I have just received this invitation to a lecture delivered by a political philosopher that I count as a friend on Facebook. I think he would class my politics as 'left.' It's hard to say. I take Marx very seriously indeed. But I take Aristotle very seriously. Aquinas, too. Is Alasdair MacIntyre a socialist or a conservative? MacIntyre, like all good thinkers, evades labels, and draws conservative and radical elements together. Charles Taylor does this, Hannah Arendt too. I try to do the same. I have made MacIntyre's influence on my own work explicit, whilst also criticizing him recently as remaining far more within the liberalism he rejects than perhaps he realizes. I criticize a democracy of subjective opinion and assertion, seeking to replace all atomistic models in politics with a comprehensive ethical and functional framework. I spell those positions out at length in my work. Rather than elaborate upon my position, yet again, I'd prefer to highlight the way that conservative thinkers are doing from the right precisely what I have been attempting from the left. I have to declare that my attempts an almost complete failure. Something of a republican turn may be visible here and there on the left – if it makes any sense to refer to 'the left' in any generic or homogeneous sense – but in the main perspectives from that direction remain firmly, and fatally, within a liberal ontology and metaphysics which will undermine each, any, and every common purpose in politics and ethics. At some point I have to face the conclusion that my attempts to radicalize democracy in the direction of socialism are destined to fail – in the main, people remain self-choosing individuals incapable of accepting either the obligations or the culture of discipline involved in constituting an authentic public order. It's not a conclusion I would like to draw. But I have to admit to having drawn a blank on this. The best work in this area is being done by conservatives.
Like Patrick Deneen.
The 2019 First Things Lecture in Washington, D.C.
Aristopopulism: A Political Proposal for America
Delivered by Patrick Deneen
“In a liberal democratic age, two words are widely used to contrast what liberal democracy is not: aristocracy and populism. Yet, we have both political factions emerging today in new and caustic forms that pit an increasingly corrupt elite against an increasingly coarse and angry populace. Both are morally adrift and engaged in politics as an assertion of power, albeit for different reasons.
While the current trajectory of the West would appear to be an ongoing and inconclusive battle between these two factions, classical political theory understood that only an appropriately mixed regime could correct and even elevate the shortcomings of an opposing faction. In an age in which monarchy and inherited titles are rightly suspect, is there nevertheless a prospect for a mixed regime in the modern age that goes beyond pitting elite against populace and vice-versa, and which might instead give rise to a fruitful combination?
In this lecture, Patrick Deneen will envision the prospects for an ennobled aristoi and a more refined populace. He will at once acknowledge the persistence of class and inequality even in a democratic age (denying a path forward lies in a growing sympathy for socialism), but will propose that only a well-formed elite can support a humane condition of the populace, and only a well-formed populace can fruitfully restrain the hubris of a liberal elite and even orient them toward virtue. Through such a mixed regime, practices supporting a common good might emerge, correcting the core weakness of a liberal order designed to forestall such a possibility.”
I have sought to define socialism as a viable economy for social use, and an authentic public order of active, involved citizens willing and able to assume a (co-)responsibility within an associational space that grows from neighbourhoods and communities upwards. Hence my demand that MacIntyre's communities of virtue and practice scale upwards and outwards from the local level. My view is opposed to top down bureaucratic imposition, but envisages a public realm that is organically rooted. I defined that view years ago in my work on Hegel and Marx. I can't say that the idea has caught fire on the left. Frankly, my view has generated next to no interest in the left circles I have been involved in. I think I'm treated as an eccentric. At best. An irrelevance, really. And one of the awkward squad if I ever open my mouth. I've stated my view plainly enough and often enough over the years. Maybe I have the wrong audience or have just plain read the audience all wrong. My brother thinks that the anti-EU sentiment of working class Labour areas is so entrenched that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has to accept a clean Brexit is the only way. I don't like that kind of reasoning. I like leadership in ethics and politics - and I like a notion of leadership which presupposes a willingness and capacity to be led. Aristotle defines citizenship as a willingness to lead and be led in turns. We don't have anything like this kind of citizenship. Instead, we have a prideful self-assertion.
Many are seeing the way forward in something like the conservativism of Patrick Deneen. I can see a combination of Hegel and Tocqueville, taking account of Marx's critique of capital, giving us something like an “aristo-populism.” Back in 2004 I argued for an “anarcho-Aristotelianism.” It sounds remarkably similar, but with certain key differences. It has to be said that Deneen is making much greater progress than I am.
Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen
“Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.”
I'll end with more conservative critique along these lines.
