A long post, below the fold, offering my charitable interpretation of what he is saying.
1. We have three options for government, two of which are very unpleasant: anarchy; repression; or legitimate government. With anarchy, people don’t obey the law. With repression, they obey with great reluctance and only if carefully watched. With legitimate government, they obey the law voluntarily.
2. Legitimate government means that people willingly make sacrifices, such as paying taxes and serving in the armed forces, to help sustain that government.
3. Contrary to the theories of John Locke and others, legitimacy does not come from consent. It first requires that people have a sense of commonality. This comes from common traditions and cultural focal points. These might include language, religion, holidays, moral codes, social narratives, etc. Without this sense of commonality, a state has to default to anarchy or repression.
4. Because of commonality, the nation-state is a natural unit of government. Trying to extend government beyond the boundaries of nation-states is an exercise either in futility, imperialism, or both. The nation-state, while clearly not a sufficient condition to ensure individual freedom, is a necessary one.
5. It is possible for people to come to voluntary agreements across national borders. I don’t know about Hazony, but I would say that the best of these agreements are often negotiated privately, not by government actors. But he would say that government treaties and agreements are usually legitimate.
To me, it seems that Hazony’s main project is to elevate the significance of bonds of commonality and to reduce the relative significance of consent as a source of government legitimacy in practice. That gets back to (3).
In an email exchange I had with Alberto Mingardi, he raised this objection to (4):
The paradox indeed is that nationalists, Hazony included, claim something is “natural” while it is in fact profoundly artificial. “Nations” are for the most creatures of the 19th century: think about Germany or England. They were indeed “imaginary communities” that existed among the literati but never among the people. Whatever ‘commonality’ they felt, for example, in the trenches of WWI was, by and large, the result of propaganda, nothing spontaneously felt.
He goes on to write,
is a commonality to produce a “nation” and then a political unity that ought to coincide with the “nation”? What about clubs and Facebook groups? But, far more importantly, what about cities and municipalities that go together with profoundly shared identities? Why should they be overcome by nations?
– do nations really and always pre-exist politics and should then call for a government “representing” them? What happens if people, for whatever reason (political propaganda or the spontaneous rise of a new identity) start feeling they belong to another nation than their nation states? Say, Catalonia? We libertarians tend to favour zip code secessionism: but if it is ‘nationalism’, that is: if it thinks that a state should go with a homogenous cultural group (a nation), can’t go that way.
To me, this brings out the tension between relying on consent and relying on commonality. When a nation-state makes decisions that otherwise could be made by individuals or other groups, as libertarians we focus on the lack of consent. Hazony might argue that what is worse is an attempt at multinational government, such as the European Union. Nation states, whether they emerged naturally or artificially, now have some commonality and, Hazony might argue, this makes national governments entitled to reject rules to which they do not consent. It may be the case that below the national level there also should be more ability of individuals and groups to reject rules, but Hazony would say that at the very least we must be able to reject government by a single world entity or a single fixed set of principles.
I have yet to read The Virtue of Nationalism. What I found most helpful in arriving at my sense of his ideas is this Hudson Institute panel from a few weeks ago, which I watched on YouTube the other day. I give Walter Russell Mead and William Galston credit for making the discussion helpful.
Last week, I attended a different panel featuring Hazony, and it was excruciatingly bad. Hillsdale College’s Matt Spalding reminded me why I should be grateful that I did not end up spending my life around professors. I also fault the moderator, Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams, for allowing this torture to be inflicted on the audience.
I haven’t followed this discussion in great detail but I think that the notion that “Nations are largely a nineteenth century invention” is a red herring. It’s largely wrong, but is just right enough if you are smart enough to read Hobsbawm but not curious enough to read anyone who disagrees with him.
Right. See Azar Gat’s Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. FWIW, Gat is also Israeli, author of War in Human Civilization and tends to agree with Pinker about the general decline in violence.
The idea that nationalistic ideas of social organization were invented whole-cloth by European political philosphers deserved its own name, but is an error derived from the quirks of Euro-centric intellectual history and its interactions with later historical events and ideological movements.
Thanks, Handle!
