other metaphysical oscillation concerning freedom which accompanies the determinism/ voluntarism dyad, which was at the centre of Kant’s (unsuccessful) attempt to provide an unassailable metaphysics. That was the division between freedom as the formulation of a categorical imperative (i.e. the capacity to make unconditional universal moral commands) and simply giving into the appetites (our appetites, in this schema, are simply bodily determinations). From the Kantian perspective surrendering to our appetites is the antithesis of freedom—so much so that he holds that no act is free if is affected even by the tiniest degree by an appetite.

Kant aside, the idea of freedom has become extremely commonplace today, although the idea of our freedom requiring removing the strictures upon the appetites is the view of freedom to be found at its most brutally honest form in Sade, and in a more humorous version in Rabelais’ less semen and blood-stained depiction of the kind of giants we could be were we free of religious superstition, priests, bad rulers, lawyers, scholastics, etc.

The liberal view of freedom, which goes back to Locke and takes persons and their property as the bastions of liberty, mediates between the appetites unbound, and the binding required of other appetitive beings. That human nature is nothing but appetites in motion is also an offshoot of the deterministic metaphysics of the modern and is laid out by Spinoza and Hobbes, and it will be this view of the self without freedom or faith in its own dignity that will be a major impetus for Kant’s critical philosophy.

The politics of emancipation in the West (and they have no real resonance outside of the West today), though drawing upon “moral” posits which give it normative leverage (the leverage of shame), is the dialectical resolution of the modern components of the idea of freedom. It incorporates the satiation of one’s appetites, the right of respect (dignity) for having one’s appetites and determinations (being/ identity), control of education to enable the breaking up of oppressive/ traditional forms of social reproduction to enable this dignified/ appetitive self, as well as the political demand that this emancipated self receives the resources, whether through reparations, or career and office holding opportunities distributed on the basis of one’s being/identity, that enable its perpetuity. Indeed as we are witnessing, the emancipated self requires for its realization a complete overhaul of the entire political, economic, pedagogical and social spheres. That it has generated an all-encompassing alliance between the state, corporations and those who determine which ideas are to be taught and publicly tolerated in order to sustain this new world of new selves also requires an unprecedented technocratic, bureaucratic and ideocratic alliance.

All of this is as remote from Rosenstock-Huessy as pretty well any other kind of campus-initiated politics that have grown out of the student revolution and its aftermath. In sum, then, for Rosenstock-Huessy the secret of freedom is not disclosed by Descartes, Spinoza, Roussea, Kant, nor Fichte nor Sade, a decisive influence in the French pot-pourri of Bataille, Blanchot, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, who have played such a huge role in the Arts and Humanities in the Western world, nor Marx nor Nietzsche. even if Rosenstock-Huessy finds things in Marx and Nietzsche which he sees as valuable. It is to be found in the partitioning of time, and the foundation of a new time. For Rosenstock-Huessy the great partitioning occurred with Jesus, for it would both bring an end to all of what he called “the listening-posts” of antiquity, that is the distinct life-ways of tribes, empires, city-states, and the diasporic Jews bound by their God, their belief in His promise, their prophesies and expectation of a Messiah, as well as breathing new life into them by raising them to another socio-historical plane and purpose.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s argument about where Christianity fits into the larger scheme of a universal history can be seen as a variant of the kind of accounts we find in the writing of people like Frédéric Ozanam, Christopher Dawson, and G.K. Chesterton, though I think once the second (and third, depending upon the edition) volume(s) of his Sociology are factored in with the two studies (the German and English versions being organized differently and having somewhat different emphases) of the European revolutions then his account is sui generis. Like any historical account, and especially when it covers such a massive array of events, some of its findings as well as the stations on its way are disputable.

However, that he provides an account of history in which he draws attention to so many variables being of consequence for the world we now live in, and that he does so balancing structural (especially in the Sociology—though, it would also be the structural features of his study of the European revolutions that would lead to a preface to the Die europäischen Revolutionen being written by the doyen of structuralist/systems theory Political Science, Karl Deutsch) and contingent features lays out a great research project that remains largely neglected. Although Berman’s two volumes of Law and Revolution is an important contribution to the development of that project.

But just as the Christian centre of his universal history has left his work being neglected, the method is also something that leaves the work being neglected. That he has a method is something he makes clear in the first volume of his most methodical writing, the first volume of In the Cross of Reality/Sociology. But just as his understanding of freedom has nothing in common with the philosophical way in which freedom has developed, his method is what he calls the cruciform one in which there are no such things as objects per se or subjects per se, even if we are to retain that philosophical language, which Rosenstock-Huessy only very occasionally does, nor are future and past unmediated by each other.

We all find ourselves torn by what we each bring to a situation, as well as what has gone into creating the situation which takes us far beyond what can be encapsulated in the words of subjectivity of objectivity. Words like subject and object have such philosophical importance because of the philosophical willingness to eliminate the complexities which overly complicate the process of having clear and distinct ideas. The terms are the result of a decision to simplify reality so it is better controllable. The terms subject and object conceal an array of actions, circumstances, occasions, historic and semiotic backdrop and inherited lexicon and knowledge-pool, as well as the associations and memories that we have and do not even know we have until we speak. “Speech,” and Rosenstock-Huessy folds writing into Sprache/speech—discloses us to ourselves as much as it communes with others—and these in turn are enmeshed in what he calls our prejects, what calls us and pulls us from the future, and trajects, which push us.

At the most critical moments we are literally torn apart between competing directions, in and at the cross and the cross roads. This is also why Rosenstock-Huessy also deviates so decisively from the general tenor of the modern mind which thinks that through its intentions and designs it will get the world it wills, as if the self and world are not inexhaustible mysteries which are revealed by the word and over time through our participation in life, but substances to be analysed into clear and distinct ideas and synthesised so that we can be masters of ourselves and the world. In sum, the modern philosophical position which has seeped so deeply into the world is one which exists in defiance of the Holy Spirit through its elevation of the self as subject, or, which is in essence no different, the elevation of our understanding of “the All” whose most important determinations have been identified by our great luminaries.

Rosenstock-Huessy is a counter-Enlightenment thinker, in the vein of Hamann, in so far as he prefers to throw himself on the ground and pray in the midst of that cross-road because he knows how fragile we and our minds are. He would rather trust the Holy Spirit than the technocratic spirits which have emerged out of the modern philosophical imagination and its limited but insufferably proud understanding. His writings are testimony to that Spirit. What I recounted earlier about the way I came to Rosenstock-Huessy, and what have suggested about the way everybody has come to him is exactly the kind of meaningful event in a life that Rosenstock-Huessy has taught me to appreciate the living presence of Holy Spirit. But thinking thus, and seeing the world thus necessarily puts him at odd with the entire academic mind-set of today which, at its worst, see the world and our participation in it through a technocratic/and or ideological template, and, at best, through the systemicity we may gather through positioning ourselves within the sciences, including the human sciences.

The Holy Spirit though is not a thing, and certainly not anything that can be adequately incorporated into a social or human science, at least so long as the sciences proceed according to the strictures that were designed to study nature in its mute “object” manner. But that approach to nature also involves us blinding ourselves to ourselves. On that front it is most interesting to compare Rosenstock-Huessy’s comparison, in Der Atem des Geistes, of the respective insights and ways and means of Michael Faraday with those of Eddington. Rosenstock-Huessy rightly indicates, no science of anything would be possible were it not for the breath of inspiration of a founder of a hitherto unknown pathway of the spirit, and the inspiration (the shared breath) that the founder is able to instil in others who follow down that path as they take us further into unexplored aspects of life. Nietzsche had claimed that the ascetic ideal in Christianity prioritised truth in such a way that it opened up a pathway for science, but Rosenstock-Huessy takes seriously what most philosophers simply ignore and that is the personal dimension and interaction of those involved in research, and the spirit that binds them in their inquiry. Thus he addresses not only what knowledge is for, but for whom it is for.

I will return to this toward the conclusion of this essay but here I wish to emphasize Rosenstock-Huessy’s recognition of the primacy of the elemental component of a living process is what is invariably left behind in abstraction. As I have hinted already what Rosenstock-Huessy teaches about Christianity, and what he finds in Christianity is what has mainly been lost, especially by theologians, about why it is important: what it reveals about life.

We live in an age where doctrine and abstraction proceed as Siamese twins, where it assumes that a doctrine such as is embodied in the Christian teaching came out of someone’s head, rather than out of lives lived, and it is what was picked up and then taught by the lives lived in devotion to a particular person, a person acknowledged and revered by those who witnessed him as a person who was both man and God, someone from whom their lives took on such a meaning that they saw themselves as being reborn through their faith in him. Rosenstock-Huessy had said that his faith was something he grew into because could never understand “why everybody did not believe the Nicean Creed.” Those are not the words of someone who thinks abstractly, but rather someone who has an uncanny perspicacity, the ability to see the relationship between the spirit and flesh of Christendom and the words that those believers at Nicaea formed with such precision and purposefulness. What Rosenstock-Huessy sees as exemplified in Christianity is the illustration of the word becoming flesh: life, teaching and actions belong together, as he writes in his masterful essay, “ICHTHYS”: they are a trinity, and as such they are the cure against what Rosenstock-Huessy identifies as “the three infernal princes—of the senses, of thought, and of compelling authority.”

But it is precisely because in forming a world where ideas matter so much we have not become better attenuated to life and its commands and demands but we have deafened and dumbed and blinded ourselves as we deal in words that lack life. We misuse and abuse names that once had power, and now they reflect back our own emptiness and powerlessness, our preference for the dead and the mechanical over the real that is love’s creation. We simply cannot fathom the experiences that gave rise to the names that created the Christian world—the experiences have become completely invisible to us because the words are but husks.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s most systematic work was his Sociology: In the Cross of Reality, which was divided into a critique of the hegemony that spatial thinking had come to play in the world, culminating in the suffocating tyranny of its imposition that had been ensconced philosophically, and an account of the times that have made us into planetary neighbours. While he often had praise for Nietzsche, he saw that the arc of modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche was a fateful one for modern people. For we have become swept up in a technocratic view of life (going back to Descartes) in which the world and we ourselves are but components or resources to be dissolved into an infinitude of space, measured and reincorporated and reconfigured to conform to the plans and machinations that are supposed to emancipate us. Much of The Hegemony of Spaces is devoted to the importance of roles and the way in which they socially position us for our cooperation in making our way in the spaces we operate within. The philosophical prioritising of spaces in an age where philosophism has undermined and in many way supplanted the ways and the role of the Church also comes with the target of eliminating roles so that people better pursue their individual happiness. The rationale of roles within the family, the workplace, the school, which provides our named placement in the social order, which induct us, and steers us through the processes where we must learn the difference between shameful acts and the responsibilities which come with our role, is bound up with the fruits that we all must socially harvest if we are to have concordance and growth. Once again Rosenstock-Huessy sees the reductive and destructive force of the materialism/ idealism truncations and their naturalistic/ scientistic counterpart cutting away at how we are able to access and creatively participate in the spiritual development of the species. The grave threat facing “modern man,” requiring that he “outrun” it, is sterility, a sterility of spirit that also shows itself in its suicidal self-destruction, in its concentration camps, in its danger of turning the life-world into a gigantic factory.

If the motherless Descartes was the mother of this world, the fatherless Nietzsche aspired to be the true father who would give birth to the superman who would rule the earth. For Nietzsche the modern world is the barren offspring of the “marriage” of scientism (Descartes) and aestheticism (Nietzsche). Both swallow up the complexity of real life with their abstract fantasies. Nietzsche holds out the promise of meaning that has been shorn off our lives as but mechanical parts of the universe by Descartes. It is a deluded promise made by a man who saw much but missed much, most notably the sterility which becomes satiated by imagined children being a substitute for real children.

The second volume of Rosenstock-Huessy’s great masterpiece was devoted to one overarching theme, an account of the great times that have contributed to a universal history. The infinitization of space has as its corollary the infinitization of time, which is another way of saying the reduction of all the social creativity that has formed different times, different epochs, different generations, different ages of the spirit. Rosenstock-Huessy’s contribution to countering the spiritual and existential mass murder of reducing us and our lives, our traditions and achievements, our future hopes, and our faith and loves to spatial confinements and mechanisms is to draw us into what he calls the Full-Count of the Times.

The work as anyone knows who has read it brims with brilliance: it betrays the kind of erudition that is the preserve of the most learned of his especially learned generation; it teems with brilliant aperçus, and it makes the most marvellous connections across periods that convey an entire sense of meaning and spiritual purpose to great periods of time. Of course, it is a specialist’s nightmare. But, apart from the dire need it has of an editor who may have salvaged some of the syntactical leaps which drag entire paragraphs into thin air without leaving any trace of meaning behind, it is a work which consciously seeks to connect the lost and forgetful man of the mid-twentieth century with the multiform conditions of which he is the sociological, historical and spiritual heir.

Although he is, as I have repeated throughout a Christian, he explains in numerous works why being a Christian is not simply defining one-self against other religions and gods, but is to enter into a tradition which is founded upon the incorporation and reinvigoration of the living beyond death that precedes it. For Rosenstock-Huessy being a Christian means being open to God’s creation, voice and promise, and one cannot do that if one comes with a theologian’s or philosopher’s truncated and distorted understanding of God. A god is a living name on the lips of people—a people’s existence is bound up with the spirits they serve, the voices they respond to, what they hold sacred, the commands of their god. Rosenstock-Huessy often made the point that people first needed to understand the gods before they could begin to understand what they were talking about if God’s name arose.

And talking about God was already a sign that one was missing the point. The living God is meaningful only in relationship, in communion, in prayer and obeisance and supplication. But in so far as one is trying to explain the spiritually living to the spiritually dead, one has to imaginatively enter into life worlds remote from our own, life worlds we might never have thought about, but without which we simply would not be what we are. Few, apart from Herder, have laboured as much as Rosenstock-Huessy to explore the historical, sociological and broader cultural conditions which are part of the human story. It is the fact that, for all our differences, we are part of one family. This is why the Aborigine is the kin of the modern office worker, though on the surface they may as well live on different planets. How have we come to inhabit such different worlds, with our different traditions, our different ways of world-making, our different orientations and priorities, our different “gods” and values, hopes and expectations?

But no less important is the question, how is it that in spite of these differences we not only live on one planet, but we find ourselves conscious of the fact that there are so many different worlds, different calendars, different cultures etc. and that we also can speak to and of each other? These questions are burning ones still and Rosenstock-Huessy’s project (here he is very much following the pathway of Herder) is one which requires we drop the philosophical nonsense and norms of Western imposition and listen to each Other. Yet one more irony is that it is precisely those who do the philosophical imposition, who see the world through its norms, who are most hostile to the universal message of Christianity, and its response to the universal condition of human suffering.

