Susan McWilliams’s TAC essay on Robert Nisbet effectively conveys the emphasis he places on intermediary institutions as the basis for his conservative thought. But not all conservatives have seen their philosophy as deriving from this source. Consider, for example, Thomas Molnar’s “The Liberal Hegemony: The Rise of Civil Society,” which, as the title suggests, presents liberalism as the ideology peculiar to the third estate.

Nisbet and Molnar have a good deal in common. Both were deeply influenced in their understanding of state and society by French Catholic counter-revolutionaries such as Maistre and Bonald. But Nisbet is more Burkean and Molnar more reactionary in his theory of state and society. Molnar, for example, is less inclined to grant that the church should be an “intermediary” institution — on the contrary, as his essay makes clear, the reduction of the church to the level of a mere association has destroyed it; its earlier place was on par with the state and above civil society.

To gauge the distance between Nisbet and Molnar accurately, it may be useful to draw back and look at three general views of state and society that have won currency since the French Revolution. The three do not correspond exactly to the philosophies of liberalism, socialism, and conservatism, but there’s a rough match. The “liberal” view of state, society, and the individual holds that society is naturally harmonious, with the interests of diverse individuals (who are the reality behind such secondary institutions such as the family, church, etc.) coinciding to the benefit of all. Crime and war are therefore aberrant and pathological rather than systemic and recurrent. The place of the state, if it has any place at all, is to suppress these incidental eruptions of violence and maintain a set of legal rules that apply equally to all — which is to say, the law is not a battlefield. The latter-day anarcho-capitalist variant of this view says that the state is not in fact necessary to maintain rules and suppress sporadic violence; even those functions can better be performed by non-state agencies.

The “socialist” view, by contrast, holds that society is persistently (if not naturally) disharmonious, divided into classes of exploiters and exploited. Institutions reflect this fundamental social division, with the state, established churches, and property in land being instruments by which the exploiters extract the very lifeblood of the exploited. The social struggle is primary, institutions are merely tools, and it may be possible — through reform or revolution — for the exploited class to turn the instruments of oppression against their oppressors. In the utopian Marxist vision, the need for tools of exploitation finally disappears altogether once the exploited no longer have to use them to defend themselves or to achieve justice against their exploiters. But for now, the state either reflects the demands of the oppressor class (according to the more radical opinion) or else is an arena in which good and evil originating in the socioeconomic sphere must contend.

By way of an example of this “socialist” view, consider the fight over corporate spending and “campaign finance reform.” Modern “liberals” — that is, reformist social democrats — believe that through free and fair elections the public should be able to put in power honest representatives of the people’s (i.e., the exploited class’s) will, who will then use the state to restrain the exploitative tendencies of the private sector (which likes to cheat workers, pollute the environment, etc.). Corporations tend toward evil, in this picture, because they represent the few who have more wealth or power than the many (as a result of exploitation or, at any rate, some kind of unfairness), while democratic government supplies a means by which the many can keep the few in check. But democratic government constantly has to be guarded against perversion into non-democratic government — through the influence of corporate corruption, for example — which would turn the tables and allow the state to become once more not a defensive mechanism for the many but an extractive mechanism for the few.

The radical or anarchist variant on this “socialist” view of society and government says that government and other long-established institutions inherently favor the exploiting class, indeed are inseparable from their interests, and must therefore be abolished rather than reappropriated. The left-anarchist criticizes the anarcho-capitalist for wanting to close only one of the channels of oppression, the state, while leaving others, such as land ownership, untouched. Indeed, left anarchists who believe (as Noam Chomsky seems to do) that the state more amenable to democratic pressure than are other institutions may even accuse the anarcho-capitalists of creating a worse system than the one that already exists by removing a potentially public institution and giving more power to private interests.

The third view of society and state roughly corresponds to conservatism, but overlaps with a few other philosophies or ideologies as well. This is the view that society is naturally disharmonious, but can be brought to a degree of harmony through the action of certain institutions, particularly the state. The “liberal-conservative” variation on this view says that ultimately reconciling the conflicting interests within society is beyond any state’s power, therefore the best that can be achieved is a temporary suppression of conflict by balancing forces. This is, of course, quite similar to, but less optimistic than, the pure “liberal” view of society and state — the difference comes down to how persistent and regular one believes social conflict to be. The fascist or nationalist variation on this view says that the coercive power of the state can successfully harmonize society, if only by eliminating foreign influences and disruptive “intermediary” institutions. Finally, the “traditionalist” variation on this view is that perfect harmony cannot be achieved, nor can much long-term peace be achieved by balancing competing interest groups within civil society, therefore all power must rest in the hands of established authority (church and state). The traditional view is suggested by this passage from Molnar’s “The Liberal Hegemony”:

