A Contrast of Caricatures
by Jacob T. Levy
Reaction Essay
May 20th, 2010
I was, I confess, startled by Philip Blond’s essay “Shattered Society” in The American Conservative. I have heard Blond praised by people I like and respect, but I had never read his work myself. Having read the essay, I can only say of my friend Russell Arben Fox’s wistful comment, during the uncertainty immediately following the last British election, that “the notion that David Cameron's Conservatives could introduce anything remotely like some genuine Red Tory reforms is dead (at least for now)”: I certainly hope so!
There is caricature and simplification in the next several paragraphs — but no more, I think, than in Phillip Blond’s characterization of liberalism and modernity, and I hope that the contrast of caricatures will prove useful.
The politics of western societies since the French Revolution has often been dominated by three great party-ideas. We could call them “ideologies,” but that word has such specific baggage that I think it’s best to avoid it — and part of the distinctive feature of the party-ideas has been that they have animated parties — “parties of principle” as David Hume (who distrusted such parties) termed them. These have not always been the stable institutions of the full-fledged democratic political party as came to exist in the United States and the United Kingdom in the first third of the nineteenth century, but they have been more stable and more organized than Hume’s personal factions “founded on personal friendship or animosity.”
Liberalism (and here I include both its welfarist and libertarian variants) has been the party-idea of the rule of law, religious toleration, careers open to the talents, and markets. It represented the interests and ideas of agricultural smallholders, lawyers, religious dissenters, entrepreneurs, urban traders, merchants, and artisans, as well as the interests and ideas of a portion of the wealthier classes — particularly those involved in finance and trade, and those who were “new money.” It has also, I think, often been associated with the young and single.
Socialism has been, of course, the party-idea of economic equality within industrial society, and an equalization of power over economic decisionmaking. It quintessentially represented the interests of the organized industrial working class, and disproportionately represented the ideas of professional intellectuals and urban artists.
Conservatism is the party-idea of slowing the pace of change, of preserving order and returning to real or imagined lost virtues and communal ways of life. One part of conservatism’s base has traditionally been the armed agents of the state — the military and police. But the rest of its social base has an odd character. It is the alliance of the rural landlord and the rural peasant, of the established-church priest and his relatively poor flock. It is the party idea of resisting the changes associated with the urban middle class and working class alike, of protecting traditional ways of life (including, importantly, traditional hierarchies) against the disruptions associated with both markets and politics.
Socialism is famously ambivalent about what came to be known as capitalism, appreciating its tremendous productive capacity and disruption of old power relations, while indicting the new power relations it creates. Liberalism is committed to capitalism, in more or less restrained forms. But conservatism is bitterly anticapitalist, much as it is anti-urban and for much the same reasons. The traditional rural elite finds that the creative destruction of the market threatens his status; the traditional rural poor resent that the city draws away their young to a godless and promiscuous life while also disrupting their stable economy. A local economy based on primary goods (farming, fishing) could be stable for generations, and then suddenly become uncompetitive for mysterious reasons of finance or long-distance trade, apparently decided far away by other people. Conservatism as a party-idea is in large part the attempt to defend against those disruptions — or to express resentment after they take place.
These disruptions are real and have real social and human costs. But politics requires resources and organizational capacity and human capital — and these are concentrated in the hands of the landlords, not the peasants; the priests, not the flocks. And so, more or less inevitably, conservatism is the party of the traditional elite, drawing on the votes or social support of those they have traditionally dominated. It is the alliance the aristocrat offers the peasant against the tacky, educated, often-Jewish new money city slicker; and the aristocrat sets the terms of the alliance.
This is Red Toryism — really Toryism simpliciter, with “Red Tory” a retro-fit (like “pocketwatch”) that only has to be invented after some other version has come around. The ideas offered by Phillip Blond are not so different from those of his honestly claimed intellectual forbears, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. It was Carlyle who coined the epithet “dismal science” in his attack on economists like the liberal John Stuart Mill, because they failed to appreciate the attractive stable paternalism of West Indian slave plantations. The conservative elite offers to take paternalistic care of their subjects, and to protect them against the scary and unpredictable forces of the market. The paternalism and protectionism, the insulation of the poor from market forces, make the Tory seem “Red” by comparison with the surrounding commercial society. Indeed, part of what is so striking about Blond’s essay is how thoroughly and self-consciously it returns to the conservatism of those reacting against commercial and democratic modernity in its earliest days.
To the conservative, traditional bonds of hierarchy, community, family, and faith are under threat as never before. Indeed, they are on the verge of collapse. That is to say, throughout modernity and the era when there has been self-conscious conservatism as a party idea, conservatives have always thought that traditional bonds of hierarchy, community, family, and faith are under threat as never before and on the verge of collapse.
Many late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century conservatives tried, one way or another, to come to terms with the various attractive features of modernity. The personal liberationism of the 1960s and 70s, and the market liberation of the 1980s, did not seem to lead to the collapse of civilization — and indeed, by the mid-to-late 1990s, many of the immediate excesses of the 60s and 70s had begun to be corrected. Compared with the late 80s and early 90s, many of the social indicators that had once been taken as evidence that the bottom had indeed fallen out of our social order — crime, illegitimacy, divorce, lifelong welfare dependence — have shown considerable improvement, even though the freedoms won in the 60s and 70s haven’t been reversed. And, of course, many conservatives have tried to reconcile their views with the fact of material prosperity that the century and a half since Carlyle had brought us.
