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.

3 Comments »

Mother Jones has an essay up by the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review on the death of the literary journal. I agree with Ted Genoways on this much at least:

[T]he less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two s***s about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

In the midst of a war on two fronts, there has been hardly a ripple in American fiction. With the exception of a few execrable screeds—like Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint (which revealed just how completely postmodernism has painted itself into a corner)—novelists and story writers alike have largely ignored the wars. … In this vacuum, nonfiction has experienced a renaissance, and the publishing industry—already geared toward marketing tell-all memoirs and sweeping histories—has seized upon the eyewitness remembrances of combatants and the epic military accounts of journalists. That, combined with the blockbuster mentality of book publishing in the age of corporate conglomeration (to the point of nearly exterminating the midlist), has conspired to squash the market for new fiction.

Between literary writers who don’t care to produce anything readers want to read and the bureaucratization of the publishing world, it’s not hard to see why quality fiction is in bad shape. I note, by the way, that the “managerial revolution” came rather late to publishing, much of which was still a gentleman’s profession into the mid-20th century. For an Alfred Knopf or a Henry Regnery the idea wasn’t just to make a lot of money, but to make a little money — or at least offset losses — while promoting culture. Today an individual proprietor’s or editor’s vision has little place in publishing companies that might as well be insurance companies.

But critics and authors deserve at least as much of the blame as publishers. They have all too readily accepted the notion that the discipline of writing for readers on the open market is dishonorable. Paul Cantor, an English professor at UVA, has done great work showing how free markets and authorial integrity can reinforce one another. See his Mises Institute lecture archive for some examples, or consult the book he and Stephen Cox (editor of Liberty and a professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego) have recently published, Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture. (Available as a free PDF here.) Genoways unfortunately seems to think that the future of literary writing lies in yet more nonprofit publishing, through journals more heavily financed by universities:

With so many newspapers and magazines closing, with so many commercial publishers looking to nonprofit models, a few bold university presidents could save American literature, reshape journalism, and maybe even rescue public discourse from the cable shout shows and the blogosphere. At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I’m not calling for more pundits—God knows we’ve got plenty. I’m saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood.

There’s a practical contradiction here: so long as writers are tied almost exclusively to university-sponsored journals, they will be overwhelmingly tempted to write for an academic (or at least non-commercial) readership. What’s needed is not romantic balderdash about writing being your “lifeblood instead of your livelihood,” but to find a way to make writing your livelihood without becoming Dan Brown. In the absence of popular market pressures, writers will too easily continue churning out postmodern literary experiments that are really less daring and experimental than they are self-indulgent. They’ll continue to serve an academic bureaucracy which, while it may have better literary sense than the Dan Brown readership, nonetheless buries whatever appreciation it has for good writing under the demands of formalism, political correctness, and clever-dickery. (One thing our universities are very good at producing these days are highly intelligent people who have been rendered incapable of writing a clear English sentence, let alone good prose. (Note Gene Genovese’s remark quoted in Reid Buckley’s “The Write Stuff”: “In place of clear, straightforward prose, budding geniuses in graduate seminars have to impress their professors with the profundity that only bad writing and vacuous ‘theorizing’ can communicate.”) University-sponsored literary journals are not all as bad as that, but they’re still erring on the wrong side of things.

My sense is that what makes for a healthy market in literature is an unsettled contest between profit motive on the one hand and literary integrity on the other. Too much of the former leads to vulgarization; too much of the latter leads to authorial onanism. There is a place for nonprofit and university-subsidized publishing — the Cantor and Cox book I recommend above is published by a nonprofit, after all, albeit one that is not part of the academic establishment and whose pro-market philosophy counteracts some of the worst tendencies toward scholarly insularity. But more university publications will be a poor substitute for lost non-academic outlets for writers and will reinforce some of the habits that lead to the loss of a general readership in the first place.

3 Comments »

In his autobiography Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, J.G. Ballard raises the question Pat Buchanan asks in Churchill, Hitler, and the “Unnecessary War”:

Should we [i.e., Britain] have gone to war in 1939, given how ill-prepared we were, and how little we did to help Poland, to whose aid Neville Chamberlain had committed us when he declared war on Germany? Despite all our efforts, the loss of a great many brave lives and the destruction of our cities, Poland was rapidly overrun by the Germans and became the greatest slaughterhouse in history. Should Britain and France have waited a few years, until the Russians had broken the back of German military power? And, most important from my point of view, would the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor if they had known that they faced not only the Americans but the French, British and Dutch armies, navies and air forces? the sight of the three colonial powers defeated or neutralised by the Germans must have tipped the balance in Japanese calculations.

Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and along with his family was interned by the Japanese in 1943. Empire of the Sun is a semi-fictionalized account of his experiences. Ballard died last April. He’s well memorialized by The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, which came out in September, but Miracles of Life has yet to be published in the U.S. It’s worth tracking down the UK edition.

3 Comments »

Despite arguing a few months ago that the iPhone could already do most of what I might want a Kindle to do, I’ve lately come around to the virtues of e-readers. More than that, I’ve actually bought a refurbished Kindle. What prompted me to do so was seeing that the 12-volume works of Edmund Burke could be purchased in the Kindle store for just $0.99. Naturally enough, advertising is aimed at the lowest market denominator, but as long as I thought the Kindle store was only good for people who wanted to buy the latest Dan Brown or teen vampire novel for a “bargain” $9.99, I had no interest in it. But if you can get serious works for much less than $9.99 — well, that’s something else altogether.

