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[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
It will probably discredit me in the minds of some, but I have to admit that I read Russell Kirk’s (1953) The Conservative Mind with a great deal of guilty pleasure, and admiration. Some time I would like to return to his defense of the liberal arts in the service of the cultivation of a natural aristocracy. But today I explore what I earlier (recall) described as a his “call for a reformed more prudent imperialism.”
At first sign, Kirk’s work belongs to the tradition of American isolationism. It’s quite critical of imperialism, and one can quote many passages like the following (from the discussion of Irving Babbit in chapter XII): “Imperialism is one aspect of man's ancient expansive conceit, which the Greeks knew would bring hubris, and then blindness, and finally nemesis.” For Kirk (and Babbitt) it clearly means the divine punishment of hubris. Nemesis plays an important role in this chapter (and Kirk’s general argument).
First, the existence of nemesis is part of the argument against the false realism, and false empiricism, of Machiavellianism (I quote Kirk who partially quotes Babbit):
Yet Machiavelli and his followers are not true realists: "The Nemesis, or divine judgment, or whatever one may term it, that sooner or later overtakes those who transgress the moral law, is not something that one has to take on authority, either Greek or Hebraic; it is a matter of keen observation." With Hobbes, this negation of morality enters English political thought, and we continue to suffer from its poison.
Nemesis, thus, follows eventually and necessarily from an enduring transgression of moral boundaries. (I leave it to fans of Star Trek to draw the obvious connections.) Kirk’s claim is, part and parcel of, and supported by, the providentialism articulated throughout The Conservative Mind. But having said that, Kirk’s “whatever one may term it” betrays a hint of the need for new myths for a materialist (a point he ascribes to Santayana).
As an aside, while the main official target of this argument will be ‘liberal humanitarianism,’ the quoted passage is clearly a swipe against Burnham, whose The Machiavellians, defenders of freedom had sought to offer anti-liberals a positive program. But Burnham’s new (managerial) elite is, in fact, dangerous because, like the modern Nietzcheans whose poetry it constantly emulates, it fails to recognize natural limits and so is itself an engine of destruction.
Second, in his own age Nemesis is exemplified and illustrated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki--a point reiterated several times throughout the book. Here it also sets up the argument against ‘Liberal humanitarianism’ which “in the United States found itself embarrassed, to put the matter mildly, when the Second World War was won-won at the expense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all they meant to the American conscience, won at the expense of consuming centralization at home, the maintenance of permanent armies abroad.”
No less eloquent than the Marxist critic or the Schmittian, Kirk evokes Liberal humanitarianism (with its self-confident standardization and consumerism) as the false imperialism throughout his argument. In fact, it is the task of the twentieth century conservative to tame this “corroding imperialism more ominous even than those the Romans failed to resist after they had crushed Macedonia.” It is precisely “in victory” that conservatism is required “to redeem her from ungoverned will and appetite” that is the product of two centuries of (Hamiltonian) expansionism. Kirk forcefully rejects the idea that American “institutions” can be imposed “upon cultures which have as good a claim to respect.”
In fact, Kirk’s providentialism is informed by the near miraculous revival of conservative forces during the mid-twentieth century against the grain of progressivism. This revival he understands as a moral awakening due not just to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to the horrors of the Gulag and many smaller examples of the excesses of planning.
I don’t think Kirk advocates retreat from empire altogether. Rather, he councils national humility in preserving it, against what he calls “the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy.” Goes on to claim that it is an empirical “error (as Mirabeau said) to suppose that democracy and imperialism are inimical; they will hunt together in our time, as they did in Periclean Athens and Revolutionary France.”
Those of us long accustomed to an imperial presidency with its tendency toward plebiscitary democracy, the permanent multitude of US American bases around the world, and a number of disastrous foreign interventions in the name of humanity will have to judge Kirk’s exhortation – despite its truth – a failure. But no liberal can rejoice in this failure—rather it should be the foundation of more sober reflection on reform of our crass political culture, our weakening institutions, and empire.
This is not because the characterization of political society Walzer offers is untrue to reality. Political society is a substantive community, for there is no such thing as a purely procedural association. And associations with long histories will invariably develop substantial norms, and acquire deep allegiances. And yet, this is not so different from international society and, more particularly, that form of international society that is an empire. Thirty years ago every Australian school child recognized Empire Day, and Australians generally celebrated their membership of the former British Empire. Today, almost all school children are entirely unaware it ever existed. The polity whose history is taught has been contracted in size, and the story itself is being retold to place it more securely in the Asia-Pacific region and to sever the ties with Europe. But this is nothing new. Very few countries were never parts of empires; and some have grown so large as to subsume the parts the empire occupied. In many of these political societies the polity is the product of domination rather than the construction of the people. Political societies are built by elites, often against the wishes of many.
