Foundational Nationalism

[Ederico]

[Source: TheIdyllic.com]

Foundational Nationalism
M. Raphael Johnson, October 7, 2003

Nationalism has many defenders, though unfortunately, few teach in universities. The near monopoly of globalist forces on the grant-making foundations in American social life ensures that ethnic nationalism remains a political idea of the small minority. Nationalism remains a political idea that defies complete description or conceptual definition. Nationalism has been used by every class in European societies at one time or another, for every political end. Nationalism, at the moment, has no universally accepted definition and thus is used in radically differing ways depending on the author or topic.

Therefore, worrying about a foundational idea of nationalism is becoming increasingly important. In this matter the work of Bernard Bosanquet is of paramount importance. Since Johann Herder, Bosanquet's work, done largely during the early decades of the 20th century, is one of the greatest attempts to define and delineate the program and theory of nationalism. He is largely forgotten today. His famous work, The Philosophical Theory of the State, published originally in 1899, with the final edition coming out in 1930, provided nationalism with its contemporary idea of the State, the culture and the nature of human political activity. It deserves to be revisited with an eye to building a contemporary idea of nationalist theory and action.

It has been fairly confusing that the word "state" in social theory has come to contain many specific definitions. For G.W.F. Hegel and Bosanquet, the state is not defined in the way the Anglo-Americans define it: the collection of formal offices and coercive agencies under an administration. Such a view is common enough, and is normally what the average person will claim the state is. On the other hand, there is a more Germanic notion of the State, one coming from Hegel, which defines the state in broader terms. Here, the state is the summation of the national culture, objectified in the agencies of an executive administration. It is, again, the objectification of "right," or the rights and duties of persons embedded into the institutions that guarantee communal freedom and the identification of the self with the whole. Hegel writes in his Philosophy of Right:

The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it. The state exists immediately in custom, mediately in individual self-consciousness, knowledge and activity. . . .

The state is absolutely rational inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality (155-156).

This is quite different from the more reductionist version that is more often used in the English language literature. It is this Hegelian definition, in general, that Bosanquet uses. The Hegelian would accuse the ethno-nationalist of reducing the State to its purely abstract and formal properties. The Hederian ethnic-nationalist’s rejection of the "state," however, concernes solely the structural, coercive and formal aspects of violence that mark the modern usage of the term and the reality of modern practice. Further, the notion of a single locus of common loyalty (something specific to modernity and the state) was another problem facing ethno-nationalism, where loyalty, power and compulsion is far more diffused in the myriad institutions of cultural life. In this instance, however, there is another usage of the word "state" almost completely lost in English.However, the progress of modern social life has largely been active in showing that the state has taken on -- as a matter of self-conscious organization -- just these abstract qualities in contrast to the informal and qualitative basis of ethno-national authority. In other words, that the internal principle of state has been radically separated from the idea of "state" considered as "formal administration." Today, the state is merely this regime of formal and coercive agency. Therefore, the title of Bosanquet's most famous book must be understood in this sense, and his use of the word "state" considered more technically Hegelian and therefore does not concern, at its root, the external or formal properties of statehood except in a secondary manner. This essay will use a capital S to refer to this version of State.

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Bosanquet's theoretical starting point is Platonic, and joins his theory of nationalism to Plato's overall vision of justice:

The fundamental idea of Greek political philosophy, as we find it in Plato and Aristotle, is that the human mind can only attain its full and proper life in a community of minds, or more strictly in a community pervaded by a single mind, uttering itself consistently though differently in the life of action of every member of the community (6).

For Bosanquet, the idea of the State was to provide the all-pervasive group mind that would bind individuals to one another, that would express the common good. For Bosanquet, as with Herder before him, was that the central question of epistemology was to be referred to the cultural environment within which one lives. The "facts" an individual life become so only in reference to the whole, the life of the society. The connection of the individual life with this whole, the whole that helps "create" the individual, is the core imperative of political theory. Epistemology is not an abstract science, nor is politics, but derives from the structure of the cultural and ethnic whole.

