At an event in London hosted by UnHerd in November of last year, I listened to Yoram Hazony present his case for National Conservatism. At that point, I had only given his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism a cursory read and had not yet picked up Conservatism: A Rediscovery, which came out last year. Hazony’s case was compelling but—for reasons I’ll try to explain in brief—not entirely satisfactory to me.
Towards the end of this event, during the Q&A, the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ theologian John Milbank stood up and claimed with surprising passion that Hazony was arguing less for a species of conservatism and more for a recovery of nationalism, largely a creation of 19th century progressives with statist ambitions following the rise of individualism, itself effected by the rupture of 1789. “I say to you, then,” concluded Milbank, “that you are in fact not a conservative but a liberal.”
This was the take-home message that Milbank wanted Hazony to leave with: far from being a conservative, he was a liberal. Interesting, then, that Milbank took to Twitter recently to endorse a Guardian article that called Hazony’s National Conservatism “a divisive, far-right movement.”
Is National Conservatism not really conservative at all but a trojan horse designed to boost liberalism under the guise of a phony Burkeanism? Or is National Conservatism so conservative that it has departed from mainstream conservatism altogether and strayed into the realm of far-right, fascist ideology? Milbank doesn’t appear to know—and he leaves us guessing too.
Milbank raised another objection in his tweets, namely that “Christianity is totally incompatible with nationalism as a central determining value.” This is an aspect of Milbank’s attack with which I have more sympathy than with his apparently empty name-calling. Nationalism is indeed in tension with Christianity, and I’m with Roger Scruton in disliking the word and what it denotes.
According to Scruton, nationalism is patriotic loyalty once this normal and wholesome affection has degenerated into an ideology. As Scruton wrote in his 2006 book, A Political Philosophy, nationalism is “part of the pathology of national loyalty, not its normal condition.” In fact, according to Scruton—and this is what puts nationalism especially at odds with Christianity—nationalism places nationhood where religion would be in the lives of ordinary people, making a god out of the nation, as he writes in the same work:
Nationalism is … a religious loyalty dressed up in territorial clothes. In every case we should distinguish nationalism and its inflammatory, quasi-religious call to re-create the world from national loyalty, of the kind that we know from our own historical experience. Nationalism belongs to those surges of religious emotion that have so often led to European war.
Whilst nationalism may be in tension with Christianity, nationhood certainly is not. Indeed, the nation is a central aspect of the Christian schema of evangelisation. The Great Commission itself is not to evangelise isolated individuals but to baptise the nations of the world (Matt 28:19). A nation is a people ‘born together’ (‘natal’ and ‘nation’ having, as they do, the same etymology), with their own culture, customs, language, traditions, political settlements, legal processes, negotiated liberties, and so forth. Together, the people of a nation form a moral unit which is itself a corporate person—a person who, in the Christian vision, is called to become a disciple of the Lord.
Prior to the New Covenant in Jesus Christ, and the Great Commission whose purpose it was to extend the New Covenant to all nations, salvation came through a chosen nation, namely the nation of the Israelites. Thus, the nation played a central role in the story of salvation from the beginning. This particular nation, we should remember, was in a deeply antagonistic relationship with all surrounding nations. Christianity, however, sought to replace the antagonism of the Old Covenant with a fraternal vision for nations in a supra-national family, namely Christendom. This ‘familial’ vision of nationhood aimed to unite the nations in pursuit of their spiritual good—namely the holiness of their members—while leaving their distinct national characters intact.
Nations, then, in a Christian settlement, are meant to be distinct, but also religiously contiguous, and in various ways overlapping and politically interdependent (as in some ways the nations of the United Kingdom are to this day). Nationalism, however, belongs to the disintegration and fragmentation of the Western mind, which typically takes something true and good, and distorts it. Nationalism, as Milbank rightly pointed out to Hazony in person, grew out of early 19th century liberalism, which eventually violently exploded in the upheavals of 1848.
Some kind of political autonomy is proper to nationhood, of course. But the sort of atomised nation-statism of the Enlightenment is, broadly speaking, alien to Christianity. The problem is that the contemporary debate frames the conversation of nationhood as a ‘nation-state’ versus ‘borderless universalism’ dichotomy, which is a debate that, again, is alien to the Christian way of understanding things. The Christian understanding measures everything by agape, that is, fraternal love. Without territory and borders, nations vanish, and therefore love cannot exist between them precisely because there is no ‘between.’ But without political interdependence and cultural cross-pollination—even interrelating political jurisdictions—between nations, such nations are sundered, and love between them diminishes.
