niemeyer conservatism and new political theory

7/28/2019 Niemeyer Conservatism and New Political Theory

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MODERN AGEA QUARTERLY REVIEW

Conservatismandthe New Political Theory

G E R - H A R T N I E M E Y E R

I Nm NOVEL, TheEustace Di amonds, AnthonyTrollope has sketched this portrait of EnglandsConservatives:They feel among themselves that every-thing that is being done is bad,--even thoughthat everything is done by their own party. Itwas bad to interfere with Charles, bad to en-.dure Cromwell, bad to banish J ames, bad toput up with William. The House of Hanoverwas bad. A ll interference with prerogative hasbeen bad. The Reform bil l was very bad. En-croachment on the estates of bishops was bad.Emancipation of Roman Catholics was theworst of all Abolition of corn-laws, church-rates, and oaths and tests were all bad. Themeddling with the Universities has been griev-ous. T he treatment of the Irish Church hasbeen satanic. The overhauling of schools ismost injurious to English education. Educationbills and Irish land bills were all bad. Everystep taken has been bad. And yet to them oldEngland is of all countries in the world the bestto live in, and is not at all the less comfortablebecause of the changes that have been made.These people are ready to grumble at everyboon conferred on them, and yet to enjoy everyboon. They know too their privileges, and,

after afashion, understand their position. It ispicturesque, and it pleases them. To have beenalways in the right and yet always on the losingside; always being ruined, always under perse-cution from a wild spirit of republican-demagogism-and yet never to lose anything,not even position or public esteem, is pleasantenough. A huge, l iving, daily increasing griev-ance that does one no palpable harm, is thehappiest possession that a man can have.There is a large body of such men in England,and, personally, they are the very salt of thenation. He who said that all Conservatives arestupid did not know them. Stupid Conserva-tives there may be,-and there certainly arevery stupid Radicals. The well-educated,widely-read Conservative, who is well assuredthat all good things are gradually being broughtto an end by the voice of the people, is gener-ally the pleasantest man to be met.We all recognize the likeness. We feel thekinship and congeniality. And yet, all of usknow that this portrait does not apply to Ameri-can conservatives of the mid-twentieth cen-tury. For American conservatives of the lastquarter of a century have been a forward-driving force, an innovating force, one might

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even be tempted to say, an up-turning force.They have not been disposed to spend theirtime lamenting a status quo of this or the lastcentury. Rather, they have mounted attackafter attack against the status quo. For thestatus quo in A merica has been the liberalEstablishment. That remark is not quite accu-rate. To be correct, it would be necessary todistinguish a social status quo from an intellec-tual status quo. The social status quo, anAmerica of middle-class people, predomi-nantly still individualist, predominantly stillcommitted to free enterprise, predominantlystil l believing in God, the forgiveness of sins,and life eternal, has by and large pleased ourconservatives. Their quarrel has been with theintelligentsia who have both alienated them-selves from the traditional order of this countryand have woven over itanetwork of institutionswhere Un-A merican ideas are nurtured byacademic deans, socialist press publishers,juridical sociologists, with-it theologians, andideological bureaucrats. Even though no morethan a thin top layer, it must be called theEstablishment, for all through the institutionsofthis country which are concerned with mean-ing, goals, information, education, and moralcorrection there prevails, by tacit agreement,what has been called the second religion of theintellectuals, an amalgam of socialism,positivism, progressivism, and anti-Christianhumanism. The intellectuals do not explicitlypostulate this their religion, rather they take itfor granted; yet nobody who deviates in theslightest from these beliefs will slip by thewatchdogs of the academy, the press, themedia, and the judiciary.Todays intellectual Establishment is acomposite of yesteryears revolutionaryideologies. If they still speak the language ofopposition they know how to mute and concealit. The public hears their voice not as comingfrom the basement but as if from the seats ofauthority, the cathedra, the editorial, thetextbook, the bench, and the regulatory ?ffice.They have been in undisputed possession ofthecommanding heights for so long that nobodycan still recall every having heard anothermessage of direction. Particularly for thosewho seek and impart education, the thing to do,