Of course, smaller political orders—whether small empires or larger states—are more likely to develop distinctive and substantial common normative commitments than are larger ones. Other things being equal, they might also be less likely to be tolerant of dissenting practices or associations—though other things are seldom equal. But this does not alter the fact that many societies are very much like close-knit empires. Some are federations of states which retain a substantial measure of independence. Some states have so much independence that they hover on the brink of secession and independent nationhood. Which way matters go is a matter of contingency. In the end nations are not so much the product of a common history as the creators of one. And what is sometimes left unmentioned is that they might have been created very differently, since there is a great number of ways of combining peoples to make a political society—as is reflected in the frequency with which political boundaries change.--Chandran Kukathas (2003) The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and freedom, pp. 35-26 (emphases added).
Regular readers will have noticed that I have been reading and reflecting on Kukathas' philosophy. In the Liberal Archipelago, Kukathas identifies himself with the "the classical liberal tradition" (167) of which he is a pre-eminent theorist. Unlike most of who self-identify as 'classical liberals,' Kukathas is not obsessed with (free) markets. In fact, while I would describe The Liberal Archipelago as 'a quite Lockean work' -- with its emphasis on moral diversity, mutual toleration, the significance of conscience to it, and the focus on association and exit --, it does not obsess over property rights at all. And this hints at another important deviation by Kukathas from classical liberals, who inherit (recall) the assumption of harmony of interests from nineteenth century liberalism. At heart, Kukathas' position is straightforward: we inevitably disagree about moral matters and the relative rankings we give them, and so the best thing we can do is to associate generally with the like-minded and find a modus vivendi with those that are indifferent to us, or worse. The main proper function of the state is to facilitate such modus vivendi in order to instantiate a cosmopolitan ideal.
Now, much of The Liberal Archipelago engages in moral argument often through the lens of (or constrained by) feasibility to defend such modus vivendi. If you think this is too thin, then in the conclusion of the work, Kukathas concedes that "the point of theorising the liberal state in terms of an archipelago of loosely associated authorities, is not that this fully captures an actual liberal state, or perhaps even a possible liberal state, but that it identifies an important dimension of it— one which connects up with particular values end or concerns, even if it does not embrace every aspect of, or aspiration found within, the liberal state." Fair enough. My interest here is not, in the first instance, with that important dimension, but with a kind of recurring motif through the work on the nature of politics. For, to speak bluntly, Kukathas does not only repeatedly diagnose (perhaps with a hint of melancholy) rent-seeking behavior and elite capture by various social elites (as Marxists (recall) also emphasize), but at times he also slides into an elite theory of politics (that one may associate with names like Mosca, Michels, Pareto, Burnham, Aron, etc.--although none of them are mentioned in the book) The quoted passage above illustrates what I have in mind.
Now, Kukathas is not the first classical liberal with such a view of politics. And I think it is important to distinguish him, at once, from somebody like (the public choice theorist) Richard Wagner who doesn't only use such an elite theory of politics sociologically, but also (repeatedly) endorses (recall here) the idea (to put it politely) that eggs need to broken in order to make an omelet. (Non trivially Wagner also draws on Schmitt.) Kukathas is not inclined to do so because he quite clearly thinks that the means (e.g., broken eggs) fail to be justified by the ends, but also in virtue of the means tend to produce outcomes that are not worth having (indirectly they produce more broken eggs this is the Spinozism Kukathasendorses). So, let's stipulate Kukathas is primarily interested in the elite theory of politics as a descriptive or sociological theory.
The problem for a reader of Kukathas is that it's not clear how the normative project fits with his elite theory of politics. I have two related concerns. First, the kind of political society Kukathas advocates requires political agents with a great deal of skill to pacify social disagreements (and to set up institutions -- forms of federalism, power sharing, etc. -- that would facilitate this) and whose characteristic quality is to promote social restraint and mutual indifference. Second, it is not obvious elite agents (of the sort that Kukathas posits in his sociological theory of politics) have an interest in pursuing the ideal, or at the least the dimension of that ideal, that Kukathas' theory prescribes. This is something Kukathas repeatedly observes himself when looking at elite agents among minority groups throughout the book.
My concern is not that Kukathas lacks a theory of transition to get from a sub-par status quo to the more normatively better political place he advocates. (I do think that's a problem, too.) But rather, that even by his own lights there is no reason to think any political agent that really matters politically by his lights would pursue his ideal.