The 19th century enthusiasm among liberals for the nation-state largely arose because they believed it would make possible the kind of political decision-making that they liked, namely decisions via democratic processes. One can easily understand why the liberals of this time brought together the universalism of liberal ideology with the particularism of nationalism. Liberalism, as it developed from the opinions of Hobbes and later Locke, saw the fundamental cell of the polity to be the individual rather than the different communities, both organic and synthetic, of actual existent polities—namely couples, families, villages, businesses, schools, guilds, etc. And there is a long pedigree of hyper-statism emerging out of such individualism; in fact, the Frankenstein’s monster of admixed individualism and statism is something we now encounter everywhere.
Individualism cuts out all intermediary social cells and leaves the solitary individual quaking before the Leviathan-state. Once this process has occurred, the only question is: what is Leviathan going to be based on? If you base it on ‘national identity’ then it seems far less oppressive as it’s then based upon something that is ostensibly pre-political and belongs to everyone—while in fact the entire paradigm simultaneously denies the existence of any pre-political reality in favour of the undetermined, self-authoring individual. Hence, the whole liberal paradigm is innately chimerical, with attempts to realise its aspirations being routinely damaging.
Moreover, even though individualism would seem to be against hyper-statism, maintaining the fantasy that the individual is a world unto himself inevitably requires a highly sophisticated, state-driven, increasingly technologized system that acts to make good on the promise that the ‘sovereign individual’ will be evermore emancipated to author his own reality. So, even while liberalism purports to oppose statism, it unavoidably requires an ever-growing Leviathan.
Now, regarding Yoram Hazony, it’s quite clear that he wants to push back against the expansion of this liberal synthesis of individualism and statism. And so, despite what Milbank says, he’s not a liberal, nor is he clandestinely advancing a liberal project. In fact, Hazony delivers an extremely aggressive and compelling attack on liberalism and its foundations in Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In the opening pages of that book, he places liberalism in perfect opposition to conservatism:
Liberalism, as a political ideology, is bereft of any interest in conserving anything. It is devoted entirely to freedom, and in particular to freedom from the past. In other words, liberalism is an ideology that promises to liberate us from precisely one thing, and that thing is conservatism. That is, it seeks to liberate us from the kind of public and private life in which men and women know what must be done to propagate beneficial ideas, behaviours, and institutions across generations and see to it that these things really are done.
Hazony, though, has also taken a very ‘big tent’ approach to conservatism, repeatedly giving a voice to disparate scholars and politicians, with many of whom he doesn’t wholly agree on an array of topics. Thus, despite what Milbank suggests at other times, Hazony is certainly not some far-right ideologue with a fetish for ideological conformity.
Granted, Hazony is not selling the Christendom model of nationhood, and given his personal religious commitments—he is, after all, an orthodox Jew—one wouldn’t expect him to. In an attempt to recover an authentic conservatism, he is emphasising the pre-political reality of the nation and indicating how nationhood relates to conservatism’s organicism and traditionalism. He hopes that some good fruit will come forth from political movements that take such sources seriously.
People like me who believe in a Christendom model of western civilisation and the nations of which that civilisation is composed, and who wish to see an authentic, theocentric, establishmentarian conservatism combating liberalism and its moral corollary, secularism, find Hazony’s National Conservatism unsatisfactory. After all, his case is one in defence of “Anglo-American conservatism,” and I’ve read too much Joseph de Maistre to see such conservatism as offering a complete picture. For people like me, talk of nationalism as a virtue, even of the kind Hazony celebrates, is deeply problematic. Nonetheless, his National Conservatism is certainly something I and others like me can work with (and indeed I am working with it, given that I shall be delivering a speech at the National Conservatism conference in London next week).
Whatever its flaws, Hazony’s National Conservatism really is an earnest attempt to foster a serious conversation about what human flourishing looks like and encourage political movements to pursue such flourishing for the citizens of their own countries. It holds that—when it comes to questions of flourishing—shared culture, public religion, the protection of marriage and family, and a sensitivity to the disorder caused by unregulated immigration must all be necessarily kept at the forefront of our minds. In Hazony’s own words:
In the political arena, conservatism refers to a standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.