Rosenstock-Huessy had an uncanny knack for tapping into that suffering and for entering into the different life worlds, as he looked to the powers and spirits that animated them, the circumstances which exhilarated and terrified them, and the creations and prayers that distinguish them. In antiquity he identified four distinct life-worlds: the tribe, the empire, the Jewish diaspora and the Greek city state. For Rosenstock-Huessy if we fail to understand the spirits of these groups and their legacies we can never appreciate Christianity. If we fail to see the power behind animism, and the powers that connected human beings with their ancestral animal teachers and tribal ancestors, if we fail to appreciate how polytheistic societies arose and what they generated, and what crises befell them, if we cannot appreciate what the Jews learnt from their enslavement and exile, why they awaited a messiah, how will we be able to appreciate the miracles that may spare us from the hellish darknesses that have always befallen civilizations, and peoples?

Rosenstock-Huessy lived through the world war(s) (he believed, rightly in my view, they were but the one event) and fought in one of its phases. But what he saw was that in spite of the horror and darkness, there was survival, and he very much saw that capacity for survival as coming out of the spiritual reserves provided by the Christian faith. The importance of Christianity lies in large part in the spiritual reserves that it has absorbed from peoples and practices who knew nothing of it. We are, for Rosenstock-Huessy, bonded by the realities that different faiths and orientations have discovered and generated and which are part of us and our world, in spite of what we might want to think or believe. Thus he writes in The Secret of the University (Ray Huessy provides this quote in his marvellous introduction to his new edition of The Fruit of Our Lips): “We must all create originally (like the pagans), hope in expectation (like the Jews), and love decisively (like Christians)— that is to say, we must take part in the beginning, end, and middle of life.”

What Rosenstock-Huessy expresses here as an existential truth, an observation about ends and beginnings and the middle of history, is preceded by the life of Jesus, whom he accepts and follows as the Son of God, the genuine middle, “the hinge-point” of history, the moment where the ages are cleft into BC and AD by a life that shakes up the worlds that preceded it and sets them on a new path. In The Fruit of Our Lips, Rosenstock-Huessy talks about the spiritual dead ends that had been reached that provide the opening, the need for Jesus to be the answer to the human prayers:

Jesus was in fact the end of our first world. He took the sins of this first world upon himself. This sentence simply recognizes the fact that in separation, tribal ritual, the temple of the sky-world, poetry in praise of nature, and the messianic psalms, were all dead ends, {in the immutability of their one-sided tendency}. In this sense Jesus’ death sentence was the price of his being the heir of these fatal dead-ends. They slew him because he held all their wealth and riches in his hand, heart, mind, and soul. He was too rich not to share in the catastrophe of the all-too-rich ancient world. {So it was his duty to be the one condemned by the king, the one sacrificed by the priest, the poem of the poet, and the one foretold by the prophet} (41),

It is interesting to note in passing how the more philosophical minded trying to fathom our historical condition can, as Agamben, Badiou, Taubes and Žižek have done, take Paul seriously, but not Jesus (Žižek, the most clownish of these characters at least provides a clownish account of Jesus as a monster who fits into his Marxian-Hegelian-Lacanian schematic overriding of history and spirit). That they take the teacher more importantly than the one whose life gives meaning and purpose to the teaching conforms to the type that Rosenstock-Huessy saw as so unfit to teach because their priorities do not conform to how life and the spirt of life works. What we teach is only actual when it is lived first.

The gospels are not a compilation of doctrines but the record of a life that bears fruits that must be taught and carried into actions. And the life that was lived was what it was in large part because of when it was lived. The who and the circumstance and the encounter are all part of the spirit of the truth and its power. The realization of the power of the life of Jesus required respondents who would take his life and take his teachings into the world so that new pathways of life, new lives could be formed. Jesus’s life was the seed to be spread while, says Rosenstock-Huessy, “The four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the lips of the risen Christ. These lips bore fruit because Jesus was also an answer to their prayers. The four Evangelists lay down their human limitations at the foot of the cross and transform their individual experience into a contribution to the community.” What the modern secular minded person can easily dismiss as merely the stories told by believers and fanatics, in Rosenstock-Huessy’s eyes reveals something astonishing—and the problem with the smug dismissal lies in the complete disjuncture between cause and effect. The irony is all too conspicuous in so far as the great principle of continuity in Greek thinking is the dogma of the equivalence in power between cause and effect. And yet we see the refusal to acknowledge this very principle by those who otherwise invoke it all the time.

For the Christian something great can indeed come from something tiny, the character of a thousand years can be born from the flame of faith in hearts awed by the words and deeds done by the right person in the right time. Faith and miracles go together, and they are intrinsic to Christianity, beginning with the miracle of the world’s creation, and the story of the fall that comes from a lack of faith/trust/ obedience in God’s promise.

How faith is formed owes much to who has the faith and what it is in. Jesus lived but it mattered who responded to him, and who responded to them. That he had the respondents who had their faith is also, from this point of view, this faith-held view, and that they reported their accounts of the life of Jesus and what he taught in the order they did is yet another miracle, or what Rosenstock-Huessy more prosaically refers to as “remarkable.”

“There is” observes Rosenstock-Huessy” a remarkable sequence in the authors of the four gospels”:

Jesus’ name in the old church had four parts: Jesus, Christ, Son of God, Savior. The four Greek initials of these four names were read as Ichthys (fish). The four gospels proclaim this name. Matthew the sinner knew that the Lord was his personal savior (= Soter); Mark knew him from the beginning as the Son of God (Hyious Theou); Luke saw Christ who had converted Saul, to whom Jesus had never spoken (for Paul, Jesus could be nothing else but exclusively Christ); John, the kindred spirit, knew him as an elder brother, that is, he thought of him as “Jesus,” personally.

In spite of Rosestock-Huessy drawing upon biblical scholars and traditions to make his case, one thing that I have not seen anyone else address with such startling insight is his claim about the way in which the gospels form a unity through their positioning on different fronts to different communities. And it is this approach that I see as providing an invaluable example of how our history should be told. It takes the most important, the most world-shaping, book in the world and demonstrates how it is a living example of the circulation of spirit, how truth is polyphonic, how it is nothing without the bond between speaker and listener, how the specific speaker and the specific person/community being addressed matter—and concomitantly how any idealistic reduction, i.e., dissolution of the living encounter and the teaching expressed in that account dies if it is diced up and regurgitated as mere ideas. Allow me to quote two passages from The Fruit of Our Lips, the one tells us something important about the speaker/ writer, the other about the listening community:

1. John writes as an eye-witness who knows the minutest details when he cares to mention them. The apostle is the author of the gospel, and that is why it carries authority.
2. All four gospels are apostolic. Matthew was the converted publican {among the apostles}, and he wrote under the eyes of {Peter and the sons of Zebedee and} Jesus’ brother in Jerusalem before the year 42. Mark obeyed Peter. Luke lived with Paul. John dictated to a Greek secretary.
3. Matthew wrote in Hebrew, not in Aramaic, and he was the first to write.
4. Mark states bluntly that he is quoting Matthew (47).

and:

John spoke to people who knew the arts and sciences; Luke spoke to the greatest high churchmen and Puritans of antiquity; Mark spoke to the civilized inhabitants of the temple states. But thanks to his “bad taste,” Matthew penetrated to the most archaic layer of all society, to the tribal layer of ritual, and so Matthew gave us a version of the gospel that was to become the most universal and fundamental characteristic of the new way of life. The Mass and the Eucharist, the inner core of all worship, is identified in Matthew [26:26–29]. Since he made clear that by His sacrifice Christ had purchased the salvation of the sacrificers, the scripture now says: At every meal, the sacrifice that is the bread and wine speaks to the dining community and invites us to join our Master on the other side, so to speak—on the side of the victim (92-93).

Finally on the importance of Christianity as “the hinge point of history”—and I should emphasise that it these few citations do not remotely compare to the detailed case Rosenstock-Huessy makes in the Full Count of the Times—what matters as much as what preceded Christianity by way of the creations, loves and practices that flow into it and that it redeems, is what it puts an end to by becoming a stumbling block:

I may not relapse into tribal ritual or Pharaoh’s sky-world; Hitler, who tried to do just that, stands revealed as a madman. The other streams are similarly blocked: the modern Greeks, the physicists, and the modern Jews, the Zionists, are certainly not the Greeks or Jews of antiquity. The Greeks glorified the beauty of the universe; our physicists empty it of meaning. The Jews praised God; the Zionists raised a university as the first public building in Jerusalem. So the roadblock of the Word is simply a fact; not one of the streams of the speech of ancient men surges through us directly any more (45).

Rosenstock-Huessy’s reading of history and the role of Christianity as a universalising, planetary forming force stands in complete contradiction to the modern liberal mind which believes it and it alone has found a way to reconcile all the traditions and faiths of the world, thereby illustrating that it is no less a universal dogma than the Christian faith—but it is a dogma that proceeds by deception, the deception of purporting to respect the very traditions it destroys by squeezing their essence into the pre-formations it finds tolerable. Lived faiths are born through and from bloody sacrifices—the blood and sacrifice are as intrinsic to the existence of the faith as to its truth.

Thus, the Jewish Bible and Old Testament and Koran are as bloody books as ever have been written. They are an affront to the vapid comfortableness of the liberal mind which does not want to acknowledge the blood and horror behind its own birth—believing it escapes its reality by virtue of the sanctimony of its moral accusations against its ancestors. In place of harrowing and astonishing testimonies of despair and salvation, of battles and renunciations, of dogmas that require an all or nothing commitment, liberalism distils a religious—moral essence which it drops into an abstract mush. It presents a morally vacuous and existential picture of life’s meaning devoid of real conflictual devotional differences, a safe-space free from micro-aggressions and hate. It presides over the waste land of spirits deprived as much of authority as of their memory.

The liberal spirit is pure tyranny in which all the gods are interchangeable because they have been defanged and folded into the air of ideas and ideals. They are as loveless as they are vacant. They promise the freedom that comes from the right of sensual and racial and ethnic identity in which real differences of the sort thrashed out by Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig in the midst of war in 1916 are only of importance to the extent they may indicate degrees of demanding, having, and blaming the oppressive privileged Other. This cast of mind is the antithesis of the dialogical spirit as exhibited in the amicably acrimonious exchange between Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, an exchange that changed both their minds and opened up new paths for both of them: they both discovered more about their commitments, and priorities, their faiths, what they each held as unnegotiable in so far as they could not lie to themselves about what had made them who they were: and then they joined beyond themselves and beyond their trajects.

One of the most shocking things that we face in the Western world, particularly Western Europe with Muslim immigration is not simply a demographic transformation which the host population has not been prepared for, but the entire process is transpiring without a modicum of understanding being demonstrated in the media or education system about why an encounter must change all parties to it, why that is an opportunity for grace, for new creations of the spirit. Instead, we are witness to a people whose sense of tradition is more than a millennium and a half old encountering a people who have almost entirely lost all sense of communal historical continuity, a people now so spiritually bereft they have little but their stuff and distractions, their escape pathways in booze and drugs and hyper-sexualized culture (that only makes them despicable to Muslim migrants) to show for themselves. Is it any wonder that the Muslim youth are so embittered and willing to embrace causes where they can take direction from a God that lives in their hearts and gives them meaning and purpose that is an alternative to the wasteland that they see all around them?

The liberal narration that predominated among the political and pedagogical classes can only bring to the discussion the same failed abstractions that are tearing itself apart. The Rosenstock-Huessy-Rosenzweig dialogue, as I once said in a lecture in a university in Istanbul, provides the “model” of what a dialogue between inimical faiths must involve. Without such dialogues there can be no friendship, and no birth. But an understanding of the importance of friendship and conflict being in what it gives birth to, again something of such importance to Rosenstock-Huessy, has no meaning in a world in which ideas have supplanted living connections.

Not surprisingly the liberal mind cannot bear to read the Christian Rosenstock-Huessy, preferring to dismiss him as an anti-Semite so that he need not be heard, while the Jewish Rosenzweig is simply reduced to an aesthete and ethicist, a forefather of the pure ethicist Emmanuel Levinas, whose Jewishness never gets in the way of his Greekness, which makes him academically sellable to Jews and Gentiles, who can only look back at past animosities as Christian prejudice and Jewish victimhood. The tyranny of spatial thinking is how it cuts away at the times that provide defining and differentiating characteristics of peoples, and their respective spirits and pathways.

The critical methodological innovation that Rosenstock-Huessy proposed for a new human science unencumbered by the tyranny of spatial thinking was attentiveness to the cleavages in time, or more precisely, attentiveness to the various partitions of time which divide and surround us. When I was growing up it was not uncommon to see nuns and priests in the street. Their clothing was a reminder of another age. And yet they also inhabited this age. We rarely consider how different professions are also the result of a time partition. The further we are willing to follow the way of the spirit and not remain captive to the spatialization of our being the more conscious we can become of why our differences are time-founded and time-bound.

Thus, for Rosenstock-Huessy, the great challenge we face as a species is dialogical and time-ridden. To be able to speak and listen to what has come out of the different times we as a species have inhabited, to be able to, in his phrase, make the times “conversable” is our great challenge. It is also an opportunity in so far as the times have been literally pressed up against each other as the European revolutions and the world wars have made us conscious of our planetary condition. We may be more conscious of our world being one, we can only respond to the challenge that has been posed to us if we bid farewell to the kind of essentialist thinking that has been part of the tyranny of the philosophical legacy.

This is also closely related to other of Rosenstock-Huessy’s aspirations: the desire to make grammar the basis of a new social science, something that is sketched out in Speech and Reality. In various places RosenstockHuessy rues the triumph of Alexandrian grammar. And I recall a former classics teacher of mine saying how crazy this was: Alexandrian grammar was simply a way of teaching a language. For Rosenstock-Huessy, though, why it mattered was because it attenuated the mind to prioritize the philosophical imagination’s way of taming reality rather than properly inducting us into the living priorities such as are provided by the vocative mood and the imperative mood. Social induction commences with the imperative, just as our most serious engagements are ones in which respond to a calling, to the vocative.

The movement from God being a person whom we address and who addresses us to a figure encapsulated in, and talked about through the imposition of the indicative mood is indicative of a massive cultural shift. In our post-Enlightenment age we see that has the result of simply knowing more. But we simply do not know what we are doing if we do not render visible what powers we are giving ourselves over to in our deeds. The moderns have mostly lost all sense of themselves by being blinded by abstractions which hide their deepest sense of what matters to them from themselves. They make conversableness impossible because speech is merely a tool, the modern soul, as he observed in the fourth section of Der Atem des Geistes devoted to the need to resuscitate liturgical thinking, merely a fragmented bundle of nerves (ascribed some mythic identity—in Rosenstock-Huessy’s time race and class predominated), our expectations and motivations bound up with philosophical ideals, while formerly venerable and meaningful names such as person, nature, time, modesty, experiment, and the individual are dissolved in the intellectual acidity of the Renaissance and the further spiritual bifurcation that occurs with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Against this Rosenstock-Huessy proposed a return to “liturgical thinking,” a kind of thinking that moves us back into the primordial condition of being called, something we know happens in life from our infancy on as we are integrated into the bodies of sociality which provide us with place and purpose. But it is also in the sacred relationship between priest and God, and in the sacrifice of the mass that Rosenstock-Huessy sees the revealed truth that “The soul must be called “Thou: before she can ever reply “I,” before she can ever speak of “us” and, analyze “it” finally.” The deployment of lessons taken from liturgy, as well as prioritising how our capacity to partition and recognize the partitions of time and the different fronts of reality that grammar accentuates and drives us further into all are to be incorporated into what Rosenstock-Huessy proposes as a new science, that is a break with the ways of knowing which have failed—and which can be seen to have failed if we can see through the noise and moral self-righteousness, and observe the conflicts both regionally and globally that now beset the West.

