T.S. Eliot, The Literature of Politics (part I)

by Bradley J. Birzer

The following are excerpts from a speech T.S. Eliot gave on April 19, 1955, at the London Conservative Union. I have typed verbatim what Time and Tide reprinted in its April 23, 1955 issue. One can find the full speech in T.S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (1965; Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 136-144. I decided to take from Time and Tide rather than the book, as I assume the book is still copyrighted, whereas the Time and Tide article is less likely to be so. Part II will appear as soon as I can get it input.

While Eliot never refers to Russell Kirk, it is clear that Kirk is a huge presence in the article. Eliot was in the process of publishing Kirk's The Conservative Mind with Faber and Faber (it appeared simultaneously in the U.S. as the Second Revised Edition), and the two had already corresponded frequently with one another and spent much personal time together.

Additionally, many of the ideas that appear here are almost taken directly from The Conservative Mind.

Some of the speech, though, is distinctly Eliot. In particular, one can hear echoes of "Murder in the Cathedral," especially in its profound skepticism of politics as an academic field and as a reality.

Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still unshapen: I have seen these things in a shaft of sunlight. Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmenWho do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing.Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time.

Amen.

*****

T.S. Eliot, "The Literature of Politics," Time and Tide (April 23, 1955): 523.

What is the literature of Conservatism? That is to say, what are the ‘classic’ writings in the English language, with which any thoughtful Conservative is presumed to have some familiarity, writings by authors whose work is supposed to yield some understanding of what Conservatism is? There are four names which we could all, without any prompting, repeat and chorus are they constantly turn up together. They lead off in the bibliographical note of that admirable little book Conservatism written by Lord Hugh Cecil, as he was then, in 1912 for the Home University Library. They are, of course, the names of Bolingbroke, Burke, Coleridge and Disraeli.

Now, could one assemble four men, in one field of thought, more dissimilar to each other than these? The one thing they obviously have in common is that each in his way was a master of prose, whose work can no more be ignored by the student of English literature than by the student of politics. Each of these men had a sense of style—and that is something more than merely a trick of knowing how to write.

This is all to the good, that the Conservative tradition should be also a tradition of good writing; but it may seem irrelevant. When we consider Bolingbroke, he is hardly an example of that devotion to Christian beliefe and Christian morals that Lord High Cecil quite rightly called for. Burke was certainly a Christian thinker; Coleridge was a distinguished theologian as well as philosopher; Disraeli also deserves a pass degree, though churchmanship is the one point on which I feel more sympathy with Mr Gladstone.

As for their politics, the situations in which the three who practiced politics found themselves were very different. Bolingbroke, in fact, was pre-Conservative, if we agree with those who derive Conservatism itself only from a fusion of Tory and Whig elements, due largely to the effect of the French Revolution upon the mind of Burke. Burke, as has often been observed, uttered his most important statements of Conservative doctrine in the course of current controversy: Disraeli delivered himself through his novels as well as in Parliament. As for Coleridge, he was rather a man of my own type, different from myself chiefly in being immensely more learned, more industrious and endowed with a moe powerful and subtler mind. So we remark that with three of these writers, their philosophy was nourished on their political experience.

The fourth was a philosopher with no political experience. What are we to make of this diversity, and what common principles can be elicited from the work of such different men, writing under such different conditions? I am inclined to believe it a good thing that we should find the question difficult to answer . . . . [in original]

I venture to put forward the suggestion that political thinking, that is, thinking that concerns itself with the permanent principles, if any, underlying a Party name, can follow two contrasted lines of development. At the beginning maybe a body of doctrine, perhaps a canonical work: and a band of devoted people can set out to disseminate and popularize this doctrine through their emotional appeal to the interested and the disinterested; and then, as a political party, endeavor to realize a programme based on the doctrine.

I, Earthman

by Stephen Masty

(with apologies to Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and everybody else)

July 1, 2019: We finally escaped the cramped quarters of our spacecraft, The Triumph of America, and moved into Eagle 1, the prefab base camp that became our lunar home. Despite slightly more living space, Lieutenant McAlister and Dr. Swann were still at loggerheads. What seemed to be merely a conflict over the microwave transmitter was a much deeper clash of personalities and some of us could see it coming, especially Commander Benson.

“He’s not entitled to any more than the rest of us,” the lieutenant objected. “You’re playing favourites, ma’am, and we can all see why.”

The room went still: few suspected that relations would deteriorate so fast, or that the brash young astronaut would stoop to accusations of racial favouritism. Once that Petrie dish was opened, we’d never get the toxic bacilli back under glass.

The commander’s face failed to register the calculated insult.

“Peter’s two older boys are serving with Navy Seals’ units on the front-lines in Iran and Malaysia,” Shiela explained again, “and his wife and the little ones are home in Chicago, right in the middle of the food riots. If our geologist needs extra time on the transmitter to talk to his family, he will get it and that is my decision.”