At this point, Kukathas or somebody invested in defending him, might say, look: just like free markets require a certain amount of restraint by elites not to meddle in them and to focus on the institutions (rule of law, anti-trust, human capital, etc.) to keep the market order going and growing, the liberal archipelago also requires, as Kukathas emphasis throughout, civility and some such such restraint (and background activity to promote it). Arguably something like this insight is the great truth in common preached by Mencius, Machiavelli and (Kukuthas' key thinker) Hume. As Foucault would note, with the eighteenth century this became a matter of scientific valediction.
Now, I do not want to deny that this response is realistic (I included Machiavelli for a reason there); in practice such social restraint is sometimes visible temporarily in elites (because of domestic or international circumstances). The very mechanism that allows elites to benefit from the growing pie of a market order also allows them to benefit from the fruits of modus vivendi. But it also makes such elites sitting ducks politically when new upstarts come along to deny them these benefits. So, a politics that requires elite self-restraint is, thus, inherently crisis ridden (as liberalism is), especially if (as Schumpeter and others have noted) the mechanism of elite selection in liberal democracy has little connection to the requirements on politics that follow from normative theory.
Perhaps, the periods of lucky tranquility between crises is then the best one can hope for (qua liberal with realist sensibilities).
It's nice to see Grotius reject natural inequality (of the Aristotelian sort used by Sepúlveda (recall here)); and also to see him reject civilizational missions as a proper justification of imperialism. I re-encountered the second half of this passage (from Plutarch onward) as a frontispiece to Chandran Kukathas' (2003) The Liberal Archipelago. Before I continue I should acknowledge that I am too aware of the work of Barbara Arneil and Martine Julia van Ittersum, to use this passage to vindicate Grotius from the charge that he was an enabler of settler colonialism (both as a paid lawyer and in his more independent writing). So if you are a debunker of great, dead men don't feel you need to be on guard in what follows (not the least because there may well be a hint of sarcasm at the end of the passage because it is unlikely Grotius treats Spanish theologians -- how rational they may be -- really as authoritative).
I find passages like this useful because they undermine the pseudo-sophistication of what I (recall) call 'modern historicism. Modern historicism is constituted by three claims: first, our minds are "socially conditioned." Second, while we, too, will make socially conditioned moral mistakes, we are the products of moral progress or "Enlightenment." Third, some mechanism of historical change, even improvement, is required. In practice, modern historicism is trotted out to excuse the mistakes of the past and to re-affirm our (moral and intellectual) superiority.
For, what's really neat about about the passage quoted at the top of the post is that for Grotius the civilizational argument that purportedly justifies imperialism -- one I was taught was only really invented in the Victorian age, and that one could trace back (recall) to Hume -- is already very old and has been debunked before. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même.
Now the version of the passage that Kukathas cites is translated (in 1916) by Van Deman Magoffin edited by James Brown Scott (here). Somewhat annoyingly the editorial footnote suggests that the passage from Plutarch is on his life of Alexander. The Latin facing text suggests correctly, as does Hakluyt's translation, it's from Plutarch on Pompey (70.3). I quote it in the translation from Bernadotte Perrin.
Now, the wider context here is the Roman civil war (we're on the eve of the battle between Caesar and Pompey) and the self-inflicted implosion of the Roman republic. The romans could have quietly governed and enjoyed "what they had conquered, the greatest and best part of earth and sea was subject to them, and if they still desired to gratify their thirst for trophies and triumphs, they might have had their fill of wars with Parthians or Germans." So, Plutarch's point (and one kind of echoed by Machiavelli long after him) is that the Roman republic could have brought good government (i.e., low taxes, respect for property rights, etc.) to conquered nations, and continued their imperial conquests. But the desire for glory meant an unwillingness to share victory with purported equals. That is, Plutarch defends a kind of manifest destiny for the Romans which is to bring (softly: Greek) civilization to the barbarians (after the Greeks civilized their rulers), as Alexander had done before them.
Grotius has turned Plutarch's "πρόφασις οὐκ ἄδοξος ἐπὶ ταῦτα τῆς πλεονεξίας ἡμερῶσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά" into πρόϕασιν πλεονεξίας ημερώσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά, and so misrepresented (or misremembered) him for his own ends. When I realized this I was modestly disappointed. It would have been nice if Plutarch had anticipated Grotius' point, although it's undeniable that Plutarch clearly recognizes that often greed often is the real source of purportedly civilizing missions, even ones he endorses.
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