Adam Smith books

Nationalisme en verlichting

Voor diegenen geïnteresseerd in de combinatie nationalisme en de verlichting: Hans Cohn, the Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background

Klassiek stelt men de Verlichting gelijk aan universalisme, de rede tegenover nationalisme met focus op het lokale, tradities, collectiviteit. Hans Cohn brengt daar zware nuances in aan. Hij zoomt ook in op gespannen relatie tussen bepaalde conservatieven en nationalisme: ' At the same time, nationalism was eschewed by classical conservatism (but not for the reasons that liberals eschewed nationalism). Classical conservatives like Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria was weary of romantic nationalism because his nation (the Austrian Empire) was multi-ethnic composed of: Czechs, Austrians, Hungarians, Croats, and many, many other notable ethnic groups (Poles, Romanians, Slovaks, etc.). In addition, romantic nationalism threatened the agrarian order from which classical conservatism was premised and built upon—the primary reason why classical conservatism lamented the rise of nationalism."

Ook het klassieke tijdsschema stelt hij in vraag waarbij nationalisme als een louter 19de eeuws fenomeen wordt gezien: " By the end of the seventeenth century, therefore, England had become the first “nation” in the modern sense of the term. Having overcome the bounds of absolutism, and having reached a sense of common peoplehood, modern nationalism had been established. In continental Europe, however, the transition would be defined by strife and a far more consequential, eighteenth century, revolution "

Cohn ziet nationalisme en de Verlichting met elkaar verweven: " in the eighteenth century the free personality emerged in all fields of human activity –political, cultural and economic. But this new order posited the grave problem of how to reconcile the liberty of the individual with the exigencies of social integration, how to subject man to a law which could no longer claim the authority of an absolute lawgiver outside and above men. In this situation nationalism was to become a tie binding the autonomous individual into the partnership of a community.”

Cohn wijst fijntjes op tegenstellingen tussen de conservatieve positie en nationalisme ondermeer door de figuur van JJ Rousseau, vaak veracht door conservatieven maar cruciaal voor nationalisten. In welke mate zien jullie jezelf als conservatieven noodzakelijk ook als nationalist.

Cohn voert Jefferson op als het toonbeeld van de Verlichting die niet tegenstrijdig was met nationalisme. "Jefferson was the “founding father” of American nationalism, which made the United States the only nation to be founded by a true man of the Enlightenment." Zoals hij het stelt: “Thus, over a long life which stretched from the zenith of Voltaire’s influence to that of the Restoration and the Holy Alliance, the American apostle preserved his faith in the Enlightenment and its universal blessings. In the fifty years from July 4, 1776, to Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826, what had been a promise and intention had become the firm foundation of the American republic.”

Review of Larry Siedentop, The invention of the individual

Over the last 20 or so years, there has been a revolution in mainstream philosophy and history--reexamining the relationship between Christianity and modernity: liberalism, secularism, and democracy, etc. Larry Siedentop has joined the ranks of Philip S. Gorski (at Yale), Eric T. Nelson (at Harvard), Charles Taylor (Emeritus Professor at McGill), and the long deceased, but highly influential and respected, Talcott Parsons (at Harvard) who have re-asserted a formerly forgotten widely held belief in the academy--Christianity, regardless of the "God Question," helped give rise to cherished Western principles and values. In "Inventing the Individual," Dr. Siedentop examines the notions of individualism in the early Christian community and historical process. Primarily looking upon the works of the Apostle Paul, his epistles--found in the New testament, Saint Augustine and his work City of God (Penguin Classics), and then Medieval theologians and philosophers, like William of Ockham and Saint Thomas Aquinas among others, Siedentop highlights how these Christian works came to found the foundation for Western liberalism, individualism, and secularism (all good ideas in Siedentop's mind).

