Liberal conceptions of politics see the Ernstfall merely as the exception and “legal normality” as the rule. This vision of things, inspired by Hegel’s teleological philosophy of history, corresponds to the domination of the bourgeoisie, who prefer safety to historical dynamism and the destiny of the people. On the contrary, according to Schmitt, the function of the sovereign is his capacity to decide the state of the exception, which by no means constitutes an anomaly but a permanent possibility. This aspect of Schmitt’s thought reflects his primarily French and Spanish inspirations (Bonald, Donoso Cortès, Bodin, Maistre, etc.) and makes it possible to locate him, along with Machiavelli, in the grand Latin tradition of political science.

In Legality and Legitimacy (1932),[1] Schmitt, as a disciple of Hobbes, suggests that legitimacy precedes the abstract concept of legality. A power is legitimate if it can protect the community in its care by force.  Schmitt accuses the idealistic and “juridical” conception of legality for authorizing Hitler to come to power. Legalism leads to the renunciation of power, which Schmitt calls the “politics of non-politics” (Politik des Unpolitischen), politics that does not live up to its responsibilities, that does not formulate a choice concerning the collective destiny. “He who does not have the power to protect anyone,” Schmitt writes in The Concept of the Political, “also does not have the right to require obedience. And conversely, he who seeks and accepts power does not have the right to refuse obedience.”

This dialectic of power and obedience is denied by social dualism, which arbitrarily opposes society and the sovereign function and imagines, contrary to all experience, that exploitation and domination are the political effects of “power” whereas they much more often arise from economic dependency.

Thus Schmitt elaborates a critique of the dualistic State of the nineteenth century based on the conceptions of John Locke and Montesquieu aiming at a separation between the sphere of the State and the private sphere. In fact, modern technocracies, historically resulting from the institutions of parliamentary representation, experience interpenetrations and oppositions between the private and public, as shown by Jürgen Habermas. Such a situation destabilizes the individual and weakens the State.

According to Schmitt, it is this weakness of the democracies that allowed the establishment of one party regimes, as he explains in Staat, Bewegung, Volk [State, Movement, People].[2] This type of regime constitutes the institutional revolution of the twentieth century; in fact, it is today the most widespread regime in the world. Only Western Europe and North America preserved the pluralist structure of traditional democracy, but merely as a fiction, since the true power is economic and technical.

The one party state tries to reconstitute the political unity of the nation, according to a threefold structure: the state proper includes civil servants and the army; the people are not a statistical population but an entity that is politicized and strongly organized in intermediate institutions; the party puts this ensemble in motion (Bewegung) and constitutes a portal of communication between the state and the people.

Schmitt, who returns again and again to Nazism, Stalinism, theocracies, and humanitarian totalitarianisms, obviously does not endorse the one party state. He does not advocate any specific “regime.” In the old Latin realist tradition inherited from Rome, Schmitt wants an executive who is both powerful and legitimate, who does not “ideologize” the enemy and can, in actual cases make use of force, who can make the state the “self-organization of society.”

War thus becomes a subject of political theory. Schmitt is interested in geopolitics as a natural extension of politics. For him, true politics, great politics, is foreign policy, which culminates in diplomacy. In The Nomos of the Earth (1951),[3] he shows that the state follows the European conception of politics since the sixteenth century. But Europe has become decadent: the bureaucratic state has been depoliticized and no longer allows the preservation of the history of the European people; the jus publicium europaeum which decided inter-state relations is declining in favor of globalist and pacifist ideologies that are incapable of founding an effective international law. The ideology of human rights and the vaunted humanitarianism of international institutions are paradoxically preparing a world where force comes before law. Conversely, a realistic conception of the relations between states, which allows and normalizes conflict, which recognizes the legitimacy of will to power, tends to civilize the relationship between nations.

Schmitt is, along with Mao Tse-Tung, the greatest modern theorist of revolutionary war and of the enigmatic figure of the partisan who, in this era of the depoliticization of states, assumes the responsibility of the political, “illegally” designates his enemies, and indeed blurs the distinction between war and peace.[4]

Such “a false pacifism” is part of a world where political authorities and independent sovereignties are erased by a world civilization more alienating than any tyranny. Schmitt, who influenced the constitution of the Fifth French Republic—the French constitution that is most intelligent, most political, and the least inspired by the idealism of the Enlightenment—gives us this message: liberty, humanity, peace are only chimeras leading to invisible oppressions. The only liberties that count—whether of nations or individuals—are those guaranteed by the legitimate force of a political authority that creates law and order.

Carl Schmitt does not define the values that mobilize the political and legitimate the designation of the enemy. These values must not be defined by ideologies—always abstract and gateways to totalitarianism—but by mythologies. In this sense, the functioning of government, the purely political, is not enough. It is necessary to add the “religious” dimension of the first function, as it is defined in Indo-European tripartition. It seems to us that this is the way one must complete Schmitt’s political theory. Because if Schmitt builds a bridge between anthropology and politics, one still needs to build another between politics and history.

Part 3 of 3

[2] Staat, Bewegung, Volk: Die Dreigleiderung der politischen Einheit [State, Movement, People: The Three Organs of Political Unity] (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1934)—trans. It concerns a series of studies on one-party states, primarily Marxist, that appeared in 1932.

[3] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006)—trans.

[4] Cf. “The Era of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” [1929], trans. Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick, in the expanded edition of The Concept of the Political—trans.

Schmitt does not believe in the disappearance of the political. Any type of activity can take on a political dimension. The political is a fundamental concept of collective anthropology. As such, political activity can be described as substantial, essential, enduring through time. The state, on the other hand, enjoys only conditional authority, i.e., a contingent form of sovereignty. Thus the state can disappear or be depoliticized by being deprived of the political, but the political—as substantial—does not disappear.

The state cannot survive unless it maintains a political monopoly, i.e., the sole power to define the values and ideals for which the citizens will agree to give their lives or to legally kill their neighbors—the power to declare war. Otherwise partisans will assume political activity and try to constitute a new legitimacy. This risk particularly threatens the bureaucratic states of modern liberal social democracies in which civil war is prevented only by the enervating influence of consumer society.

These ideas are expressed in The Concept of the Political, Schmitt’s most fundamental work, first published in 1928, revised in 1932, and clarified in 1963 by its corollary Theory of the Partisan.[1] Political activity is defined there as the product of a polarization around a relation of hostility. One of the fundamental criteria of a political act is its ability to mobilize a population by designating its enemy, which can apply to a party as well as a state. To omit such a designation, particularly through idealism, is to renounce the political. Thus the task of a serious state is to prevent partisans from seizing the power to designate enemies within the community, and even the state itself.

Under no circumstances can politics be based on the administration of things or renounce its polemical dimension. All sovereignty, like all authority, is forced to designate an enemy in order to succeed in its projects; here Schmitt’s ideas meet the research of ethologists on innate human behavior, particularly Konrad Lorenz.

Because of his “classical” and Machiavellian conception of the political, Schmitt endured persecution and threats under the Nazis, for whom the political was on the contrary the designation of the “comrade” (Volksgenosse).

The Schmittian definition of the political enables us to understand that contemporary political debate is depoliticized and connected with electoral sideshows. What is really political is the value for which one is ready to sacrifice one’s life; it can quite well be one’s language or culture. Schmitt writes in this connection that “a system of social organization directed only towards the progress of civilization” does not have “a program, ideal, standard, or finality that can confer the right to dispose of the physical life of others.” Liberal society, founded on mass consumption, cannot require that one die or kill for it. It rests on an apolitical form of domination: “It is precisely when it remains apolitical,” Schmitt writes, “that a domination of men resting on an economic basis, by avoiding any political appearance and responsibility, proves to be a terrible imposture.”

Liberal economism and “pluralism” mask the negligence of the state, the domination of the commercial castes, and the destruction of nations anchored in a culture and a history. Along with Sorel, Schmitt pleads for a form of power that does not renounce its full exercise, that displays its political authority by the normal means that belong to it: power, constraint, and, in exceptional cases, violence. By ignoring these principles the Weimar Republic allowed the rise of Hitler; the techno-economic totalitarianism of modern capitalism also rests on the ideological rejection of the idea of state power; this totalitarianism is impossible to avoid because it is proclaimed humane and is also based on the double idea of social pluralism and individualism, which put the nations at the mercy of technocratic domination.

The Schmittian critique of internal pluralism as conceived by Montequieu, Locke, Laski, Cole, and the whole Anglo-Saxon liberal school, aims at defending the political unity of nations, which is the sole guarantor of civic protection and liberties. Internal pluralism leads to latent or open civil war, the fierce competition of economic interest groups and factions, and ultimately the reintroduction within society of the friend-enemy distinction which European states since Bodin and Hobbes had displaced outwards.