The wiry, white New Yorker saluted perfunctorily, scarcely cloaking his resentment. Seated at the common table, Shiela returned to editing her remarks for the spacecast to earth, for not even our commander was permitted the luxury of private quarters.

July 2, 2019: It was clear from Peter’s conversations back home, and most everyone else’s, that NASA was screening our news. From unofficial channels, it sounded as if things were getting worse earthside.

The Middle Eastern invasion was already six years old and as costly a stalemate as the newer proxy war against China. America’s police action in South America (we were under strict orders not to call it a war) was maybe the worst of all, as Venezuela had become a magnet for newly-formed insurgent groups from across the continent. At home, the federal work-camps were unpopular with the unemployed, and shrinking food rations had begun to provoke violent outbursts in major cities.

“My youngest daughter, Aretha, hears the gunfire and asks if she can come live with us on the moon,” murmured Peter, who put a brave face on everything. “I promised her that Daddy will be home as soon as we’re relieved.”

But that required a second team and a second vessel. Promised in six weeks, colleagues back at Canaveral whispered that they had not even begun synchronising the boosters.

Meanwhile, we had work to do. Peter was looking for breaches in the anorthositic crust, perhaps where a small asteroid had struck, that would give us a peek beneath the lunar surface. His odds were better than mine, as the team’s paleo-biologist and ‘fifth-wheel’ hoping irrationally for fossilised signs of life. Shiela filled bags with small rocks for chemical analysis. Back in Washington, the President was convinced that the moon contained vast fortunes in rare metals, of which Shiela had so far found no sign in her makeshift lab at the base.

July 3, 2019: Morale took a beating this morning, when ComSat confirmed that the relief team would be postponed for at least three months over a financing wrangle with Congress, but that was the least of it. Peter Junior had been injured in combat in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands, nobody would say how seriously, and communication with Chicago was down indefinitely so Dr. Swann could not console his wife. He was taking it hard, and could scarcely be lured from his bunk despite our best efforts.

“What do you think of the draft?” Commander Benson asked me after I had glanced over it.

“It’s certainly patriotic enough,” I said as convincingly as I could. “Hey, it’s what they want. They’ll probably replay it during the Super Bowl.”

The chemist grimaced: “The President promised in his first term. We’re the new Manifest Destiny, the Saturday Lunar Matinee, the Big Distraction.”

We agreed that there were no other options. SatCom would relay her remarks, through ComBase in Canaveral, to seven billion people worldwide and especially to 300 million frightened Americans potentially kept hopeful by technology.

We were the Edisons, the Alan Shepards, the Jonas Salks who tried to instil a faith lost in God, government and our fellow men.

At least I thought we had agreed, until Commander Benson asked Mom to speak with her privately. Mom, as we all called Air Force Captain Rita Velluci, was a sweet, middle-aged, Italian-American lady from Ventura, California, and the best satcom-ops technician in the business.

“Fourth of July or not,” she complained merrily, "I can’t bake hot-dog buns in zero gravity.” Otherwise she would have tried: there was nothing else to call her but Mom. The pair retreated into the oxygen reprocessing unit.

July 4, 2019: The morning satcast revealed that Peter Junior’s death had been quick, painless and with honor, but no one really knew for sure. Still cut off from communication with his family in Chicago, Peter nodded politely to our hugs and condolences, even from Gary McAlister. But otherwise he sat motionless on his bunk, staring into his empty coffee mug as tears ran down his cheeks.

“I can do it,” Mom said softly, “but only if it’s an order.”

Commander Benson nodded somberly. “My call, Captain, and my responsibility,” she replied.

“All I have to do is tell the satellite to broaden the frequencies,” the communicator explained. “Then it feeds Canaveral and everywhere else on the planet. You’ll have three minutes before they can shut down satellite transmissions altogether.”

“Just do it, Mom,” ordered Commander Benson.

NASA signalled that the President had concluded his Independence Day remarks, and in sixty seconds Commander Benson would begin her historic spacecast from mankind’s first permanent colony on the moon. Captain Velluci frantically keyed data into the transmitter, nodding at the skipper when she had finished

Sheila glanced up at us from the table.

“You are about to hear a lifelong American patriot commit treason,” she said. Then she turned to the trembling scientist beside her.

“Peter,” she added, “believe me. We’re all going home.”

Stephen Masty lives in Kabul and London.

"Aristocracy" by T.S. Eliot

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES Sir.—The traditional use of the word [aristocracy] implies, I believe, an emphasis upon inheritance: not merely the inheritance of property, however important that may seem to some, but the inheritance, partly through biological trans­mission and partly through environment, of, other less tangible values. In other words, the unit of aristocracy, in the sense in which the word has been used in the past, is not the individual but the family. In the new sense of the word (and the phrase “the new aristo­cracy” is acquiring currency) inheritance is ignored, and the family implicitly depreciated. We are to have an aristocracy, not of families, but of individuals; and those individuals will have been turned into aristocrats, not by their parents, but by their schoolmasters, employing some system of selection to be elaborated. I suggest that this may be a more violent mutation of meaning than any word ought to be required to undergo. It will not do to appeal, behind the back of tradition, to the etymological sense of the word: for govern­ment by the best men is surely the aspiration of every society, whatever its social organiza­tion. I am, Sir, your obedient servant.