George Kennan, in his first volume of memoirs, made a distinction between “old” and “new” nations in Europe, claiming that the “new” ones seemed somehow unsettled (emotionally) and hinky or jumpy compared to the older ones.
I am a big fan of Anthony D. Smith’s work, and also the book by Adrian Hastings, _The construction of nationhood_.
Hastings book placed emphasis on liturgies, which is one way to go. That approach kind of goes along with literacy in the vernacular. There are other approaches, of course.
One could ask, if nations are so new, why was there a distinction made between “old” and “new” nations/nationalities in the old Habsburg Monarchy (after 1867 the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
I understand the claim that nations and nationalism somehow don’t really predate the French Revolution. It’s an interesting claim–for me it’s not persuasive.
Perhaps the “nations are new” makes more sense if you are focused on large territorial units with a demotic form of government, and especially if you think that nationalism is largely civic, with emphasis on republican energies and a loyalty to the government that just kind of happens.
Unless you spend time browsing _Nationalism_ in the Oxford Reader series it’s easy to forget how protean the word and the idea really is. I think the word I’m looking for is protean.
And it gets worse–I tend to agree with Walker Connor that the “sense of belonging” or community that drives nationalism is ineffable.
Thanks for listening. Sorry if this is a rant–perhaps it’s a useful one.
I need to re-read Kennan. More likely he was talking about old and new *states*. Thus Germany was an unsettling factor in recent history, uniting an older, increasingly self-aware group of German speakers in a large, new-ish state.
How does prior consent interact with familial relations? Babies do not consent to be born, nor do babies consent to the rules of the family. Does any human society believe otherwise? Likewise, communities impose obligations on families.
A family exists in a community. That might be a tribe whose relationships are closely reflected in genetic ties. It might be an outbred society, where nuclear families come from mixing among unrelated peoples who move from regional communities. In either case, there are rules and strictures that are imposed without consent on families and children.
Groups of communities can exist where the genetic average of all the members of the communities has a fairly small variance. These citizens, when dealing with each other in a market-type transaction, might feel more inclined to play the iterated prisoner dilemma with the “cooperate” strategy. Other groups of communities may not have such cohesion, simply because the intermixing of genes is more centrally located in close-knit tribes rather than regional groups of communities.
To me, research into the question of what constitutes a family, a community and a nation is completely useless without also taking genetics into account in some way.
Private property also does not involve the consent of third parties. Trespass is illegal even if I’ve never consented to your owning the property.
>Trespass is illegal even if I’ve never consented to your owning the property.
Who consented to that enforcement rule?
You tell me. But I suspect that you don’t go around your neighborhood consenting to your neighbors owning their properties, or to being prosecuted for trespass should you commit one. At best it could be said that you’re consenting to all that by default, by virtue of being a local resident or a US citizen or whatever, but such a formulation effectively negates the whole idea of focusing on consent.
It’s quite common in the Anglo-Saxon common law to presume “constructive assent”, imputed to a party based on conduct or even continuing, passive acquiescence with failure to object, and without explicit expression. Anton’s claim (part of a series on the subject of birthright citizenship) is that the Founders’ weren’t naive on the issue, and understood and debated the problems with the idea, and that their conception of social compact had voluntary expatriation as a natural right that was the remedy for the lack of consent and the most obvious way for an individual to effect its withdrawal.
That is, while we often think of the active measure of an individual consenting, it is sometimes more appropriate, especially in relationships that tend to continue indefinitely, to require that the active measure be the withdrawal of such consent. The Founders’ believed that staying put instead of getting out of Dodge was best interpreted that, despite objection, one still prefers to rather remain beholden to local rules than accept the costs of departing.
Yes. I was being sarcastic, as I assume Dave was, in order to point out that focusing on active voluntary consent at a minimum excludes a whole lot of important societal relationships.
Prior Consent?
On such grounds Lysander Spooner disparaged the U.S.Constitution a mere eighty years after its signing: .
Interesting, thanks for that link. Certainly nobody asked babies born in the US if they agree to the Constitution as a condition of their citizenship. On the other hand, communities and nations need to have some kind of legal framework in order to get anything done.
People would worry less about the Constitution and the Supreme Court if their power relative to states was much smaller. Individuals are forced to choose “voice” in the big central model rather than “exit” in a smaller federalized model.
