“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
I would agree with this passage so long as it is interpreted as valuing the role of all smaller communities within the greater community of the state, and defending those communities against the bureaucratic encroachment of the abstract, centralised state. That would be to reinterpret Burke's 'little platoons' as establishing the associational and municipal conditions of a flourishing public life in the democratic age. The problem is that, set in context, Burke is saying something that is quite the contrary, enjoining members of the demos to rest content with their allotted station in life and defer to the aristocracy in a class based society.
To salvage the quote and make it serve for a politics of civic attachment and involvement, we may look back to Aristotle and look forwards to Alexis de Tocqueville so as to identify associations and the filling of associational space with 'little platoons' as fundamental to politics in its original sense as the best regime for human flourishing. According to this understanding, the best life is rooted in and flourishes within the 'little platoons' which bond individuals together — family, church, the various bodies of the local community. Participation within these primary organisations generate and sustain solidarities and loyalties that orient men toward virtues such as temperance and fortitude. It is in the local and the particular that individuals are able to live freely and justly as social beings. In seeing political life as best conducted within an order of particular habits and presumptions, this Aristotelian tradition rejects the tendency of the liberal age to study human beings as discrete individuals separated from one another and from the trappings of society.
The outsourcing of responsibility and conscience has brought an external expansion and internal implosion – a social, moral, and fiscal emptying-out. The state, unfortunately, has come to serve as a surrogate community. Not only is such commonality abstract, it takes communal purposes and inverts them, turning them into their opposite. That commonality is relocated from below to above, from the proximal relations of kinship, friendship, and neighbourliness to the external legal (rights-based) and institutional sphere.
It is instructive to see how that inversion quickly colonised socialised, taking a political movement formerly rooted in associationalism (a self-socialisation from below that proceeded through the cooperative movement, friendly societies, and mutual aid) and reforming it as a top-down bureaucratic approach to social organisation. It substitutes the ties and bonds that individuals as social beings forge for themselves, naturally and voluntarily, for something imposed by way of professionals and experts of all kinds.
That techno-bureaucratic managerialism is a menace to both conservativism and (original, associational) socialism. Unfortunately, socialists lost touch with the true meaning of socialism a long time ago and seem wedded to top-down control, with them at the helm as the controllers. This applies, too, to contemporary environmentalists who, too clearly, employ fear, crisis, and emergency to push for an authoritarian austerian climate-controlled regime (which is about as inorganic and unecological a political form as can be imagined).
The dissolution of face-to-face relations and responsibilities grace of externalisation and centralisation results in a moral and social unravelling.
Everywhere you look there is inversion and perversion, the hollowing out of cultures and communities, an external encroachment on the ties and bonds people forge for themselves historically and organically and their refashioning for extraneous priorities and imperatives. There is institutional cowardice and complicity and worse.
The way back is to re-invigorate communities of character and communities of practice in a society in which the moral and intellectual virtues are known, acquired, and exercised. In such a society, the virtues are 'signalled' less by empty words than by deeds.
I will repeat a point that I have made many times before: all grand and ambitious political schemes for the human betterment will either fail or, worse, turn into their opposite unless they are grounded in small-scale practical reasoning, proximal relations, modes of conduct fostering a sense of ownership, and the love of place and home.
I would just caution, though, that associationalism must foster solidarity and loyalty for right reasons within right relationships. As John Stuart Mill lamented: “England has never had any general break-up of old associations. Hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head.” But this opens up into another discussion - Mill was a liberal who was once described as 'His satanic free trade majesty.' If associationalism is not necessarily a good thing, atomisation, rootlessness, and abstraction are moral and social blights. My view favours an associative and democratic public life.
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