I’m now reading Daniel J. Mahoney’s short book on the political thought of the late Sir Roger Scruton (whom Mark and I had the honor of hosting for the second leg of the Tradition Project–see below for his talk) and Pierre Manent. Dan argues that these philosophers share a common project to “recover the meaning of politics, civilization, and the soul” from the depredations of various “late modern dogmas.” He is aware of their differences but he focuses in these essays on their many affinities, including their similar views of secularism and the modern state (in my office, I have a signed copy of Scruton’s The Soul of the World, where he takes on some of these matters with great sensitivity and depth). Dan’s book is Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul: Essays on Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton (St. Augustine Press).

The Western inheritance is under sustained theoretical and practical assault. Legitimate self-criticism has given way to nihilistic self-loathing and cultural, moral, and political repudiation is the order of the day. Yet, as Daniel J. Mahoney shows in this learned, eloquent, and provocative set of essays, two contemporary philosophic thinkers, Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent, have––separately and together––traced a path for the renewal of politics and practical reason, our civilized inheritance, the natural moral law, and the soul as the enduring site of self-conscious reflection, moral and civic agency, and mutual accountability.

Both Scruton and Manent have repudiated the fashionable nihilism associated with the “thought of 1968” and the “Parisian nonsense machine,” and have shown that gratitude is the proper response of the human person to the “givenness of things.” Both defend the self-governing nation against reckless nationalism and the even more reckless temptation of supranational governance and post-political  democracy, what Manent suggestively calls a “kratos” without a “demos.” Both defend the secular state while taking aim at a radical secularism that rejects “the Christian mark” that is at the heart of our inheritance and that sustains the rich and necessary interpenetration of truth and liberty. Scruton’s more “cultural” perspective is indebted to Burke and Kant; Manent’s more political perspective draws on Aristotle, St. Thomas, Tocqueville, and Raymond Aron, among others. By highlighting their affinities, and reflecting on their instructive differences, Mahoney shows how, together, the English man of letters Scruton, and the French political philosopher Manent, guide us to the recovery of a horizon of thought and action animated by practical reason and the wellsprings of the human soul. They show us the humanizing path forward, but first we must make the necessary spiritual decision to repudiate repudiation once and for all.

It is nothing new to observe that the center of American political and cultural life is having difficulty, as Yeats once put it, “holding.” It is instead increasingly extremes of various kinds that are gaining greater traction. “Extreme” carries a negative rhetorical charge, of course. One might say instead that Americans are coming to see the attraction of values long alien to their own largely optimistic, pragmatic, and open tradition–the values of commitment, hierarchy, tragedy, identity, and others–values that have their own claims on human hopes and fears. Some believe this to be a change from America of the past–a deeply and widely divided America has some precedents, but it is perhaps not the main stream–and one interesting question is just why the change has come upon us with such force today.

A new book out this fall makes the case for a return to balance: Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals (Cambridge University Press) by Aurelian Craiutu. Worth checking out, especially by those of us who might react with some (moderate) skepticism to its claims.

Moderation is often presented as a simple virtue for lukewarm and indecisive minds, searching for a fuzzy center between the extremes. Not surprisingly, many politicians do not want to be labelled ‘moderates’ for fear of losing elections. Why Not Moderation? challenges this conventional image and shows that moderation is a complex virtue with a rich tradition and unexplored radical sides. Through a series of imaginary letters between a passionate moderate and two young radicals, the book outlines the distinctive political vision undergirding moderation and makes a case for why we need this virtue today in America. Drawing on clearly written and compelling sources, Craiutu offers an opportunity to rethink moderation and participate in the important public debate on what kind of society we want to live in. His book reminds us that we cannot afford to bargain away the liberal civilization and open society we have inherited from our forefathers.

To say “nationalism” today is generally thought to sound a politically conservative note. Contemporary nationalists are generally thought to be for what the liberal theorist Karl Popper once criticized as the “closed society.” But the claims of nationalism can be liberal, even radical, and they have been in the past. After the defeat of Napoleon, attempts were made to return to the ancien régime in the Restoration, but these failed and the so-called “Revolutions of 1848” were their terminus. The Revolutions were a cluster of uprisings that swept across European nations simultaneously. The respective peoples of each nation demanded the repudiation of the old forms of governance and social structure precisely in favor of what were then thought to be the democratic, liberal politics guaranteed by the nation. In the Catholic Church, as Russell Hittinger has observed, it was the claims of nationalism that, in part, provoked Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. The politics of nationalism are not fixed, but historically contingent.

I’m slightly late to noticing this interesting new book on the understudied Revolutions of 1848: Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 (Penguin RandomHouse), by Christopher Clark.

As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848 nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to significant changes that continue to shape our world today. These battles for the future were fought with one eye kept squarely on the past: The men and women of 1848 saw the urgent challenges of their world as shaped profoundly by the past, and saw themselves as inheritors of a revolutionary tradition.

Celebrated Cambridge historian Christopher Clark describes 1848 as “the particle collision chamber at the center of the European nineteenth century,” a moment when political movements and ideas—from socialism and democratic radicalism to liberalism, nationalism, corporatism, and conservatism—were tested and transformed. The insurgents asked questions that sound modern to our ears: What happens when demands for political or economic liberty conflict with demands for social rights? How do we reconcile representative and direct forms of democracy? How is capitalism connected to social inequality? The revolutions of 1848 were short-lived, but their impact on public life and political thought throughout Europe and beyond has been profound.

Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and filled with a cast of charismatic figures, including the social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, the writer George Sand, and the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, who struggled to reconcile his faith with politics, Revolutionary Spring offers a new understanding of 1848 that suggests chilling parallels to our present moment. “Looking back at the revolutions from the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is impossible not to be struck by the resonances,” Clark writes. “If a revolution is coming for us, it may look something like 1848.”