the way to prove their decency, is to conform tothis message. The sole effective rebellionagainst this Establishment comes from yes-teryears anti-revolutionaries, the conserva-tives. It is they who now, rather than standingpat, take the bold step forward, voice the dar-ing alternative.Since our topic is the reconstruction of poli-tical theory, let us look at the most original,furthest advanced political theorist living to-day, Eric Voegelin. Since we arespeaking ofthe public difference made by the thinking ofconservatives, we shall not consider the wholework of Eric Voegelin-who in many ways is aprofessors professor-but chiefly the twoworks that have been most widely read anddiscussed, The New Science of Politics, andScience, Politics, and Gnosticism.

I1VOEGELINSestoration of pol itical theory can begauged if we consider what political sciencewas unable to do at the time when Voegelin wasayoung academic teacher in Vienna. It wasthetime when fascism had possession of itaiy, andHitler clamped the iron heel of his stormtroop-ers on Germany. As he himself described thesituation:

Europe had no conceptual tools with whichto grasp the horrorthat was upon her. Therewas a scholarly study of the Christianchurches and sects; there was a science ofgovernment, cast in the categories of thesovereign nation-state and its institutions;there were the beginnings of a sociology ofpower and political authority; but there wasno science of the non-Christian, non-national intellectual and mass movementsinto which the Europe of Christian nation-states was in the process of breaking up.(Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 1968,p.5)

The inadequacy of positivist political sciencewhen confronted withanovel phenomenon liketotalitarianism can be gauged by the work of aleading scholar, Herman Finers MussolinisI taly. Painstakingly accurate in its facts, thebook utterly failed to comprehend the spiri t of

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evil in fascism. Its incomprehension was afitting foil to Neville Chamberlains illusionthat Hitler was nothing more than a zealousGerman patriot who merely desired to unite allethnic Germans and who could be appeased byoffering him the German-speaking part ofCzechoslovakia. Similarly, the educatedclasses of Germany, used to keep up withphilosophy and sociology, could not find thereany conceptual tools that would lead to anunderstanding of Hitlers movement and re-gime. With intellectually innocent eyes, theywent forward to their disaster. On this side ofthe A tlantic, the positivistic taboo on theoryhad actually barred people from imagining thatthere could be any such thing as a distinctionbetween a good and a bad government, or be-tween irrational mass movements andbow&political parties.The experience of this intellectual.helpless-ness in a dark hour of human history was themotive that spurred Eric Voegelins forwardmoves into political theory. Roughly, the newterrain which he opened and secured can becharacterized as follows:a) Totalitarian mass movements result fromunderlying idea systems that must be under-stood as variants of theologizing, as theyconverted religious symbols into mundaneones, thereby creating political religion sub-stitutes. To analyze this, Voegelin had to dis-cover the distinctions between theologies ra-tional and irrational, and religious experienceshigh and low. As he plowed into such ques-tions, Voegelin noted that half a century earl ierit would have been impossible to establish anyanswers in terms of scientific discipline. Thetask had become feasible since for two genera-tions, now, the sciences of man and society areengaged in a process of re-theoretization. Tlienew development, slow at first, gained momen-tum after the First World War, and today it ismoving at breathtaking speed. (The New Sci-ence ofPolitics, 1952, p. 3). In philosophy,classics, orientology, biblical studies, andcomparative religion eminent scholars haddone work that deliberately broke out of theshell of positivist limitations. This was thedevelopment that permitted Eric Voegelin tocall his own book: the new science of poli-