Such a system naturally appeals to the idea of “Humanity” to get rid of political unities.  “Humanity is not a political concept,” writes Schmitt, who adds:

The idea of Humanity in doctrines based on liberal and individualistic doctrines of natural Right is an ideal social construction of universal nature, encompassing all men on earth. . . . which will not be realized until any genuine possibility of combat is eliminated, making any grouping in terms of friends and enemies impossible. This universal society will no longer know nations. . . . The concept of Humanity is an ideological instrument particularly useful for imperialistic expansion, and in its ethical and humane form, it is specifically a vehicle of economic imperialism. . . . Such a sublime name entails certain consequences for one who carries it. Indeed, to speak in the name of Humanity, to invoke it, to monopolize it, displays a shocking pretense: to deny the humanity of the enemy, to declare him outside the law and outside of Humanity, and thus ultimately to push war to the extremes of inhumanity.[2]

To define politics in terms of the category of the enemy, to refuse humanitarian egalitarianism, does not necessarily lead to contempt for man or racism. Quite the contrary. To recognize the polemical dimension of human relations and man as “a dynamic and dangerous being,” guarantees respect for  any adversary conceived as the Other whose cause no less legitimate than one’s own.

This idea often recurs in Schmitt’s thought: modern ideologies that claim universal truth and consequently consider the enemy as absolute, as an “absolute non-value,” lead to genocide. They are, moreover, inspired by monotheism (and Schmitt is a Christian pacifist and convert). Schmitt claims with good reason that the conventional European conception that validated the existence of the enemy and admitted the legitimacy of war—not for the defense of a “just” cause but as eternally necessitated by human relations—caused fewer wars and induced respect for the enemy considered as adversary (as hostis and not inimicus).

Part 2 of 3

[2] Cf. The Concept of the Political, 53–54—trans.

We met Carl Schmitt in the village of Plettenberg, the place of his birth and retirement. For four remarkable hours we conversed with the man who remains unquestionably the greatest political and legal thinker of our time. “We have been put out to pasture,” said Schmitt. “We are like domestic animals who enjoy the benefits of the closed field we are allotted. Space is conquered. The borders are fixed. There is nothing more to discover. It is the reign of the status quo . . .”

Schmitt always warned against this frozen order, which extends over the Earth and ruins political sovereignties. Already in 1928, in The Concept of the Political,[1] he detects in the universalist ideologies, those “of Rights, or Humanity, or Order, or Peace,” the project of transforming the planet into a kind of depoliticized economic aggregate which he compares to a “bus with its passengers” or a “building with its tenants.” And in this premonition of a world of the death of nations and cultures, the culprit is not Marxism but the liberal and commercial democracies. Thus Schmitt offers one of the most acute and perspicacious criticisms of liberalism, far more profound and original than the “anti-democrats” of the old reactionary right.

He also continues the “realist” manner of analyzing of politics and the state, in the tradition of Bodin, Hobbes, and Machiavelli. Equally removed from liberalism and modern totalitarian theories (Bolshevism and fascisms), the depth and the modernity of his views make him the most important contemporary political and constitutional legal theorist. This is why we can follow him, while of course trying to go beyond some of his analyses, as his French disciple Julien Freund, at the height of his powers, has already done.[2]

The intellectual journey of the Rhenish political theorist began with reflections on law and practical politics to which he devoted two works, in 1912 and 1914,[3] at the end of its academic studies in Strasbourg. After the war, having become a law professor at the universities of Berlin and Bonn, his thoughts were focused on political science. Schmitt, against the liberal philosophies of the Right, refused to separate it from politics.

His first work of political theory, Political Romanticism (1919),[4] is devoted to a critique of political romanticism which he opposes to realism. To Schmitt, the millennialist ideals of the revolutionary Communists and the völkisch reveries of the reactionaries seemed equally unsuitable to the government of the people. His second great theoretical work, Die Diktatur [Dictatorship] (1921),[5] constitutes, as Julien Freund writes, “one of the most complete and most relevant studies of this concept, whose history is analyzed from the Roman epoch up to Machiavelli and Marx.”[6]

Schmitt distinguishes “dictatorship” from oppressive “tyranny.” Dictatorship appears as a method of government intended to face emergencies. In the Roman tradition, the dictator’s function was to confront exceptional conditions. But Machiavelli introduces a different practice; he helps to envision “the modern State,” founded on rationalism, technology, and the powerful role of a complex executive: this executive no longer relies upon the sole sovereign.

Schmitt shows that with the French jurist Jean Bodin, dictatorship takes to the form of a “practice of the commissars” which arose in the sixteen and seventeenth centuries. The “commissars” are omnipotent delegates of the central power. Royal absolutism, established on its subordinates, like the Rousseauist model of the social contract which delegates absolute power to the holders of the “general will” set up by the French revolution, constitutes the foundation of contemporary forms of dictatorship.

From this point of view, modern dictatorship is not connected with any particular political ideology. Contrary to the analyses of today’s constitutionalists, especially Maurice Duverger, “democracy” is no more free of dictatorship than is any other form of state power. Democrats are simply deceiving themselves to think that they are immune to recourse to dictatorship and that they reconcile real executive power with pragmatism and the transactions of the parliamentary systems.

In a fundamental study on parliamentarism, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923),[7] Schmitt ponders the identification of democracy and parliamentarism. To him, democracy seems to be an ideological and abstract principle that masks specific modalities of power, a position close to those of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. The exercise of power in “democracy” is subject to a rationalist conception of the state which justified, for example, the idea of the separation of powers, the supposedly harmonious dialogue between parties, and ideological pluralism. It is also the rationality of history that founds the dictatorship of the proletariat. Against the democratic and parliamentarian currents, Schmitt places the “irrationalist” currents, particularly Georges Sorel and his theory of violence, as well as all non-Marxist critiques of bourgeois society, for example Max Weber.

This liberal bourgeois ideology deceives everyone by viewing all political activity according to the categories of ethics and economics. This illusion, moreover, is shared by liberal or Marxist socialist ideologies: the function of public power is no longer anything but economic and social. Spiritual, historical, and military values are no longer legitimate. Only the economy is moral, which makes it possible to validate commercial individualism and at the same time invoke humane ideals: the Bible and business. This moralization of politics not only destroys all true morals but transforms political unity into neutralized “society” where the sovereign function is no longer able to defend the people for whom it is responsible.

By contrast, Schmitt’s approach consists in analyzing the political phenomenon independently of all moral presuppositions. Like Machiavelli  and Hobbes, with whom he is often compared, Schmitt renounces appeals to the finer feelings and the soteriology of final ends. His philosophy is as opposed to the ideology of the Enlightenment  (Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Rousseau, etc.) and the various Marxian socialisms as it is to Christian political humanism. For him, these ideologies are utopian in their wariness of power and tend to empty out the political by identifying it with evil, even if it is allowed temporarily—as in the case of Marxism.

But the essence of Schmitt’s critique relates to liberalism and humanism, which he accuses of deception and hypocrisy. These theories view the activity of public power as purely routine administration dedicated to realizing individual happiness and social harmony. They are premised on the ultimate disappearance of politics as such and the end of history. They wish to make collective life purely prosaic but manage only to create social jungles dominated by economic exploitation and incapable of mastering unforeseen circumstances.

Governments subject to this type of liberalism are always frustrated in their dreams of transforming politics into peaceful administration: other states, motivated by hostile intentions, or internal sources of political subversion, always emerge at unforeseen moments. When a state, through idealism or misunderstood moralism, no longer places its sovereign political will above all else, preferring instead economic rationality or the defense of abstracted ideals, it also gives up its independence and its survival.

Part 1 of 3.

[2] Cf. Julien Freund, L’Essence du politique (Paris: Sirey, 1965), and La Fin de la Renaissance (Paris: PUF, 1980).

[3] Carl Schmitt, Gesetz und Urteil. Eine Untersuchung zum Problem der Rechtspraxis [Law and Judgment: An Investigation into the Problem of Legal Practice] [1912] (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1968) and Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen [The Value of the State and the Meaning of the Individual] (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1914)—trans.

[4] Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1985).—trans.

[5] Carl Schmitt, Die Diktaur: Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf [The Dictator: From the Origins of Modern Theories of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle] (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1921)—trans.

[6] In his Preface to the French edition of The Concept of the Political: Carl Schmitt, La notion de politique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1972).

[7] Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986). See also Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty [1922], trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986)—trans.

Western Political philosophy tends toward moral and political universalism: the idea that norms are valid for all human beings. This presupposes either that human beings are biologically pretty much the same, or that human biodiversity is irrelevant to moral and political issues. Nevertheless, Western political philosophers initially limited their conclusions to ethnically homogeneous regions they knew and understood. Plato’s Republic, for example, portrays an ideal society for Greeks, not barbarians, and even well past the Enlightenment John Stuart Mill explicitly excluded many non-Europeans from his conclusions in On Liberty.[1]

Plato and Mill were prescient to do so. Few pre-modern people could travel widely. Consequently most people they knew were much like themselves. But during the Age of Discovery, which started at the end of the fifteenth century, European voyages throughout the world encountered the full richness of Earth’s botanical, zoological, and anthropological diversity, and efforts to understand it contributed to the seventeenth century’s Scientific Revolution.

By 1735, in the Enlightenment’s full flower, Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus developed the system still used to classify Earth’s biodiversity. He observed significant morphological differences between the human populations of the different continents, which led him classify these groups as distinct species.[2] Such human populations are now called races.