The spiritual bifurcation mentioned above has continued on its way with its appeal to rights on the one hand—the abstract spirit of idealism, whose best metaphysical cases are to be found in the contestation between the a priorism of “practical reason” [Kant] and logic [Hegel])—and materialism which plays out in the twin perversions of scientism and economism. Scientism is science deprived of an understanding of its “why?” and “for whom?” Which is also to say that it is science unhinged from a culture in which the bonds of real solidarity have been fragmented into the same nervous bundles and isolated atoms monstrously compounded by economic gain irrespective of the spiritual worth of a project (funding and tenured employment), ambition, pride, honour and the other diabolical temptations of the spirit—it splits, dehumanises and terrifies, and annihilates (from the alienated lonely soul to the concentration camp); its rewards are as ephemeral as they are grace-less.

For Rosenstock-Huessy, this is the Greek legacy, shorn of the constraints that accompanied its initial resuscitation and direction under the auspices of the trinity. The metaphysical drive to know and control the world, without a break, is the great juggernaut of technē and calculation. Like the Greeks we moderns in entering into this pact with these diabolical powers that can be unlocked by the “metaphysicilization” of the material world into its scientifically reductive and economically productive components are driven onto find slaves to do our bidding and pleasures to slake our empty time. There are deep affinities between Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and Rosenstock-Huessy’s, but they drastically depart on the issue of what saves us from it. The pairing of Descartes (science) and Nietzsche (aesthetics) mentioned above is the sterile pairing of a world losing its faith, hope and love in what is worth having faith in, hoping for, and loving. It is the blocking out of grace that comes from being indifferent to the living person and delivering the self to its own emptiness and abstractness.

It is against this horror we are blindly running into as we can no longer distinguish between the living and the dead, between human loving lives animated by a common spirit and promise of future in spite of tensional differences and zombies whose utility is to be calculated on a vast spread sheet and whose moral worth is the purely sterile one of self-worth that Rosenstock-Huessy raises the spectre of Saint Paul and his meaning for science in Der Atem des Geistes. There he pits the legacy of Paul’s devotional development of his understanding in its wholeness, with the Platonic desiccation of life into ideals and world, and the subsequent cultural and social truncations and deformations that come from tearing the world into mental strips and bits to be inserted into an idealistic/ technocratic design. One may recall the picture Plato presents of the philosophers having to switch babies around when the eugenics program designed to improve the natural likelihood of philosopher kings being born goes awry. The horror of it is so much that there are Platonic scholars who see it all as a warning against utopia—completely downplaying why Plato admired the Spartans so much and how he was trying to improve upon what he saw as the best of Sparta and Athens by eliminating the family and private property for philosophers.

In a section that strikes me as amongst the most profound of Rosenstock-Huessy’s insights into the gift of the Christian way of creation, revealing and redeeming life, we see how it matters whom Paul serves and what follows from that faith and devotion.

Paul is the non-idealized teacher of the Gentiles, believing the “incarnated Word” instead of his ideals. Pagans have ideals, academics have values, but men have ancestors of their soul journey. Thus Paul simply says: Scio cui credidi. I know who I have faith in…. Paul is the first normal, modern scientist. He knows whom he is serving, whom he has believed. If we do not recognize the mysticism of the apostle Paul as the sound sociological truth of research, then the freedom of science is lost. Because only on the Pauline basis of “Cui cogitatur?” where the one knowing thus serves the loving ones, can vice be banished from the schools… the Christian peoples believed Paul was right. Paul has been at work in every school and college for the last nineteen hundred years… Thanks to Paul we knew what still concerned us in Plato and what didn’t. Thanks to Paul we knew what still bound us in the Old Testament and what had passed. Today’s scholarship, however, deals with Paul instead of being based on him. It is to him we owe the freedom of science.

And a page or so later, he continues:

Paul is the normal thinker, and the liberal theologians are the originators of all tyranny. For in tyranny, whether that of Hegel or Marx or Hitler, the deadly thirst for knowledge reigns supreme over life-hungry individuals.

However, in the normal order, love reigns over death and knowledge. Both desires are unleashed today – those which consume the antediluvian individual, the thirst for knowledge and the thirst for life, the will to power of the knowledge-hungry, the thirst for life of herd animals. The Lord had overcome the thirst for life; Paul had overcome the thirst for knowledge. The two desires condition and produce each other. Hackel and Hitler belong together like Jesus and Paul. Hitler’s mysticism and Häckel’s rationalism together have perverted the relationship between thinking and speaking: animals have become our models since we have forgotten that we only understand animals thanks to the language of our own love. But whoever recognizes Jesus and Paul as two generations of one and the same man formed together out of both of their loving—and that’s what they have required of us—sees that they came into the world against mysticism and reason, against Haeckel and Hitler.

Apart from the point that I have emphasised above, what is also worth noting in this passage is the way Rosenstock-Huessy makes his point by way of invoking the names of Haeckel and Hitler. While in the early part of the nineteenth century, the zoologist, biologist and eugenicist Ernst Haeckel was a household name in Germany, especially through popular science books like The Riddle of the Universe, he is now largely forgotten; Hitler’s name though has become synonymous with political evil.

Rosenstock-Huessy constantly emphasizes the living name over the primacy of the concept. And it is noteworthy how in Plato’s attempt to provide an answer for everything important from the structure of the cosmos to the way in which to live one’s life, he insisted on the primacy of the idea over the name (see his Cratylus), only to disprove everything he was saying by making the man with the name Socrates the model of the best man who had ever lived. Plato had ridiculed Protagoras’ claim that “man is the measure of all things,” only to make the powers exhibited by one man to be the measure of all that mattered. Our names do indeed matter, and the fact that the name of Haeckel will send someone of a certain age back to google while everyone knows who Hitler is indicative of how a name and its mattering is also bound up with time—how it may become a cipher of significance over a certain period of time.

In conclusion and on a personal aside I will also say, that every time I reread Rosenstock-Huessy I discover something not only inspirational, but something I have never previously seen. Much of my life over fifty years as a university student, academic, and writer was spent reading philosophers. None have had the same effect on me. I do make exceptions of Hamann and Herder, when I say no matter how brilliant all the other great minds I have read, Rosenstock-Huessy, has remained an open-ended source of inspiration. The spirit always awakens something in me when I read him. I picture him beckoning me to show me something else I have never considered. I have written much on Rosenstock-Huessy. I do not consider myself to be an expert on him. I know as little about what it would mean to be an expert on Rosenstock-Huessy as to be an expert about a day I was inspired by the wind and a walk in the forest or a thrilling conversation. He is too vital for that. I have written this because he not only changed my life, his presence has remained constant throughout it.

I hope that through our common love of this man we might keep his spirit alive for a future generation, who living beyond the hells that are now upon us, will hear the wisdom of his way, and participate in delivering future generation from the mental entrapments we have adopted over multiple generations and the particular horrors those entrapments have unleased.

For us, we have prayer. And I thank Rosenstock-Huessy for showing how necessary prayer is when we are at the end of our tether.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


Freedom’s Anchor: An Introduction to Natural Law Jurisprudence in American Constitutional History

In Freedom’s Anchor, Andrew P. Napolitano, the well-known American jurisprudent, vigorously demonstrates that the Natural Law is the very lifeblood of the United States—and without it the nation cannot truly and fully exist. The strength of the book lies in its rich array of caselaw, from Colonial America down to the present-day, in which the Natural Law has functioned as the dynamic “logic” for the rulings rendered. This book will not disappoint, so do make sure to get a copy.

Judge Napolitano is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School. He is the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of the State of New Jersey. He sat on the bench from 1987 to 1995 and presided over more than 150 jury trials and thousands of motions, sentencings, and hearings. Judge Napolitano taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at Delaware Law School for one and a half years, at Seton Hall Law School for 11 years, and at Brooklyn Law School for four years. He was often chosen by the students as their most outstanding professor. As Fox News’s Senior Judicial Analyst from 1997 to 2021, Judge Napolitano gave 14,500 broadcasts nationwide on the Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network. He is nationally known for watching and reporting on the government as it takes liberty and property. His newspaper column is seen by millions every week. He is an internationally-recognized expert on the U.S. Constitution and a champion of personal freedom. Freedom’s Anchor is his tenth book.

This excerpt comes through the kind generosity of Academica Press.

What is the Natural Law Tradition? Is the natural law related to the medieval church and the nature of man as a divine creation? Or is it a philosophical methodology linked to Enlightenment ideas of personhood? Perhaps it is a legal rule with specific form and content incorporated by the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? The truth is that the natural law is often confounded among many of these questions, and as such, we must look backwards throughout history to discern its complete meaning if we are to look forward and see how we may use it to achieve the best form of government.

Even those who question or reject the existence of a Creator can embrace the concept of natural rights, for they can accept that our exercise of human reason leads us to discern right from wrong, and in turn, discover truth. An atheist will agree that there are certain basic values acknowledged everywhere, in all times and circumstances. After all, even a person deprived of senses has the ability to reason.

The Boston Massacre Trial: Self-Defense as a Natural Right for All

Indeed, “it was not uncommon for colonial lawyers and colonial courts to regard Natural Law and ancient principles of the common law as superior to ordinary legislative acts.” For instance, during the Boston Massacre trial of 1770, in which John Adams and Josiah Quincy II defended British soldiers accused of killing innocent colonial civilians, Adams asserted a self-defense justification. Adams was advised, Roscoe Pound maintained, by Jeremiah Gridley, “the father of the Boston bar, […] that [the] study of the natural, i.e. ideal, law, set forth in the Continental treatises on the law of nature and nations, if unnecessary in England, was important for the American lawyer.” Quincy argued for one of the soldiers by dispelling the notion forwarded by the Crown, that “the life of a soldier was of very little value; of much less value than others of the community.” Quincy argued that “we all reluct at death […] God and Nature hath implanted this love of life.—Expel therefore from your breasts an opinion so unwarrantable by any law, human or divine[.]” He then quoted Blackstone, who… unmistakably invokes the natural law: The law by which the prisoners are to be tried, is a law of mercy—a law applying to us all—a law, judge Blackstone will tell us “founded in principles that are permanent, uniform and universal, always comfortable to the feelings of humanity and the indelible rights of mankind.”

Quincy was quick to remind the jury of the earlier natural law claim he asserted with Adams, including a citation to John Locke. Adams, in his closing discussion of justifiable homicide, also invoked Blackstone and “the laws of nature,” signaling the powerful sway of natural law arguments on juries and the bench at the time.

Of course, as any trial attorney will attest, judges and juries often decide cases on many factors beyond the persuasiveness of the attorneys and compassionate presentation of the defendants or victims. A colonial Boston jury, some scant three-and-a-half years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was not sympathetic to a cadre of British soldiers who had just killed or injured several of their fellow Bostonians. However, the natural law appeals of Adams and Quincy were rational rather than sympathetic; and they won the day resulting in the acquittal of six of the soldiers, and convictions for manslaughter, instead of murder, for the remaining two.

Madison, in crafting the Bill of Rights, needed to manage two competing arguments: the disingenuous argument of Alexander Hamilton, that any enumeration of rights “could be used to justify any unwarranted expansion of federal power” as the government is of enumerated powers, and to enumerate rights implies areas of rights the government can reach into beyond those enumerated, on the one hand; and, the Madisonian argument that “any right excluded from enumeration would be jeopardized,” on the other hand. Madison, in this initial proposal to the House “ran together both of these concerns.”

His proposals went to a select committee (of which he was a member) for consideration, and “[e]ventually, the two ideas were unpacked” into the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which deal with “rights” and “powers,” respectively. That is the Barnett-libertarian view of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which Professor Randy Barnett… termed as power-constraint: The two amendments act to constrain the federal government from either expanding its own powers at the expense of individual persons and of the States, or from infringing on the other unenumerated natural rights of individual persons.

Such a bundle of amendments dispels any argument that the founders disavowed natural law and natural rights.

Why else would such a clause exist? What other rights could there be? Of course, there were the state bills of rights, but Madison addressed that concern too! “The powers not delegated by this Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively.” So, after setting up the Bill of Rights to contain a provision to protect non-enumerated rights, Madison returned to protect the rights of the states which created the Constitution and to emphasize that the Constitution provided government only with the powers that the states ceded to it, and nothing more.

Whereas legal positivism dominated the judicial landscape of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, natural law theory jurisprudence began to reemerge and win small victories starting in the middle of 1946 and persisting through today. That is not to say that the Supreme Court adopted a doctrinal approach that examined matters before it with strong deference to natural law and natural rights, but rather that activist and conservative Courts alike ruled on matters in such a fashion as to incorporate into lofty stare decisis certain natural law principles. All of this occurred much to the chagrin of simple fairweather positivists, who grumbled about statutory law, and so-called legal realists, who believe in the importance and primacy of judicial precedent, though, it seems, only when such reliance suited their ends.

We see now that around the end of the second World War a return to Natural Law theories emerged with renewed vigor. During this time, the Third Reich had revealed to humanity the devastation and atrocities of which contemporary society became capable when deploying modern methods of engineering, science, and manufacturing to sinister, horrific and protracted ends and grounding them in positivism. We have also observed the means by which societies sought to safeguard against future abuses through the passage of laws and rules holding government more accountable, such as the Federal Tort Claims Act in 19462 in the United States, which allowed injured persons to sue the federal government in certain limited circumstances, and the Crown Proceedings Act in 1947 in England, which granted English “subjects” (how I loathe the word when referring to persons) the right to sue the Crown without first obtaining a royal fiat.

Though typically at loggerheads, Natural Law theory and legal positivism can find common purchase through soft-hearted approaches to Originalism that factor in the principles behind the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most significant figures in the spread and modern development of Originalism, brought what he believed to be a greater sense of order and consistency to the bench by calling for judges to restrict their decisions in a narrow fashion by adhering to Originalism, a philosophy he believed would lead toward more authentic and honest interpretation of laws and the Constitution itself.

