Family and the Politics of Moderation: Private Life, Public Goods, and the Rebirth of Social Individualism

Notes

117 notes Introduction 1 aristotle criticized Plato’s belief that the city should be a unity, arguing instead that “the city is in its nature a sort of multitude,” made up “not only of a number of human beings, but also of human beings differing in kind.” aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 56. Chantal Delsol, following aristotle’s thought, argues that “to constitute a world is not only to live together in a group, band, or collectivity, for the purpose of better satisfying basic needs; even more, it is to weave together coherent meanings that allow us to exist on earth as wayfarers capable of speaking about ourselves.” Delsol, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay on Late Modernity, 1st ed. (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2006), 58. each author believes that a central balancing act of politics is preserving both individuals and the communities to which they belong. 2 While there were many contributing factors to these wars—ethnic and religious conflict, changing economic circumstances, new technologies, and social and cultural shifts—the ideological roots of these wars are also clear. Francis Fukuyama argues, in part, that the wars of the twentieth 118 noteS to PP. 1–2 century were primarily ideological conflicts between Western liberalism and the various illiberal ideologies of imperialism, fascism, and Marxism. See The End of History and the Last Man (new york: Free Press, 1992). 3 Chantal Delsol argues that the failures of the twentieth century were caused by “the obscure weight that sinks utopias: a truth about man that limits the omnipotence of the will in the drive toward perfection.” Delsol, Unlearned Lessons, 29. She further argues, “totalitarianism made humanity barbarous by depriving humans of their cultural world” (58). That cultural world includes traditional laws and mores that help balance individual meaning and collective need. Though from a different tradition , Friedrich Hayek argues that communism and fascism are ultimately linked and that fascism is “simply collectivism freed from all traces of an individualist tradition which might hamper its realization.” Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 183. Fascism is, therefore, one form of collectivism, made extreme by the rejection of the importance of the individual. He later quotes Keynes describing a German author of 1915 who believed that “individualism must come to an end absolutely,” and as a result “the nation will grow into a ‘closed unity’”(201). This radical collectivist thought is, according to Hayek, characteristic of German thought at the time (201). 4 Fukuyama distinguishes between previous authoritarian regimes and the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union and nazi Germany, arguing that while older authoritarian regimes might have sought to control civil society, “totalitarianism sought to destroy civil society in its entirety.” Fukuyama, End of History, 24. Jose Harris also makes this claim explicit, arguing that collectivism and individualism “advanced in tandem at the expense of more traditional social arrangements such as philanthropy, the family and the local community.” See Jose Harris, “Society and the State in twentieth Century Britain,” in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, vol. 3, Social Agencies and Institutions, ed. F. M. L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 113. 5 according to Hayek, communism opened the door to fascism in europe by stamping out liberal individualism and the intermediate institutions on which liberal individualism rests. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 33–35. 6 See, e.g., Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (new york: alfred a. Knopf, 2007). 7 Pangle and ahrensdorf argue that “from this complex and manifold latemodern reaction to what appeared to be the denuded ‘bourgeois’ vision of the human vocation sprang the great and diverse idealistic political movements of the past two centuries—not only Wilsonian liberalism . . . but also the varieties of socialism, including communism, and romantic nationalism, distorted finally into fascism.” Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. noteS to P. 2 119 ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 262. 8 The Cold War was the obvious extension of this ideological tension. 9 Marx, e.g., cites precisely these changes in his argument for eventual communist triumph. Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. tucker (new york: norton, 1978), 345. More recently, Gellately cites the First World War, in conjunction with previous changes wrought by industrialization , as setting...