This post is written in response to an article which compares and contrasts left- and right-wing political perspectives. From a conservative perspective, the article presents a view on the work of convergence and commonality that I develop from a socialist perspective in economics and a conservative position in ethics and culture. I have been known to say, provocatively, to incite people out of sterile grooves, that for conservatives to preserve all they hold dear from the tyranny and violence of economic abstraction, they need to be socialists; and that for socialists to embody their principles and values in a viable, functioning, and stable social order, they need to be conservatives. There is a fundamental truth in that position, with each complementing the strengths of the other and overcoming their weaknesses. Those who read my work superficially will tear it apart according to the particular political and theoretical perspective they may take: too conservative for the socialists, too socialist for the conservatives. It is all in the interweaving.
I was working on precisely this blend of left and right when I got rushed off to hospital in an ambulance in 2018. I had been overworking, having written three books on Marx and a book on Istvan Meszaros earlier in the year, followed by 200,000 words on this blend of left and right. I was getting pushed for deadlines and, in recuperating, was never able to return and finish as I wanted. The work was wasting away, so I put it out ‘as-is’ in 2020. It is a rather substantial piece of work, if I may say, and concerns the key problem of the age: how to restore the sense of belonging, meaning, and purpose in the moral life. On that restoration, everything else that concerns us in the social and natural environment follows. Here is the work of re-connection.
The article is titled ‘Where Left- and Right-Wing Political Theories Meet.’
When I read that title I feared the worst, a cliché-ridden article claiming that the Left and Right meet at extremes, proceeding inexorably to the reassuring conclusion that a middling centrist liberalism is the way for all sensible moderate folk of liberal persuasion. But as I read I found myself pleasantly surprised. The article was perceptive and thought-provoking, open in comparing and contrasting both sides of the political divide.
As I read I could see plainly where conservatism and socialism converge in my own thought and writing. Over the years I have attracted interest from people who have read something of their own concerns in the things I have written and, impressed, have contacted me vowing to read further. In many cases, the initial interest cools. People who admire St Thomas Aquinas soon see that I write on Marx, and vice versa. Those who come at my writing from particular perspectives can soon recoil in the confrontation with contrary thinkers and viewpoints. People who love my particular writing on Spinoza or William Blake or Kant or whoever can quickly become confused. They can't see the blending and interweaving around a common theme. I was recently accused of specialising in "word salad." People see the menu but prefer to choose a particular dish rather than develop the connection. It is one big banquet, not a running buffet.
This simple and well-written article gives a good idea as to what I am doing with my work, giving a clear overview of the way that left and right thinking in political philosophy can converge in surprising ways.
I span both sides of the spectrum here but, in emphasising transcendent standards of truth and justice, incarnating in time and place, mediated by culture, custom, tradition, the mores and habits of the heart - ideas tested by experience in communities of practice - it would appear that I veer in the direction of conservatism.
A contact on Academia wrote to me to express his appreciation of my work on Tolkien. I found his message perceptive:
"Peter, as a Tolkienesque fellow traveller, I just want to say how much I appreciate the way you are reframing what it means to be a small c conservative; i.e., one who is invested not in the radically extremist status quo that is Indulgence Capitalism, whereby an economy and culture of disciplined needs and wants has been subsumed by ones of fantasies of desire and immediate satiation no matter how diabolical the longer term consequences….but a humble vision of a sustainable and satisfying future for our descendants, built around an intact and prospering ecological, social and existential commons, that is no longer in the totalitarian thrall of Mordor."
That sounds about right. The division between socialism and capitalism is not a division between socialism and conservatism. And liberals cannot get away with the pose that they are somehow beyond class and division in embracing some neutral 'third way' on the moderate middle ground. Liberalism is the dominant tradition, complicit in that 'Indulgence Capitalism.' There is no centre ground. The world has been hollowed out by that indulgence. There has, of course, been a number of liberations at the personal level, and these are not to be dismissed, and not to be lost, either. The challenge is how we reclaim commonality whilst enhancing rather than suppressing difference. Moderation is not the answer. That is merely liberalism as a hidebound conservatism, preserving what has been attained. Moderation in these conditions will continue to see the world go to extremes. Liberation within a greater alienation is no liberation at all.
I am a critic of abstraction in both political and economic terms, an advocate of social proximity. That's how I read Marx's critique and Marx’s socialism – as a self-governing society that has brought social relations within human reach, restituting the power alienated to the state and capital to the social body. As Marx writes in On the Jewish Question:
'All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to man himself.
Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.
Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.'
Instead of a conventional or historicist ethics, relative to specific social relations in time and place, I embed that emancipatory critique in a transcendent ethic.