As time passes, language can undergo semantic shift in which the popular meanings of words change. So, in order truly to understand a statute, some argued, one needed to seize the mantel of the historian and endeavor to determine what was meant by a statute at the time of its passage rather than interpreting the statute according to the contemporary meaning of its words. In 1982, Paul Brest, then a professor at Stanford Law School, coined the term “Originalism” which he defined as “the familiar approach to constitutional adjudication that accords binding authority to the text of the Constitution or the intention of its adopters.” According to Brest, “[a]dherence to the text and original understanding arguably constrains the discretion of decision makers [i.e., judges] and assures that the Constitution will be interpreted consistently over time.”

Different flavors of Originalism focus on different original elements involved in the drafting, creation, adoption, and passage of various elements of the Constitution, its amendments, and legislation written under its authority. The textualists look to the language of the text in question.5 “The plain meaning of a text is the meaning that it would have for a ‘normal speaker of English’ under the circumstances in which it is used.”6 Though textualists focus mainly on the words of the text in question, they will occasionally consult outside sources to determine exactly what a word or a term of art meant to the general public at the time the particular provision was adopted or passed. In other words, they may look to newspapers, other legislation, books, speeches, circulars, broadsides, treatises, or treaties contemporaneous to the particular language they seek to understand. However, such an approach looks to extratextual material only in so far as it clarifies the meaning of the words involved in the piece in question and is not used to try to understand what may have been the intent of those who adopted the law. The textualists care only about the plain public meaning of the words at the time they were written, not the intent of the authors.

Intentionalists, on the other hand, seek to divine the intentions of those who adopted or passed a piece of legislation or provision. They endeavor to do so by considering the text of the law or provision as a persuasive—though not controlling—authority.

Intentionalists will look to a nearly endless variety of sources related, directly, or even imaginarily, to the piece in question. The camps of intentionalists diverge or sometimes disagree over whose intent they should consider. Some believe that the intent of the drafters of a piece should carry more weight when it comes to its interpretation, while others argue for heavier consideration of the intent of those who adopted it. Further wrinkles arise when others advocate for the inclusion of ideas of legal structuralism, calling for evaluation of the relationships between the various branches of government at the time of the passage of language in question to determine how different organs of government relate to and interact with one another.

Was Jefferson partly right about the tree of Liberty occasionally, and only when absolutely necessary, soaking up the blood of patriots and tyrants in order to survive? Or was he right when he observed that in the long march of history, governments grow and liberty shrinks? Or, were intellectual giants from Aquinas to Rothbard right when they argued that so long as we can reason, we will have liberty?

But to exercise reason, we must have free will. Both free will and natural law principles have been imprinted in us. Positive law not faithful to the natural law principles is an artificial fabrication of humans, usually for their own good or tenure in power. Yet all rational adults have natural inclinations to know good from evil.

The issues this work addresses are not those of individual fidelity to natural law principles, but government infidelity to them. Government fidelity to natural law principles assures individual choices, personal autonomy, and authorship of one’s own life. Isn’t that the definition of personal liberty – freedom bounded, as Jefferson said, only by the natural rights of others? Isn’t that the pursuit of happiness?

Short of a government committed to the preservation of natural rights, there is darkness and chaos.


Featured: The Tontine Coffee House, New York City, by Francis Guy; painted in 1797.


On “Oracular Philosophy” and “Oracular History of Philosophy”

The Spanish philosopher, Gustavo Bueno Martínez (1924-2016), is known for the system he created and which he called, “philosophical materialism,” which holds that philosophy is neither science nor wisdom but second-degree knowledge, in that philosophy requires first-degree knowledge (biological, mathematocal, political, technical) before it can begin to constitute itself. Bueno is an important thinker of the right. In the article that follows, Bueno recoups “oracular philosophy,” from the denigration given it by positivism.

1

The expression “Oracular Philosophy” was used by Karl Popper in the second part of his famous book, The Open Society and its Enemies, written during the Second World War and published in 1945, in two volumes, the first devoted to Plato and the second to Hegel and Marx (it would seem that Popper’s offensive against the Soviet Union, very little “political” at a time when the Soviets were entering Berlin, was diverted towards Plato and Hegel, through whom Nazism could be glimpsed). Indeed, in the second part, entitled “The High Tide of Prophecy,” the opening chapters, 11 and 12, are devoted to “The Rise of Oracular Philosophy,” where Hegelianism is discussed. Chapter 24, under the heading “The Aftermath,” is entitled “Oracular Philosophy and the Rebellion against Reason.”

These chapters by Popper constitute an attack on what he called “oracular philosophy,” an idea very close to the most elementary and naive positivism, along the lines of the old dichotomies proposed by Lévy-Bruhl (prelogical thinking/logical thinking), or in the distinction of W. Nestle (myth/logos).

For Popper, oracular philosophy is that philosophy which, instead of resorting to “reason” (“that is to say, to clear thinking and experience”), resorts to the methods of prophecy, revelation or oracle, unfolding towards a vision of the future of human societies which, instead of being exposed through clear reasoning, reaches for the most irrational methods, such as oracles, founded more on a mystical and irrational inspiration than on a philosophical discourse. The oracular philosophy, according to Popper, despises other men, because it has the conviction of the truth of its intellectual intuition (“Plato believed that reason is shared only by the gods and by a few select men”). The oracular style of philosophizing avoids dialogue, preferring to speak dogmatically, as if the foundations of the predictions and the content of the predictions were thoroughly known. The critique of oracular philosophy is thus directed against totalitarian thinking.

Popperian anti-totalitarianism, radical in 1945, formed a reservoir for the anti-totalitarianism of ‘68, and most especially for that editorial movement that took the name of nouveaux philosophes, with a common root, re-created through Michel Foucault, which continued in two distinct currents: the one taken by André Glucksmann (1975: The cook and the man-eater, a reflection on the State, Marxism and concentration camps) and Bernard-Henri Lévy (1977: Barbarism with a human face); and the one taken by Alain Baidou.

2

For our part, we have always been faced with the radical, disjunctive opposition to any oracular philosophy as such. An oracle is a channel of expression that (especially if it presents itself in the guise of a shaman or prophet) cannot reduce the flows that it channels, and therefore it cannot be accepted that the expression “oracular philosophy” is a contradictory impossibility, a “wooden iron.”

Philosophy, as an institution, did not come out of nothing, out of prelogical thought, nor did it emerge in the years in which “reason” freed itself from the mystical mists of “myth.” Philosophy began with the oracles, and remained in history, to a certain extent, in function of them.

Ancient philosophy, for example, manifested itself, first of all, through the oracle of Delphi, when it advised those who approached its precincts: “Know thyself.” For this oracle was taken up by Socrates, and centuries later by Linnaeus, who, in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae, identified the oracular message, no less, to define Man as Homo sapiens, and later as Homo sapiens sapiens.

Philologists usually warn that the “road map” proposed by the Delphic oracle did not have a humanistic-metaphysical objective, but a much more prosaic and pragmatic one (know your possibilities of action, curb your hybris!). However, this pragmatic and prosaic norm could have evolved, becoming the norm of Man himself or of Humanity in general (at least until Man himself ceased to exist). And this evolution would have the same scope that the logos, subsequently to a situation as insignificant as could be the theorem of the diametrical triangle of Thales (intuited “oracularly,” not proven, but asking for a hecatomb), could have developed applying itself to other domains of the cosmos, and even to the same spherical cosmos of Anaximander or Empedocles.

But oracular philosophy not only flowed through the oracle of Delphi; it flowed again through the oracles of Ephesus, from the temple of Diana, which had been visited by Heraclitus and by St. John. It was, in short, the Christian oracles that, confronted with the Jewish and Mohammedan oracles, announced that God was not unique, individual, but that he was triune, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And this oracle would have been the one that succeeded, among other things, in transforming the ancient individual, the citizen who had already been transformed into a theatrical person through his tragic mask, into a real person.

“Towards the end of the second century there were two opposing monarchist currents, the modalist and the dynamist. The modalist is usually designated by the name of Sabellianism, because of its main representative, Sabellius. The Libyan Sabellius, who taught in Rome and was condemned by Pope Callixtus (217-222), proposed the following formula: One God in three persons, using the word according to its classical sense of role in the theater, of mask. God himself, insofar as He acts as Creator and Ruler of the world, is called Father; when he appears in the role of Incarnate Redeemer, He is called Son; in His role as dispenser of grace, He receives the name of Holy Spirit. This formula had the advantage of allowing Christ to be considered as true God. But at the same time, it eliminated the real distinction between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. According to it, God manifested Himself in three different ways (hence the name modalism), and therefore was called by three different names. This was tantamount to disregarding the testimony of Sacred Scripture, where the real distinction, at least, between Father and Son is clearly expressed. For the rest, Sabellianism was soon discarded. In Rome it was above all the learned presbyter Hippolytus who set himself the task of combating it.

The other direction of monarchianism maintains the real distinction between the Father and the Son, but in order not to endanger the uniqueness of God, it subordinates the Son to the Father (hence the name subordinationism). This direction then branched out into various systems in order to explain in what sense it was still possible to call Christ God: whether God dwelt in the man Christ or whether He conferred upon the man Christ divine forces (dynamis, hence dynamism). Such systems had already been condemned by Pope Zephyrinus (around 200-217), the predecessor of Callixtus, but at every moment they reared their heads again. In the second half of the third century, the bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, was deposed by a synod for holding a similar doctrine. It seems, however, that even later analogous doctrines were taught in Antioch, especially by the learned Lucian, who died a martyr in 312. In the dogmatic polemics of that time, we find readily used by Pope Dionysius (260-268) the formula of the consubstantiality (consubstantialis, in Greek, homoousios) of the Father with the Son, thanks to which the solution was later found.” (Ludwig Hertling, S. I., Historia de la Iglesia, Editorial Herder, Barcelona 1964, second expanded edition, pp. 92-93).

However, the history of philosophical oracles remains to be written. It is necessary to enter more deeply into the analysis of the oracles that spoke in the schism of the West, through Luther, Calvin, Servetus or Newton; and, if you will, Kant or Nietzsche.

3

In any case, it would not be justified to confuse the history of philosophical oracles with the oracular history of philosophy, which we discussed in our Tessera 128, “Oracular Philosophy.” It could even be said that the oracular history of philosophy assumes an opposite perspective to the history of oracular philosophy, since the former aims to erase the halo of philosophers who deserve to be considered for their doctrines, while the latter aims to transform philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Heidegger into oracles.

Such happens in the process of formation of new scattered groups of philosophy professors competent in editorial matters, which are incorporated in the anthological editions of the works of “great thinkers,” presenting, for example today, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Heidegger, rather as oracles than as formers of philosophical systems and acting from more or less mystical (oracular) coordinates of anarchist sign.

From 1915 to 1919, the popular library, Los grandes pensadores (The Great Thinkers), promoted by the heirs of the Modern School of Francisco Ferrer Guardia (whose librarian and editor, Mateo Morral Roca, threw the bomb on May 31, 1906 at the wedding procession of Alfonso XIII in the Calle Mayor in Madrid), selected among these great thinkers Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Volney, Lamennais, Michelet, Victor Hugo, all under a common design on all covers, The Thinker by Rodin. In 1925 the library of the Revista de Occidente published six volumes devoted to The Great Thinkers: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. etc.


This article was originally published in El Catoblepas.


Featured: The Oracle, by Camillo Miola; painted in 1880.


Cultural Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism and Cultural Pluralism

We note in the present discussions the effectiveness of a trilemma between whose options it would be necessary to choose (whoever contests cultural relativism will be classified as ethnocentrist or as pluralist, etc.), we denounce what could be the source of this trilemma, and we propose a fourth way through which we can free ourselves from the system of disjunctions noted.

1. The Increase in Immigration Resuscitates the Debate between Relativism and Ethnocentrism.

In recent years, and as a result of the increase of immigrants from the so-called “third world” to the various countries of Europe, the debates between cultural relativists or integrationists and the “intolerant” who demand the adaptation of the immigrant to the culture of the host country have resurfaced with great virulence. And this is without prejudice to the fact that “adaptation” requires, on the part of the one who must adapt, to get rid of institutions considered as “signs of identity” of the culture of origin (for example: the chador, the burqa, polygamy, clitoral ablation, circumcision, the lip disc, voodoo, the institution of visiting husbands, the penalty of stoning or mutilation, vendetta, etc.).

The accusations that the defenders of cultural relativism, or the defenders of pluralism, direct against those who do not share their points of view, are usually channeled through something they consider to be the most terrible denunciation: “ethnocentrism.” To be accused of ethnocentrism is as much, practically, as to be accused of being intolerant, intransigent, archaic, racist, violator of human rights, “puppet of the most conservative right wing”, and ignorant of the ABC of modern Anthropology, characterized ad hoc precisely as a discipline constituted from the perspective of pluralism or cultural relativism.

And, in fact, Anthropology, as a scientific discipline, began in the 19th century (Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, etc.), not to mention its precedents (Joseph François Lafiteau, Charles de Brosses, etc.), recognizing the plurality of cultures (understood as “cultural spheres”); a plurality that seemed to be linked to the comparative methods characteristic of the new discipline.

Cultural pluralism, at the stage of anthropological evolutionism (Morgan, Friedrich Engels) often seemed compatible with the postulate of a possible confluence of the various cultural spheres in a universal Civilization. A postulate that many considered as concealing a cultural monism, and even an ethnocentrism of European sign, given that “Civilization” was generally conceived in the image and likeness of “European Culture,” which also found in this ideology the justification of colonialism (colonialism, understood as the only way through which the cultures of the present, situated in the epoch of savagery or barbarism, could reach, without the need for centuries or millennia to elapse, the superior stage of European civilization).

In the anthropological schools after “evolutionism,” for example, in the functionalist schools (represented by Bronislaw Malinowski) and later, in some variables of structuralism (represented by Claude Levi-Strauss), cultural pluralism gradually slid towards a radical relativism: each cultural sphere would have its own internal structure (emic), which would be impossible to understand from the outside (etic). Therefore, with Levi-Strauss, it could be said: “Savage is he who calls another savage.” In this way, cultural relativism began to be associated with a “modern spirit” (which some would interpret Pascalianly as an esprit de finesse), the spirit of understanding, of tolerance, of respect for the “other” and for his “sensibility,” which is opposed to the esprit géométrique, rigid, intolerant, “imperialist,” blind to everything that does not presuppose universal evidence, above any individual or group sensibility.

2. We are not Faced not with Alternatives, but with Disjunctions: The Trilemma.

The most serious aspect of the matter is that these three attitudes or philosophies of culture, which we designate as cultural monism (“ethnocentrism,” for their adversaries), relativism and cultural pluralism, are not presented as mere alternatives, but as disjunctions among which we must choose. From where does the disjunctive disposition of these three ways of understanding the relations that cultural spheres can supposedly maintain among themselves derive?