tics, a title that in no ways implied a claim ofunprecedented invention.b) Using analytical tools developed throughthese scholarly advances, Eric V oegelin beganto do new work in political theory, as he devel-oped an in-depth understanding of totalitarianmovements and their intellectual foundations.If one may be allowed to reduce this work to abrief formula, he showed that the totalitarianthought pattern had immanentized the tran-scendence. Transcendence here is shorthandfor the ensemble of historical symbols and con-cepts through which man had comprehendedthe divine in contrast to the things of thisworld. Since the event of philosophy, the con-cepts of these two realms had been kept sepa-rate, acknowledging a tension between imma-nence and transcendence that is characteristicof the human condition. The totalitarian ideasystems had attributed the absolute characterof symbols of transcendence to forces and en-tities of this world. This amounted to a deifica-tion of something that ought not to be deifiedbecause it could in no ways claim to be god. Inother words, the divine transcendence wasconceptually pulled into history and identifiedwith political enterprises so that, as Camusremarked, politics became religion and log-ical murder was legalized.c) Further, Voegelin called attention to thecharacter of these idea patterns as a closedsystem the internal logic of which was tyran-nically used to displace human experience andthe exploration of reality. He showed thatComte and Marx prohibited any questioningthat might endanger their systems, so that thesystem itself was substituted for reality andbecameafalse second reality. (M usil) To useMaritains words, they impugn from the outset. . . the reality to be known and understood,which ishere, seen, touched by the senses, andwith which an intellect which belongs to a man,not an angel, has directly to deal: the realityabout which and starting with which a philoso-pher is born to question himself: if he missesthe start he is nothing. (The Peasant oftheGaronne, 1968, p. 100) This givenness ofbeing was removed in totalitarian thinking, thestart of which is rather his will to power, firstmanifested as the power of manipulated con-

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cepts, then as the power to change, destroy,and manipulate being, which in turn requiresintellectual control of the divine ground of be-ing. Asa result of ideological thinking politics,which Aristotle had recognized as belonging tothe realm of acting,i.e. human choices madein view of a given reality, now shifted to therealm of making. Or, to use again Musilslanguage, politics, which had been understoodas action within the limits of real pos-sibilities was now being looked at asthe im-possible dream, the creation of possiblerealities.111

I N THESEanalytical efforts, Voegelin developeda number of more general concepts of pol iticaltheory which were first brought together in histwo chapters on the problem of political repre-sentation, in TheNew Scienceo Politics. Rep-resentation, he pointed out, is not agency,political representation is governed by mansunderstanding of the society in which he livesasacosmion, a little world, so that it essen-tially represents the truth of being. T hi s heproved to be an empirical finding applicable toall civilizations and all ages. Society is anintegral part of mans self-understanding, for inpolitical association man participates in theorder-ofbeing which includes of necessity thedivine ground of being. Thus the problem ofGod in political existence is not arbitrary. Itcannot be escaped.

Voegelins thinking here has been calledtheological. It is not. It is strictlyanthropological-anthropology understood, ofcourse, philosophically. Voegelins anthropol-ogy i s new in language and conceptualcategories but in substance it draws onthousands of years of thinking fed by experi-ence. Indeed, Voegelin characteristically hasdeveloped his concepts through an exegesis oftexts of political thought from all ages andmany cultures, not only of the philosophers butalso of the cosmological myths. Historicallyspeaking, his anthropology, while deeplyrooted in the past, is also new because it i s arestoration achieved against a background oftwo hundred years of the contracted self, aconcept of man willfully reduced to a fragment

of human experiences and involvements. Incontrast to his artificially reduced human real-ity, Voegelin has regained the full dimension ofmans concerns, questions, experiences, sym-bolizations, and participations. The fact thatthis reality includesGoddoes not stem from anintent to proselytize but rather from an empiri-cal recognition of the full dimension of realitywhich humans have embraced in their en-deavor at self-understanding.a) In addition, we find in Voegelins work thenew distinction between ideology and philoso-phy. Ever since Napoleon had ridiculedDestutt de Tracy by using ideologists in asnarl ing tone, the concept has been usedpejoratively. Marx used it to characterize whathe termed the false consciousness of thebourgeoisie, Max Weber took the pejorativecolor of the term for granted, and so did K arlMannheim. What was new was not the elementof deprecation but Voegelins contradistinctionbetween ideology and philosophy which im-plied a scientifically elaborated dichotomy be-tween rationality and irrationality. This waspossible only after a painstaking reinterpreta-tion of philosophy attained by a profound re-reading of the texts, chiefly of Plat0 and Aris-totle.Voegelin disclaimed any attention to returnto the specific content of an earl ier attempt ofpolitical science. He does want, however, toreturn to the consciousness of principles.This meant, above all, that one had to ridoneself of the modern notion of philosophy asan academic field consisting in a survey of agreat variety of philosophies, like a survey ofvarious opinions. The discovery of philosophywas an historical event in which there emergeda new mode of human participation in the orderof being, a mode in which the mind and itsworkings became itself a basic experience ofthe soul. One cannot simply change the mean-ing of philosophy that was shaped in this event.There are no philosophies, there only isphilos-ophy, a way of life rooted in experiences andarticulating new and differentiated symbols oforder.Voegelin describes this event of man-becoming-conscious in the following terms:

Man is notaself-created, autonomous being

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carrying the origin and meaning of his exis-tence within himself. He is not a divinecausasui; from the experience of his life inprecarious existence within the limits ofbirth and death there rather ri ses the won-dering question about the ultimate ground. .of all reality and specifically his own.The question is inherent in the experiencefrom which it rises: the (rational animal)that experiences itself asa living being i s atthe same time conscious of the questionablecharacter attaching to this status. Man,when he experiences himself as existent,discovers his specific humanity as that ofthe questioner for the where-from and thewhere-to, forthe ground and the sense of hisexistence. . . . the adequate articulationand symbolization of the questioning con-sciousnessasthe constituentof humanity is. . . the epochal feat of the philosophers.(Reason: The Classic Experience,South-ern Review p. 241)

I t was the new, philosophic mode of humanparticipation which made the science of politi-cal order possible. But the concepts and sym-bols developed by the philosophers could nothave any meaning part from the motivatingexperiences. As Voegelin put it:[The] Platonic-A ristotelian analysis didnot in the least begin with speculationsabout its own possibility, but with the actualinsight into being which motivated the ana-lytical process. The decisive event in theestablishment of (political science) was thespecifically philosophical realization thatthe levels of being discernible within theworld are surmounted by a transcendentsource of being and its order. And this in-sight was itself rooted in the real movementsof the human spiritual soul toward divinebeing experienced as transcendent. I n theexperiences of love for the world-transcendent origin of being, in philiu to-ward the sophon (the wise), in eros towardthe agathon (the good) and the kalon (thebeautiful), man became philosopher. Fromthese experiences arose the image of theorder of being. (Science, Politics, and Gnos-ticism, 1968, p. 18)

From this analysis follows the criterion of ra-tionality in existential terms:Thus, the reality expressed by the NOUSsymbols is the structure in the psyche of aman who is attuned to the divine order n thecosmos, not of a man who is in revoltagainst it; Reason has the definite existen-tial content of openness toward reality in thesense in which Bergson speaks of (the opensoul). If this context of the classic analysisis ignored and the symbols Nous or Reasonare treated asif they referred tosome humanfaculty independent from the tension towardthe ground, the empirical basis from whichthe symbols derive their validity is lost; theybecome abstracts from nothing, and thevacuum of pseudo-abstracts is ready to befilled with various non-rational contents.(Reason: The Classic Experience, XSouthern Review, p. 246)The characteristic of philosophy is thereforethe atti tude of spiri tual openness whichBergson has named the open soul aswell asthe intellectual openness which is the opposite

of ideological reductionism, the willful exci-sion of questions and of factual evidence fromthe record. And the philosophical science ofpolitical order is, like all science, firmly basedon experience and ceases to be science as soonasthe experiential basis is removed or ignored.b) Philosophy was an historical event of thefirst magnitude and must be recalled as that.This insight served as the pivot of V oegelinsconstruction of history. An irrational conceptof history has played the decisive role in the in-tellectual and social disorders of our time. Con-temporary ideologies are all futurist. The fu-ture isgiven the place of eminent and absolutereality; this means, as Camus put it, that noone is virtuous, but everyone will be. Ethicsgives way to an absolute imperative to act, forthe sake of history. TOchoose history, andhistory alone, is to choose nihilism. ...Thosewho rush blindly to history in the name of theirrational, proclaiming that it is meaningless,encounter servitude and terror and finallyemerge into the universe of concentrationcamps. Those who launch themselves into itpreaching its absolute rationality encounter