Paul's theological egalitarianism, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus," etc. (Gal. 3:28), Augustine's separation of the two worlds (the "two cities": the city of man, and the city of God)--a precursor to secularism, which is not anti-religion, but the separation of matters of the temporal world ("city of man") and possible divine world ("city of God"), Ockham's nominalism (the idea that abstracts exist), and Aquinas's pioneering work in Natural Law all helped slowly build the foundations for liberalism and individualism. Lest we forget that liberal social contract theory, from Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, and Grotius, etc. have their foundation, or minimally, some influence, from Natural Law theory which is rooted firmly in the Christian/Catholic tradition. In fact, some conservative critics of liberalism have attempted to pin down liberalism as a modern reincarnation of Medieval Nominalism (cf. Richard Weaver, d. 1963), so again, Siedentop's discussion of Ockham's Nominalism and its influence on the direction of Western understanding of human freedom (pp. 313-319) are incredibly important and insightful, but nothing "new" in the same sense that others have already made these assertions (but in a negative means as opposed to Sidentop's more neutral to celebratory tone). Indeed, even atheist and agnostic scholars and philosophers, not associated with the "New Atheism" of recent fame, have also "rediscovered" Paul's philosophy of individuals and community have begun a "critical" re-examination of Paul and early Christian philosophy through Marxian lenses (cf. John Milbank, Slavoj Zizek, and Creston Davis).

Siedentop's work, most appropriately, can be seen as a scholarship in the field called "political theology." Political Theology is not theocracy, or religious fundamentalism guiding law, but the analysis of how theological principles and ideas have come to influence "secular" institutions. This is where Sidentop's work shines most brightly. He eruditely shows what had been accepted in the Academy long ago, but only recently has been gaining new popularity in the present: religious ideas and principles inexorably influenced Western institutions that we still have today. While Siedentop largely defends modernity as the product, or child, of Christianity, he also offers a cold question for future.

In recent times, the West has been embroiled in a "civil" war between religious conservatives on one side and secular agnostics, atheists, and even anti-institutionalists (mostly referring to being anti-Church and anti-religion) on the other (sometimes better referred to as the "culture wars"). Siedentop argues that this "disturbing" civil war is harming the fabric of Western civilization. Indeed, even learned religious leaders, like Pope Benedict XVI, in saying that his primary mission was the confrontation of secularism, made a huge error in not recognizing the contributions to secularism from Christianity itself (p. 360). This civil war is the product of BOTH sides not really understanding their own history and heritage. As the West is moving into the 21st Century, and with recent conflicts with the Islamic World, the serious question remains whether secular and religious forces in the West will unite to realize its shared heritage, or continue to wage a bitter, destructive, and ultimately needless, if not "disturbing" civil war.

Thus, Siedentop's work is much needed, and hopefully, is not going to be under appreciated by emotivist secularists and Christians who will likely see Siedentop as either "giving cover to Christians" or conversely, "giving cover to secularists." However, one area where Siedentop work falls a bit short, as opposed to Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" is the brevity of "excessive" footnoted scholarship employed by Dr. Siedentop. While Taylor's A Secular Age is far longer, it is also more extensively footnoted, whereas Siedentop opted for a more accessible and popular style, at the expense of extensive footnoting. Regardless, "Inventing the Individual" is a timely work that is the next wave in modern scholarship finding the roots of Western liberalism.