--T. S. Eliot, Shamley Green, Surrey, April 14.

[Source: T.S. Eliot, “Aristocracy,” London Times (April 17, 1944), pg. 5.]

The Humane Economy of Wilhelm Roepke

by Russell Kirk

Today I offer you some observations concerning Wilhelm Roepke, a principal social thinker of the 20th century - and, incidentally, the principal architect of Germany's economic recovery at the end of the Second World War. His books are out of print in this country at present, but I plan to reprint in a series that I edit, The Library of Conservative Thought, his study The Social Crisis of Our Time, and later other books of his (they are now in print, ed.). And to my remarks on Professor Roepke, I shall add certain related reflections of my own. 

Roepke was the principal champion of a humane economy: that is, an economic system suited to human nature and to a humane scale in society, as opposed to systems bent upon mass production regardless of counterproductive personal and social consequences. He was a formidable opponent of socialist and other "command" economies; also a fearless, perceptive critic of an unthinking "capitalism." Although German by birth, during the Second World War, Roepke settled at Geneva, where he became professor of economics at the Graduate Institute of International Affairs. There he wrote Civitas Humana; The Social Crisis of Our Time; Economics of the Free Society; The Solution of the German Problem; and the essays included in the volumes Against the Tide and Welfare, Freedom, and Inflation. The title of his last book, A Humane Economy, which was published in America, was suggested by me. 

A gentleman of high courage and a sincere Christian, Roepke set his face against both the Nazis and the communists. He was intellectually and physically vigorous: an accomplished skier, he always climbed back up the mountainside, rather than riding a chair-lift. Knowing that man is more than producer and consumer, Roepke detested Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism and found that most of his fellow economists perceived human existence imperfectly, being blinkered by utilitarian dogmata. 

Before turning to Roepke's arguments, I venture to offer some background of his thought during the disorderly period that followed upon the Second World War, a time during which the idea of grand-scale social planning exercised a malign power. Roepke was the most effective opponent of that Plannwirischaft.

That highly speculative division of knowledge, which our age calls "economics," took shape in the 18th century as an instrument for attaining individual freedom, as well as increased efficiency of production. But many 20th century teachers and specialists in economics became converts to a neo-Jacobinism. (Burke defines Jacobinism as "the revolt of the enterprising talents of a nation against its property.") Such doctrines of confidence in the omnicompetence of the state in economic concerns came to predominate in state polytechnic institutes and state universities especially. Quite as 18th century optimism, materialism, and humanitarianism were fitted by Marx into a system that might have surprised a good many of the philosophies, so 19th century utilitarian and Manchesterian concepts were the ancestors (perhaps with a bend sinister) of mechanistic social planning. The old Jacobins scarcely realized that their centralizing tendencies were imitative of the policies of the "old regime"; so it is not surprising that recent humanitarian and collectivistic thinkers forget their debt to Jeremy Bentham. Yet the abstractions of Bentham, reducing human beings to social atoms, are the principal source of modern designs for social alteration by flat.

At the end of the Second World War, centralizers and coercive planners were mightily influential in Western Europe and in Britain, and they were not missing in the United States. The modem nation-state enjoys effective powers of coercion previously unknown in political structures. But the increase of coercion frustrates the natural course of development; economic theory as a basis for state coercion has repeatedly proved fallible; "planning" destroys the voluntary community and tries to substitute an ineffectual master plan (as, most ruinously, in Iran under the Shah); the goals of state action should be primarily moral, not economic; and thus the whole perspective of social planners is distorted. In opposition to the dominant school of economic theory just after the Second World War, such economists as Roepke, W. A. Orton, F. A. Hayek, and a handful of others strove to restrain the economic collectivists. 

Although he proved himself very competent to deal with the vast postwar economic difficulties of Germany, a major industrial country, Roepke nevertheless much preferred the social and economic patterns of Switzerland, where he lived from the triumph of Hitler until the end of his life. His model for a humane economy can be perceived by any observant traveler in Switzerland.