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servitude and terror and emerge into the uni-verse of the concentrationcamps. (A. Camus,TheRebel, 1956,p. 246) It was in the nameofphilosophy of history, an eighteenth centuryenterprise that sought to establish ascience ofhistory on the basis of an exclusion of thedivine and the assumption o f mans autonomy,which had set up the usurpation of divine rankby the historical future and the forces workingfor it. Unless one could find an intelligibleconstruction of history as an alternative, therecould be no escape from terror, concentrationcamp and legalized murder.Voegelins brief formula for an alternativeconstruction is that the order of history is thehistory of order. The mere sequence of actionsand events, kingdoms and wars, rulers anddynasties has no meaning. Meaning is experi-enced when one mode of human participationin the order of being replaces another. Thismay happen as the result of the experiencesand articulations of a few concrete persons,and within the limits of a small people, butinsofar as what happens this way is seen asuniversally human, the concrete persons orsmall people are functioning as representativesof mankind. Nor are such experiences andarticulations events in a separate sphere of themind. They result in a new outlook on life,hence in a new mode of living. Borrowing aterm of Bergsons, Voegelin has called themleaps in being. A leap in being occurs whenexperience and insight rush in on establishedtraditions with the effect of something like anew truth, so that people, looking at theirown past, begin to separate the before fromthe after. Thus history, too, is an order oftime stemming from typical experiences thatresult i n ordering symbols. The symbols, re-flecting the reality of experience, shed light notonly on a particular leap in being but on thewhole of human existence in time. Voegelinswork first concentrated on two such leaps, thefirst identified with the experience and insightsof the Hebrew prophets, the other with theadvent of Greek philosophy.In the New Science of Pol i ti cs he hinted,under the name of soteriological truth, at athird leap identified with the experience ofJ esus of Nazareth. The order of history, thus

constructed, is no story of inevitable progress.A leap in being is indeed something likeprogress, but, first of all, any such leap alwaysencounters also resistance, and, secondly,there is noguarantee of its permanence. T rue,once it has occurred it cannot be made undoneor even neglected. It becomes a fixture in his-torical memory. But there is also the possibil ityof deliberate revolt against that memory. Eventhough it turns out impossible simply to fallback on the status quo ante, the revolt willresult in a fall from being, a loss of reality.What happens in such cases can be graspedonly in the light of that order of understandingagainst which the revolt is aimed. In this sense,Voegelin is probably the one political theoristwho has shed most light on the character of ourtime, as when he coined the formulaGnosticism-the nature of modernity.The use of the name of an heretical religionof the early Christian centuries was analogical.Voegelin showed that an analysis of ancientgnosticism helped us to understand the ideasand symbols that have played a major role inthe shaping of the modem outlook. In thatcontext he also coined the phrase that has beensowidely noted, of the fallacious immanenti-zation of the Christian eschaton, which pin-points the chief sourceof political irrationalitytoday. Voegelins analysis of our time takes upthe last three chaptersofTheScience ofPoZiticsand all of Science, Politics and Gnosti cism I tinduced Time magazine to give amajor reviewto his work, in 1953,and to commit itself toVoegelins ideas for at least the following tenyears. One may say, however, that it is regret-table that Voegelins deprecatory judgment ofour time should have occupied the attentionparticularly of young people, to the exclusionof his constructive philosophy, particularly ofhistory.The term gnostic has thereby lost its use-fulness as a heuristic tool as it became anepithet, ameans by which people excuse them-selves from thinking as they gain in one-upmanship. In view of this regrettable selec-tiveness, it may be in order to quote here apassage from Voegelins last major work, thefourth volume of his Order and History: Thisultimate mode of lastingness to which as a

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measure we refer the lasting of all other things,is not a time in which things happen, but thetime dimension of athing within the whole thatalso comprises the divine reality, whose last-ingness we express by such symbols as eter-nity. Things do not happen in the astro-physical universe; the universe, together withall things founded in it, happen in God. (p.