The great controversy of our time rages between those who acknowledge or deny the existence of distinct races. The race deniers are motivated by the conflict between human biodiversity and philosophical or religious forms of universalism. Nevertheless, the study of human diversity remained mainstream science until it was purged and proscribed for political reasons in the mid-twentieth century.[3] This is hardly the first effort to censor inconvenient scientific truths. The Catholic Church’s temporary suppression of heliocentric cosmology is only the most notorious example among many.

Suppressing the truth of racial diversity is proving as hard as maintaining belief in an earth-centered solar system or a flat earth. Even as early as 1979, the fundamental fact that innate and fixed racial mentalities cause distinctive cultures rather than result from them was proven, even though quietly ignored.[4] Now we know how truly stable these mentalities remain, even with the increasing mobility of populations. Few factors are as important in human affairs, since they offer the only reasonable explanation for the otherwise inexplicable stability of differences in seemingly disparate phenomena ranging from neighborhood school achievement to international development levels.[5]

For years genetics remained a crutch that permitted differences among races to continue being trivialized, since differences among genes were not readily apparent. Even genetic differences between clearly distinct species like humans and chimpanzees appeared to be few. Now we know better. Significant differences within genes and in non-gene DNA important for controlling gene activity correlate with race so well that DNA can now be routinely matched to racial phenotypes with complete reliability.[6] Claiming races are alike because they share the same genes is now equivalent to claiming all books written with the same 26 letters say the same thing.

Modern genetic analysis shows that Plato’s Greeks and Mill’s Europeans are an unusually homogeneous part of the earth’s human population. European mitochondrial DNA, for example, has fewer haplotypes and is thus more homogeneous in origin than that of the human populations on other continents including those superficially appearing more geographically isolated, a conclusion confirmed by other measures of genetic diversity.[7]

Nevertheless, it is an article of faith for modern political philosophy that races and even their associated cultures are trivial phenomena that should be ignored. What it considers significant are various universally applicable abstract concepts. Consequently it was an ideological bombshell when Samuel Huntington, a leading political scientist, acknowledged the obvious fact that continental fault lines between ethnic groups are more significant and stable sources of human difference and potential conflict than abstract philosophical concepts ever were.[8] Just as racial and ethnic diversity are relevant to understanding conflicts between societies, they can also illuminate conflicts within them. What follows is a sketch of American political history not in terms of abstract philosophical concepts, but in terms of the ethnic rivalries and hegemonies that have played a decisive role in shaping out destiny as a people.

Anglo-Saxon Hegemony

The first settlers of what became the United States came from the British Isles. Britons rapidly dominated other ethnic groups, both the aboriginal Indians they found and the Europeans (French, Dutch, Swedish, German, etc.) who followed, establishing the hegemony of English language, law, literature, religion, and general culture. By convention, this culture is called “Anglo-Saxon,” but this term conceals the considerable ethnic diversity of settlers from the British Isles. In fact, there was no unified Anglo-Saxon hegemony, but a series of shifting hegemonies of different British ethnic groups.

In the seventeenth century, East Anglians settled New England. People from the south and west of England settled Virginia and the coastal colonies to the south. Diverse English and non-English groups settled the Middle Atlantic colonies between them. In the eighteenth century they were followed by a large migration of lowland Scots and north English who often arrived after a sojourn in Northern Ireland. This second wave of migrants, collectively called the Scots-Irish, eventually brought their distinctive ethnic character to much of the future United States as they spread south and west across North America during the next century from initial settlements in valleys of the Appalachian Mountains.[9]

All these groups were once called “Native Americans.”[10] From a biological point of view, this is entirely accurate. Organisms are considered ecologically “native” to a place if they arrive there on their own initiative, irrespective of arrival time. They are non-native or introduced if they arrive due to another entity’s activities. For example, in the United States house sparrows are non-native birds because people introduced them around 1850. Cattle egrets, in contrast, are native because they arrived on their own initiative, even though it was in 1941, long after the house sparrows had arrived. Cattle egrets are considered non-native only in places they first reached with human help, like Hawaii.[11]

America’s European settlers are the authentic Native Americans because they invented the concept of America and arrived here on their own initiative. Only later, as part of the concerted campaign to generate self-hatred among Native Americans of European origin, was the title stolen from them and bestowed on the disparate aboriginal peoples called Indians, who had arrived in America earlier but never conceived of it as a unified entity. Non-native people did not exist in North America until slaves were imported from Africa.

The English settlers rapidly came into ethnic conflict with Indians. (There were, of course, many ethnic conflicts between Indians as well, but these fall outside of American history proper.) In 1622, Indians of the Powhatan tribal confederacy launched a genocidal attack that killed nearly one-third of Virginia’s settlers, and in 1675 the Wampanoag Indian leader Metacom or King Philip waged a nearly successful war of annihilation against the New England colonists.[12] America’s new settlers gradually increased in numbers and technological skills, which caused their conflicts with Indians to eventually become more one-sided. Their frontier, however, was most often defined by isolated and vulnerable Scots-Irish homesteads.[13] Until well into the nineteenth century, many of these pioneers faced death each night from Indian raiders, and from the 1840s to 1860s Comanches supported by Mexican Comancheros drove the Texas frontier back 100 miles while ethnically cleansing it of Scots-Irish families.[14]

Britain’s first colonies in North America were gradually surrounded to the north and west by a thin cordon of small French settlements along waterways of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers connected through the Great Lakes. Between 1689 and 1763, a series of wars between France and England spilled over to their North American colonies. The last of these wars is called “the French and Indian War,” reflecting alliances between French and Indians that brought death and destruction to the British colonists in general and Scots-Irish frontier families in particular. Final victory over the French in 1763 brought British rule to the St. Lawrence Valley and the Great Lakes region and created colonies that eventually became Canada.

Soon after the first British colonies were founded in North America, the mother country passed, from 1642 to 1651, through a time of troubles that included two civil wars. In the colonies, this resulted in self-reliance and de facto independence that the inhabitants were reluctant to relinquish when the troubles ended and British power returned. English divisions leading to the civil wars, mirrored by differences between northern and southern colonies, also accentuated their pre-existing ethnic distinctiveness.[15] Britain’s effort to directly control New England under Edmond Andros was aborted in 1688, when locals resisted, and his patron, King James II, was replaced by William and Mary in England’s Glorious Revolution.[16] Increased eighteenth-century British efforts to directly control the American colonies eventually led to the Revolutionary War and independence in 1783, followed by the formation of a united national government in 1789.

The first US president, George Washington, initially united the coastal regions of the original thirteen states reasonably well, but discontent among Scots-Irish in the interior led to armed resistance.[17] After 1797, under John Adams, there was a significant shift of hegemony to New England. But this was abruptly ended by the election of 1800, in what might be called America’s first peaceful democratic revolution. The defeat of Adams by Jefferson gave the coastal South and Virginia virtually unopposed hegemony in America until Andrew Jackson’s 1828 election shifted it to the interior Scots-Irish, who largely retained it for the next thirty years. Opposition to Jackson and his unpopular Dutch-New York successor Martin Van Buren provided an opportunity, however, for growth of the Whigs, a rival Scots-Irish-centered party that won some elections during this period.

Two major new immigrations began in the 1840s with the arrival of large numbers of Germans, who often became farmers in the Middle West, and Irish, who found work as laborers in eastern cities like New York and Boston.[18]

In many nations a unifying nationalism develops around a central or core region, but America lacked such a region.[19] The post-1828 hegemony of the Scots-Irish and allied groups was America’s closest approximation to an authentic ethnic nationalism capable of uniting its regional ethnic cultures. Nationalist groups like the American Party and Young America[20] appeared during this period, which one modern historian disapprovingly calls the “White Republic.”[21] It didn’t last, but “white” is still used to this day as a term for European-Americans.

During the White Republic, New England increased its soft power by emphasizing education, manufacturing, and trade. Its early colleges like Harvard and Yale were academic models that still give America’s college towns a New England cultural character. New England’s weakness was a lack of political power, but it eventually gained that by exploiting divisions that weakened Scots-Irish hegemony. [22]

Part 1 of 4

[2] George M. Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[3] Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); William Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

[4] Daniel G. Freedman, Human Sociobiology: A Holistic Approach (New York: The Free Press, 1979).

[5] Michael Levin, Why Race Matters: Racial Differences and What They Mean (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997); Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002) and IQ and Global Inequality (Augusta, Ga.: Washington Summit Publishers, 2006); J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Natural History Perspective (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1995); Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, Race: The Reality of Human Differences (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2004).

[6] John M. Butler, Forensic DNA Typing: Biology, Technology, and Genetics of STR Markers, 2nd Edition (Burlington, Mass.: Elsevier, 2005).

[7] Stephen Oppenheimer, The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey out of Africa (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003); L. Cavalli-Sforza, P. Menozzi, and A. Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes, abridged paperback edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

[8] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

[9] David H. Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); James Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway Books, 2004); Kevin Phillips American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006).

[10] Madison Grant, The Conquest of a Continent (New York: Scribners, 1933).

[11] John Long, Introduced Birds of the World (New York: Universe Books, 1981); John Terres, The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds (New York: Knopf, 1980).

[12] Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 3rd edition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992).

[13] Webb, Born Fighting.

