Notes
PREFACE
1. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New York: Vintage, 1992), 162.
2. Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Democracy and the Citizen: Community, Dignity, and the Crisis of Contemporary Politics in America,” in Redeeming Democracy in America, ed. Patrick J. Deneen and Susan J. McWilliams (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 27.
INTRODUCTION
1. Adrian Vermuele, Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
2. Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor, 2000), 7.
3. From a response essay to David Brooks “Organization Kid,” by a member of Notre Dame class of 2018, in my course Political Philosophy and Education, August 29, 2016. Paper in author’s possession.
4. Wendell Berry, “Agriculture from the Roots Up,” in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005), 107–8.
5. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).
6. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2011).
7. Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the Family (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998); Mark Shiffman, “Humanity 4.5,” First Things, November 2015.
CHAPTER 1. UNSUSTAINABLE LIBERALISM
An early version of parts of this chapter was previously published as “Unsustainable Liberalism” in First Things, August, 2012. I am grateful for permission to republish portions of that original essay.
1. The best guide to the premodern origins of many institutions commonly thought to have their origins in the early-modern liberal tradition remains Charles Howard McIlwain’s The Growth of Political Thought in the West: From the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1932). See also his Constitutionalism, Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1940). Another helpful source is John Neville Figgis, Studies of Political Thought: From Gerson to Grotius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907).
2. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997); Paul E. Sigmund, Natural Law in Political Thought (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1981); Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
3. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and trans. David Wooton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 48.
4. Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Francis Bacon, 14 vols., ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longmans, 1879), 3: 294–95.
5. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, Summer 1989.
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 229.
7. Ibid., 143.
8. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 40.
9. Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus, Of the Interpretation of Nature, in Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, The Works of Francis Bacon, 3: 218.
CHAPTER 2. UNITING INDIVIDUALISM AND STATISM
1. Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008); Marc J. Dunkelman, The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community (New York: Norton, 2014); Charles A. Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012); Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
2. Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 60.
3. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. McPherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 32.
4. Thus the Constitution positively charges Congress “to promote the Progress of sciences and useful arts.”
5. John Stuart Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 232.
6. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 2001). More recently, a similar argument has been made by Brad Gregory in his magisterial The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012).
7. See especially Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 45–58.
8. Ibid., 147.
9. Among the most powerful indictments of industrialism are to be found in the writings of southern authors, and thereby often dismissed as defenses of an unjust economic order. See, for instance, The Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper, 1930), and Wendell Berry’s response to this indictment in The Hidden Wound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).
10. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Stephen Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
11. John M. Broder and Felicity Barringer, “The E.P.A. Says 17 States Can’t Set Emission Rules, New York Times, December 20, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/washington/20epa.html?_r=0.
12. John Dewey, Individualism, Old and New (Prometheus, 1999), 37, 39.
13. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 280.
14. Walter Rauschenbusch, Theology for the Social Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997).
15. The Obama campaign’s original “Life of Julia” ad has been removed from the campaign’s website (https://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia/). Most search results now direct one to various spoofs and critiques of the original ad. Stories about the ad are still available, and provide a general description of the campaign spot. See, for example, http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/oh-julia-from-birth-to-death-left-and-right.
16. Marglin, The Dismal Science.
17. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951); Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941); Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2010). The publication record of Quest for Community is revealing. Published by Oxford University Press in 1953, it went out of print until the late 1960s, when it became popular with the New Left. Thereafter, it went out of print again until 2010, when it was republished—with a new introduction by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat—by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute press. Nisbet’s argument has never found a true political home in America, wandering between the New Left and the social conservatives on the right. Yet that his book continues to find readers suggests that his analysis remains relevant, even with the eclipse and fall of fascism and communism. See E. J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 36.
18. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, 145.
19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 672.
CHAPTER 3. LIBERALISM AS ANTICULTURE
1. Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 58.
2. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. See also William T. Cavanaugh, “‘Killing for the Telephone Company’: Why the Nation-State Is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” in Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011).
3. A quietly beautiful expression of this view, capt
ured after its passing, is offered by the part-time political scientist and full-time Vermonter Charles Fish, who wrote of his farming forebears: “For Grandmother and my uncles, there was an imagined coexistence of the hand of God and the workings of nature that was midway between divinity and the operations of mechanical laws. They would have been uncomfortable if pressed to describe the relationship between the two or to declare whether they believed there was none. When weather or disease caused damage, it was nature, not God, that was named, but nature was not simply a malevolent force. While they had to fight her as she sought to dissolve the artful bonds which held things in useful forms, they also felt they were cooperating with her as they made use of her powers of renewal and growth. They would have listened without objection to the phrase ‘harnessing the power of nature,’ but it is unlikely that in their hearts they ever thought they could do it except in the most partial way. Through nature they could accomplish fine things, but that nature herself was ever under their control would have struck them as not quite blasphemous but erroneous and perhaps presumptuous. There was much to remind them that they were not the lords of creation. . . . What fell to their hands to do they did with all their strength and craft, but they knew they worked at the center of a mystery, the motions of which they could neither influence nor predict.” Charles Fish, In Good Hands: The Keeping of a Family Farm (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 102–3.
4. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920; New York: New American Library, 1950), 46.
5. Ibid., 48.
6. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 508.
7. Ibid., 548.
8. Ibid., 557–58.
9. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 102.
10. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Set Forth in Some Resolutions Intended for the Inspection of the Present Delegates of the People of Virginia. Now in Convention. By a Native, and Member of the House of Burgesses. (Williamsburg: Clementina Rind, 1774).
11. Berry’s understanding is best grasped not through his essays but through his fiction. Based in the fictional location of Port William, Berry’s fiction portrays an idyllic (though not perfect) communal setting in which strong ties between people and to place and land are its prominent features. As Berry has described his own fiction, “by means of the imagined place . . . I have learned to see my native landscape and neighborhood as a place unique in the world, a work of God, possessed of an inherent sanctity that mocks any human valuation that can be put on it.” Berry, “Imagination in Place,” in The Way of Ignorance, 50–51.
12. Wendell Berry, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 120.
13. Ibid., 120–21.
14. Ibid., 157.
15. Lest it appear that this critique of liberal “standardization”—most often in the form of national, and increasingly international, legal imposition—implies that the left or Democratic Party is the sole perpetrator, see as a counterexample the article “Bullies along the Potomac” by Nina Mendelson in the New York Times, July 5, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/opinion/05mendelson.html. Mendelson relates that the Republican-controlled Congress—far from insisting upon states’ rights—had in a five-year span beginning in 2001 enacted twenty-seven laws “that preempt state authority in areas from air pollution to consumer protection,” including one law entitled the National Uniformity for Food Act. Or, in the domain of education, consider the standardizing effect of President Bush’s landmark No Child Left Behind program, or attraction of the standardization in the area of higher education that was threatened by President Bush’s secretary of education Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
16. Berry’s stance shares significant resemblance with many of the criticisms and concerns of the intellectual historian Christopher Lasch. See Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991) and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1994).
17. The defense of local diversity begins, but does not end, with agricultural diversity. Such diversity is necessary not only for reasons of good husbandry but further, as a means of avoiding the susceptibility of homogenous systems to cataclysmic events—whether natural or man-made, such as in the case of terrorism. See Berry, “Some Notes for the Kerry Campaign, If Wanted,” The Way of Ignorance, 18. Berry was under little illusion that Kerry would heed his advice, and it seems he was correct in that estimation.
18. In this sense, Berry’s critique of externally imposed “logic” is similar to the critiques of Michael Oakeshott. See “Rationalism in Politics,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (New York: Basic, 1962), and The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
19. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” in Solzhenitsyn at Harvard, ed. Ronald Berman (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980), 7.
20. Stephen Gardner, “The Eros and Ambitions of Psychological Man,” in Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2006), 244.
21. Simone Polillo, “Structuring Financial Elites: Conservative Banking and the Local Sources of Reputation in Italy and the United States, 1850–1914,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008, 157. This study was brought to my attention by Matthew Crawford in Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2010).
22. Cited in Polillo, “Structuring Financial Elites,” 159.
23. “No Longer the Heart of the Home, the Piano Industry Quietly Declines,” New York Public Radio, January 6, 2015, http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/despite-gradual-decline-piano-industry-stays-alive/.
CHAPTER 4. TECHNOLOGY AND THE LOSS OF LIBERTY
1. Brett T. Robinson, Appletopia (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013).
2. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010).
3. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2011).
4. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993).
5. Ibid., 28.
6. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
7. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our Future Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 5.
8. Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” Atlantic, May, 2012.
9. Richard H. Thomas, “From Porch to Patio,” Palimpsest, August 1975.
10. This practice echoes the call by John Winthrop in his oft-cited but rarely read sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” for the kind of community by the emigrating Puritans whose members would be knit closely together in the bonds of Christian charity: “Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.” John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 83.
11. Stephen Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like
an Economist Undermines Community (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 18.
12. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology, 9.
CHAPTER 5. LIBERALISM AGAINST LIBERAL ARTS
1. Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 199.
2. https://www.utexas.edu/about/mission-and-values.
3. In his classic statement about The Two Cultures, C. P. Snow is able to justify with ease why humanists should study the sciences but struggles to articulate grounds why scientists should study the humanities. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).
4. See the contrast drawn by Ruthellen Josselson between “the hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion,” in “The Hermeneutics of Faith and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Narrative Inquiry 14, no. 1 (2004): 1–28.
5. For a fuller discussion of this history, see Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), especially chapters 3–4.
6. A locus classicus that wed radical feminism with optimistic belief in technology’s ability to alter human nature remains Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Morrow, 1970).
7. Steven Levy, “GU NAACP President Discusses Diversity Issues,” Hoya, October 19, 2010. “I feel [that] money and the lack of it, as well as the lack of opportunity to participate in our consumerist, capitalist society and economy, proves difficult. For many minorities, they find that they’re not located on the same playing field as the rest of the nation.” http://www.thehoya.com/gu-naacp-president-discusses-diversity-issues/#.
One study has shown that there is a significant disadvantage in elite college admissions for students who have held leadership positions in areas that do not conform to expectations of “capitalist society.” Russell Nieli summarizes the study: “Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. Being an officer or winning awards ‘for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America,’ say Espenshade and Radford, ‘has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.’ Excelling in these activities ‘is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.’” Russell Nieli, “How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites, and Lots of Others,” Minding the Campus, July 12, 2010. https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Pub_Minding%20the%20campus%20combined%20files.pdf.
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