Conservatives should be wary of Big Business by John A. Burtka IV, The Washington Post, 29 April 2018
“Among conservatives, the erosion of civil society is most often attributed to the heavy hand of the administrative state. While the welfare system, especially at the federal level, certainly deserves its fair share of the blame, a growing number of conservatives, including Tucker Carlson, Patrick Deneen, Rusty Reno, Michael Brendon Dougherty, and Rod Dreher, have also expressed concern about the side effects of economic globalization and the elite culture that shapes many corporations. In short, conservatives are coming to see that Big Business can also threaten our liberties and the flourishing of civil society.
I am not insinuating that capitalism is bad or that free markets haven't dramatically reduced poverty and raised living standards. What I am saying is we should not underestimate the importance of our immediate commercial environment to the forging of a sense of community, and that the shift from locally owned businesses to multinational corporations comes at a cost.
A major consequence of purchasing goods at Walmart and Costco instead of local farms and small businesses is a levelling of regional distinctions and particularities, replacing unique local cultures with a national or international monoculture...
How does this new arrangement shape civil society? As National Affairs editor Yuval Levin summarizes in a recent podcast on the classic book Reflections on the Revolution in France, philosopher Edmund Burke was disturbed that the French had “erased all of the country divisions in France and instead divided the country up into perfect squares. And Burke says, nobody loves a perfect square. People love the place where they are from.” It is that love, of family and friends and neighbourhoods that precedes and makes possible our love of the state or nation.
The same point about the impossibility of loving a square could be made about the Big Business monoculture. Do people love the strip malls and big box stores where they purchase products of unknown origin from strangers? And when they return home, does the impersonality of that monoculture encourage them to engage with their neighbours? The placelessness of our commercial space is more likely to draw them inward – to make them more likely to lock the door and eat a pre-prepared meal while watching the same television show that people everywhere (or perhaps nowhere) are watching...
This is not just about small towns – the importance of local commerce in civic life is just as important in West Philadelphia, South Boston, and Anacostia as it is in southeast Pennsylvania. Across the country, as locally owned businesses have been priced out of the economy, we lose links to the unique history and cultural memory that permeate not only the local market but also the philanthropic institutions many small-business owners support. As our attachments, and consequently obligations, to families, neighbourhoods, small businesses and charities diminish, I fear that people cease to exercise civic responsibility and fill the empty societal space with whatever appears on their easily accessed screens: reality TV, strident talking heads on cable news, gossip on social media.
If we want to strengthen our country, we must strengthen the fabric of civil society in our towns and neighbourhoods – and that includes the urban neighbourhoods where most Americans live. Limiting the size of the administrative state is certainly a necessary ingredient toward achieving this goal. However, when financially possible, people should also reinvest their dollars into locally owned institutions – vigorously defending community and cultural heritage against the stifling conformity of our national monoculture, which is often sustained by multinational corporations dependent on cheap labour and ugly working conditions. By embracing a twofold disposition toward preserving beautiful things and also local things – call it “aristopopulism” - we can live in better solidarity with our neighbours and the 'better angels of our nature.'
After all, if people don't love a place, will they serve it? If they are called to defend it, will they for it? [If they lack a sense of ownership and belonging, will they take responsibility for a place? People will serve and defend something that is theirs] When building our future, with all the progress that may come, it would be prudent to consider how we might conserve the personal, small-scale institutions that make ordered liberty possible.”
Ordered liberty? That sounds very much like the “rational freedom” I have spent a lifetime trying to inject into the politics of the left. Instead, economic libertarians of the right and ethical and cultural libertarians of the left have proceeded hand in hand to give us an atomistic model of democracy that is incapable of true freedom and true order – or a true left or right. Excuse the extensive quoting of passages above, but I have spent years defining some such position in an attempt to wean the left from liberalism towards taking ethics and public life seriously, that is, as something more than conventionalism and sophism. I'm too tired to repeat myself any further. It's just gratifying to know that there are others out there who see the point. And slightly worrying that these figures, such as Roger Scruton and his emphasis on small scale practical reasoning grounded in a love of home and place, are conservative. I've tried to galvanize the left with a public ethics and politics. I even cite Noam Chomsky's article on 'that dangerous radical Aristotle' in order to drop hints that the left should take these themes seriously, if they are to be serious about constituting a viable social order. I'm reduced to stating things very simply now: engage with Aristotle, please. (And yes, I know Aristotle's criticisms of democracy (and Plato's too). A democracy is not a republic – for another day).
I'll end with a reference to my most recent work Morality and Modernity, which I should polish, edit and publish quickly – because it is very much along the above lines.