[14] T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: Macmillan, 1968).

[15] Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

[16] Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (New York: Knopf, 1993).

[17] Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars.

[18] Fischer, Albion’s Seed.

[19] N. Pounds and S. Ball, “Core-Areas and the Development of the European State System,” in F. Dohrs and L. Sommers, eds., Cultural Geography: Selected Readings (New York: Crowell, 1967).

[20] Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005).

[21] Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso, 1990).

[22] Fischer, Albion’s Seed; Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars.

Carl Schmitt

Note: The following short synthesis of Schmitt’s classic essay The Concept of the Political stems, in part, from a recent discussion with the Bay Area Nationalist Book Club.

However it is posed, the question of the political is always about the most important issue facing every people.

The political, though, is not to be confused with “politics” or “party-politics,” which speaks to individual or special interest in parliamentary gas houses.

“Politics” is tied to rationalism, materialism, economism, and the rule of Mammon, all of which undermine authority, tradition, and the imperatives of the “political.”

One.

The political addresses the state in its highest manifestation as the agent of its inner peace and outer security.

Only after liberal society reformed the state — to enable private individuals to maneuver for positions of power and influence, once particular interests superseded the polity’s collective interest — did politics and the political begin to diverge.  (In the Unites States, the first liberal state, politics was a business from the very beginning).

The political for Schmitt is thus not about what is conventionally thought of as politics, but rather about those situations, where the state (“the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit”) is separate from and above society, especially in situations when it is threatened with destruction by a superpersonal movement or entity and must therefore act to defend itself and the community it is dedicated to defending.

Two.

The polar categories defining the political are, as such, those of the friend-enemy distinction — a distinction implying the possibility of physical killing between rival states. This distinction is based on antithetical categories distinct to the political — distinct in the way that the categories of good and evil are specific to morality, the beautiful and the ugly to aesthetics, the profitable or unprofitable to economics, etc.

Three.

Who is the enemy? For Schmitt, it is the superpersonal other, the stranger, the existential outsider, whose intense hostility and readiness for combat threatens the state and the relations of friendship internal to it.

The enemy is thus designated not on the basis of personal feelings or moral judgments (inimicus), but only in face of an intensely hostile power (hostis), which menaces the state’s existence.

An enemy, in this sense, exists wherever one fighting-collectivity poses an existential threat to another collectivity.

In order to identify the enemy, it is necessary to experience it as a live-threat — in a way no rational analysis, no discursive logic, no objective judgment, no normative standard can possibly anticipate — for this experience is of a people, which knowingly senses whenever its existence is endangered.

The enemy here is defined in terms of criteria, not content or substance — which means it takes the form of something that is always specific and concrete and very intense — not being, then, just something symbolic or metaphorical.

“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict.”

Usually the enemy is the alien “other,” whose threat comes from the exterior.

But the enemy can also emerge from internal differences, such as when domestic social, religious, sectional, etc., differences become so antagonistic that they weaken the unity of the state and the common identity of the citizenry, polarizing them into friends and enemies — i.e., into a state of civil war, as internal politics become primary.

Another, rarer example of an enemy situated in the interior (an example distinct to the United States,) is found whenever foreign culture elements take control of the state at its citizens’ expense (becoming what Yockey called “an inner enemy”).

Four.

Friends, by contrast, share a commitment to a way of life that binds them together, that gives them a sense of solidarity, a sense transcending matters of economics or morality, something that resembles a shared, homogenous identity reaching beyond the imperatives of private life — even if these “friends” do not know one another.

Friendship — the condition of amity between those making up a large socially or communally cohesive association — is always prior to enmity.  For it is impossible to have a life-threatening “them” without first having a life-affirming “us.”

Indeed, it is only in face of the death and destruction posed by an enemy that “we” become fully conscious of who we are and learn what is truly “rational” for us.

This friendship implies that the “particular” trumps the “universal” and that a compromised convergence of interest, based on qualities shared with the enemy, is inconceivable.

Five.

The political is ultimately, then, a question of life or death — a question that presupposes the existence of an enemy — an enemy comprehended independent of other antitheses (e.g., the moral antitheses of good v. evil) and with conceptually autonomous categories of thought.

In presupposing the political, the state in the Schmittian sense orients to external threats rather than to internal structures of government or social-economic activity (the realms of party politics).  The state anchors itself, instead, in its willingness to defend — with arms, if necessary — its distinct existence.

This gives the state the “right,” in exerting its jus belli authority, to call on its individual members to kill and to risk being killed.

Such an authority makes the state “superior” to all other associations, for it alone compels its members to kill and risk being killed.

Weak peoples afraid of the “trials and risks” that come with the political inevitably disappear from history

It is this determination, implying life or death, that specifically constitutes what Schmitt sees as the essence of the political.

Whoever, moreover, makes this determination, deciding whether an enemy is to be fought or not, possesses the decisive, authoritative political power: Sovereign power.

When the imminent threat of war subsides, so too does the political.

This doesn’t mean that war in itself is the “aim, purpose, or content” of the political, only that the “mode of behavior” — the individual responsibility — the sovereign exercise of authority — that perceives the danger and decides to resist it — constitutes the political.

To be political in Schmitt’s sense requires, then, not just a prior commitment to domestic relations of friendship and the social solidarity it engenders, but also to a particular form of life in which group identity is valued, in the last instance, above physical existence.

Six.

The political, which “neither favors nor opposes war,” is thus not necessarily a function solely of war (the highest expression of the friend-enemy polarity) nor can it be said that it is per se a bellicose nihilism. Rather it is more like something determined by the possibility of armed enmity — even in cases where the parties belligérantes legitimate their belligerency in the name of freedom, justice, or some other abstraction.

War is simply an “ever present possibility,” which Schmitt recognized and designated as the core of the political sphere.

But if war for Schmitt is, above all, a reaction to an external threat, not a sought-after aggression, what does this imply existentially? (On the surface, at least, it suggests a rejection of l’esprit de conquête and the will to power, which one comrade thought was a liberal vestige in Schmitt’s thought and I thought was a Catholic moral one. In any case, Schmitt never actually came to terms with Nietzsche.)

Seven.

Liberalism cannot distinguish between friend and enemy because its individualist, universalist, and pluralist ideology (“conceived in liberty and dedicated to the [abstract] proposition that all men are created equal”) denies that such a designation is conceivable in a world understood in market or moralist terms, where there are only competitors and moral entities, with whom one negotiates or reasons on the basis of universal rights and interests.

Compromise, not conflict, is accordingly the principal aim of the liberal state. Hence, its propensity for exchange, negotiation, and business.

But however it may try, liberalism cannot elude the “political.”

In cases where it is forced to designate an enemy, it is conceived as being outside “humanity” and thus something not simply to be defeated, but ruthlessly annihilated — for, by definition, the liberal’s enemy is non-human.

Eight.

Because it sees the state as essentially an instrument of society and economy, dedicated to the greatest happiness (material well-being) of the greatest number, liberalism lacks a political theory – having, in effect, only a critique of the political.

Indeed, liberal individualism and universalism negate the very possibility of the political, at least in principle. For nothing in its view should compel an individual to die for the sake of the state, which it understands in economic and ethical, instead of political terms.

Such a compulsion, it holds, would not only violate the individual’s freedom, it would make his nation/state association primary — whereas liberalism, in its humanism and rationalism, irrationally and inhumanely claims that only individualistic matters of ethics and economics are primary.

The liberal state, as such, is ethically committed to the rights and interests of individuals seen as self-contained units, whose sum is humanity — and economically, committed to untrammeled production and trade.

In practice, this has meant that the old ordered estates, along with the “prerogatives” of tradition, were forced to bow to the wishes of formless, manipulable masses, as quantity trumped quality and money overthrew the divine right of kings — a right, incidentally, that subsequently passed to the money men, this ethnic minority whose rule has proven to be more devastating than that of any former tyrant.

It has also meant that the usurer could evoke property rights to dispossess farmers of their land; that the personal interests represented by politicians takes priority over the nation’s Destiny; and that the brotherhood of man entails the greatest, most violent, and vigilant of wars to stifle expressions of political polarity.

Nine.

The political, though, cannot be done away with or evaded — it is immune to depoliticizing procedure — it is the essence of sovereignty.

In cases of war, the state, as the instrument of the political, is the ultimate authority — above the law — and as long as a state of emergency lasts.

Legal systems are based, in fact, not on legal reason, but on an authority that speaks to an existential/ontological situation needing no justification other than its own existence.

Ten.

“The protego ergo oblige [I protect therefore I oblige] is the cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am] of the state.”

The state, as such, is the highest form of human association, defending the life of its citizens and expecting that they, in turn, prepare to die for it, if necessary.

Protection and obedience, in healthy bondage to one another, are in this way mutually entwined.

Eleven.

Ultimately, the political is an existential matter of the highest degree.

In the face of death, one is forced to take sides and thus to take responsibility for one’s life. The enemy, in this strife, invariably highlights the true significance of friendship.

At the same time, the enemy defines what it means to be human, for only when faced with death do we confront life as a whole.

The political, then, entails Destiny, for it keeps men in historicity and it takes them beyond their private selves, into the realm of great events.