IVATTHIS POINT we return to Trollopes portrait ofEnglish conservatives in order to find out some-thing about ourselves. We have seen that thatportrait is not our own likeness. That means,we have inherited aname but not the content towhich this name referred when it arose. Inother words, it does not make sense today toraise the question: What is a conservative?as we could not possibly answer that questionin any way like Trollope did, by means of aportrait. Nor can we answer it by definingsomething like a party line. That is a politicalvice reserved to such modem movements ashave crystallized around an ideology. There isa small group of Americans call ing themselvesconservative who feel collectively bound to aparty line: the assertion that there is only asingle kind of human order, the order of themarket tending to equilibrium. That belief,however, does not even extend to all who areotherwise also known as libertarians; nor isinsistence on market prices alien to thoseothers who may refer to themselves by theawkward and ill-f itting name of traditionalists.The fact is that a name without a content,conservatism, has been arbitrarily thrown intothe modem political scene and has stuck on us.But to whom do we refer as we, then?By the via negativa we can indeed grouptogether all citizens who oppose and abhor thepolitics of futurist, revolutionary, progressivistideologies which confuse civi lization or revolu-tion with works of human salvation. That prob-lem first became a test of political judgmentthrough the phenomenon of fascist and com-munist totalitarianism and legal murder. Hav-ing learned to recognize the spirit of politicalirrationality on that largeascale, we were ableto discover it in the politics of liberal welfarism

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too. Finally we came to discern the intellectualand spiritual elements of such perversion inreligion, philosophy, literature, art, and thesciences of man. We, then, are primarilythose who feel they must say no to thesetendencies and movements. But what is it towhich we say yes? Basically, and in oneword, to common sense. That is our affirmationin the realm of politics. Political commonsense, however, is not to be had for the asking,in our time.ThePolitics of Aristotle is largely commonsense, but it is informed by fully adequateconcepts of God, nature, society, and man.Today such concepts must be regained by adeliberate effort, for the wares available on theintellectual market are defective, broken, dis-torted, and phony. Thus whoever holds aviewof man that reduces the human person to afraction of his full reality cannot see man forwhat he is, and thereby bars himself effectivelyfrom common sense. Whoever entertains aview of history that destroys the present andpast and locates all values exclusively in somehuman future, is also barred from commonsense. Whoever acts under the il lusion thatman can create a new man, a new world, or anew-society lives in a dream-world and isbarred from common sense. Whoever looks onparticular social forces, political movements,or policies as something like ahallowed causethat implies full justification, is divinizinghuman action and is thereby barred from com-mon sense. Common sense is political sobrietythat is fully aware of human limits inherent inthe human condition.Thus there is a philosophical and culturalpatrimony to which conservatives are com-mitted by their affirmation of common sense. Inthe face of modem reductions and distortions,they press toward a restoration of the humanimage in the fullness of its dimensions. Thatprohibits a willful exclusion of the transcen-dence, which exclusion is nothing but anideological choice. They reject the false cer-tainty of closed idea-systems because our ex-perience of life is not systematically closed.They reject the false dichotomy of fact andvalue, the il licit tyranny of the methods ofphysical science over the knowledge of man.

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They disdain the ideology-ridden fragmenta-tion of life and the human person in literatureand art.In all of this, conservatives are very farfromsomething resemblingnostalgia.Since modernthinkers and mpdern scholarship have alreadyblazed trails of rediscovery, we simply decideto live and think b lahauteur desprincipes. Wethereby know that in our time not all roads leaddownwards. Left politics characterize the Es-tablishment, but already are going from defeatto defeat. This may not be cause for celebra-tion, sinceweare tied up with liberals in histor-

ical existence. But we rejoice in all signs ofrecurring sanity. Thus, with Whitaker Cham-bers we fully realize the grim significance ofour fight against the assault on the humanmind. But with Maritain we can also see, in themidst of much darkness, the stars weaklyglimmering.**T his article is based on an address presented at the IS1.National Fr iends and A lumni Conference in April of 1978,held in Washington, D.C . T he theme of the Conferencewas: T he Consequences of 25 years of ConservativeThought.

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niemeyer conservatism and new political theory

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