Morality and Modernity by Peter Critchley
(548 pages, 196,000 words)
Contents with page numbers
1 Rationale 4
1 Re-enchanting the world 4
2 Approaches 7
morality and modernity 9
the problematic of morality and modernity 11
3 Moral and metaphysical reconstruction 12
2 Community, Individualism, and Modern Society 23
1 Community and Modern Society 23
the search for community 23
2 Modernity and the Quest for Community and Personality 34
Community and Personality – the loss and recovery of form 38
The constitution of communities of identity, meaning and belonging 40
The New Communitarian Vision 47
Recovering personality and community 47
Fostering the politics of self-government 49
3 The Unit Ideas of Sociology and their Antitheses 53
The revolt against individualism 55
Liberalism, Radicalism, Conservatism 57
The critical view of liberal society, abstraction, and alienation 67
The unity of ethics and aesthetics 75
Conservatism, modernism, and nostalgia 82
4 The Loss of Community 103
Rationalisation/Modernism – the loss of community 103
Nietzsche, subjectivism, nihilism 106
Social theory and rationalistic desolidarisation 107
Modernity and its prophecies of doom and disaster 112
God and the moral framework 115
3 Capitalist Modernity and the Rationalization of the World 125
The non-academic philosophy of life against the tyranny and violence abstraction – against the rationalizations of social theory 125
The dialectics of hope and despair 131
The sociological critiques of modernity 131
Modernity and the future 133
Marx, Nietzsche and Weber 134
Marx and Weber on capitalist modernity 136
Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber – convergences and generational differences 137
Weber - rationalisation beyond capitalism – Fleurs du mal 144
Nietzsche and Weber and the fear of ersatz communities 148
Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber as key thinkers 160
Virtuous Communities fostering Habits of the Heart 172
Rehabilitating the ethical life as key to reinhabiting place 183
The tyranny and violence of abstraction 196
Prospects for Re-enchantment 202
4 The Moral Sociology of Nostalgia 207
The Problem of Nostalgia 207
Nostalgia – the story of loss 209
The Sociological Tradition 210
Sociology and the Nostalgic Frame 214
Nostalgia and German Social Thought 220
Nietzsche and nostalgia 222
Nietzsche’s concern with an authentic morality 223
Tonnies 225
Simmel 226
Weber in the context of social theory 228
Critical Theory 230
Martin Heidegger 232
Michel Foucault and Modernism 235
The Religo-moral Problem and the Post-modernist Crisis 237
The relation between society and religion 237
Conclusion on social theory 241
5 Nietzsche, the Death of God; or Nihilism and the Death of Liberalism 241
Why Nietzsche? 241
Nietzsche and the end of the moral and metaphysical standpoint 242
Statement of the problematic – why Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber – Nietzsche’s influence throughout social theory 243
An Overview 256
The universal-transcendent essentialist ethic incarnated in time and place 257
Liberalism, Nihilism and the Loss of Community 258
Ideology, Morality and Values 263
The nostalgic frame – the loss of unity and its recovery 263
Nietzsche against the nostalgic frame 265
Nietzsche and the practical truth of being and knowing 266
Nietzsche and the machine 269
Nietzsche’s life philosophy – Nietzsche’s cultural politics 272
Practical truth against abstract blueprints 273
Morality after god 274
Nietzsche's provocations 278
Organicism as a life philosophy 283
The ethic of embodiment 289
Nietzsche as a critic of modernity 290
The criticism of liberalism and the liberal ontology – the abstract individual and the abstraction of society 292
Personality and the autonomous individual 295
The Doctrine of the Little Things 298
6 God, reason, values, and grounds 301
Modernity and the loss of an authoritative moral and metaphysical standpoint 301
7 Under the Shadow of Modernity 350
Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics 350
Weber’s political sociology and ethics 352
Modernity, Politics, and Max Weber 362
Weber’s methodological individualism 363
The division between fact and value 364
Capitalism 373
Maturity and Politics 378
Politics, means, and force 387
Habermas, Reason and Faith 423
Habermas and authoritative standards 423
Anti-Prophetic Prophecy, Pessimism and Hope 437
8 Philosophical Anthropology and Hope for an Ethical Polity 438
Weber as the perfect interlocutor. 438
The Appropriate Human Regimen - Philosophical Anthropology 439
Weber’s concern with the appropriate human regimen 451
The New Dark Age 453
Refusing complicity with the Beast 455
Alasdair MacIntyre 456
Freedom that Enslaves 478
Transformative Practice and the Good of Human Beings 480
Eudaimonics – the appropriate regimen for the human good - MacIntyre in criticism of Weber and the modern moral condition 480
The Politics of Local Community 490
MacIntyre, ethical polity, the politics of local community 490
Engaging MacIntyre Critically: Flourishing, Modernity and Political Struggle 493
MacIntyre – critique of MacIntyre’s politics of local community 493
Closing Reflections: Politics and Strategy in the Present 495
Politics and community in the aftermath of Weber 495
Key themes 498
Reaffirming transcendent norms, truths and values vs conventionalism and sophism 499
Reaffirming transcendent standards against conventionalism 499
Essentialist politics – responding to criticisms 500
The problematic dualism of local community and public community 510