Professor Roepke and I once conversed about the Swiss town of Thun, at the foot of Thunersee, enormous peaks looming above the town, and the beautiful long lake stretching southward from Thun's miniature harbor. At Thun one perceives the Swiss achievement in dealing with the problem of social tranquility - and in reconciling the old world with the new. From the railway station at Thun you cross the river, make your way through twisted streets between very old but perfectly preserved houses, and presently reach the steep hill on which stand the square-towered schloss and the old church. From the battlements of the schloss, you look down upon the remains of the city walls, the venerable rathaus, and all the immaculate prosperity of a prospering Swiss municipality. And then your eye discovers that Thun is also an industrial town of some importance, for across the railroad tracks are factories and warehouses, busy as the old town is sedate. Here is an industrialism that has not blighted the traditional life of a society. There can be few regions more pleasant for the industrial worker than Thun. Eat at a cafe frequented by workingmen, and you are surprised by the cheerfulness, cleanliness, and good appearance of the place - which serves highly satisfactory food. Zurich, Basel, Fribourg, Bern, and other places much larger than Thun also have been successful in keeping their industrial life decent - in contrast with what industrialism has done to British, let alone American, cities. 

I have mentioned Thun because it illustrates well enough the embodiment of Roepke's idea of a humane economy. Now permit me to turn to Roepke's thought.

Roepke seemed to have read everything. He was familiar, for instance, with the social ideas of John Calhoun and James Fenimore Cooper, concerning which most U.S. professors of economics are densely ignorant. Wilhelm Roepke knew the insights of religion and poetry, the problems of history and morality. His book, The Social Crisis of Our Time, is at heart an analysis of the menace that Roepke called "the cult of the colossal." Social equilibrium has been overthrown in our age, Roepke knew. Here are some moving sentences of his concerning that grim subject. 

“Men having to a great extent lost the use of their innate sense of proportion, thus stagger from one extreme to the other, now trying out this, now that, now following this fashionable belief, now that, responding now to this external attraction, now to the other, but listening least of all to the voice of their own heart. It is particularly characteristic of the general loss of a natural sense of direction - a loss which is jeopardizing the wisdom gained through countless centuries - that the age of immaturity, of restless experiment, of youth, has in our time become the object of the most preposterous overestimation.”

Of all our afflictions, Roepke continues, the product of moral decay, of consolidation, and of the worship of bigness, the worst is proletarianization. Capitalism may have introduced the modern proletariat, but socialism enlarges that class to include nearly the whole of humanity. Our salvation, Roepke argues, lie s in a third choice, something different from either ideological socialism on doctrinaire capitalism. He writes:

“Socialism, collectivism, and their political and cultural appendages are, after all, only the last consequence of our yesterday; they are the last convulsions of the nineteenth century and only in them do we reach the lowest point of a century-old development along the wrong road; these are the hopeless final state toward which we drift unless we act... . The new path is precisely the one that will lead us out of the dilemma of 'capitalism' and collectivism. It consists of the economic humanism of the 'Third Way.'”

Roepke's "third way" is not "gas and water socialism" or consumer cooperatives or a managed economy. Instead it is economic activity humanized by being related to moral and intellectual ends; humanized by being reduced to the human scale. Roepke proposes to abolish the proletariat, not by reducing everyone to proletarian status, the method of socialism, but by restoring property, function, and dignity to the mass of men. His ideas, although not new, are put with a clarity, practicality, and assurance that other people who wish to simplify and decentralize the economy sometimes lack. A liberal in the tradition of Tocqueville, Roepke believed in the restoration of local institutions and local choices, not in a centralized bureaucratic elite. He desired a society with reverence, stability, personal rights, and manners; he saw that, if we do not restore such a society, presently we may have no civilized society at all. The work of the French Revolution must be undone, he reasoned, not to reinstate a rule of force, but instead to recognize order and authority, established by prescription and consent. Society cannot be organized, he wrote, "in accordance with rational postulates while disregarding the need for genuine communities, for a vertical structure." 

Unexplainable Behaviour by Churchmen

by Stephen Masty

Yesterday saw a puzzling outbreak of abnormality from senior Christian leaders that, so far, nobody has attributed to this week’s solar storm which was the biggest since 2005.

Anglican bishops in Britain’s House of Lords revolted over the Government’s proposal to cap family welfare benefits at 26,000 pounds sterling per annum ($40,600), which is the average national salary.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith insisted that the limit was not designed to punish claimants: “The purpose of this is to give fairness to people who are paying tax …(and) It is not fair to trap somebody in an expensive house which they cannot afford because they would lose their housing benefit if they went to work, so they have no incentive to work.” Nevertheless, socialist peers, defectors from the Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition government and others voted to exempt children’s benefits from the legislation.

There is nothing odd in this. Across the Anglosphere, High Church clerics are always pink at the edges. A generation ago, writer Dinesh D’Souza telephoned American Catholic bishops who had signed a letter denouncing President Reagan’s defense budget as too high. He asked them how much America spent on defense and not one of them had a clue.

The anomaly is a declaration from a former Archbishop of Canterbury that his colleagues need to go soak their heads.

Lord George Carey, who led the Anglican faith from 1991 to 2002, pronounced that Britain’s spiraling debt, not welfare limits, “is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today.” Not a political challenge, not an economic peril – a moral scandal. Take that, Ben Bernanke!