This article cites a lot of philosophers and social theorists, both conservative (Nisbet, Tocqueville) and leftist (Habermas), that I have written on over the years and incorporated into my work. Some quotes as a taster: "Individuals have been left unmoored from the traditional communities that bound them to one another in a web of reciprocal obligation and mutual commitment. The possibility of transcendent meaning is regarded as little more than an antiquated parochialism—a childish dream from a more naive era. Gott ist tot. And even as we inhabit a world of ever-increasing material prosperity and political freedom, we cannot help but feel a profound sense of loss in His absence." It is this unmooring that I analyse precisely in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality: Morality and Modernity.
The article continues: "Leading theorists from across the political spectrum share a recognition of this distinctly modern problem. Even as they often diverge in their views of its root causes, modern philosophers on both the left and the right are united in their profound concern for the empty promises of late modernity.
‘On one level, this is a surprising commonality: political conservatives and religious traditionalists regularly deride “cultural Marxism” for its ideological bankruptcy and deleterious social effects, while leftists have recently been known to reject their conservative counterparts as dangerous reactionaries.’
I do my work precisely on this terrain of commonality. I see past the obvious divisions to identify common themes, proceeding from there to interweave different viewpoints into one that would make sense to advocates of either side.
The article continues:
‘But there are parallels between contemporary left- and right-wing political philosophy. Even as the two schools of thought maintain profound disagreements regarding foundational questions of human nature and the limits of political possibility, both structure their politics upon a shared anxiety regarding the individuated alienation and dissolution of community in large portions of the developed world.’
When it comes to foundational questions, I adhere to an essentialist metaphysics within transcendent standards of truth and justice as against constructivism and conventionalism.
The article is well worth exploring. I can compare it, passage by passage, with the key themes of my own work. I'm encouraged by the realization that I may well not be on my own in exploring this terrain. There have been times when I have thought I was out on my own here. That is clearly not the case. It is also encouraging to see that others may also be getting it, looking beyond the false divisions of right and left, which are merely different wings of the same dominant liberalism, the economic and the cultural, and which, at libertarian extremes lead to an anarchy of the rich and the identitarian.
‘The question of why the modern predicament has occurred is complex—in many ways, it is the central focus of both Nisbet’s and the Frankfurt School’s body of work—but both the conservative sociologist and his leftist counterparts saw the growth of rationalist ideology, propagated by the state and a variety of cultural institutions, as having invaded the fragile ecosystem of associations and civic community ties that had previously ordered and mediated the individual’s relationship to his world.’
Marx located that problem not in some ahistorical reason and rational process but in an alienated system of production. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,’ Marx wrote. The loss of the physical commons has also been a loss of the ethical commons; the loss of the sense of belonging has also been a loss of the sacred.
In my PhD thesis I argued that Marx sought to confront bourgeois society and politics with its own internal contradictions, either having to choose its key institutions or its most cherished principles. Liberals can still tend to see liberalism as a plucky outsider leading the cause of emancipation against constituted power and authority. The truth is that liberalism is the dominant political and cultural tradition and has been for a long while now – the problems liberals confront are in some way self-authored and need to be owned.
It is in this light that we should ponder the conservative Robert Nisbet’s argument in The Sociological Tradition:
'We have reached the point today, however (I am speaking, of course, only of the West), when the word revolution begins to have a hollow sound. On every side, to be sure, we continue to ring changes on it with respect to technology, education, civil rights, suburbanism, international relations, morality, and so on. No doubt there is some degree of applicability of "revolution" to every aspect of culture in every age. But it must be admitted that much clarity and evocativeness have eroded away in the past few decades. For, like it or not, the two revolutions, in any concrete sense of the word, have been accomplished. We are urban, democratic, industrial, bureaucratic, rationalized, large scale, formal, secular, and technological. That many of us are uncomfortable amid the results of the two revolutions—uneasy, perplexed, even nostalgic—does not affect the matter. And, despite our occasional, quixotic tilting at windmills, the results of the revolutions are fixed. They are irreversible.
It thus becomes ever more difficult to squeeze creative juices out of the classic antitheses that, for a hundred years, have provided theoretical structure for sociology. Community-society, authority-power, status-class, and sacred-secular all have vitality so long as the substantive equivalents have reality and relevance. It is like the distinction between state and society or between rural and urban: good so long as substantive referents are still existent, still imperative in their reality, but of diminishing significance, even illusory, once they are gone. The tidal movements of change that up until now have given significance to these antitheses and their numberless corollaries have all too clearly reached a stage of completeness—a stage of mere expansion rather than of continuing development—that cuts much of the empirical ground out from under the antitheses. It becomes ever more difficult to extract new essence, new hypothesis, new conclusion, from them. Distinctions become ever more tenuous, examples ever more repetitive, vital subject matter ever more elusive.'
Those words were written in 1970. ‘Progress’ has arrived, we are here, we have landed. And yet there is widespread discontent and dis-at-ease. Why? That’s the question I seek to answer in my work. For now, the article I cite here serves as a useful and insightful introduction.