Undoubtedly, in our opinion, from the very concept of “cultural sphere,” understood as a relatively closed totality (a “complex whole,” in the attributive sense), self-sufficient, without prejudice to the benefits and influences that it may receive from the remaining cultural spheres that constitute the distributive whole or totality of culture, understood as a cultural sphere. As a paradigm of the concept of “cultural sphere,” in this sense, one could consider each of those “superorganisms” that Oswald Spengler precisely called “cultures.”

However, perhaps the best way to show to what extent the scheme of cultural spheres is alive and active today, even among people who do not even use this denomination, is to analyze the expression “signs of identity,” so often used by politicians, journalists, intellectuals or radio broadcasters to refer to what they consider “their own culture.” Because the innocent formula—”signs of identity”—in reality only makes sense in terms of a presupposed cultural sphere; that is to say, of a sphere whose identity (of a substantial nature) is presupposed, and of which the “sign of identity” considered would turn out to be a mere indication. Thus, the sardana would be a sign of identity of a supposed Catalan culture or cultural sphere, and the aurresku would be a sign of identity of a supposed Basque culture or cultural sphere. What is equivalent to say that the importance, the meaning, the scope, etc., of the sardana (or that of the aurresku) cannot be grasped by itself, not even by the similarities that it can maintain with institutions of other cultural spheres, but by what it has of revelation, indication or sign of a presupposed identity, which is applied precisely to the culture of reference, and not to the sign of identity in itself, in its material supposition.

Now, by placing the various cultural spheres on a plane of confrontation, in terms of value, consistency, dignity, originality, etc., it is possible to give a “logical reason” for the system of (disjunctive) alternatives that we have established; for this system has to do with the system of quantifiers of predicate logic, linked to the {1, 0} values of truth:

(1) Either we assert that, among the various cultural spheres of the distributive whole of cultures, only one cultural sphere can be considered as supporting authentic values; that is, that there is only one cultural sphere that deserves to be considered as authentic or true culture (the other cultural spheres would be reflections, de-generations, or mere appearances or phenomena of the “true culture”).

(2) Or we affirm that all cultural spheres are of equal value, as cultures that find their meaning precisely in the concavity of their own sphere: “All cultures are equal,” we read on a huge plaque installed in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

And this statement is developed in two other dichotomous versions (since equality does not imply connectedness):

(2A) “All cultures are equal,” except in a regime of disjunction, of separation, even of “megaric” incommensurability (which can reach the situation of incompatibility). It is evident that the formula of this option is equivalent to the opposite formula: “All cultures are unequal,” without being able to speak of logical contradiction, because the postulated equality refers in some cases to equality in dignity, in rights, etc., of the spheres that, however, are considered unequal in contents or in numerical or substantial identity.

(2B) “All cultures are equal,” except without the need to presuppose between them a regime of separation; on the contrary, postulating the possibility and convenience of a coexistence or juxtaposition of men belonging to the various cultures (this was the scheme that Americo Castro used to describe the supposed coexistence, under Ferdinand III the Saint, of the three religions—Jews, Moors and Christians—which today it is customary to translate as the coexistence between “the three cultures”).

Option (1) is that of cultural monism (which from the other options will be perceived as ethnocentrism); option (2A) is that of cultural relativism; and option (2B) is that of cultural pluralism or multiculturalism. It would seem that a choice must be made among these three options.

3. Critical Illustrations of each of the Members of the Trilemma

Cultural monism (practically ethnocentrism, if we leave aside, for the moment, the attempts to create a “universal culture” obtained by recasting all cultural spheres) is certainly, without needing to be called in this way, the most traditional perspective, without prejudice to the interpretations of Protagoras’ principle of homomensura—”man is the measure of all things”—as a man shaped by each culture (in the sense of cultural relativism). However, cultural monism can be presented and “justified” from two quite different sources:

The first wants to remain in the realm of facts, i.e., outside of value judgments. If it is only possible to speak of one cultural sphere of reference, of which all the others were reflections or even degenerations, it is because all the cultural spheres that really exist on earth would have been originated by an original culture, and would be like pulsations of that mother culture, identified with the Egyptian culture. Such was, as is well known, the monistic vision of culture defended by the school of so-called radical diffusionism, of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, or of William James Perry (The Children of the Sun, 1923).

The second does not hesitate to vindicate cultural monism, even ethnocentrism, but in the name, not of realities that are perhaps only demonstrated by science fiction, but in the name of values, no longer past but future, that are imposed from a given cultural sphere on those who identify with it. For Pericles or Plato, the values of the “paideia” (or Greek culture) were the only values that could oppose the barbarian peoples; for the Spaniards who entered America, Christian values (which were not only religious values, but also moral, ethical, ceremonial, political, artistic), were usually seen as the only values that should prevail over the barbarian gods, inspired by the devil; for most Western scientists and engineers (and not only those of the positivist era), the values of “Western culture” (which include both scientific values and democratic values) are the only values that can be accepted and that must be offered to other peoples; within this same perspective Richard Rorty has recently defended the need to assume the “ethnocentric” position in everything that concerns the values of truth and other criteria proper to our culture.

Now then, cultural monism, as ethnocentrism, is difficult to defend today, and many of the arguments of relativism and multiculturalism can serve to reduce it to its fair limits. But neither do we consider cultural relativism defensible, insofar as it faces the evidence of the superiority of some “cultures” over others, in the technological, scientific and even political fields. What about the option of cultural integrationism? If it is interpreted as a mere coexistence or juxtaposition of different peoples or religions, it seems obvious to us that such an option is, in reality, empty, rather a wish, of an irenistic nature. It cannot be said that social groups with different cultures coexist, or that they coexist, even peacefully, unless some remain in their ghettos, in the face of those who hold the dominant positions. Effective integration will only be apparent (an integration by juxtaposition), until the social groups in the dominated position either reach dominant positions or get rid of their institutions incompatible with those of the host society. This is what happened with Moors, Jews and Christians in medieval Seville: the myth of coexistence put into circulation by Américo Castro is being challenged in our days (Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, Serafín Fanjul García).

4. The Myth of the Cultural Spheres as the Source of the Trilemma

But how could we reject each of the three options of the trilemma (monism, relativism, pluralism) without rejecting the trilemma itself? For it is evident that once we have accepted the trilemma (in our case, the bifurcated dilemma), we would have no choice but to embrace one of its options. It is evident that, once the trilemma has been accepted by a critic, if he rules out that the author he criticizes is a relativist or pluralist, he will have to launch against him the dreaded accusation of ethnocentrism.

It is therefore a question, for my part, of going back further behind the trilemma, that is to say, it is a question of denouncing the assumption on which the trilemma is running at full speed in our days, without journalists, intellectuals, politicians and radio broadcasters, but also historians, sociologists and anthropologists, being aware of it.

And this assumption is that of cultural spheres, understood as substantive entities that offer the researcher very diverse “signs of identity” of their substance (of what else?); of a substance that is supposed to come from the most arcane times and that pretends to maintain its identity, considered as the supreme and sacred value. But there are no cultural spheres in that sense. Cultural spheres are only ideological constructions, purely and simply myths.

This will allow us to add a fourth option to the system of the three options, (1) (2A) (2B), which we have established on the basis of the assumption of cultural spheres: that not one or all cultural spheres can be taken as subjects or supports of value, not one.

And if there are no cultural spheres as entities endowed with a substantive identity (idiographic, numerical, delimited in the distributive whole), then the options, or the very concepts of ethnocentrism, cultural relativism and pluralism of cultural spheres dissolve. Cultural spheres are not entities endowed with a substantial identity of their own; at most, they are phenomenal entities, delimited perhaps over the centuries (when not invented ad hoc by groups, peoples or nations in search of a state), by isolation from other phenomenal spheres, or by a mixture of some of them. And by this we mean that the diagnoses (or accusations) of ethnocentrism, relativism or pluralism, are impossible diagnoses or accusations, if we keep to a scientific or philosophical terrain. They are diagnoses or accusations that can only be maintained in the doxographical terrain of confused and obscure opinions about the ideological nebulae that are formed at a given juncture. Can possession or diabolical obsession be admitted, in the scientific terrain, as a psychological or psychiatric diagnosis? But, according to our thesis, the diagnosis of ethnocentrism or relativism, in the field of anthropology, does not go further than the diagnosis of diabolical possession or diabolical obsession, in the field of psychiatry.

5. Reduction of Substantive Cultural Spheres to Phenomenal Cultural Spheres.

There are no cultural spheres endowed with a substantive identity. These spheres only have a phenomenal identity, enough to begin to organize the relevant ethnographic and ethnological descriptions.

Phenomenal identities, because their unity is resolved in a system, conglomerate or concatenation, whether of cultural traits (patterns, institutions, elements) but also natural (racial, for example) or tertiogenic (such as the Pythagorean relations of the right triangle, which are neither natural nor cultural, and this is said in the face of dualists who continue to consider as a fundamental principle that of the distinction in the Universe between Nature and Culture, perhaps a last pulsation of the ancient distinction between Matter and Spirit).

Now then, the reduction of cultural spheres, endowed with substantial identity, to the condition of cultural spheres endowed with phenomenal unity, should not be confused with the reduction of the theory of cultural spheres to one of the aggregationist theories of culture (to the theory of cultural mosaics, for example). The key to the latter theories can be found in a process of “substantivation of the parts” (of traits, patterns, elements) confronted with the process of “substantivation of the complex whole” that leads to the substantive cultural sphere.

But the substantivization of the parts would also be gratuitous—a cultural sphere is not the result of the aggregation of supposedly pre-existing cultural elements (which some call memes). Cultural elements or features are figures that are shaped from the phenomenal totalities themselves, and precisely at the moment when these are decomposed or broken down into formal parts in the very process of cultural shock. Nor did eyes, or foreheads, as Empedocles thought, pre-exist the animals that could have been formed from the union of those “solitary limbs” that would have given rise, first, to hideous monsters that adaptation to the environment would have had to polish little by little. A femur bone does not precede the vertebrate organism; but once formed it can be extracted from the animal, becoming a figure, element, value or countervalue of the organic factory. The elements, traits, cultural institutions—are not prior to the phenomenal cultural spheres, but can be taken apart, transported and incorporated, with eventual deformations, into other cultural spheres, either as elements with the capacity of integration with other parts of their own, or as elements with the capacity to dissolve the phenomenal whole constituted by a given cultural sphere. And all this without prejudice to the fact that the incorporation of an element or trait from a given cultural sphere into another is not always “clean,” since it will almost always drag along other elements, splinters or traits from the cultural sphere of origin.

6. There is no Conflict of Cultures, but neither is there Integration of Cultures or Cultural Relativism.

According to what we have said, therefore, it is not possible to speak of conflicts of cultures, or of conflicts of civilizations; nor is it possible to speak of integration or expansion of cultures. All these expressions would have to be restated in terms of conflicts of cultural elements, or of integration, or of diffusion of cultural elements or traits. Therefore, whoever considers a cultural element (let us take the democratic system, for example) as universal cannot be accused of ethnocentrism. Even less can anyone be accused of ethnocentrism (or of cultural monism) who recognizes and defends the universality of the Pythagorean theorem, as a detached element, no longer of Greek culture, but of all culture, as a structure valid for all cultures, above any relativism.

Niembro, March 23, 2002


Gustavo Bueno Martínez (1924-2016) was a foremost Spanish philosopher who has had a deep influence among thinkers of tradition. This article comes courtesy of El Catoblepas.


Featured: Still life with musical instruments on a laid table, by Pieter Claesz; painted in 1623.


Rational Responses to Skepticism: A Review

This big fat book (571 pages), Rational Responses to Skepticism, is an anthology of Dennis Bonnette’s later writings. It contains more than forty essays on a variety of philosophical topics.

But who (you may ask) is Dennis Bonnette? For one, he’s a philosopher. More precisely, he’s a Catholic philosopher. More precisely still, he’s a Catholic philosopher of the Thomistic (hence Aristotelian) persuasion.

He is the author of two previous books, Origin of the Human Species (three editions so far) and Aquinas’ Proofs for God’s Existence.

Among Bonnette’s other achievement are these, that he is the father of seven adult children and the grandfather of twenty-five children.

Bonnette was a college professor of philosophy for forty years. Upon retirement, he found that he could not renounce his teacherly addiction to explaining difficult philosophical ideas. And so, no longer able to explain them orally to undergraduates, he took to explaining them in writing to broader and more well-educated audiences. It should be noted that, because these audiences included critics who issued critiques that were far more challenging than a teacher would find in a college classroom, Bonnette was compelled, in his written explanations, to work at a more precise and more sophisticated intellectual level. This book is made up of many of these later explanations, all of which first appeared in online journals.

Not the least merit of this volume is that it is written with clarity. My guess is that Bonnette’s ability to explain things clearly is the result of his old job requirement—he had to explain some rather difficult philosophical ideas to college students for whom philosophy was not at the top of the list of their worldly concerns. This is like Lincoln’s talent for plain writing, a talent very probably developed by his professional need to explain things to juries made up of prairie farmers and shopkeepers. Bonnette knows how to write a plain English sentence. He knows how to write economically; for instance, he will illustrate a point with one example instead of five or ten. And although his subject matter often compels him to use a technical vocabulary, he doesn’t revel in technicalities as many academics do.

In short, Bonnette writes for an audience of educated laypersons who happen to have an amateur interest in following philosophical arguments. He never forgets who makes up his intended audience.

It should come as a surprise to no one that Bonnette discusses a number of topics that have long been near and dear to the hearts of Thomists and Aristotelians. For instance:

  • The existence of God
  • The nature of God
  • The spirituality of the human soul
  • The immortality of the human soul
  • The distinction between sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge
  • The first principles of reason
  • The principle of non-contradiction
  • The principle of sufficient reason
  • The principle of causality
  • Natural law
  • Free will
  • The impossibility of infinite regress
  • The existential contingency of everything that is not God
  • Metaphysical certitude
  • That an infinity being (God) alone can create being out of non-being
  • The distinction between time and eternity
  • That everything moved is moved by another
  • The problem of evil

But Bonnette also deals with some post-13th-century questions, questions that have emerged since the modern scientific revolution. For instance:

  • Modern naturalism and materialism
  • Modern skepticism and agnosticism
  • The compatibility of Thomism and modern physics
  • Darwinian evolution
  • The idea of “existential inertia”

He even deals with some “current affairs” issues. For instance:

  • Ape language
  • Space aliens
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Abortion

And he touches on a few specifically Catholic issues. For instance:

  • The heavenly knowledge of the Virgin Mary
  • Can the reality of Hell be reconciled with the goodness of God?
  • The apparitions at Fatima
  • Adam and Eve
  • Why Catholics are prone to believe in miracles

At first glance this book is a hodge-podge collection of articles dealing with this and that; a mere miscellany. But look closer and you’ll see that there is a unifying theme running through its nearly-600 pages. Bonnette sees that modern atheism or naturalism is the great contemporary danger faced by Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, and he further sees that skepticism—the belief that it is impossible for human beings (i.e., rational animals) to know anything with certainty—underlies atheism/naturalism. What’s more, he is convinced that Thomism is the philosophy best able to refute skepticism and naturalism.