That is most certainly something I, and traditional conservatives like me, can work with. So, don’t listen to Milbank. Both as a speculative approach and as a practical initiative, National Conservatism may not be perfect, but it’s neither liberal nor far-right—and that makes it considerably better than all other alternatives currently on offer in our increasingly divided West.
National Conservatism Isn’t Perfect, but It’s Neither Liberal nor Far-Right
At an event in London hosted by UnHerd in November of last year, I listened to Yoram Hazony present his case for National Conservatism. At that point, I had only given his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism a cursory read and had not yet picked up Conservatism: A Rediscovery, which came out last year. Hazony’s case was compelling but—for reasons I’ll try to explain in brief—not entirely satisfactory to me.
Towards the end of this event, during the Q&A, the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ theologian John Milbank stood up and claimed with surprising passion that Hazony was arguing less for a species of conservatism and more for a recovery of nationalism, largely a creation of 19th century progressives with statist ambitions following the rise of individualism, itself effected by the rupture of 1789. “I say to you, then,” concluded Milbank, “that you are in fact not a conservative but a liberal.”
This was the take-home message that Milbank wanted Hazony to leave with: far from being a conservative, he was a liberal. Interesting, then, that Milbank took to Twitter recently to endorse a Guardian article that called Hazony’s National Conservatism “a divisive, far-right movement.”
Is National Conservatism not really conservative at all but a trojan horse designed to boost liberalism under the guise of a phony Burkeanism? Or is National Conservatism so conservative that it has departed from mainstream conservatism altogether and strayed into the realm of far-right, fascist ideology? Milbank doesn’t appear to know—and he leaves us guessing too.
Milbank raised another objection in his tweets, namely that “Christianity is totally incompatible with nationalism as a central determining value.” This is an aspect of Milbank’s attack with which I have more sympathy than with his apparently empty name-calling. Nationalism is indeed in tension with Christianity, and I’m with Roger Scruton in disliking the word and what it denotes.
According to Scruton, nationalism is patriotic loyalty once this normal and wholesome affection has degenerated into an ideology. As Scruton wrote in his 2006 book, A Political Philosophy, nationalism is “part of the pathology of national loyalty, not its normal condition.” In fact, according to Scruton—and this is what puts nationalism especially at odds with Christianity—nationalism places nationhood where religion would be in the lives of ordinary people, making a god out of the nation, as he writes in the same work:
Whilst nationalism may be in tension with Christianity, nationhood certainly is not. Indeed, the nation is a central aspect of the Christian schema of evangelisation. The Great Commission itself is not to evangelise isolated individuals but to baptise the nations of the world (Matt 28:19). A nation is a people ‘born together’ (‘natal’ and ‘nation’ having, as they do, the same etymology), with their own culture, customs, language, traditions, political settlements, legal processes, negotiated liberties, and so forth. Together, the people of a nation form a moral unit which is itself a corporate person—a person who, in the Christian vision, is called to become a disciple of the Lord.
Prior to the New Covenant in Jesus Christ, and the Great Commission whose purpose it was to extend the New Covenant to all nations, salvation came through a chosen nation, namely the nation of the Israelites. Thus, the nation played a central role in the story of salvation from the beginning. This particular nation, we should remember, was in a deeply antagonistic relationship with all surrounding nations. Christianity, however, sought to replace the antagonism of the Old Covenant with a fraternal vision for nations in a supra-national family, namely Christendom. This ‘familial’ vision of nationhood aimed to unite the nations in pursuit of their spiritual good—namely the holiness of their members—while leaving their distinct national characters intact.
Nations, then, in a Christian settlement, are meant to be distinct, but also religiously contiguous, and in various ways overlapping and politically interdependent (as in some ways the nations of the United Kingdom are to this day). Nationalism, however, belongs to the disintegration and fragmentation of the Western mind, which typically takes something true and good, and distorts it. Nationalism, as Milbank rightly pointed out to Hazony in person, grew out of early 19th century liberalism, which eventually violently exploded in the upheavals of 1848.