Review of N. Elias, The Civilizing Process

Norbert Elais' The Civilizing Process is an explanation of the rise of the modern nation-state, and the process by which state formation engendered changes in the psyches and day-to-day manners of modern citizens. In short, his argument is that the functional complexity of post-medieval Europe went hand-in-hand with a sublimation of man's baser instincts. Upon first glance, the reader immediately wonders about the relevance of findings such as "in medieval society people generally blew their noses into their hands" (126). The dominant explanations for the rise of the modern nation-state have usually been based in economics (Marx, Polanyi, Moore, North & Thomas) and not in the sort of etiquette, manners and social customs that are the key operating concepts in Elias' work. However, Elias makes a convincing case that such customs deserve predominant explanatory weight, being vehicles of social control that lay the psychological groundwork for the nation-state. Such a finding helps political scientists answer the persistent question of why Western political institutions fail when placed into unfamiliar Third-World social environments. Most analysts have chalked this up to unequal economic development, but Elias would probably favor an argument emphasizing the lack of a "civilizing" process in Third-World societies. Such an explanation--like Putnam's reasoning in revealing Southern Italy's "civic culture" to be bankrupt--is admittedly open to criticism of essentialism, cultural determinism, and other postmodern shortcomings, but at a minimum, it certainly alerts us to pertinent, non-economic variables at work in the development-democracy relationship.
Elias selects three comparative cases, France, England and Germany, and performs a content analysis of medieval texts on manners, etiquette, and the transformation of the nobility from warriors into courtiers. These texts are the empirical evidence offered for his key variable, pan-European courtly manners delineated by social structure (classes and "monopolies" of power). The other key variable (it's rather unclear which one is "dependent" on the other) is the rise of the nation-state, which was brought about by an exogenous variable (population growth) as well as two intervening factors: 1) the decline of the nobility relative to national absolutism (both economically and militarily); and 2) the rise of a money economy. Elias shows how centrifugal forces in these societies (mainly the warrior-noble class) resisted the "integration" of absolutism/nationhood, but that these forces in the end were overcome by economics coupled with the centripetal social groundwork of pan-European "civilite" and social customs, leading to an increasingly complex interweaving of social functions. "Society was `in transition' . . . `Simplicity' . . . had been lost. People saw things with more differentiation" (61). "Social control was becoming more binding . . . with the structural transformation of society . . . a change slowly came about: the compulsion to check one's own behaviour" (70).
The near totality of Elias' evidence is qualitative, often selected from medieval writings and secondhand observations. Although he means to proceed inductively from these facts, Elias often reads like a deductive historian, especially when positing lawlike generalizations such as "the more or less sudden emergence of words within languages nearly always points to changes in the lives of people themselves, particularly when the new concepts are destined to become as central and long-lived as these" (48). In fact, his entire thesis can be summarized with another of his apparently deductive axioms: "The growth of units of integration and rule is always at the same time an expression of structural changes in society, that is to say, in human relationships" (254). Marxists, of course, would say that such social changes are themselves dependent upon changes in the relations of production, but Elias gives equal weight to social causes as to economic ones. The economy is by no means neglected in his analysis, since he gives currency, demand for property, and population growth prime explanatory roles in his causal process (despite the fact that there is no quantitative evidence given for these socioeconomic correlations, unlike the analysis of the same topics by North & Thomas). However, Marxists would surely have a fit over Elias' assertion that the civilizing process leads to a wholesale leveling of distinctions between social classes (430), as well as his claim that the modern state arose out of a virtual stalemate between the bourgeois and the nobility (327).
On the topic of state-society relations, Elias makes the provocative argument that for the past 300 years, "monopoly rulers" (including, but not limited to, absolutist kings) are mere functionaries, with the real power resting in the hands of their "subjects" (271). "Control of the centralized institutions themselves is so dispersed that it is difficult to discern clearly who are the rulers and who are the ruled" (315). Of course, under an instable balance of power (including today's Third World) the playing field is presumably up for grabs between different classes and parts of the state, but in a developed society, Elias would argue that the internalization of "civilized" norms means that the "strong" state, while resting on a cohesive social order, is not as autonomous from social forces as one might think.

 During the Early Modern Period, Germany was a decentralized power which featured many states. In a learned manner, he instructs the reader on why this had been so as compared to France. However, Elias' most helpful contribution is his contention that the court system had been a means through which knights and nobles developed a super-ego. As the nobles became less powerful in time, the court system also helped the bourgeoisie become more civilized. In time, Elias argued that all classes (upper, middle and lower) became more civilized as more individuals came into contact with the bourgeoisie after migrating to the towns and cities; this process, however, was, of course, an incredibly slow one.