In the liberal’s envisioned one-world state, in a situation where there is only “humanity” and thus no friend-enemy distinctions (except with extra-terrestrials), there would be no political, only competition between individuals, whose highest concern would be self-enrichment, comfort, and entertainment.

Without the political and the state upon which it rests (i.e., without an existential commitment to a shared identity), there would be, as a consequence, no polarity, no opposition, no transcendent reference, and no way to counter the entertainment of modern nihilism.

The first victim of liberal depoliticization is thus always “meaning.”

If Europeans, then, are ever to regain control of their Destiny, it will only come through a political assertion of the identity that distinguishes them from the world’s other peoples.

All else is simply “politics.”

The Vicomte de Bonald, 1754 - 1840

Unlike Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald devoted little space to analyzing the French Revolution itself. His focus instead was on understanding the traditional society which had been swept away. His review of Mme. de Staël’s Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, e.g., ends up turning into a theory of the nobility and its function. Bonald scholar Christopher Olaf Blum calls this “his most original contribution to the theory of the counter-revolution.”

Any advanced society requires men who devote themselves to the public good in preference to the private good of their families. This is particularly so in the professions of law and war: Bonald calls judges and warriors “merely the internal and external means of society’s conservation,” and hence the two fundamentally political or public professions.

To entice men into public service, two things are required. First, such men must be economically independent. They cannot rely on the changeable will of an employer who pays them a salary, however generous. Nor would their public duties allow them leisure to busy themselves with commerce. Therefore they must be landholders.

Second, men must be socialized to see public service as an honor and a distinction:

The [pre-revolutionary] constitution said to every private family: “when you have fulfilled your destination in domestic society, which is to acquire an independent property through work, order and thrift—when, that is, you have acquired enough that you have no need of others and are able to serve the state at your own expense, from your own income and, if necessary, with your capital—the greatest honor to which you can aspire will be to pass into the order particularly devoted to the service of the state.

In reality, this is a kind of noble fiction: the service nobility’s “distinction, by a strange reversal of conceptions, has seemed, even to them, to be a prerogative, while it is in fact nothing but servitude.” Their own interest would dictate their continued devotion to their families and the concerns of private life.

Pre-revolutionary France had a remarkable way of filling public offices: they were sold. Known as the “venality of offices,” the system is most often cited as an example of the irrationality of the ancien régime’s finances. Liberal historians especially have criticized the system for delaying the onset of large-scale capitalism in France: instead of expanding their commercial operations indefinitely, successful merchants would convert their fortunes into land in order to purchase more ‘honorable’ offices for themselves or their sons. Bonald warmly defends the custom:

There could be no more moral institution than one which, by the most honorable motive, gave an example of disinterestedness to men devoured by a thirst for money in a society in which the passion was a fertile source of injustice and crime. There could be no better policy than to stop, by a powerful yet voluntary means, and by the motive of honor, the immoderate accumulation of wealth in the same hands.

A large payment for occupying offices of public trust, he says, functioned as proof of a candidate’s independence and disinterestedness. The ‘opening of careers  to talents’ (which the Revolution made such a fuss over) merely encouraged bribery and endless strife over who was talented. Open venality was, strange to say, the more objective procedure.

Bonald contrasts the service nobility of France favorably with what he calls the political nobility of England: the English peers were “no body of nobles destined to serve political power but a senate destined to exercise it.” Nor were they wholly devoted to public duties: “The peer who makes laws for three months of the year sells linens for the other nine.”

The liberal might respond that “private” linen merchants are serving the public just as much as judges or military men: they provide merchandise to the “general public.” Contemporary libertarians have effectively satirized the notion of “public servants” who consume half our incomes, while “selfish businessmen” labor so that we may feed, clothe, and house ourselves more cheaply than any people in history.

Bonald mentions someone’s suggestion that actors be considered “public servants” since they perform for the public: this notion was universally and deservedly ridiculed, even by many who could not explain why actors were not “public men.”

The case with merchants is similar: “the merchant who arranges for a whole fleet of sugar and coffee serves individuals no less than the shopkeeper who sells them to me.” But the soldier who sacrifices his life for his country does not act merely for the benefit of the particular persons who make up the country at a particular moment. Justice has a similar irreducibly impersonal or universal intention: it is ideally “blind” or without regard for persons. Economic thinking cannot account for these types of human action.

(The philosophically inclined may wish to consult my discussion of the essential difference between universalist vs. particularist action in Alexandre Kojeve and the Outcome of Modern Thought, p. 92ff. Bonald’s views on this matter are quite similar to Hegel’s.)

It should be acknowledged that Bonald’s theory of the nobility is an idealizing interpretation. Since the time of Louis XIV, the grande noblesse at Versailles had not performed much of any function, and well before the Revolution, many noblemen bore a closer resemblance to the dissolute characters in Les Liaisons dangereuses than to the ideal type described by Bonald. As Blum says, “in making [his] argument, [Bonald] was a reformer, for the French nobility had shown itself willing to jettison its duties in favor of the kind of freedom that would enable them, the wealthy, to dominate more effectively and without the hindrance of traditional strictures.”

Recommended reading:

The True & Only Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Economy, & Society
Louis de Bonald (translated by Christopher Olaf Blum)
Naples, Fla.: Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2006

Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition
Edited and translated by Christopher Olaf Blum
Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2004

On Divorce
Louis de Bonald
Translated and edited by Nicholas Davidson
New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992

Read F. Roger Devlin’s review of Bonald’s On Divorce here and here.

Kdo by měl vládnout?

Každý den, když si prohlížím internetové zpravodajství a diskusní servery, vidím, že otázka, jak by se měla rekrutovat skutečná vládnoucí elita, je ostrým bodem sváru mezi politickými komentátory. Až dosud jsem neměl osobně k problematice příliš co říci. Nechci ostatním vnucovat svůj názor. Být politikem by nevyhovovalo mé spíše introvertní povaze, je to úkol, který radši přenechám jiným. Bude lepší se tedy skutečně podívat na podstatu věci, než pokračovat v kypění debat bez znalosti patřičných souvislostí.

Zastánci Nietzscheho

Jak zde jistě každý bude vědět, zastánci a příznivci filosofa Friedricha Nietzscheho jsou jeho zanícenými obdivovateli a poněkud nezvykle interpretují teorie svého vzoru. Věří v kastovní systém kněží, válečníků a rolníků (dělníků), sami sebe jako součást úzké skupinky vyvolených, kteří by tvořili vládnoucí elity ve vysněném etnicky homogenním státě. Každý z nich věří, že každý člověk má svou niternou podstatu, panskou nebo otrockou, dominantní, či submisivní a od tohoto základu odvozují morální systém, korespondující s prvotním rozdělením lidí na silné a slabé. Tak jako Nietzsche hlásal „panskou morálku“, jeho zastánci chtějí o tom, kdo bude vládnout, rozhodovat „vyšší typ člověka“ a skoncovat s liberální demokracií.

Zastánci Thomase Jeffersona

Ve Spojených státech představují tito lidé nejpočetnější část konzervativních a národních kruhů. Z jejich pohledu je nejlepší vláda ta, která má nejmenší moc. Na americkém systému nespatřují apriorně nic špatného. Věří ve stát a lokální vládu a instinktivně oponují shromažďování moci ve Washingtonu. Jeffersonovi zastánci by rádi přičetli úpadek porodnosti a civilizační pokles korumpujícími tlaku vnějších sil, jmenovitě Židů (či Izraeli) a argumentují, že rozumná rasová politika (založená na odmítnutí imigrace, pozn. překl.) by například mohla po odstranění této rakoviny vyvést Ameriku ze společenských potíží. V jeffersoniánském systému by byla vládnoucí elita delegována lokálními volby a hromaděním národního bohatství.

Zastánci Alexandra Hamiltona

Podobně jako zastánci Jeffersona, tak i zastánci pojetí AlexanderaHamiltona stále věří v republikánskou (samo)vládu, ale na rozdíl od prvně jmenovaných preferují silný, centralizovaný stát, oslabující lidský individualismus. Namísto volného obchodu, požadují „America First“, tedy víceméně soběstačnou obchodní politiku. Zastánci Hamiltona podporují silný veřejný sektor a regulovaný trh s cílem zabezpečit rovnocennou distribuci bohatství. Věří, že ústavní reformy mohou zbrzdit, nebo zastavit kulturní a etnický úpadek západní civilizace. Vládnoucí elitu by formovaly volby a akumulace bohatství v soukromé sféře.

Libertariáni

Libertariáni jsou podmnožinou zastánců Jeffersona, kteří věří v minimální stát. Tvrdí, že jediná funkce státu, která by měla příslušet státu, je ochrana práv jednotlivce: čili policie, armáda a soudy. Libertariáni odmítají veškeré pokrokářství devatenáctého století ve jménu individuální svobody. V ideálním libertariánském státě by se vládnoucí elita legitimizovala skrze participaci na tržní ekonomice a jako vládnoucí moc by byla omezena striktní Ústavou.