I recommend this book for well-educated lay Catholics who are looking for an intellectual challenge. Professional philosophers and theologians will also profit from it. And it should be considered for advanced undergraduates taking courses in Thomism.

It is not a book that must be read starting at page one. You can start in the middle. You can begin with the book’s final essay. You can skip around. In fact you’ll be better off if you skip around (as I myself did). This is a book for grazing, the way cows in a field graze. They never try to eat everything all at once.


David R. Carlin is a former Democratic Majority Leader of the Rhode Island Senate, a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the recent author of Atheistic Humanism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church.


Featured: The Calmness of the Philosopher Pyrrho in the Storm, perhaps by the Master of Petrarch, ca. early 16th century.


From the American Dream to the American Nightmare

Higher education has transitioned from a focus on affirmative action (AA) to a focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). How did this come about and what does it mean?

In the minds of their advocates, both AA and DEI are aspirational public policies focused on rectifying “underrepresentation” in the workforce of groups historically subject to inequalities in education and in the workforce. The former policy (AA) was initiated in 1965 and focused on improving equality of access (opportunity). It was subject to lengthy and controversial legal litigation over the use of quotas. By 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court held that “States may choose to prohibit the consideration of racial preferences in governmental decisions.” (DEI) is a later version and continuation of (AA). It arose from several sources including Higher Education and Immigration Law. It is seemingly focused on training of current employees in the workplace, but job applicants are required to subscribe and committed to achieving some version of equality of outcome.

The following account traces the long and circuitous route by which these policies came about. My account of this transition has three interrelated elements: the intellectual origin, the institutional context or evolution of higher education in America, and finally the larger political context. It is important to keep in mind that these controversial policies originated within and were welcomed by the academy, and these policies remain aspirational in the sense that they have no firm legal standing either in legislation or in the U.S. Supreme Court. My contention is that (AA) and (DEI) seek to replace the American Dream of a meritocracy with the Nightmare of egalitarianism.

Part I: Intellectual Origin

The modern context of egalitarianism originated with the success of Newtonian physics and its ability not only to explain and predict natural phenomena but to give us control over them. As Bacon and especially Descartes expressed it, it helped to make us the “masters and possessors of nature.”

Inspired by Newton, the French philosophes developed the idea of the social sciences. Specifically, they sought not only to explain and to predict social phenomena but to gain control over the social world. They proposed to pursue a social technology as a reflection of their Enlightenment Project. Such mastery was not only intended to achieve power but to bring about a social utopia.

(Isaiah Berlin characterizes the Project as follows: “…there were certain beliefs that were more or less common to the entire party of progress and civilization, and this is what makes it proper to speak of it as a single movement. These were, in effect, the conviction that the world, or nature, was a single whole, subject to a single set of laws, in principle discoverable by the intelligence of man; that the laws which governed inanimate nature were in principle the same as those which governed plants, animals and sentient beings; that man was capable of improvement; that there existed certain objectively recognizable human goals which all men, rightly so described, sought after, namely, happiness, knowledge, justice, liberty, and what was somewhat vaguely described but well understood as virtue; that these goals were common to all men as such, were not unattainable, nor incompatible, and that human misery, vice and folly were mainly due to ignorance either of what these goals consisted in or of the means of attaining them—ignorance due in turn to insufficient knowledge of the laws of nature… Consequently, the discovery of general laws that governed human behaviour, their clear and logical integration into scientific systems—of psychology, sociology, economics, political science and the like (though they did not use these names)—and the determination of their proper place in the great corpus of knowledge that covered all discoverable facts, would, by replacing the chaotic amalgam of guesswork, tradition, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy and ‘interested error’ that hitherto did service as human knowledge and human wisdom (and of which by far the chief protector and instigator was the church), create a new, sane, rational, happy, just and self-perpetuating human society, which, having arrived at the peak of attainable perfection, would preserve itself against all hostile influences, save perhaps those of nature” (The Magus of the North, pp. 27-28).

Thus, the intellectual origins lie specifically in the French version of the Enlightenment Project. The Enlightenment Project was the attempt to define, explain, and control the human predicament through science and technology. This project originated among the French philosophes during the eighteenth century, among whom the most influential were Diderot, d’Alembert, La Mettrie, Condillac, Helvetius, d’Holbach, Turgot, and Condorcet. The philosophes were inspired by Bacon’s vision of the liberating power of science, Hobbes’ materialism, Newton’s physics, and Locke’s empiricist epistemology. The Project was epitomized in the nineteenth century by Comte and in the twentieth century by positivism. Denying the Christian concept of sin but still choosing to play God, these philosophes initiated the modern hubristic search for a secular utopia. What the Enlightenment project did was to change our idea of what knowledge is and what it is for.

The legacy of the French Enlightenment persisted throughout the nineteenth century in the works of Comte and Marx. Voegelin maintains that this is a form of Gnosticism, the Christian heretical attempt to achieve heaven on earth. “In the Gnostic speculation of scientism this particular variant reached its extreme when the positivist perfector of science replaced the era of Christ by the era of Comte. Scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest Gnostic movements in Western Society; and the immanentist pride in science is so strong that even the special sciences have each left a distinguishable sediment in the variants of salvation through physics, economics, sociology, biology, and psychology” (Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, p. 127).

Egalitarianism is based upon a False Analogy to Physical Sciences

Our first claim is that affirmative action and DEI are policies based on the contention that there are such things as social sciences (Social studies, or the attempt to study and to understand the human/social world is not committed to the assumption that understanding means prediction and control. Nobel laureate Hayek’s understanding of economics and the market economy explicitly precludes prediction and control)—and specifically social technology able to explain, predict, and control social phenomena. The agents of this policy are deeply embedded in the social science programs of the modern university.

As we shall see, the most influential variants of this policy are Marxist in origin. Karl Marx believed not only that he had found an explanation of the social world but that he could predict its future evolution and identified the working class as the agents of reform through violent revolution. All of Marx’s predictions turned out to be false, so Marxist theory had to be revised. (It is worth noting in this context the modification introduced by Lenin, namely “colonialism,” the exploitation of non-western countries for their raw materials and low cost of labor. This alleged “exploitation” indirectly helped workers in the developed world to enjoy a higher standard of living and therefore not revolt. The same kind of argument can be read back into the domestic economy). The important relevant revision was provided by Antonio Gramsci in his doctrine of the “long march” through the institutions, specifically a revolutionary party needed the working-class to develop organic intellectuals who articulated an alternative hegemonic ideology critical of the status quo. Gramsci maintained that the agent of change was not the working class but the class of intellectuals and that the latter would bring about a peaceful revolution through the gradual take over of the major institutions in society like the university.

A. Hidden Structure Fallacy

Two features of “social” science allegedly analogous to physical science are worth noting. Modern physics does not explain phenomena (e.g. color) by reference to what is directly observable. On the contrary, modern physical science explains what is observable by reference to an initially hidden substructure, not visible to the naked eye (e.g. microbes, molecules, quarks, etc.). Subsequent experimentation gives us access to this initially hidden substructure by means of sophisticated equipment.

In an attempt to replicate this feature of physical science, the alleged “social” sciences explain the surface by reference to an initially hidden substructure (Marxist economics, Freud’s ego, id, etc., choices made behind Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”). So, today, for example, we are told that there is such a thing as “institutional racism.” However, there is a disconnect here. Instead of a hidden substructure that later gets verified or observed, the social sciences present a cornucopia of rival theories with no way to choose among them (libertarian, liberal, socialist, Marxist, Feminist, Critical Theory. Etc.).

To make matters worse, if one social scientist disagrees with another both can dismiss the other by claiming that the rival is a victim of a hidden bias. There is thus an infinite regress of hidden structures: your account, my account, your account of why my account is wrong because it reflects a hidden structure, my account of the hidden structure that explains why you cannot overcome your account (e.g. why “white” people who have not suffered “discrimination” cannot understand “black” people but “black” people can somehow understand and explain “white” people; likewise, “white” people can understand that “black” people suffer from the mental disorder of racial paranoia, etc.). This not only brings civil discourse to an end but it also gives enormous rhetorical advantages or power over the debate. The only social technology produced to date is the power to control debate.

B. No Replication by other Scientists

There is one final twist to the argument. A number of philosophers of science (e.g. Kuhn, Feyerabend, even Wittgenstein) have pointed out, rightly, that a theory in physical science is deemed “true” or in some sense viable if the theory meets the criteria (tests) agreed upon by the community of physical scientists. In short, intellectual acceptability depends upon a prior professional social consensus. Even Hayek pointed out that physical science rests upon assumptions that science cannot establish. Armed with this insight (anticipated by Vico in the 18th century and even to be found in Gramsci), social scientists contend that agreement amongst the community of “social” scientists is sufficient to establish the validity of a hidden structure account about the social world.

The foregoing analogy does not work. To begin with, physical scientists do not merely have conversations but engage in replicable experiments that do identify something “out there” independent of us. Moreover, the physical sciences have allowed us to extend human life, conquer diseases, engage in space exploration, etc. whereas, the “social” technologists to date have wrecked economies, engaged in needless wars, promoted social unrest, and provoked destabilizing mass migrations.

C. Concepts are not Things

In the “social” sciences, we meet only concepts and not things. Microbes and molecules are real; “systemic racism” remains a linguistic expression. There is also the question of who are the authoritative members of the community of social sciences (e.g. tenured members of the Harvard sociology department?). This may begin to explain why the contemporary university seeks to silence dissent and to discredit if not prevent certain kinds of research. Worse yet, the purveyors of this view need to appeal to a grand social consensus outside of their disciplines in order to identify their specific disciplines. Either they deny, for political reasons, that a valid social consensus exists (NO GRAND NARRATIVE) or they invoke an infinite regress. In practice, what this amounts to is that you only speak with others who already agree with you and shun, dismiss, or silence those who do not.

D. IAT Test: An Example of Unreliable Pseudo-Science

Let me give an example of pseudo-social-science. The implicit-association test (IAT) is intended to detect subconscious associations between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory. Its best-known application is the assessment of implicit stereotypes such as associations between racial categories and stereotypes about members of those groups, e.g., associations involving racial groups, gender, sexuality, age, and predictions of the test taker. The IAT was introduced in 1998 and has been used as an assessment in implicit bias trainings (e.g. in diversity training) designed to reduce unconscious bias and discriminatory behavior.

IAT is the subject of significant debate regarding its validity, reliability, and usefulness in assessing implicit bias. Arkes and Tetlock offer “three objections to the inferential leap from the comparative RT (Reaction Time) of different associations to the attribution of implicit prejudice: (a) The data may reflect shared cultural stereotypes rather than personal animus, (b) the affective negativity attributed to participants may be due to cognitions and emotions that are not necessarily prejudiced, and (c) the patterns of judgment deemed to be indicative of prejudice pass tests deemed to be diagnostic of rational behavior.” (In press: H.R. Arkes, “The Rationality, Interpretation, and Overselling of Tests of Implicit Cognition,” in J.A. Krosnick, T.H. Stark, & A.L. Scott, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Implicit Bias and Racism (Chapter 11, pp. 319-330). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Part II. Institutional Context: Evolution of Higher Education in the U.S.

Historically the modern American university emerged in the 19th century from a variety of sources: religious affiliation, local communities, and private benefactors. From the beginning the university consisted of factions with competing paradigms. The oldest paradigm, the Ivory Tower so to speak, originated in the small liberal arts college with a religious (usually Puritan) affiliation and famously romanticized by Newman. The purpose of liberal education was to preserve, critique, and to transmit our cultural inheritance. In seeking to subordinate itself to the outside world, the university would only compromise itself and become an instrument for commercial or political exploitation.

A teacher is one who initiates a student into a cultural inheritance. The inheritance only comes alive when exhibited in the living embodiment of an instructor. The teacher exhibits academic virtues by consistently and coherently organizing intellectual judgments and inviting the learner to share in that process. Teaching was successful when students learned how to construct a self-understanding inclusive of the inheritance, a particular way of ordering or appropriating the inheritance, and to do so in a way that leads to the acquisition of an intellectual personality of their own.

A second paradigm is the German research model of the university with its emphasis on the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, the graduate school and the training of professionals. In this model, knowledge cannot be in the service of special interest groups because knowledge knows no political boundaries. Although non-political, the spectacular success of this model in science and technology eventually encouraged government subvention.

The third paradigm is utilitarian, wherein the university is seen as an institution for solving various and sundry social problems. In this model, the university exists as a means to social ends defined externally to the university itself (e.g. an A&M).

Looked at from our contemporary perspective, it is now clear that Newman’s moral model of the university has evaporated or has been marginalized; the research model has been corrupted and coopted; the notion of the college graduate as a civil servant has evolved into the notion of a special class which aims to run society. It is the politicized utilitarian model that has triumphed.

At first glance it is clear that institutions that were supposed to be the locus of higher education have become entwined with and encompass an enormous range of social, economic, and cultural activities. In the process, they have become big businesses with vested interests. In attempting to encompass all of these activities, institutions of higher education have abandoned learning. In so doing, such institutions have evolved into fraudulent enterprises. This is not to say that everything that occurs within institutions of higher education is fraudulent; nor is it to say that this outcome was planned or even foreseeable. It is to say that institutions of higher education have evolved, and in the course of that evolution factors internal to and external to the institution, intellectual and non-intellectual, have contributed to the rise of a Tower of Babel, meaning that the experts can no longer communicate with each other and have no clear common purpose. Symptomatic of this problem is a lack of consensus on the meaning of concepts like “learning,” “higher education,” “university;” no one seems to know what “teaching” is as opposed to “instructing” or how to evaluate it; no one seems to know the difference between “research” and “scholarship.” We have, in short, lost all sense of purpose. The fraud consists in maintaining that all of the activities that occur within present institutions of higher education are legitimate, consistent with each other and capable of forming a coherent whole under the rubric of the pious rhetoric that appears in mission statements and commencement addresses.

Although seemingly serving these external interests, universities have become a home for the adversary culture, for all those groups that are hostile to the very activities the university seeks to encompass. What are we to make of this contradiction? Schumpeter has observed that most modern intellectuals (including clergy and media people) are generally at odds with the representatives of the business community even though academics are dependent upon commerce for their own existence and comfort. Part of this opposition is reflected in the firm commitment of the academic world to socialism even when it has been repeatedly shown that centrally planned economies woefully and of necessity underperform free market economies. Schumpeter attributes this opposition to jealously on the part of academics who resent the fact that the leadership of modern culture emerges from the business community instead of the academy. Here we have a clue as to what has happened, namely, something was transformed in the evolution of the university from a medieval to a modern institution.