Let us state bluntly that while churchmen and state administrators are tempted by their closeness to power and the abuses derived therefrom, members of civil society are exposed to the temptations that their daily activities offer. … Put in a simplified way, State and Church never quite trusted the agitation in the forum and the marketplace, the myriad intertwined interests, the greed, the occasions for immorality. The all-time consequence was (it still is, read the papal encyclicals) the insistence on the supremacy of Church and State over civil society…

Nisbet and Molnar both subscribe to the third view of society and the state, Nisbet to something like its “liberal-conservative” variant and Molnar to the “traditionalist” or authoritarian version.

It’s worth stressing again that the three general views correspond only roughly to “liberalism,” “socialism,” and “conservatism.” There’s plenty of overlap and admixture. Classical liberals and libertarians, particularly the more radical among them, can agree to some extent with the socialist view that the state embodies power divisions within society, though the liberal/libertarian would be inclined to say that the state creates, rather than reflects, those divisions. Traditionalists who subscribe to the third view of state and society may find their perspective shattered after a revolution has disestablished the church and subordinated the state to civil society. At that point, traditionalists may find much of value in criticisms derived from views of state and society that are not customarily their own.

Not only are there many combination and permutations of the three basic perspectives and their variants, but adherents of each group tend to make some effort to speak the language of the others. Here, for example is a traditionalist-authoritarian explaining how “liberty” works within his system (and doesn’t work within a rival liberal system):

What is important to the life of the taxpayer is liberty; what is important to the political life of the nation is authority, the precondition of the spirit of continuity, decision and responsibility.

“Authority at the top, liberty below” is the basic maxim of royalist constitutions.

The ridiculous [French] republic, one and indivisible, that we know so well, will no longer be the prey of ten thousand invisible, uncontrollable little tyrants; instead thousands of little republics of every sort, “domestic” republics like families, “local” republics like towns and provinces, “intellectual” and “professional” republics like associations, will freely administer their own affairs, guaranteed, coordinated and directed as a whole by one sole power which is permanent, that is to say personal and hereditary and with an interest in the preservation and development of the state.

It is to be noted that such a state, so powerful in its proper function of government, will be extremely feeble from the point of view of acting against the interests of the citizen. Whereas the citizen of the French Republic is left only with his own meagre individual powers to protect him against the mighty state machine, the citizen of the new kingdom of France will find himself a member of all kinds of strong and free communities (family, town, province, professional organization, etc.) which will deploy their strength to protect him from any interference.

The guarantees made to citizens in the republican state are entirely theoretical. They are, in fact, derived from a theory (the rights of man) which leads to the repudiation of the state’s prerogatives. In practice these guarantees entirely disappear. Respecting the paramount prerogatives of the state, monarchist theory confers upon the citizen practical guarantees, guarantees of fact: not only are they theoretically inviolable, they are in practice very difficult to violate.

Liberty is a right under the republic, but only a right: under the sovereignty of the royal throne liberties will relate to actual practice — certain, real, tangible, matters of fact.

That’s a bit of Charles Maurras from J.S. McClelland’s The French Right: From de Maistre to Maurras. The similarities to Nisbet are plain enough — Maurras even goes so far as to say that strong intermediary institutions will provide a buffer against the state, which should complicate the picture for anyone who wants to dismiss reactionaries as simple statists. But Maurras’s description of the organs of civil society as being free to “administer their own affairs, guaranteed, coordinated and directed as a whole by one sole power which is permanent,” is still quite different from Nisbet’s insistence (in a 1978 essay, “The Dilemma of Conservatives in a Populist Society”) that “the American Constitution … is conservative to the core in its regard for separation of powers in the national government … its strict limitation upon powers granted the national government, and its strongly regionalist-localist emphasis…” A key question is, should civil society have some institutional power over politics at its largest scale (whether national or whatever) or should civil society have only indirect, noninstitutional influence — power over its own small-scale affairs perhaps, but none over the large-scale prerogatives of the state? For the traditionalist-authoritarian, the state should be as closed as possible, and thereby insulated from the conflicting interests and intrigues of civil society. For the conservative-liberal, some degree of openness is desired.

Filed under: Philosophy, Politics