Fašisté

Fašisté (zahrnující nacionální socialisty a další různorodé odrůdy fašismu) požadují autoritativní stát v čele s mocným vůdcem s pokud možno absolutní mocí. Rádi by se zřekli liberální demokracie a nahradili ji vládou hierarchizované, režimu věrné byrokracie. Tato koncentrace moci a síly by byla užita ke zbavení se pro fašistický stát nežádoucích elementů (různých politických odpůrců, etnických skupin – Židů, atp.). Vládnoucí stav by se delegoval z vládnoucí strany, jejíž představitelé by zároveň tvořili lídry establishementu.

Platonisté

Nemohu najít lepšího slova, ale „Platonisté“ jsou v zásadě ti, kdo obhajují pravidla, stanovená Vládcem. Vládci budou vybírání na základě svého chování a morální hodnoty.

Konzervativní nacionalisté

Konzervativní nacionalisté věří v silnou, obrozenou vládu Christianitas. V podstatě to znamená, že požadují stát, postavený na hodnotách Evangelia. Někteří konzervativní nacionalisté preferují republiku, jiní monarchii, někteří teokratickou diktaturu. Ve všech případech je vládnoucí vrstva úzce spjata se zbožností.

Monarchisté

Požadují vládu krále a dědičné aristokracie. Vládnoucí vrstva je odvozena z královské krve.

Anarchisté

Chtějí zcela odstranit jakoukoli vládu. V jimi navrhovaném stavu není žádná vláda, politika neexistuje a stejně tak žádný mechanismus pro selekci elit. V beztřídní společnosti jsou si všichni teoreticky rovni.

Kde stojím já?

Po tomto výčtu nezbývá než zformulovat vlastní odpověď na vytyčenou otázku.
Politicky někde mezi Hamiltoniány a Platonisty. Domnívám se, že vláda může být dobrým silovým prostředkem v situaci, kdy potřebujeme mít silný stát k odvrácení invaze masového přistěhovalectví. Republikánský systém je osvědčený model pro zajištění kontinuity a mírovou výměnu moci. Myslím, že bychom nebyli moudří, kdybychom se těchto jistot vzdávali ve jménu některých vratkých idejí, vyjmenovaných výše.

Nejhorší aspekty republikanismu však spočívají v obchodovatelnosti s ústavními principy. Osobně například nevěřím v rovnost volebního práva. V mé osobní, hypotetické, ideální republice, by bylo případnému rozšíření volebního práva vyhověno jen za určitých podmínek. Volič by musel být inteligentní, kompetentní a mít určité morální minimum, postačující k tomu, aby využil privilegia generovat svou volbou vládnoucí elitu. Také vládnoucí vrstva by měla více moci než „lid“.

Z morálního (nikoli tedy politického) hlediska mě v těchto otázkách ovlivnil Alasdair MacIntyre. Stejně jako on, i já věřím, že morálka má smysl vždy pouze v určitém kontextu etablovaných tradic. Na světě máme celou řadu morálních řádů, každý z nich má vlastní historii, každý z nich vzešel z odlišných předpokladů a odlišných počátků. Je nemožné snažit se najít společný jmenovatel ideální vlády mezi nesouměřitelnými tradicemi a sdílenými morálkami jednotlivých společností.

Myslím, že současný stav západní morálky se stal obětí katastrofy, popsané MacIntyrem v předmluvě knihy „After Virtue“: ovládáme pouze malé části našeho koherentního morálního systému, termíny, které ztratily svůj kontext, když se jednou stali hodnověrnými a že racionálně uvažující jedinci jsou odkloněni do nihilismu tímto zmatkem. Nejsou zde žádné univerzální, objektivně platné morální principy analogické zákonům vědy. Namísto toho se morální filosofie stala praktickou vědou a popřela tak své poslání, o kterém hovořil Aristoteles: je to návod k tomu, jak realizovat daný ideál dobra. Jinými slovy, věřím tomu, že morálka (na jakémkoli stupni a v jakékoli společnosti), je redukovatelná na dobro. To je ale pro jinou diskusi.

To byly mé odpovědi. A jaké jsou vaše?

The Vicomte de Bonald, 1754 - 1840

Read Part 1 here.

Divorce

The reader may be forgiven for wondering why the foregoing matters are discussed at length in a treatise called On Divorce. Today we are inclined to view marriage as a “personal matter.” But it is not. Most obviously, it also concerns the interests of the children it produces:

Public power is the guarantor of the commitment of the two spouses to form a society; for public power always represents the absent person in the family: the child before birth, the father after death. The contract formed between three persons cannot be broken by two, to the prejudice of the third, the weakest one in the society. (176)

It also concerns the larger society, since the family is its fundamental element.

As Bonald says, “no question is simpler in its principles or more fertile in its consequences, since by itself [divorce] raises all the fundamental questions for society concerning power and duty.” (38)

Bonald’s treatise was occasioned by the proposal of a new Civil Code which allowed divorce on various grounds. Arguing against the permission, he referred to his threefold division of societies: primitive or patriarchal, perfect or natural, and deviant or unnatural. The law of polygamy, as well as the Mosaic permission to repudiate wives, are imperfect laws permissible to a primitive society:

[They] can be tolerated in that state of society which precedes any public establishment and is called the patriarchal state; because the multiplication of the species, which polygamy encourages at this age of society alone, may be appropriate to a small tribe which is trying to raise itself to the strength and dignity of a nation. (79)

Polygamy is imperfect because it creates conflicting interests within the family; but it does not separate children from their parents.

Similarly, the law of repudiation is harsh, since it punishes a woman for the fault of nature (childlessness). But it is not unnatural, since it leaves exclusively in man the essential attribute of power, the right to judge the woman; it is always an act of jurisdiction even when it is not an act of justice. The power vested in the man is, indeed, excessive and despotic; but in this respect it merely resembles public authority in its earliest stage.

The permission of repudiation has less dangerous consequences among a nascent people than it would for us. The family lived a rural life, isolated from other families, occupied with healthy work; repudiation was seldom used except in cases of infertility.

In a more advanced state of society, “communication of the sexes becomes more frequent through the proximity of families, and less innocent through the taste for pleasure and the progress of the arts, which follows that of wealth” (79). Under these circumstances, repudiation is certain to be abused. Among the Jews of a later age, for example, one famous rabbi taught that a man could repudiate his wife for having burned the soup; another because he found one more beautiful, or even without any pretext at all (82).

“Among Christian peoples,” says Bonald, “marriage makes woman, not a being equal to man, but a helper (or minister) similar to him.” (108) The purpose of the union is not merely the production of children (for which marital indissolubility is unnecessary), but for their proper conservation—what sociobiologists term “high-investment parenting.” For society does not consist of those who are born, but of those who subsist.

“The law of indissoluble monogamy is perfect,” declared Bonald; “its opponents themselves acknowledge this, since they only criticize its perfection.” (The legislators had alleged that indissolubility laid too great a burden on weak human nature.) He even quotes Christ’s injunction “be ye perfect!” (96).

It is not difficulties which must be opposed to man’s desires, for difficulties only enflame them, but the impossibility of satisfying them altogether. (185)

Laws must be more severe in proportion as society is more advanced and man looser. Thus the grown man has duties to fulfill which are far broader and involve a whole different level of obligation than those to which the child is subject. (129)

Like many writers of our own time, Bonald notes that divorce can be especially hard on women:

Out of everything [the wife] brought into the [domestic] society, she can only, in the case of dissolution, recover her money. And is it not supremely unjust that the woman, having entered the family with youth and fertility, may leave it with sterility and old age; and that, belonging only to the domestic state, she should be put out of the family to which she gave existence, at the time in life when nature denies her the ability to begin another one?

But unlike many of our contemporaries, Bonald was perfectly cognizant “that most divorces are provoked by women; which proves that they are weaker or more impassioned, not that they are more unhappy” (106). He even calls indissolubility a way of protecting women from their own inconstancy, a privilege feminists have rarely demanded for their constituency. He also notes that the plurality of men is “more contrary to nature” than the plurality of women practiced by primitives (119). (The sociobiologist would say that polyandry does not contribute to the evolutionary fitness of the species.) Finally, allowing women to divorce the father of their children overturns the natural pattern of authority within the family; it makes wives the judges or tyrants of their husbands.

Bonald notes that separation remains perfectly legal even where marriage is indissoluble: “the separation of goods and bodies (a mensa et a toro) remedies all the disorders of the disunion of hearts: reason is satisfied with it. It is the passions which go further and demand the capacity to form new bonds” (177-78).

To allow divorce on the grounds of adultery is to propose adultery as a means to divorce; such a law makes “change the cure for inconstancy [and] pleasure the restraint on voluptuousness” (197). It also encourages false accusations of adultery. And it creates analogous incentives for abandonment, cruelty, or false accusations of mistreatment, wherever these are named as permissible grounds.

[Divorce] takes all authority from the father, all dignity from the mother, all security from the child, and transforms domestic society into a struggle between strength and weakness; [it] constitutes the family as a temporary lease, where the inconstancy of the human heart stipulates its passions, and which ends where new passions begin. (38)

The reader may wonder: was this book really written in 1801?

Bonald did not succeed in persuading the Empire’s legislators; the Civil Code was ratified, including the provisions for legal divorce. But after the Bourbon Restoration, he would be given a second chance.