Babies do not consent to be born, nor do babies consent to the rules of the family.
what a red herring.
Whatever ‘commonality’ they felt, for example, in the trenches of WWI was, by and large, the result of propaganda, nothing spontaneously felt.
Not sure I’d agree with that. War has a way of forging bonds rather quickly between people on the same side. One of Krupp Steel’s Big Bertha cannons was probably worth more than all the propaganda either side produced in terms of creating a sense of unity or commonality amongst the Tommies and the Poilus in the trenches. I would describe the “commonality” phenomenon as neither wholly natural or wholly artificial, but rather based on specific circumstances.
I’ve got to get cracking on my own review of Hazony’s book, but there’s an important point to drop here of the contrast between consent (in truth, “collective consent” or “majority consent”) and commonality, which is that collective consent is fickle and fragile to stress, whereas the ingredients of commonality tend to be enduring and robust.
Consent is especially fragile when political disagreements tend to strongly correlate with commonality within, but not between sub-populations, which then always end up with one group dominating another, with foments internal tensions and resentments and provokes antagonistic factionalism (or ‘tribalism’, if you prefer). At the extremes of this phenomenon one gets “prison gang” social dynamics / politics, in which the salience of all other characteristics besides the one of commonality that generates cohesion for the purpose of collective security falls away out of desperation.
The question becomes whether, especially in modern democracies, such disparities and polarizing tensions will tend to smooth out, cool over time, and be calmed by a class of capable statesmen dedicated to internal peace, harmony, and comity, or whether the opposite condition will hold, in which parties discover that provoking acrimony in a sure-fire way to “agitprop the vote” and generate the kind of antagonistic enthusaism among their base necessary to win elections.
Oh, whoops, there is no question whatsoever about the latter case being the nature of any human system with similar incentives.
Of course all democracies are characterized by degrees of unhealthy antagonism, but when this intersects with perceptions of group differences it is a recipe for constant tension. Basing a society and ‘jurisdiction governing entity’ in as much commonality and “organic social glue” as possible tends to mitigate these problem, minimize the perception of domination, and maximize the perception of common interests.
In particular, many Americans suffer from what could be called “racial tension fatigue syndrome” and hoped for generations that a fraternal, colorblind, post-racial future would await in which, for example, races tended to have similar voting patterns and ideological distributions, etc. A lot of the energy and excitement about Obama’s election was based on a naive hope (and failure to actually read his memoirs) that his Presidency would usher in the beginning of this new era at last. Instead, we seem permanently mired in these matters and, as described above, as general social stress and perceptions of zero-sum contests increases and ideological sources of commonality evaporate in terms of a conflict of social and political visions, sub-population hatred rises as well.
It’s also worth pointing out that the aftermath of WWII involved a great deal of ethnic cleansing and geographic disaggregation of peoples according to heritage, much like what happened to the Balkans in the aftermath of the wars of Yugoslavian break-up. So the conflict turned out to produce even more ‘nationalism’ than existed beforehand. Now it’s been a stable era since then, but it’s impossible to correct for the role of the United States and the Cold War and existence of nuclear weapons. It is still worth asking as an empirical matter whether these kinds of disaggregations tend to be more or less peaceful, both externally and domestically, than the status quo ante.
Good comment.
Trump was elected and all of a sudden there were millions of people all over the world who defined themselves by their hatred of Trump. This brand new nation united around their obsession with this hate-figure who was going to put their patrie, which didn’t exist until he was elected, en danger. So they circle the wagons. They go to the mattresses.
If that’s not spontaneous, it’s instantaneous. It’s sudden onset something. It happened again with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, or what Linda Sarsour’s group called “Donald Trump’s nomination of XX.”
They almost got his name right later on: “Judge Brett Cavenaugh’s nomination threatens to move our nation’s highest court dangerously to the right and further erode protections for almost every marginalized group in America.”
Also note that when you meet people who are 100% convinced of Kavanaugh’s guilt these same people are really shaky on the details they point to by way of evidence. They haven’t been paying enough attention to the news to get the specifics down but they’ve bought in 100% to the nationalist myth-making about the villain in the stocks, the prisoner in the tumbril.