Higher education is the initiation into an inheritance, and it was from the beginning institutionalized in universities. As medieval institutions, universities saw themselves as the elite defining institutions of the culture, as superior to and independent of the state, as playing both a Socratic role with respect to the culture as a whole and a potentially adversarial role with respect to individual institutions such as the state. The source of our difficulties lies in the conflict between these roles, the conflict between the Socratic initiation into the inheritance and the adversarial relation between a self-defined elitist institution and the rest of the culture.

As Western Civilization evolved the content of the inheritance evolved. Unfortunately, certain historically contingent aspects of the medieval world became mistakenly identified with the content. Given the late medieval context, academics believed in a collective, holistic, and hierarchical common good, a good to which the good of individuals was subordinate, a good that encompassed both the church and the state. Intellectuals, in short, see themselves as the high priests of the collective good The university as agent of the church not only articulated that good but enlisted the subordinate state to promote the conditions necessary to achieve that good.

The modern world is not the medieval world. There are two elements in the medieval view that are at odds with modern culture. The most distinctive institutions of modern culture are individual rights, the rule of law, a republican form of government, and a market economy. First, modern culture is post-Reformation and therefore does not believe in a holistic common good. There is, instead, the individual good rooted, at least initially, in the relationship of individuals to God. There is no holistic common good over which academics may preside, only a cultural inheritance. Universities, however, may still perform the functions of providing a context for learning and maintaining a Socratic role vis-a-vis the rest of the culture. Second, there is no one institution, and therefore no one group, that authoritatively articulates the cultural inheritance. Without a collective good, intellectuals in the modern world are merely trained communicators who might be spokespersons for a particular interest group. Schumpeter’s observations and diagnosis are not only accurate, but we can explain the situation further by reference to the medieval origins of Institutions of Higher Education. The now mythological holistic common good is the metaphysical phantom behind central planning.

The Enlightenment Project allowed academics to reassert the cultural hegemony of the university. College graduates were no longer mere civil servants but definers and implementers of the good. The good was understood as the medieval cosmic order now accessed by physical and social science. Since media people are trained by the academics, they too become advocates of the project. It should come as no surprise that the press is no longer Socratic but adversarial.
How did this happen?

The internal transformation begins with how the Puritan Ivory Tower underwent a remarkable secularization. Inspired by 19th-century Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau (environmentalist, author of “Civil Disobedience,” and whose support of John Brown turned abolitionism into a civil religion), these “heretical” Puritans (now a sect of Presbyterians) surrendered the concept of “original sin” and replaced it with a moral universalism in which it was assumed that all people were naturally good and corrupted only by their environment. As Santayana allegedly remarked, “Thoreau was impervious to the evidence of evil.” What began as WASP Hegemony evolved first into Wilsonian (President of Princeton University became President of the U.S.) Progressivism that assimilated all Americans in the 1920s but by the 1960s had evolved into liberal-egalitarian idealism applicable to the entire multicultural world. This view is expressed in a speech given by Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger to the American Historical Association (1942) titled “What Then is The American, This New Man?” Schlesinger declared that: “The American character … is bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish.” In his 1989 essay, The End of History, Francis Fukuyama argued that American liberal democracy and modern technology had produced the final form of political association. Henceforth, all societies would, in time, inevitably take on the form of liberal democracy.

What will probably strike some readers as an aside or a remarkable coincidence, worth noting is that the 16th century English theologian Richard Hooker’s critical portrait of Puritan methodology in his Ecclesiastical Polity aptly catches what has become today “Woke” methodology in higher education and its attendant “witch hunt.” Puritans exhibited a Millenarian vision of spiritual redemption through worldly reform; severe criticism of social evils and the conduct of the upper classes; they are virtue signalers; experience themselves as the elect and distinguish themselves from the damned; concentrate popular ill-will against the establishment; recommend a new form of government as the “sovereign remedy of all evils;” turn a blind eye to any part of our intellectual inheritance that is incompatible with their doctrine; anyone who uses tabooed instruments of critique will be socially boycotted and defamed; there is a special role for women: emotionally more accessible, tactically well placed to influence husbands, children, friends, more inclined to than men to serve as spies/”commissars” concerning the state of affections in their circle, and more liberal in financial aid; they are impermeable to argument and have their answers well drilled – beyond shaking by argument; sacred documents had to be carefully chosen and the interpretation standardized; propaganda is a form of political action not a search for truth; where they control the means of communication, all theoretical argument is prohibited (Voegelin, pp.135-144).

Going back to the medieval origin of universities focused on educating the clergy, the faculty had always viewed itself as the moral and intellectual elite. The Puritan roots of higher education in the U.S. always had as its aim the notion of the college graduate as part of a special class which aims to run society. Heretofore, it had been assumed that knowledge cannot be in the service of special interest groups because knowledge knows no political boundaries. In the 1960s, the secularization of Puritanism came to mean that colleges promoted a specific political agenda, namely liberal-egalitarian idealism associated with transcendentalism or humanism. That agenda emerged from the so-called “social” sciences.

The alleged “social” sciences, acting as a kind of “fifth column” starting in the 1960s, achieved intellectual hegemony over the entire university curriculum. The humanities were social-scientized under the aegis of “deconstruction” seeking the hidden structure meaning of texts so that Shakespeare, for example, was now read not as someone who had important insights into the human condition but perhaps as a racist or homophobe. Here is a typical itinerary that reflects a forced interdisciplinarity: the student registers in a philosophy department; instead of the Truth for which she was searching all that she is offered is tiresome analysis; bored, she changes disciplines and ends up writing a thesis entitled “The Phenomenology of Moby Dick” or “How Class Struggle is related to Paternalism.” Following all this, she will be hired in a department of literature, or social sciences, or psychology and will satisfy in turn the disappointed philosophical aspirations of a new generation.

“Deconstruction” became the origin of the view that there are multiple but no authoritative narratives or grand theory. (According to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the postmodern condition rejects universalizing theories. Lyotard argues that we have outgrown our needs for metanarratives that bring together social practices. Any narratives we tell to justify a single set of norms are inherently unjust. Little narratives have now become the appropriate way for explaining social transformations and political problems. This is easily translatable as a rejection of Huntington’s “creed” and the promotion of multiculturalism). By a not so strange coincidence with Rousseau’s elusive “general will,” the substitute for an authoritative narrative was whatever the majority, or those who spoke in the name of the majority, voted for or agreed to. As we shall see, this had important implications for immigration policy.

The American Historical Association (the national professional organization for academic historians), issued a statement supporting the removal of Confederate monuments from the public square because the 1861-1865 War was about slavery. American historians and legal scholars acting now in a post-modern idiom for whom the “realities of race and slavery” stain and color nearly all events in antebellum history, just as Marxists stained and confounded everything they touched from an obsession with class struggle, will ignore or dismiss constitutional claims about the right of secession and by an act of will confer “factual” status on the official doctrine that the War was about slavery. And since most academic historians subscribe to that thesis, it is presented as something determined by “experts.”

In philosophy, John Rawls (winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award) was a barometer of the direction of academic thinking. In his youth, Rawls was influenced by Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question, criticizing the idea that inequality in ability justifies the distribution of wealth in society. G. A. Cohen, used Rawls’s writings to inaugurate Analytical Marxism in the 1980s, and the same can be said of Habermas and the Frankfort School. In the Law of Peoples (1999) Rawls embraces a form of multiculturalism)—eschewed and replaced even the historical account of our norms by articulating the method of “reflective equilibrium” to undercover the alleged “hidden” structure of our moral intuitions. Rawls’s theorized, in a series of articles written between 1957 and 1963 and a book in 1971, that justice meant “fairness” which really meant equal basic liberties, “fair” equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur.

(The qualification “fair” opens the Pandora’s box that leads ultimately from equality of opportunity to equality of result. See below on Hume’s discussion of “fair.” Notice as well the difference between a society which maximizes benefits for all and one which is focused on maximizing benefits for the least well off. The former defines itself in terms of its “most” successful while the latter defines itself in terms of its ‘least’ successful).

Rawls’ sympathizers and critics pointed out that he had not gone far enough. Even in a system of perfect equality of opportunity there would be some inequality of result. The children of super-achievers would have gained privileges that the children of others did not. Such inequality and the resulting resentment was, as Marxists argued, the root of all other social problems. It is at this point that cultural Marxists hijacked the liberal-egalitarian agenda in the academic world.

(Just as Hooker had in the sixteenth century exposed the logic of Puritan Gnosticism, David Hume had in the 18th century in the Enquiry Concerning Morals exposed the logic of inequality. First, there is no consensus on what is a fair distribution; second, you cannot in advance assign resources to who will make the best use of them because this is not something anyone can know in advance {refutes central planning}; third, if in the beginning you give everyone equal resources this will be followed by interactions that will lead to a new inequality of result; finally, all of this will require an all-powerful central authority to maintain the ongoing equality).

An important transition had occurred. Rather than demanding that Americans live up to their norms, it had now been revealed that those norms, the entire history behind them was inherently evil and exploitative. If so, then against that standard Western Civilization was a fraudulent form of exploitation. What followed was a scholarship of endless denigration of Western achievement. Not even the physical sciences could resist. Western physical science had, unbeknownst, all this time operated within a flawed set of moral foundations. Something, later, like Covid became a social/political/ideological problem and not a medical problem.

This intellectual voyage provided an opening for Frankfort School cultural Marxists like Marcuse. Rawls had to be supplemented by Dworkin who in turn gave way to critical race theory. Pre-law students usually majored in political science (subtly conceptualizing law into applied politics) and when they arrived at Law Schools were introduced to the U.S. Constitution as a document written by white males who had owned slaves. Social technologists turned law schools into preparing graduates to be federal bureaucrats, activist judges, and regulatory agents.

To recruit more like-minded faculty for Gramsci’s “Long March through the Institutions,” a succinct mission statement coined by Marxist student activist Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s, whole new disciplines of inequality grievance studies were introduced. John Ellis (2020), in his book, The Breakdown of Higher Education, shows how Antonio Gramsci inspired Marxists and Students for a Democratic Society, the latter publishing in 1962 the Port Huron Statement. In that document, Students for a Democratic Society “decided . . . their only choice was to “wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy…(and) consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power” (Ellis, pp. 48-52). They went on to use universities to convert young people to their ideology. Radicals patiently built their numbers until they had achieved a 5-to-1 left-right faculty ratio by the turn of the century (2000). That dominance allowed radicals to control most new faculty appointments, and the left-right ratio accelerated dramatically, reaching about 12 to 1 by 2016. The affected institutions include law schools and business schools. The best discussion of Marxism in higher education is American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas, by Dario Fernandez-Morera (1996).

Part III: Political Background

As we shall see the political context was both a cause and an effect of the growth of affirmative action and its transition to DEI.

The utilitarian conception of the university understood as serving an external political agenda was facilitated by federal funding. In an important sense, there is hardly any longer a totally private institution of higher learning. The external sociological origin of this triumph lies in the commercial exploitation of the university’s research resources, in the political appropriation of the university’s scientific research capacity commencing with the Cold War, and in the vast expansion of the number of people accepted into the institution during the 1960s. It’s always about the 1960s.

In the immediate post WWII period, both major political parties, Democrats and Republicans, shared different but overlapping narratives. Both supported what I shall call the “American Dream,” namely the view that through hard work and merit (talent) any American could become economically successful. It was always understood that a meritocracy meant inequality of result, but this was accepted on the grounds that all were then better off (“a rising tide raises all boats”). Republicans wanted to protect this Dream for those who already had achieved it and for their posterity; and Democrats wanted to extend it to those (unionized workers) who felt that they had been unfairly excluded.

Heretofore, Blacks, when allowed to vote, had, for historical reasons, supported the Republican Party going back to Lincoln and Reconstruction. All of that was about to change. The 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court outlawing segregated schooling and the 1964 Civil Rights Act protecting voting rights, among other things, convinced Black leaders that their path to the American Dream was paved by increasing the power of the Federal Government, the favored tactic of the Democratic Party. What Democrats discovered was that their power base was no longer with the working class but with groups who perceived themselves as previously excluded (i.e., “victims”). Post WWII economic growth had already lifted many members of the working class into a share of the American Dream, and this led to a steadily increasing movement away from the Democratic Party (e.g., “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s and many Trump supporters in 2016). These changes did not go unnoticed by cultural Marxists who had already perceived that the great revolution would not be accomplished through the working class. In due course, the cultural Marxists would take control both of the Democratic Party and even the leadership of the Black community. By 1991, the NAACP had, according to Andrew Young, achieved its civil rights goals. But it was losing members, revenue, and influence, so a new direction had to be taken. Blacks formed an alliance with other groups who perceived themselves as victims.

Two other interrelated political phenomena are worth noting, namely multiculturalism and immigration. Prior to the 1960s, immigration rules favored Europeans from north-western Europe (U.K. and Scandinavia). In addition, immigrants had been encouraged/required to assimilate to the dominant culture. The dominant culture was, according to Huntington, Anglo-Protestant. The dominant culture encompassed a specific set of norms or “creed” (individual liberty, rule of law, equality before the law, limited government, and market economy).

Elsewhere, it has been argued that those norms, including the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial and technological economy, had empowered Western Europeans, in general, to colonize (dominate) the globe, allowed Britain to create a global empire in the 19th century on which “the sun never sets,” enabled the U.S. to “win” the Cold War against the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union, and ultimately become the world’s superpower. “English” is now the world’s universal second language (certainly the major language of commerce, politics, and academe). Assuming this to be the case, success within the U.S. (and economic success as a “developing” “country”) depended upon already possessing or mastering those cultural norms.

Within U.S. politics, Democrats characterized good government as democratization understood as majority rule; Republicans characterized it as limited government or a Republic with a Constitutional legal system that protected individual rights. Post WW II and in response to the Cold War, both major parties promoted decolonialization (self-rule) and democratization, as opposed to Soviet centralization of all power, in international affairs.

The counter-narrative, i.e. the cultural Marxist narrative, is that the success of north-western Europeans and their heirs (Anglo-American world) was the product of the denigration and exploitation of the “non-white” colonized world. The remedy was not revolution (original Soviet Marxist theory) but democratization and multi-culturalism. Multiculturalism is not just about the wide availability of ethnic restaurants but “is about the proper terms of the relationship between different cultural communities.” This is understood to mean that the standards by which the communities resolve their differences, “the principles of justice must not come from only one of the cultures but must come through an open and equal dialogue between them” (Parekh, p. 13).

This has two major immediate implications. Domestically, it means that politics is now about negotiation among different “cultural” groups wherein each group’s culture enjoys equal dignity and respect. The older notions of success and meritocracy through competition are to be discarded as remnants of bias. “Cultural appropriation” occurs when a member of a majority group assimilates a cultural element of a minority group without due regard for its original meaning and thereby implies the subordination and disrespect of the minority culture.