The Vicomte de Bonald, 1754 - 1840

On Divorce
Louis de Bonald
Translated and edited by Nicholas Davidson
New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992

On the European continent, Louis de Bonald has long been named alongside Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre as a foremost first generation critic of the French Revolution and founder of modern conservatism. De Maistre himself, late in life, wrote to Bonald: “I have thought nothing you have not written; I have written nothing you have not thought.” But while Burke has become the object of a veritable cult, and de Maistre is at least widely known and available in translation, it was not until 1992 that a work of Bonald’s (On Divorce ) finally appeared in English. Two other volumes have recently been added to his English bibliography; these will be the subject of a future essay.

Early Life

Louis Gabriel Ambroise Viscount de Bonald was born the only son of a landowning family near Millau in the Rouergue region of Southern France in 1754. The area had long been a center of religious strife, with a Protestant rebellion breaking out as late as 1702. Bonald’s father died when he was four, and he was raised by his mother, a pious Jansenist; he himself remained an orthodox Catholic his entire life.

Bonald received an unusually extensive education for a provincial nobleman of his time. He attended the celebrated College de Juilly near Paris (1769-1772), run by the Oratorians since the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1762. While the Jesuits had offered a strict classical education, the Oratorians embraced the new learning: Cartesianism and the latest advances in empirical science. Bonald’s closest mentor, Fr. Mandar, with whom he always remained in contact, was even a disciple of Rousseau! After graduation, Bonald joined the Royal Musketeers and served until their dissolution in 1776. He then returned to his native region and married. He and his wife of forty-eight years had seven children, of whom four would survive to adulthood.

Content to devote himself to domestic life, Bonald was pressed by the royal intendant into accepting the mayoralty of Millau in 1785; the citizens retained him as Mayor when the office was made elective in 1790. He initially imagined the Revolution might lead to a revival of localism, and even led civic celebrations of some of the early acts of the National Assembly. He also succeeded in averting a riot between Catholics and Protestants in Millau at this time, an accomplishment in which he took special pride.

Elected to the departmental assembly, Bonald resigned rather than countenance the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which subordinated the Church to the revolutionary State. In October 1791, he fled with his two eldest sons to Heidelberg, where the Duc de Bourbon was gathering a counter-revolutionary army, and took part in the abortive Jemappes campaign. Back home, the rest of his family were forced into hiding.

During this exile, Bonald produced his first book: Theory of Political and Religious Power (1796). Most of the copies were smuggled into Paris, where they were seized and burned by the authorities. This early work has been described as “an immense, rambling statement of his principles in impenetrable Latinate prose.” Bonald’s finest work is almost always found in shorter pieces written in response to specific situations; his attempts at general treatises have contributed less to his reputation.

In 1797 Bonald returned to France, “traveling across the mountains at night to avoid French border patrols,” and was briefly reunited with his family in Montpellier. But the modest “Jacobins revival” of 1798-99 intervened and he sought the anonymity of Paris. In hiding there, he produced three books: An Analytical Essay on the Natural Laws of the Social Order (1800), “essentially a more economical statement of A Theory of Power,” On Divorce (1801), written in opposition to the legalization of divorce in the proposed Civil Code of 1800; and Primitive Legislation (1802), “a systematic statement of the principles of his political philosophy.”

Fundamental Concepts

On Divorce is a good place to begin studying Bonald’s leading ideas. Unlike Burke and de Maistre, he devotes little space to analyzing the Revolution itself. He is interested in explaining what was lost because of it, viz., a social pattern he viewed as natural.

The work opens:

It is a fertile source of error, when treating a question relative to society, to consider it by itself, with no relationship to other questions, because society itself is only a group of relationships. In the social body as in every organized body—that is, one in which the parts are arranged in certain relationships to each other relative to a given end—the cessation of vital functions does not come from the annihilation of their parts, but from their displacement and the disturbances of their relationships. (3)

We note at once the rejection of enlightenment ‘individualism.’ That vision of man and society, still very much alive, assumes a materialist metaphysic: since only bodies are real without qualification, society is simply the sum of its members, and the social good is ‘the greatest good of the greatest number.’ Bonald described enlightenment thought (“la philosophie”) as “the universal solvent.”

For Bonald himself, society has a natural structure or order analogous to that of a living organism. Our social roles are part of what we are, so that people are not interchangeable (“equal”). Society suffers, therefore, when the natural disposition of different kinds of men to one another is disturbed.

Editor Nicolas Davidson points out the relevance of this organic view of society to the failure of modern ‘progressive’ social crusades. The reformer does not grasp “the infinite feedback loops that relentlessly frustrate [his] targeted plans” (xx). For example, he sets out to help ‘the working man’ by championing him against his employers, with whom he is engaged in a common enterprise. Or he advocates for women by encouraging them to compete against men in a zero-sum game rather than partner with men in marriage.

A little farther down, Bonald states that all beings and their relationships can be comprehended under the “three general ideas: cause, means, and effect.” They may be seen, for example, in the natural human family:

[T]he father has, or is, the power to accomplish through the means or ministry of the mother the reproductive and conservative action of which the child is the term or subject. . . . The father is active or strong, the child passive or weak; while the mother, median term between the two extremes of this continuous proportion, is passive to conceive, active to produce, receives to transmit, learns to teach, and obeys to command. (44-45)

The purposes of the natural family are the production and conservation of man. The relationship between the sexes produce the child, and the relationship between the ages (parenthood) conserve him. Conservation includes not only nourishment and physical preservation but everything which comes under the heading of education.

The reader of Bonald cannot fail to notice his frequent references to “conserving,” “conservative,” and “conservation.” His use of these terms is, in fact, the direct source of the modern political term “conservative.” In 1818, Bonald and Chateaubriand would found a newspaper called Le Conservateur, which made it popular. Chateaubriand is more often given the credit, but the term does not occur frequently in his works. (The first self-described “liberal,” by the way, was a member of the Spanish parliament of 1812 who opposed the restoration of the old regime.)

The three fundamental social relations power, minister, and subject apply not only to family members but “to all intelligent beings; [they] embrace the generality, the immensity of their relationships, and open the very gates of the infinite to contemplation.” For even the relations between God (“our Father”) and man are conceived no differently:

The society between God and primitive man has all the general characteristics of the society we have observed between men, and I see in it the moral persons: the power, who is God; the subjects, who are the domestic persons; the minister, who is the father of the family. The father is at once passive and active, partaking of the dependence of the child and the power of God himself; receiving orders to transmit them, and obeying one to command the other. (50)

According to Bonald, this original religion of the family predates the establishment of civil society: “nowhere do I find a historical truth better established than the religion of the first families and the priesthood of the first patriarchs” (50; examples include the Roman lares and Laban’s “gods” mentioned in Genesis 31: 19, 30-35).

As the domestic society of the family is necessary to conserve man, so the public or political society becomes necessary to conserve families:

Common needs bring [families] together but equally strong passions more often disunite them. Women, children, herds, territories, hunting and fishing grounds—everything becomes a subject of conflict between families. In every society there are private wars as soon as there are families living close together, and neighbors who sue each other today would have taken up arms a few centuries ago. (54)

The pattern of public society is once again a mediated hierarchy:

Among all peoples I perceive a man who speaks and commands and men who listen and obey—i.e., men in an active state and men in a passive one. I perceive other men (magistrates or warriors) median between the two extremes, who receive orders which they transmit, and obey to command. (54)

Contra Rousseau

Bonald’s explanation of social structure as mediated hierarchy may strike the reader as trite or obvious if he does not perceive the implied polemic against Rousseau. “What God wills man to do,” Rousseau declares, “he does not tell him through another man; he tells it to him himself, and writes it in the bottom of his heart.” In other words, Rousseau rejects all human or visible forms of authority. The Social Contract was his attempt to construct a state without such authority, something Bonald would consider a fool’s errand. (The final outcome of Rousseau’s effort was his inability or refusal to provide an unambiguous method for determining the general will: see my “From Salon to Guillotine,” TOQ 8:2, p. 74.)

The notion of God writing things on our heart—direct individual inspiration—Bonald calls “the theory of all extravagances and the arsenal of all crimes” (51). For anyone may assert that God has “told” him to do anything. Some radical puritans, indeed, were known to claim divine inspiration as authority for criminal behavior, and Bonald believed Rousseau got the idea from his early Protestant upbringing.

Bonald even defines “fanaticism” as “believing that God perpetually acts without means, like a prince who, relying on God for the care of his defense by a supernatural operation, neglects to levy troops.”

Rousseau does not explain what criterion to use when the divine inspiration of one man contradicts the divine inspiration of another. It seems there would have to be some public authority to make such decisions.

(An atheistic version of the claim to private inspiration, viz., the imputing of “false consciousness,” is alive and well on American university campuses today.)

Nature in Bonald: Contra Rousseau Again

“Everything that is not in nature has its disadvantages,” writes Rousseau, “and civil society more than all the rest” (quoted in 9).