First, the clergyman explained, there should be justice for middle-class taxpayers squeezed by the recession. Justice for the bourgeoisie? Coming from a modern Anglican clergyman, this is as astonishing as professing faith in the Resurrection.

Noting that he was raised in public housing and had left school at age 15 to work for the Electricity Board, Carey lamented: “The truth is that the welfare system has (grown)…to an industry of gargantuan proportions which is fuelling those very vices and impoverishing us all. In the worst-case scenario it traps people into dependency and rewards fecklessness and irresponsibility.”

Not only did he dare to mention vice, indeed vice committed by poor people, but fuelled by the Welfare State and aided by posh, bien pensant goo-goos in the Upper House of Parliament. In modern England, discussion of vice is traditionally restricted to mosques.

Adding insult to injury, he praised Secretary Smith as “a committed Christian whose motivation is to dispel the modern myth which lies behind our benefits culture (and) gives the lie to the argument that good Christians who care for their fellow man should continue to support our bloated welfare state.” Unstated is who are the bad Christians: any volunteers from the noble, Lord Bishops?

Before anyone tut-tuts about the decadent, socialist, God-less Limeys, what American presidential candidates dare accuse the idle poor of vice? Never that daring, they address the same problems but in the Oprah Winfrey/Pop Psychology School of Victimology. Carey, however, is equally stern against those who engage in vice and those who spread it, and his dramatic statements seem to resonate increasingly across Middle England.

Meanwhile, if Anglicanism is the Christian equivalent of Burger King, even less expected utterances were made across the road at McDonalds.

On the Catholic Church’s World Day of Communication, Pope Benedict XVI told everyone to shut up.

As a communication advisor, this thought delights me beyond description and it must remove anyone’s lingering doubt that this man is truly the representative of God on earth.

“Silence is a precious commodity,” the Pontiff declared, “that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive". He continues:

"Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth…By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible...When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary."

He is reminiscent of Duke Ellington, who observed that “music is what happens between the notes”, else all is lost amid uninterrupted sound. He also recalls Saint Augustine nominating selfishness as Original Sin, for only learning to clam up permits listening to others.

Will We Learn from Rome?

The rise of Rome from a crossroads town to world mastery, its achievement of two centuries of security and peace from the Crimea to Gibraltar and from the Euphrates to Hadrian’s Wall, its spread of classic civilization over the Mediterranean and western European world, its struggle to preserve its ordered realm from a surrounding sea of barbarism, its long, slow crumbling and final catastrophic collapse into darkness and chaos—this is surely the greatest drama ever played by man; unless it be that other drama which began when Caesar and Christ stood face to face in Pilate’s court, and continued until a handful of hunted Christians had grown by time and patience, and through persecution and terror, to be first the allies, then the masters, and at last the heirs, of the greatest empire in history. 


But that multiple panorama has greater meaning for us than through its scope and majesty: it resembles significantly, and sometimes with menacing illumination, the civilization and problems of our day. This is the advantage of studying a civilization in its total scope and life—that one may compare each stage or aspect of its career with a corresponding moment or element of our own cultural trajectory, and be warned or encouraged by the ancient aftermath of a modern phase. There, in the struggle of Roman civilization against barbarism within and without, is our own struggle; through Rome’s problems of biological and moral decadence signposts rise on our road today; the class war of the Gracchi against the Senate, of Marius against Sulla, of Caesar against Pompey, of Antony against Octavian, is the war that consumes our interludes of peace; and the desperate effort of the Mediterranean soul to maintain some freedom against a despotic state is an augury of our coming task. De nobis fabula narratur: of ourselves this Roman story is told.

Durant, Will (2011-06-07). Caesar and Christ (Kindle Locations 46-55). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

My Favorite Liberal Arts Professor and I Never Had Him for Class

by Robert M. Woods

What prompted this blog is that not long ago, a professor I have tremendous respect for stated in an interview that there are few, if any great essayist alive and writing today. If I understood him correctly, I disagree. If I misunderstood him, I apologize. In either case, I wanted to write a blog (not an essay) about my favorite living Liberal Arts professor. There are some odd things about him being my favorite.

Professor Schall is Roman Catholic (actually Father Schall in the Jesuit order) and I am not. Professor Schall is a Professor of Political Science and yet a genius of Liberal Arts. I am a Professor of Great Books and when he writes of Great Books (it is obvious he has read many) he warns of the temptation of relativism. Mortimer Adler and others also warned of such things and they are right in their warnings. I have never heard a single lecture by Dr. Schall but have read over a thousand pages he has penned. In one essay he speaks about the mystery of people who have taught him and yet he has never met them. Dr. Schall is such a teacher for me. We did have one brief email exchange once about Great Books and in his gracious tone he told me to proceed with caution.