Some kind of political autonomy is proper to nationhood, of course. But the sort of atomised nation-statism of the Enlightenment is, broadly speaking, alien to Christianity. The problem is that the contemporary debate frames the conversation of nationhood as a ‘nation-state’ versus ‘borderless universalism’ dichotomy, which is a debate that, again, is alien to the Christian way of understanding things. The Christian understanding measures everything by agape, that is, fraternal love. Without territory and borders, nations vanish, and therefore love cannot exist between them precisely because there is no ‘between.’ But without political interdependence and cultural cross-pollination—even interrelating political jurisdictions—between nations, such nations are sundered, and love between them diminishes.
The 19th century enthusiasm among liberals for the nation-state largely arose because they believed it would make possible the kind of political decision-making that they liked, namely decisions via democratic processes. One can easily understand why the liberals of this time brought together the universalism of liberal ideology with the particularism of nationalism. Liberalism, as it developed from the opinions of Hobbes and later Locke, saw the fundamental cell of the polity to be the individual rather than the different communities, both organic and synthetic, of actual existent polities—namely couples, families, villages, businesses, schools, guilds, etc. And there is a long pedigree of hyper-statism emerging out of such individualism; in fact, the Frankenstein’s monster of admixed individualism and statism is something we now encounter everywhere.
Individualism cuts out all intermediary social cells and leaves the solitary individual quaking before the Leviathan-state. Once this process has occurred, the only question is: what is Leviathan going to be based on? If you base it on ‘national identity’ then it seems far less oppressive as it’s then based upon something that is ostensibly pre-political and belongs to everyone—while in fact the entire paradigm simultaneously denies the existence of any pre-political reality in favour of the undetermined, self-authoring individual. Hence, the whole liberal paradigm is innately chimerical, with attempts to realise its aspirations being routinely damaging.
Moreover, even though individualism would seem to be against hyper-statism, maintaining the fantasy that the individual is a world unto himself inevitably requires a highly sophisticated, state-driven, increasingly technologized system that acts to make good on the promise that the ‘sovereign individual’ will be evermore emancipated to author his own reality. So, even while liberalism purports to oppose statism, it unavoidably requires an ever-growing Leviathan.
Now, regarding Yoram Hazony, it’s quite clear that he wants to push back against the expansion of this liberal synthesis of individualism and statism. And so, despite what Milbank says, he’s not a liberal, nor is he clandestinely advancing a liberal project. In fact, Hazony delivers an extremely aggressive and compelling attack on liberalism and its foundations in Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In the opening pages of that book, he places liberalism in perfect opposition to conservatism:
Hazony, though, has also taken a very ‘big tent’ approach to conservatism, repeatedly giving a voice to disparate scholars and politicians, with many of whom he doesn’t wholly agree on an array of topics. Thus, despite what Milbank suggests at other times, Hazony is certainly not some far-right ideologue with a fetish for ideological conformity.
Granted, Hazony is not selling the Christendom model of nationhood, and given his personal religious commitments—he is, after all, an orthodox Jew—one wouldn’t expect him to. In an attempt to recover an authentic conservatism, he is emphasising the pre-political reality of the nation and indicating how nationhood relates to conservatism’s organicism and traditionalism. He hopes that some good fruit will come forth from political movements that take such sources seriously.
People like me who believe in a Christendom model of western civilisation and the nations of which that civilisation is composed, and who wish to see an authentic, theocentric, establishmentarian conservatism combating liberalism and its moral corollary, secularism, find Hazony’s National Conservatism unsatisfactory. After all, his case is one in defence of “Anglo-American conservatism,” and I’ve read too much Joseph de Maistre to see such conservatism as offering a complete picture. For people like me, talk of nationalism as a virtue, even of the kind Hazony celebrates, is deeply problematic. Nonetheless, his National Conservatism is certainly something I and others like me can work with (and indeed I am working with it, given that I shall be delivering a speech at the National Conservatism conference in London next week).
Whatever its flaws, Hazony’s National Conservatism really is an earnest attempt to foster a serious conversation about what human flourishing looks like and encourage political movements to pursue such flourishing for the citizens of their own countries. It holds that—when it comes to questions of flourishing—shared culture, public religion, the protection of marriage and family, and a sensitivity to the disorder caused by unregulated immigration must all be necessarily kept at the forefront of our minds. In Hazony’s own words:
That is most certainly something I, and traditional conservatives like me, can work with. So, don’t listen to Milbank. Both as a speculative approach and as a practical initiative, National Conservatism may not be perfect, but it’s neither liberal nor far-right—and that makes it considerably better than all other alternatives currently on offer in our increasingly divided West.
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