To this vision of an originally good nature corrupted by the development of society, Bonald opposed his idea of “the three states: imperfect; perfect or natural; [and] corrupted or against nature.” These states apply to all living beings:

The organized beings which have an end and the external means to attain it are born in a state of weakness of means which prevents them from attaining their end. So begin man and society. This is the imperfect state; and it is imperfect since it tends toward another state which is better and stronger, and since the being perishes if it does not attain this latter state.

Time and acquisitions develop its means, and cause the being successively to pass to a more advanced state. Thus the seen becomes a plant, the fetus becomes a man, and a savage people becomes civilized. (67)

There is no such thing as a natural man prior to all society: we are born into the domestic society of our family, if nothing more.

Some [beings] use their developed means in the manner best suited to the end for which they exist, and attain that state which is called maturity in the plant, manhood and reason in the man and civilization in society. This is the perfect or natural state of beings (67). Thus the adult is more natural than the child, the educated man more natural than the ignorant one, the virtuous man more natural than the vicious one, and the civilized man more natural than the savage (71).

Bonald implicitly returns to the premodern understanding of nature found in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy. He himself cites Leibniz, the modern philosopher most conversant with this older tradition: “certain philosophers locate nature in the state which has the least art, failing to notice that perfection always includes art.”

Society, to attain its end, which is its conservation, has laws, which are its will, and persons, the means or ministers of the laws in the execution of social action. Nascent society is in the imperfect state: it has weak laws and a weak or violent action (for violence is weakness). [This] is political despotism which subjects everything to its whims. Sometimes it acts without ministers, like Clovis, who personally split the skull of one of his soldiers. Sometimes power is usurped by its ministers, [e.g.,] by the mayors of the palace under the first dynasty. (68)

In the good or perfect state of society, will, represented by the laws, is perfect, and action is ruled by will. Power is absolute and not arbitrary; the ministers are subordinate, the subjects obedient. This state of society rests on laws rather than persons. (69)

Later on, Bonald concedes that the “natural, perfect” society is an ideal type which actual societies—particularly Christian societies—tend to approach: “although no society is in this fulfilled state, no more than any man, one can observe, in the social world, more enlightenment, virtue, strength and resolve among Christians than among other peoples” (76).

Rousseauan primitivists made their same characteristic mistake in treating religion:

As the religion of primitive families was exclusively called natural, and the religion of the State was exclusively called revealed, it was concluded that only primitive or patriarchal religion was natural, and that the religion of the State was artificial, and the religion of priests. (72)

There was a great debate at the time opposing the ‘positive’ religion of Christian dogma to an alleged ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ religion which never quite got worked out; eminent thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, and Hegel contributed. Bonald rejected the very terms of this debate. To him, the religion of the Christian State was the natural development of the original patriarchal religion (which he tended to identify with biblical Judaism).

The third state is the deviant state which beings fall into

either because their means are insufficiently developed, because they have deviated in the course of their development, or because they do not use them in a manner appropriate to their end. For man, this is the state of bodily infirmity or moral weakness. In society, it is the state opposed to civilization: evil, corrupt, unnatural. (67)

In other words, corruptio optimi pessima. And for once, Bonald quotes Rousseau with approval: “If the legislator, mistaking his object, establishes a principle different from that which arises from the nature of things, the State will not cease to be agitated until it is destroyed or changed, and invincible nature has resumed her sway” (75-76).

Bonald again:

Once a nation has attained the perfect state, and has tasted the heavenly gift of natural laws, it cannot descend from thence without falling into the last degree of misery and degradation. France, having fallen into the monarchical democracy of 1789, descended to the vile and bloody demagogy of 1793. Thus a nation declines and falls when it descends from the perfect state. Who would dare to contemplate the probably consequences of this revolutionary delirium, if the principle of life which fourteen centuries of constitution had given this society had not drawn it back from the abyss of shame, corruption, and sorrow.

The Assyrians, Medes, Romans, and Greeks perished because they had passed from the imperfect state of nascent peoples to the corrupt state of degenerate peoples. The Northern peoples continue to exist in Europe, stronger than at the time of their establishment, because they have passed from the imperfect to the perfect state of society. There is no rest for a people but in society’s perfect state. (75-77)

Read Part 2 here.

Who should rule?

Logging on this morning, I see that this has once again become a burning issue among the commentators. So far, I haven’t had much to say about the topic. I don’t aspire to rule over anyone. Becoming a politician isn’t a good fit with my introverted personality type. It is a task that I would prefer to leave to others. We have already had one commentator storm off the site because of a controversial turn in this discussion. It is better to discuss the matter now (in its own definitive blog entry) than to have it continue to spill over into unrelated threads.

Nietzscheans

As everyone here knows by now, NeoNietzsche is a passionate admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche and subscribes to a peculiar interpretation of his theories. He believes in a caste system (warrior, cleric, peasant) and sees himself as part of the elect few who should rule in a White Nationalist ethnostate. Following Nietzsche, NN believes everyone has an essential orientation, master or slave, dominant or submissive, and that different moral systems correspond to this primordial mammalian division. As an advocate of “master morality,” he would abolish liberal democracy and confer elite status upon the “higher types” who are naturally born to rule.

Jeffersonians

In the United States, Jeffersonians are the most numerous in White Nationalist circles. In their view, the best type of government is the one that governs least. These people don’t see anything essentially wrong with the American system. They believe in state and local government and instinctively oppose the consolidation of power in Washington. Jeffersonians like to attribute our racial decline to the corrupting influence of outside forces, namely the Jews, and argue that racial sanity would quickly return to America after the excise of this cancer. Under the Jeffersonian system, elite status would be conferred through local elections and the private accumulation of wealth in a capitalist economy.

Hamiltonians

Like the Jeffersonians, the Hamiltonians still believe in republican self government, but prefer a strong, centralized state to a weak one. Instead of free trade, they want an America First trade policy. Hamiltonians support a strong public sector and a regulated market economy to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth. They believe a few constitutional reforms will be sufficient to reverse our racial decline. In their ideal White ethnostate, elite status would also be conferred through elections and wealth accumulation in the private sphere.

Libertarians

The libertarians are a subset of the Jeffersonians who believe in a minimal state. They believe the only function of the state is to protect individual rights: military, police, courts. The libertarians would scrap the entire ediface of twentieth century progressive reforms in the name of liberty. In a libertarian White ethnostate, elite status would be conferred through participation in the market economy, as government would be hamstrung by a strict constitution.

Fascists

The fascists (this includes National Socialists and related species of fascism) want an authoritarian state headed by a dynamic leader with near absolute power. They would dispense with liberal democracy entirely and replace it with a racialized bureaucracy. This concentration of power would be used to rid the fascist ethnostate of Jews and other undesirable elements. Elite status would be conferred through rising in the party and pleasing its established leaders.

Platonists

For lack of a better word, the “Platonists” are White Nationalists who advocate rule by a Guardian caste or order. These Guardians would be chosen through breeding and merit. Exemplary Whites imbued with an unusual dedication to their race would enjoy rights and privileges that other citizens would not.

Christian Nationalists

The Christian Nationalists believe a strong, rejuvenated Christianity is a necessary component of a White ethnostate. In essence, they want an ethnostate based on Christian moral values. Some Christian Nationalists want a republic; some a monarchy; some a theocratic dictatorship. In all cases, elite status would be strongly connected to religious piety.

Monarchists

The monarchists want a king and hereditary aristocracy. Elite status would be conferred through the possession of royal blood.

Anarchists

The anarchists want to dispense with government entirely. In their proposed ethnostate, as there would be no government, politics would not exist and there would be no mechanism for selecting elites. In theory, everyone would be equal in this classless society.

Where I Stand

So, after all this, what is my answer to this question?

Politically, I stand between the Hamiltonians and Platonists. I think that government can be a force for good and that White Nationalists will need a strong central state to repel invasions by our multitude of enemies. The republican system is a proven model for ensuring continuity and the peaceful transfer of power. I think we would be unwise to dispense with it in pursuit of some of the more outré, untested ideas discussed above.

The worst aspects of republicanism can be dealt with through constitutional reforms. For one, I don’t believe in universal voting rights. In my ideal republic, the franchise would only be extended after certain conditions are met. Voters would be required to demonstrate they are intelligent, competent, and moral enough to enjoy the privilege of selecting our leaders. I also believe that the Guardian caste should have more sway than the average citizen. A real electoral college could be set up in which the Guardians could exercise a veto over bad popular selections.

Morally, Alasdair MacIntyre has been the major influence on my views. Like MacIntyre, I believe that morality is only logical within the context of established traditions. There are a number of moral traditions out there, each of them with their own history, each of them having different premisses as their starting point. It is impossible to properly reason across these incommensurate traditions.

I believe our moral discourse has been the victim of the catastrophe described by MacIntyre in the Preface of After Virtue: we only possess fragments of a coherent moral framework, terms which have lost the context which once made them plausible, and that rational people are diverted into nihilism by this disarray. There are no universal, objective moral principles analogous to the laws of science. Instead, moral philosophy is a practical science like Aristotle always claimed it was: it is a how-to guide for actualizing some given ideal. In other words, I believe that morality (at some level) is reducible to aesthetics. That’s a topic for another day.

These are only my answers. What are yours?

From Occidental Dissent, October 20, 2009