I have for several years now required some of my graduate students in a Great Books program I oversee to read select essays by Dr. Schall. I always get the same reaction. The students speak about how much they have learned in only a few pages of print. Dr. Schall moves from Scripture to Thomas Aquinas, to Peanuts (that is correct, Peanuts the comic strip), to discussions about metaphysics, science, the economy, and our muddled political milieu with the greatest of ease. My theory is that he is able to do this, because he has the wisdom that can come with the best of a Liberal Arts education.

In addition, to offering delightful insights on just about every page, Dr. Shall provides reading lists of books that have shaped the way he thinks. I suspect that he has read more books than many in our increasingly bookless society have seen. Dr. Schall writes with clarity, grace, wit, and wisdom. I hope I have learned much from him, and if I have then I thank him for being one of my best teachers, and he is indeed my favorite teacher I never had for a single class.

The books in the above picture are:

• The Modern Age (grand insights into our dark moment)
• On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (for those needing clarity on why wasting time can be virtuous)
• The Life of the Mind (for those with a mind looking for furniture to place in it)
• Another Sort of Learning (for those who have yet to learn despite all their learning)
• A Student's Guide to the Liberal Arts (for any and every student who will ever attend a modern university)
• *The Classic Moment (not pictured, but will be purchased and read as soon as released)

Dr. Robert M. Woods is Director of the Great Books Honors College at Faulkner University. This essay was originally published on Musings of a Christian Humanist and appears here with Dr. Woods' gracious permission.

Literature in a Democracy

"By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste."

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2 (1840), Book 1, Chapter XIII

Leo Strauss on Zionism

I came across this letter in my research on conservatism in the 1950s.  It appears in one of the earliest issues of National Review, January 5, 1956, pg. 23, in the letters to the editor section.  I didn't retype it fully--but these selections, I hope, will give a sense of his argument.  


As far as I know, Strauss never identified himself as a conservative.  Rather, if memory serves (and I don't have the book in front of me), Strauss claimed himself as a part of the liberal tradition in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern.

*****

Leo Strauss, (letter to editor) “The State of Israel,” National Review (January 5, 1956), 23. 

“I am, therefore, tempted to believe that the authors in question are driven by an anti-Jewish animus; but I have learned to resist temptations.”

“The first thing which strikes one in Israel is that the country is a Western country, which educates its many immigrants from the East in the ways of the West: Israel is the only country which as a country is an outpost of the West in the East. Furthermore, Israel is a country which is surrounded by mortal enemies of overwhelming numerical superiority, and in which a single book absolutely predominates in the instruction given in elementary schools and in high schools: the Hebrew Bible. Whatever the failings of individuals may be, the spirit of the country as a whole can justly be described in these terms: heroic austerity supported by the nearness of biblical antiquity. A conservative, I take it, is a man who believes that ‘everything good is heritage.’ I know of now country today in which this belief is stronger and less lethargic than in Israel.”

“A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.”

“A conservative, I take it, is a man who knows that the same arrangement may have very different meanings in different circumstances.”

“The men who are governing Israel at present came from Russia at the beginning of the century. They are much more properly described as pioneers than as labor unionists. They were the men who laid the foundations under hopelessly difficult conditions. They are justly looked up to by all non-doctrinaires as the natural aristocracy of the country, for the same reasons for which Americans look up to the Pilgrim fathers.”

“I wish to say that the founder of Zionism, Herzl, was fundamentally a conservative man, guided in his Zionism by conservative considerations. The moral spine of the Jews was in danger of being broken by the so-called emancipation which in many cases had alienated them from their heritage, and yet not given them anything more than merely formal equality; it had brought about a condition which has been called ‘external freedom and inner servitude’; political Zionism was the attempt to restore the inner freedom, that simple dignity, of which only people who remember their heritage and are loyal to their fate, are capable. Political Zionism is problematic for obvious reasons. But I can never forget what it achieved as a moral force in an era of complete dissolution. It helped to stem the tide of ‘progressive’ levelling of venerable, ancestral differences; it fulfilled a conservative function.”

Defending Hayek

by Brad Birzer

When Friedrich Hayek announced his personal political philosophy as an “unrepentant Old Whig” in his magnum opus Constitution of Liberty, he was reaching deep into the well of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, even if he had originally spoken these words against his friend, Russell Kirk, in their famous Mont Pelerin debate of 1957.[1] 

While the Old Whigs founded themselves rather spontaneously as a coherent movement during the 1680s in England, they drew their inheritance and patrimony from the great republican and Stoic thinkers of the Occident. As with other liberally-educated persons of his generation, Hayek frequently referenced the great thinkers of the ancient world, especially Aristotle and Cicero, in his own works, and, of course, he also cited a number of other thinkers who helped develop the Whig and republican movements during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke. And, finally, he discussed intellectuals following the events of 1688, including Commonwealth men such John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. Hayek rightfully viewed himself in a line of succession with these profound social critics and philosophers.[2]

Though Hayek openly rejected the label “conservative,” he did, for example, find and identify with many of the same heroes of the past as did self-professed conservatives such as Kirk and R.A. Nisbet. Indeed, with the very important exceptions of Locke, Mill, and Acton, the primary influences on all three men were nearly identical. That Hayek came from Central Europe and Kirk and Nisbet from America probably helps explain, in many ways, the desire on Hayek’s part to avoid the label “conservatism.” Its American (and English) manifestation was quite different from the continental variety. Hayek, of course, knew its twentieth-century English and American types, but he had seen much in Europe that almost certainly shaped his distaste for the term, “conservative.”

