-
Liberty, Equality, Nobility: Aurel Kolnai and the Moral Foundations of Democracy
- Central European University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Liberty, Equality, Nobility: Aurel Kolnai and the Moral Foundations of Democracy DANIEL J. MAHONEY “If society exists for the sake of anything at all, it exists for the sake of itself and thus for the sake of its ruling, leading and tone-giving members, and for the sake of the distinctively valuable, eminent, virtuous, ingenious and creative members emergent in its midst, and, last but not least, for the good of its members pure and simple. ”1 INTRODUCTION: KOLNAI, CRITIC OF “PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRACY” The Hungarian-born moral and political philosopher Aurel Kolnai (1900– 1973) was among the twentieth century’s most philosophically minded conservative critics of “progressive democracy” . In his writings in political philosophy, he was an independent, even idiosyncratic thinker, indebted most especially to the broad spirit of classical and medieval thought, and to the phenomenological school’s desire to “let the phenomena speak” , to recover the “sovereignty of the object” . He particularly identified with “conservative-liberal” thinkers such as Burke and Tocqueville (and a host of lesser-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of mass society) who recognised the ultimate dependence of modern liberty on premodern traditions and supports. In his Political Memoirs (1955) he states that these conservative-liberal thinkers helped him arrive at the “insight that, if the technical elaboration of the Rechtsstaat—constitutional government and society regulated by law—had been largely a work of Liberals, its historical basis and spiritual presuppositions were eminently Conservative: tied, that is, to a habit of stable civilisation and an intrinsic concept of moderate and plural authority” (PM 210).2 Kolnai’s occasionally intemperate polemics against progressive democracy sometimes convey the impression of a cranky, backward-looking thinker, an aristocratic liberal who saw democracy as the deadly enemy of liberty properly understood. But this is far from the case. In the spirit of the best conservative-liberal thought, Kolnai defended “the constitutional design of public power, the validity of the universal moral Law, the protection of general human and civic rights, and the plane of Christian equality among men” (PL 49). Kolnai, to be sure, fiercely denounced a “‘common man’ conception of democracy”3 which reduced the inherent plurality of individual and collective life to an understanding of man as EXPLORING THE WORLD OF HUMAN PRACTICE “nothing but man” , “unencumbered by culture and possessions” and “unfettered by dogma, tradition, and presupposition” (CRE 142). As John Hittinger has noted, Kolnai was a critic avant la lettre of contemporary liberalism’s celebration of the unencumbered self.4 Kolnai believed that such a reduction of man to the lowest common denominator of “pure humanity” undermined the dignity and individuality of all men, including the “nobleness” inherent in the ordinary human being as such. The “common man” conception of democracy was incipiently totalitarian because it presupposed a unitary and “arbitrary human will” , a “prideful identitarianism ” which was coextensive with the “self-sovereignty” of man (PL 44). Kolnai believed that true liberty was inseparable from privilege. This language hardly reassures dogmatic democrats but it is not evidence of anti-liberal or anti-democratic intent on Kolnai’s part. He never defended the right of an aristocracy or oligarchy to rule by nature or independently of the just claims of ordinary citizens. Instead, he envisioned a rich, pluralistic , and balanced society that respected the dynamic interplay of “relatively independent” persons and groups. In his view, radically egalitarian or “identitarian” democracy transforms free persons into “anonymous molecule(s) of society” , the individual into nothing more than an “infinitesimal entity of the political calculus” (PL 47). It is therefore essentially antidemocratic , despite its extravagant claims made on behalf of the “sovereignty ” of the people. In contrast, a pluralistic, conservative democracy accepts the reality of “privilege and countervailing privilege” but also the “finiteness and limitations” (PL 47) of all privileged claims. It affirms “liberty under God” (PL 39) rather than the self-sovereignty of man. Kolnai’s point is inseparably political and metaphysical: “It is only because some people, in different manners and different respects, weigh something in the scale as against state power that the ‘individual’ as such, the ‘plain man’ who is not in any sense a ‘master’, may also ‘count for something’ and make an active contribution to the life of the state” (PL 47). In essays such as “Privilege and Liberty” and “The Meaning of the ‘Common Man’”5 Kolnai repeatedly affirms that democracy has “manifold positive manifestations” (PL 44) and therefore cannot simply be identified with its most radical or pernicious tendencies. He...