Blond, however, remains unshaken. The last 30 years — somehow it always seems to be about that long, so that the middle-aged can remember their childhood with sepia tones and the young can prefer their grandparents to their parents — have been a “social disaster.” This is, to be blunt, false.
Let us take for an example: “If we do marry, the time an average relationship lasts decreases with each passing year.” That could mean that the average marriage is falling in duration because people are getting married later in life and life expectancy, while rising, is not rising quite so fast as the marriage age. But the shift from 25-year olds marrying for life to 30-year olds marrying for life is not in any obvious way disastrous. Blond certainly seems to be talking about divorce. In Britain, the long post-60s climb in the divorce rate has reversed, and the divorce rate is now lower than it was thirty years ago and apparently still falling. In the United States, the divorce rate peaked thirty years ago, and has been falling ever since.
The overall historical narrative Blond offers is no more reliable. William Cobbett was one of the most radical and principled free-traders of the nineteenth century, and it slanders his memory to lump him in with the anti-commercial Carlyle and Ruskin. Cobbett’s great cause was the repeal of the Corn Laws — the ultimate exemplar of economists’ liberalism triumphing over the rural farming world’s desire for protectionist stability.
Or consider: “The 1960s New Left, to counter the authoritarian state it created, built a personal zone free of control in which to repudiate all standards and sell the poisonous idea of liberation through chemical and sexual experimentation.” Try as I might, I cannot see how the 1960s New Left could have created the authoritarian state against which it was to rebel.
More importantly, still in the narrative of the social disaster of the last thirty years: “The loss of our culture is best understood as the disappearance of civil society. Only two powers remain: the state and the market. We no longer have, in any effective independent way, local government, churches, trade unions, cooperative societies, or civic organizations that operate on the basis of more than single issues.”
It is undoubtedly true that there has been a long-term decline in some of those organizations. But, again, there have been variations and cycles, and there is considerable reason to think that the last generation has been better than the one before. At least in the United States (I know little about Britain in this respect) church attendance has shown no measurable decline, and the density of counter-establishment civil society institutions (schools, media outlets, churches, and more) created by fundamentalist Protestants over that time has been stunning. This does nothing for my social capital, but it’s simply false to think that the last generation has seen some new collapse of the intermediate institutions of civil society.
It seems to me that Blond is uninterested in such historical niceties, and that he is pronouncing the conservative’s eternal complaint. It is much the same complaint that surfaced in Anglo-American political theory in the 1980s and came to be labeled “communitarianism,” and qua political theorist I have little to say about it that wasn’t said during the liberal-communitarian debate of that era. One of the most important pieces of writing from that era's denouement was Michael Walzer’s “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism."
Walzer was usually classified among the communitarians. (As with most ideological labels, “communitarian” was basically a term of abuse, not one of self-identification; as far as I can tell, Amitai Etzioni was the only self-proclaimed communitarian of the lot.) But Walzer saw, as Blond does not, that communitarianism is a permanent feature of and within the life of modern liberal societies, not a root-and-branch critique of them. Its value is corrective — to round sharp corners, soften rough edges, and slow rather than reverse changes.
I close with some considerations on Rousseau. It is, frankly, bizarre to find someone in so much sympathy with the anti-modernism of Carlyle and Ruskin for whom Rousseau is such a villainous figure. Blond’s depiction Rousseau has just enough truth in it to be wildly misleading. It is true that the individual agent of Book 1 of the Second Discourse is a creature of pure individual will. It is true that the Social Contract proposes a cure for modernities’ maladies that rests on the articulation of a general will — and that the general will really is will, not tradition or truth or virtue or reason. And, finally, it is true that both the noble savage and the democratic will have been important forces on later thought. So when Blond paints Rousseau as the founder of both a liberalism that worships atomistic individual will and a democratic state that worships collective will, there’s something to it.
But Rousseau’s most important mood as an intellectual was critical and diagnostic — the articulation of the malaise, not of its cure. Humans were at their best and happiest, not in an era of pure will, but in a profoundly social and communal era — the era of language and village life that preceded agriculture and metallurgy, the era of the tribe. The claim that commercial modernity necessarily represents a time of mutual alienation, dissolution of traditional communal bonds, decline of virtue, and perpetually increasing wealth for the wealthy and poverty for the poor — that claim found one of its most profound and influential formulations in Rousseau’s work. In short, Rousseau has as good a claim to be the founder of Red Toryism and conservatism as anything else — and much better a claim than to being any kind of founder of liberalism. (Not that any such anachronistic claims are particularly good.)
In a subsequent response, I will discuss Blond’s understanding of liberalism and liberty, and also address some of the ideas broached by Patrick Deneen’s essay.
[...] his attack on Red Toryism the (libertarian?) writer Jacob Levy also appeals to class ideas to define conservatism. Liberalism (and here I include both its welfarist and libertarian variants) has been the [...]