Regardless, I think it’s critically important for those of us who identify with imaginative conservatism to give Hayek his due as a thinker and a man. While Hayek has much to tell us about many things (he was, after all, accomplished in philosophy, economics, law, and psychology), I’ll offer just two of his most important ideas: the necessity of voluntary community and the fatal conceit.

Economies and Communities 

Importantly, Hayek argued that while “each man knows his interests best,” one’s gifts should be used in community, where reason is “tested and corrected by others.”[3] Daniel Rush Finn has done an excellent job of contrasting Hayek’s and John Paul II’s economics in his 1999 article, “The Economic Personalism of John Paul II: Neither Right nor Left,” so I won’t try to rehash that or make the attempt to claim that Hayek’s understanding is fully commensurate with Catholic social teaching.[4] Though nominally Roman Catholic, Hayek's understanding of the individual is clearly not the same as the Catholic understanding of the human person, but it's worth mentioning here that John Paul II held Hayek in great respect. John Paul consulted Hayek on some issues in 1980; but that’s another story.

Hayek’s views on community and the role of the individual within community, however, are very western, if not completely Catholic. This is a very long passage from Hayek, but I think it’s worth quoting all of it, especially as Hayek did such an excellent job of distinguishing true individualism from false:

This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, which all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working in human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may be recognizable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational. I need not say much on the first point. That true individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group, that it believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations, and that indeed its case rests largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration need not be stressed further. There can be no greater contrast to this than the false individualism which wants to dissolve all these smaller groups into atoms which have no cohesion other than the coercive rules imposed by the state, and which tries to make all social ties prescriptive, instead of using the state mainly as a protection of the individual against the arrogation of coercive powers by the small groups. Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society as these smaller groupings of men are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of the rules of social intercourse; and the readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process which nobody may understand is also an indispensible condition if it is to be possible to dispense with compulsion. That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background, is of course, a commonplace. But the reverse of this, while less familiar, is probably not less true: that coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and traditions have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.[5]

Hayek’s view, after all, agrees with Aristotle’s (and St. Paul’s and Marcus Aurelius’) belief that “man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis.” That is, man must employ his particular gifts within community to make and render them meaningful.[6] Hayek was anti-utopian regarding this, however. Man is a “very irrational and fallible being,” Hayek wrote, “whose individual errors are correct only in the course of the social process, and which aims at making the best of a very imperfect material.”[7] The market process, and, consequently, the social process helps attenuate the problems of man’s inherent flaws, but it does not erase them or make somehow good. The system of private property rewards virtue and punishes vice, at least to a great extent, as well as allows entrepreneurs to try and fail and try again. As an additional advantage, private property also brings a considerable amount of harmony to a community. In this, Hayek sounds as much like Adam Smith as he does Burke. As the great Anglo-Irish statesman had argued, commerce reconciled “conflicting interests without giving one group power to make their views and interests always prevail over those of others.”[8] But, it was more to Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith that Hayek turned, arguing that commerce and virtue were not incompatible. Certainly, Mandeville and Smith each recognized that man is fallible. One can neither reshape nor redesign the human person.

TIC Exclusive Interview with President Obama

This is Herbie Hardcheese, TIC’s Election-2012 reporter, here in the Oval Office for an exclusive interview with President Barak Obama. Mister President, what do you make of the Republican nomination process so far?

Obama: Herbie, I’m glad you asked me that question.

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
(I wasn't there; I simply state
What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

Herbie: Do you mean that you expect the campaign tensions to increase?

Obama: Herbie, I’m glad you asked me that question.

The gingham dog went "Bow-wow-wow!"
And the calico cat replied "Mee-ow!"
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
(Now mind: I 'm only telling you
What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

Herbie: Sir, when you say Dutch are you citing the Netherlands Information Service?

Obama: Herbie, I’m glad you asked me that question.

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, "Oh, dear! what shall we do!"
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfullest way you ever saw---
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
(Don't fancy I exaggerate---
I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Herbie: Mister President, does Beijing, presumably the Chinese plate, prefer a second Obama Administration to anything Republican despite today’s strained Sino-American relations?

Obama: Herbie, I’m glad you asked me that question.

Next morning, where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
But the truth about the cat and pup
Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
(The old Dutch clock it told me so,
And that is how I came to know.)