The Democratic Party embraced this view in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act and with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The latter act removed “de facto discrimination” against Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans and other non-North-Western European groups.

“Discrimination” simply means making fine distinctions. This is usually a good thing. “Discrimination’ has taken on a largely negative connotation when associated with irrelevant or counterproductive criteria. Several waves of immigrants had been successfully integrated into the creed of Anglo-Protestant culture largely because of assimilation policies. It was now assumed by an ignorant public without any serious discussion or debate that anyone coming to America would fit in simply by osmosis. We were told that America was a “land of immigrants,” something that is impossible. You can only immigrate into a country that already has a culture; and the U.S. already had an Anglo-Protestant culture because of its English settlers. The original settlers were not immigrants but settlers. Of course, if one claims that the misnamed “Native American” tribes were a country, then the English settlers were just another immigrant group. What was overlooked was the deliberate intention of cultural Marxists to welcome those who might resist assimilation to the creed. It all depends on one’s “narrative.”

The Immigration Act of 1990 rescinded the provision discriminating against members of the LGBT+ community. It also introduced for the first time a “Diversity Immigrant Visa” to be determined by the Attorney General to rectify imbalances. “Diversity” has the clear meaning here of referring to cultures or countries. In essence, this transferred authority to deal with immigration issues from the judiciary to the unelected civil service (staffed largely by university trained attorneys). This Act also clarified but extended “family reunification” immigration visas to immediate family members. For immigration purposes, immediate family is defined as one’s spouse, parents, or unmarried children below age 21. Demographically this increases the percentage of the population that is not derived from north-west Europe.

With regard to immigration, it means that all cultures are to be equally respected (= given equal weight). Hence, there is to be no favoritism for north-west (i.e. “white”) Europeans. This reflects the replacement of what Huntington (2005) had called the “creed” by the norms of cultural Marxism (instead of transforming the earth you must repair the damage of climate change, instead of a free market economy you advocate a managed global economy where the difference between crony capitalism and socialism disappears, instead of limited national government you espouse unlimited leadership by the UN, instead of the rule of law you advocate rule through law, and finally, you are defined by membership in a group).

(As Michael Oakeshott put it, “The emergence of this disposition to be an individual is the preeminent event in modern European history… there were some people, by circumstance or by temperament, less ready than others to respond… the familiar anonymity of communal life was replaced by a personal identity which was burdensome… it bred envy, jealousy and resentment… (it developed) a new morality… not of ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination,’ but of ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’… not… the ‘love of others’ or ‘charity’ or… ‘benevolence’… but… the love of ‘the community’…(the anti-individual or mass man, i.e., those attracted to identity politics) remains an unmistakably derivative character… helpless, parasitic and able to survive only in opposition to individuality.” See also “Pathology of Identity Politics”).

The alarm bells were beginning to ring. As Schlesinger pointed out:

There remains however a crucial difference between the Western Tradition and the others. The crimes of the West have produced their own antidotes…to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry and expression…that continent is also…the unique source—of those liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law,… These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.

From Affirmative Action to DEI

The undefined expression “affirmative action” began innocuously enough in executive orders issued by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It soon began to take on a variety of evolving meanings.

Definition 1 (open-search): Affirmative action consists of those policies designed to advertise all openings as widely as possible and to monitor appointments and promotions processes in order to insure that the process is open, nondiscriminatory, and promotes excellence. (As we shall shortly see, this was clearly the intention and extent of the original legislation).

Definition 2 (punitive): Affirmative action consists of any policy, private or public, ordered by the court to redress proven cases of individual discrimination. The remedy may involve a specific numerical objective, but the numerical objective is limited to a specific time and place.

Definition 3 (backward-compensation): Affirmative action covers any policy designed to redress alleged cases of discrimination against a group by placing members of the group in the positions they would have allegedly held if the alleged discrimination had not taken place. This is a contrary-to-fact conditional: it claims to identify what would happen if something else had not happened. (This was exactly what the original legislation was designed to prevent by adding 703 (h) and 703 (j)—see below).

Definition 4 (backward-compensation): Affirmative action covers any policy designed to redress alleged cases of discrimination against a group by placing members of the group in the positions they would have allegedly held if the alleged discrimination had not taken place. This is a contrary-to-fact conditional: it claims to identify what would happen if something else had not happened.

Definition 5 (forward-preferential): Affirmative action designates any policy in social planning, without any causal claim of what would have been, designed to produce a democratic and diverse society in which all power, resources, rewards, etc. will reflect the percentage of the population of the officially designated groups. Instead of equality of opportunity we shall endorse equality of result. The Hidden Agenda.

Legislative History

It is useful to cite the legislative record concerning these definitions. As then Senator Hubert H. Humphrey put it, “Title VII does not require an employer to achieve any sort of racial balance in his work force by giving preferential treatment to any individual or group.” Senator Harrison Williams noted that Title VII “specifically prohibits the Attorney General or any agency of the government, from requiring employment to be on the basis of racial or religious quotas. Under this provision an employer with only white employees could continue to have only the best qualified persons even if they were all white.” Senator Joseph Clark stated, “Quotas are themselves discriminatory.” If anyone still has any doubts, then recall the words of Representative Emanuel Celler, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the congressman responsible for introducing the legislation:

It is likewise not true that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would have power to rectify existing “racial or religious imbalance” in employment by requiring the hiring of certain people without regard to their qualifications simply because they are of a given race or religion. Only actual discrimination could be stopped.

Original Legislation

Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unequivocally outlaw compensation or preference (see definitions 3 and 4 below). Two provisions spell this out:

703 (h) it shall not be unlawful employment practice… for an employer to give and act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test provided that such test, its administration or action upon the results is not designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

703 (j) Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer… to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number of percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex or national origin employed by any employer.

As we all have come to understand, what a law means depends upon how unelected federal bureaucrats choose to understand it. The labor department had its own definition: Definition 3 (backward-compensation); see above.

Court History

In the pivotal Alan Bakke case (1978), Justice Powell, in the plurality opinion, specifically attacked and rejected the backward-looking argument for compensation (definition 3). “…But for this discrimination by society at large, Bakke “would have failed to qualify for admission” because Negro applicants…would have made better scores. Not one word in the record supports this conclusion. (italics added)… (it) offers no standards for courts to use in applying such a presumption of causation to other racial or ethnic classifications….”

Although Powell urged “strict scrutiny” to be applied to affirmative action programs, in a second opinion he suggested that schools might take race, as one factor, into account in order to achieve a “diverse” student body. Powell did not clarify what he meant by “diversity.” Powell did not link “diversity” to cultures or ethnicity, and he could not link it to egalitarian outcomes because that would have contradicted his official opinion.

Mercifully, the latest Supreme Court decision has ended the waffling and reasserted the primacy of meritocracy.

It is now almost 60 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It has been 60 years during which the university as an institution has been thoroughly taken over by cultural Marxists; during which every institution in the U.S. (civil service, military, medicine, sports, entertainment, etc.) has bent over backwards to root out any vestige of discrimination; during which even the business community has adopted or at least paid lip service to the “woke” agenda; during which we have seen that the top household income positions are held by Indians (India), Taiwanese, Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Lebanese, Iranian, Turkish, and Nigerians as opposed to whites. Nevertheless, the household incomes of Blacks (as a whole) and Hispanics (as a whole) continue to lag. Rather than question the original diagnosis for this lag, cultural Marxists have doubled down on outlawed policies of compensation and preference by changing the names.

(Hundreds of thousands of Blacks and Hispanics have achieved economic, social, and professional success. There are several plausible hypotheses about why some prosper and others fail to do so. These alternative explanations and possible alternative policies are dismissed without discussion because they do not fit the cultural Marxist narrative).

Federal Bureaucracy at Work: From Affirmative Action to DEI

Institutions of higher education, seized upon the term “diversity” and linked it to what we have identified as the fourth definition and justification of affirmative action. Borrowing from the Immigration Act of 1990, “diversity” was linked to multi-culturalism (see the online definitions from the Merriam-Webster dictionary and Cambridge dictionary) and the assumption that federal bureaucrats could engage in post-hoc rectification. (For examples of how Federal bureaucracies misrepresent legal decisions see N. Capaldi, “Twisting the Law,” in Policy Review, Spring (1980), pp. 39-58).

“Diversity” and “Inclusion” were specifically derived/defined from immigration law. Immigration law, going back to the 1920s attempt at assimilation had focused on domestic nation retention/maintenance; but specifically the debate surrounding the 1965 ACT, was focused on future nation building. Coupled with America’s foreign policy in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and The End of History conception of remaking the world in our own image, it was a short step to imagining a world homogeneous in all respects. Therefore, the U.S. had to “look” like the UN. Nation building applied to or was retroactively imposed upon the the U.S. “Globalization” came to mean much more than doing business internationally.

The key point of conflict was “equality.” Either the world would aim for a meritocracy (Huntington’s Anglo-Protestant core) with its inevitable version of inequality of outcome or the world would aim for something vaguely egalitarian (cultural Marxism). Hence, the concept of “equity.” Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity is different for it recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact (additional?) resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. The term “equity” refers to fairness and justice and is distinguished from equality: Whereas equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances. The process is ongoing, requiring us to identify and overcome intentional and unintentional barriers arising from bias or systemic structures. In such a world, meritocracy becomes a form of unintentional systemic bias (racism?).

Inclusion means the practice or policy of including and integrating all people and groups in activities, organizations, political processes, etc., especially those who are disadvantaged, have suffered discrimination, or are living with “disabilities.”

It is worth noting that people with disabilities surely are victims (perhaps of the “genetic lottery” in some cases), but they are not usually victims of social or institutional policies or arrangements as is alleged in the case of other (racial, ethnic, etc.) groups. However, they are likely to be economically disadvantaged and therefore beneficiaries and supporters of proposed democratic party policies of the redistribution of wealth and positions of power.

All of this sounds like a way of improving productivity by adjusting distribution. It slides easily into equality of result. But there is something even more ominous. To achieve the foregoing noble ends, a new class of administrators needs to be created. The concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion must apply to them, i.e., the members of government bureaucracies and the leaders of every private institution have to mirror the general population. This becomes a sort of bizarre version of what Tocqueville warned us were the dangers of a “democratic” culture. Recall here, as well, Hume’s warning that a specially empowered class is required to maintain the egalitarian structure. To conclude, Bertrand de Jouvenel said it best. Redistribution strives to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, but all that we have ever accomplished is to transfer power from the individual to the state. The new world of DEI focuses on distribution not production, on equality and not individual excellence, on specially identifiable groups and not autonomous individuals. Nevertheless, the leaders or spokespersons of the groups will enjoy power, prestige, and perks not available to the rest of the group. The end product is neither a classless society nor an egalitarian one. Some are always more equal than others.

Keep in mind that universities, largely influenced by the social science faculty, had already been practicing some forms of affirmative action in the post WWII era and had since then openly welcomed and promoted it. Moreover, the demographics of university personnel has consciously strived to reflect an international demeanor.

The business world soon followed suit. In order to obtain some specific government contracts, private companies had to submit to the Department of Labor not only a bid but an affirmative action plan and show “good faith” in implementing it. The easiest way to “show” good faith is to adopt hiring quotas. It became part of the overhead of conducting a business. Moreover, in order to avoid being harassed, sued and absorbing enormous legal costs by a government agency, even if you are innocent and committed to the most rigorous meritocracy, is to adopt a quota hiring policy. Always remember, the “long march” through the institutions is designed to achieve revolutionary results by gaining control of institutions and government bureaucracies whose employees were all educated in institutions of higher education run by cultural Marxists and their allies and fellow travelers.

The number of well indoctrinated cultural Marxists is further increased and embedded (another “fifth column”) even in the business world by requiring or expecting companies to hire affirmative action officers and diversity training specialists. Diversity training is any program designed to “facilitate positive intergroup interaction, reduce prejudice and discrimination, and generally teach individuals who are different from others how to work together effectively” (“The Impact of Method”).

The Race Issue(s):

Hierarchy: Every society and every social entity has an elite who get privileges. There is no way to avoid a hierarchy. Even egalitarians themselves need, and insist upon, an elite to maintain the proposed equality.

The important question is whether the hierarchy has Functionality. What makes a hierarchy functional or dysfunctional? Answer: if the hierarchy serves to maximize the interests of all relevant parties. Traditionally, Anglo-American societies has aspired to achieve meritocracy because the pursuit of excellence benefits everyone. It benefits everyone because outstanding individuals create things (entrepreneurs, technology, medicine, sports, arts, etc.) that benefit everyone and actually create more opportunities for everyone. American Blacks as individuals have many examples (hundreds of thousands) of being part of the elite—success stories. This refutes every claim that the history of slavery and ‘Jim Crow’ necessarily hold people back.

The Black elites are not mathematically analogous to White elites. However, there is no reason to believe that any talent is proportional to a group’s size. History seems to confirm this. The greatest obstacles to more Black success are fatalism, the assumption that individuals are not responsible for their decisions, poor family structure, poor education policies and teacher union activism, previous government programs of welfare and affirmative action, the greed and corruption of some Black political and cultural elites, misguided liberal political and social theories and policies.

At the same time, a large percentage of American Blacks are dysfunctional (illegitimacy, unemployment, literacy, numeracy, imprisoned, etc.). THIS IS A FACT! Apologists automatically assume that (a) everyone is born ‘good’ and corrupted only by their environment (same way they presume that gun deaths are caused by guns not by people), (b) claim America is inherently racist or anti-Black achievement, (c) that the solution requires non-Blacks to make unending concessions (now its reparations), and (d) just in case equality of outcome is still not possible in a meritocratic society, then meritocracy has to be surrendered, OR replaced by egalitarianism and we as individuals are all to be conceptualized by group membership (class, race, culture, whatever). This is the hidden agenda of cultural Marxists.

Many Americans have believed, even before 1776, that Blacks (sub-Sahara African origin) as a group would never fit into American society. Even as late as Lincoln, Americans considered the policy of repatriating or emigrating Blacks to another less challenging environment (originally, e.g., Liberia). Affirmative action and DEI policies in a “woke” environment are beginning to exhaust the public’s patience and trust. It is time to consider that this may be the only viable alternative. Other countries are also beginning to learn that mass migrations often bring people from other cultures and subcultures that reject or resist assimilation.

Summary

The seamless transition from affirmative action to DEI reflected a series of public policies that challenged the Anglo-Protestant norms of America’s original settlers (liberty) and set in motion the current conflict with the norms of cultural Marxists (equality). That conflict originated in institutions of Higher Education with the domination of the social sciences by the utopian vision of a social technology. It was aided and abetted in institutions founded by Puritans under the influence of Transcendentalist millenarianism. The conflict spread beyond the universities when cultural Marxists gained control of the Democratic Party.


Nicholas Capaldi is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University, New Orleans.


Featured: Dante and Virgil in Hell, by Filippo Napoletano; painted ca. 1619-1620.