My initial impressions of the machine itself were not all that favorable. The iPhone has spoiled me; I’ve been habituated to think a handheld device should have a touchscreen, which makes Kindle’s physical keyboard and clicky “next page” button seem very 1990s. I was looking forward to converting free PDF’s from the Online Library of Liberty into Kindle-readable files, but the program I used, the otherwise pretty good Stanza, miserably failed to format them correctly. A pleasant surprise, however, was the efficacy of Amazon’s own PDF conversion service: I would e-mail the files to Amazon and usually within a minute or two I would be e-mailed back a link to the newly converted document hosted on Amazon’s server, free of charge. A couple of PDF’s didn’t format well, but most worked fine.

This week Amazon released a firmware upgrade that makes even the bare-bones U.S. network Kindle 2 that I bought a much more powerful machine. The new firmware gives it native PDF support, which I’ve been using aggressively these past few days to fill my Kindle with archival Modern Age and Independent Review essays, along with volumes from the Online Library of Liberty, Mises Institute, and Henry Regnery Legacy Project. The only drawback to the native PDF functionality so far is that, unlike files converted to Kindle’s propriety AZW format, the text in these PDF’s cannot be manually re-sized. Or at least I haven’t figured out how to do it, if there is a way. What does work is to use another capacity bestowed by the firmware upgrade — horizontal display — to enlarge text automatically. (The horizontal display is about 50 percent wider than the vertical, and PDF text adjusts to fit.)

So far I haven’t in fact read very much on the Kindle. For the most part, it’s stayed in my desk drawer. Although I much prefer downloading PDF’s to lugging around pounds of books, for me the inability to browse texts on the Kindle is a serious drawback. I can’t flip through, say, Jeffrey Hart’s When the Going Was Good and spend a few minutes reading about the origins of ’50s rock and roll. (Hart notes that even in the first days of rock, “sexuality was … central and sometimes brutally explicit: ‘Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box,’ and ‘Drill, Daddy, Drill.’” Somebody should tell Sarah Palin. The former song is noteworthy, by the way, for its early use of the piano as yonic metaphor.) I may aspire to read 12 volumes of Burke sequentially, but I’d really prefer to skip around first. Also, while I’m otherwise over the moon about Kindle’s new PDF capabilities, it sometimes takes a couple of seconds to turn a page (depending on how text/graphic intensive the page is), which can be annoying.

I’ll give my Kindle a real test over Christmas, when I’ll take it on vacation rather than hauling copies of Nock’s Theory of Education in the United States, Oppenheimer’s The State, and a half-dozen other titles in my luggage. What used to happen every year is that I’d weigh myself down with books, only find I didn’t bring something I needed for one research or writing project or another. Maybe this time I’ll write that essay on Burke, Oppenheimer, and de Jasay that I’ve been compiling notes on for a few months. (And my notes are in Google docs, so I shouldn’t have the excuse that those have been left at home either.)

p.s. See Helen Rittelmeyer’s “Turning the Pixels” for a skeptical take on the Kindle revolution.

6 Comments »

The forthcoming issue of TAC includes my review of one of my favorite books of the past year — Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. Get it by subscribing to TAC here (or give a friend a gift subscription).

Meanwhile, my review of Gregory Schneider’s The Conservative Century is online at First Principles. Here’s a bite:

Gregory Schneider’s new book puts recent discussions about “the death of conservatism” in perspective, for many of the disputes that rage on the Right today have antecedents in the controversies of a century ago. Indeed, The Conservative Century (just released in paperback) begins at the turn of the twentieth century with two distinct strains of conservatism contending with one another—what Schneider calls the “laissez-faire conservatism” of such nineteenth-century thinkers as William Graham Sumner and Herbert Spencer against the “nationalist conservatism” of Theodore Roosevelt. The one side wanted smaller government, a noninterventionist foreign policy, and almost unfettered capitalism. The other believed that the federal government should exercise a strong regulatory role at home and had a mission to spread American values abroad. All this may seem disconcertingly familiar in 2009.

Neither the nationalists nor the proponents of laissez-faire typically called themselves “conservatives.” The former often styled themselves as “progressives,” the latter were classical liberals or radical individualists. But Schneider is not making a normative judgment by classing them all together as conservatives—however paradoxical it may seem, progressive nationalists and laissez-faire liberals alike strongly influenced later, self-described conservatives. The Cold War conservatism and popular Right of the mid-twentieth century drew upon national-security and free-market rhetoric (in different proportions at different times, to be sure), while throughout the postwar era noninterventionism and “Red Tory” economics have informed conservative critiques of conservatism. They represent paths not taken that nonetheless have roots on the Right as deep as those of the dominant traditions of nationalism and capitalism.

Schneider, an associate professor of history at Emporia State University, has demonstrated his understanding of the nuances of modern American conservatism before. His sourcebook Conservatism in America since 1930 was arguably the best and most diverse anthology of twentieth-century traditionalist and libertarian writing since William F. Buckley Jr.’s Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking? Before that, Schneider’s Cadres for Conservatism, a short but comprehensive history of Young Americans for Freedom, illustrated his knack for integrating political, institutional, and intellectual histories into a coherent narrative. The Conservative Century is a successor to both earlier works: a narrative companion to Conservatism in America Since 1930 that weaves political history together with the development of conservative thought over the last century—all in a mere two hundred pages.

Lastly, a not-so-recent review of mine is now online for the first time here at TAC: my take on Robert Higgs’s Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.

No Comments »