Herbie: Would you please explain?

Obama: I mean, Herbie my man, that you’re welcome to come to the White House and see me anytime through 2018. Good talking to you!

Herbie: Thank you, Mister President. (to camera) This is Herbie Hardcheese for The Imaginative Conservative, bringing you up-to-the-minute changes in The Permanent Things.

(Thanks to Eugene Field, 1850-1895).

Women and Children First

Mark Steyn's observations on the Costa Concordia and The Sinking of the West, remind me of James Hamilton, Jr., for whom "women and children first" meant something.

Hamilton (1786 - 1857) was born near Charleston on May 8, 1786 to James Hamilton, Sr., a rice planter, and his wife Elizabeth Lynch. He was educated at Newport, Rhode Island and Dedham, Massachusetts before returning to Charleston to read law under the tutelage of Daniel Huger and William Drayton. Admitted to the bar in 1810, Hamilton began practice in Drayton's office and later became a partner of James L. Petigru. Volunteering for service in the War of 1812, Hamilton eventually rose to the rank of major. On November 15, 1813, he married lowcountry heiress Elizabeth Heyward, gaining three plantations and two hundred slaves. The couple had eleven children.

In a state known for its flamboyant politics, Hamilton was among the most colorful individuals to sit in the governor's chair. As a member of South Carolina’s lowcountry aristocracy, Hamilton epitomized the chivalrous manner and deportment of planter society. A famous duelist, he successfully fought fourteen duels, always wounding but never killing his opponents. His prowess on the field of honor made Hamilton a much sought after second. Among the men he seconded were George McDuffie, Oliver Perry, Stephen Decatur, and John Randolph of Roanoke in his celebrated duel with Henry Clay. Hamilton was also one of Charleston’s most aggressive and reckless entrepreneurs, whose planting activities and land speculations were combined with extensive investments in numerous business, banking, and mercantile ventures.

Hamilton's political career began in 1819, when he was elected to represent St. Philip and St. Michael parishes in the South Carolina House of Representatives. Twice reelected, Hamilton resigned from the state legislature in December 1822 to fill a vacancy in the U.S. House of Representatives created by the resignation of William Lowndes. In that same year, Hamilton served as intendant (mayor) of Charleston, where he oversaw the response to Denmark Vesey's slave conspiracy. Like most South Carolinians in the early and mid-1820s, Hamilton was a strong nationalist and ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson. He carried these views with him to Washington and, after the election of 1824, led the House opposition to the administration of John Quincy Adams. Hamilton continued to represent Charleston and the lowcountry in Congress until 1829, when he declined reelection and returned to South Carolina.

The passage of the Tariff of 1828 and his gradual conversion to states' rights principles soon soured Hamilton on both the federal government and Andrew Jackson. In a speech delivered at Walterboro on October 21, 1828, Hamilton publicly renounced his earlier nationalism and called for “a nullification by the State” of the despised tariff. Claiming precedent for such action in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the speech at Walterboro launched the nullification movement in South Carolina and placed Hamilton its forefront. On December 9, 1830, the legislature elected Hamilton governor and he assumed leadership of the States Rights and Free Trade Party, which he organized into local associations to popularize free trade ideas. While governor, Hamilton also presided over the 1832 Nullification Convention, which voted to nullify the tariff within South Carolina's borders. After leaving office on December 10, 1832, Hamilton was made a brigadier general of the state militia by the new governor, Robert Hayne. In this role, Hamilton prepared the state to defy federal authority with arms if necessary.

After the nullification crisis subsided, Hamilton turned his attention to his far flung business pursuits, most of which soured in the Panic of 1837 and left him deeply indebted. Hamilton also became interested in the affairs of the newly independent Republic of Texas. He loaned the republic money and in 1838 was appointed loan commissioner for Texas by President Mirabeau Lamar. His duties carried him to Europe where he negotiated several commercial treaties and won recognition of the Republic of Texas from Great Britain and the Netherlands. Relieved of his post in 1842, Hamilton spent much of the remainder of his life shuttling between Texas, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C. trying to gain repayment of the money he loaned to Texas.

On November 15, 1857, Hamilton was en route to Texas, travelling on the steamer Opelousas, when it was struck by another ship just off Avery Island, Louisiana. Within half an hour the Opelousas had sunk. A gentleman to the end, Hamilton gave his life jacket to a woman and child and helped them into a life boat. Seconds later a wave swept Hamilton from the deck of the sinking ship and he drowned.

Sean Busick

Edgar, Walter, ed. The South Carolina Encyclopedia. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

Freehling, William W. Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836. New York: Harper & Row, Publisher, 1966.

Glenn, Virginia Louise. "James Hamilton, Jr., of South Carolina: A Biography." Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1964.

Kell, Carl Lewis. “A Rhetorical History of James Hamilton, Jr.: The Nullification Era in South Carolina, 1816–1834.” Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1971.