The impact of the whole on the individual, therefore, is not a "diminution of the self," but paradoxically, part of the inherent nature of the self. The individual becomes real only in society, and society, inherently, contains sanctions and coercive techniques that limit the "free" action of individuals. The "paradox of self government," that is, the idea that human freedom in society requires the existence of laws that limit freedom, for nationalism, disappears, the notion of limitation does no violence to the self, but creates the conditions for the flourishing of the common good, which creates the true and authentic self.

Nationalism here is attacking the strictly negative approach to freedom that classical liberalism put forth through such famous theorists as Locke or Mill. Here, the self becomes the locus of all moral value, and the state is legitimate only to the extent it protects the maximum freedom of action possible for each individual. In contrast, Bosanquet claims that the state needs to be more than a purely negative force, "diminishing" the capacity for free action among individuals who are, in this case, radically alienated from it. The State has a more positive role to play in creating the conditions for the self to become truly what it is, a "real" freedom realized in the common good, rather than the false freedom of arbitrary human caprice. In other words, the essence of Bosanquet's nationalism is that there is no individuality outside of a well defined social order. Individuality does not merely appear, but is built through a cultural and social order that makes it possible for men to cooperate in manifesting justice, rather than individuality being rendered an inexplicable and "pre-political" condition:

The theories of the first appearance, as we have called them, are characterized by accepting as ultimate "the absolute and naturally independent existence" of the physical individual, and therefore regarding government as an encroachment on the self and force as oppression. Whereas, if the social person is taken as the reality, it follows, as Rousseau points out, that force against the physical individual may become a condition of freedom (90).

Rousseau becomes, in a sense, the model for Bosanquet's State, and the doctrine of nationalism in general. Man is born in natural liberty (an impossible notion), but only through the State does man develop civil liberty and become part of a community. He might be an individual in isolation, but he only becomes a man, citizen and a person through the community. The first sort of person, to the extent he exists outside of theory, is characterized by a "natural will," deriving solely from his passions and natural impulses. The second sort of will is his real will, the will of a functioning member of society. Therefore, he becomes a citizen only through the set of sanctions the State imposes upon him. Previous to that, he is not a person, but a savage. Envisioning the State in this capacity, Bosanquet writes:

(a) The negative relation of the self to other selves begins to dissolve away before the conception of the common self; and (b) the negative relation of the self to law and government begins to disappear in the idea of a law which expresses our real will, as opposed to our trivial and rebellious moods (95).

The will of the "natural man" is not a will that is social. Human beings are naturally social, and therefore, the notion of "self-determination" requires that the natural will be transformed into the "social" or "real" will, the will that is necessary to function at all in society. Of course, ethno-nationalism has claimed that there is no such thing as the "natural man" (as a fact of history), but, it might be posited here that Bosanquet is making an analytic distinction in order to build a theory, rather than making a historical claim. For Rousseau, there is a will that is fundamentally social, that of the General Will, which is radically distinct from the mere aggregate of wills, or the "Will of All." The latter is merely the drive for each to hoist their momentary demands upon the whole, while the former is the notion of a broader self, the self that is social and seeks the common good, in fact, it concerns he who represents the common good internally. There has always been something attractive about Rousseau's refusal to countenance the liberal obsession with the naked and abstract "will," but the General Will he replaced the liberal idea with is absolutely bereft of ethical content. Hegel writes of it in his Philosophy of Right:

Unfortunately, however, as Fichte did later, [Rousseau] takes the will only in a determinate form as the individual will, and he regards the universal will not as the absolutely rational element in the will, but only as a "general" will which proceeds out of this individual will as out of a conscious will. The result is that he reduces the union of individuals in the state to a contract and therefore to something based on their arbitrary wills, their opinion, and their capriciously given express consent; and abstract reasoning proceeds to draw the logical inferences which destroy the absolutely divine principle of the state, together with its majesty an absolute authority (157).

In and of itself, in an abstract form, the General Will is proper enough. On the other hand, one cannot leave it as an abstraction, as Rousseau does. Hegel's' problem is correct -- however eccentrically stated -- that the content of the will's "generality" derives from arbitrary wills. It is not based on objective reality. For nationalism, that reality is the historical experience of a community, crystallized in language and customs, and objectified into social institutions of authority. It is not something that is discovered by counting votes, but manifests itself in history as the essence of the community.

Now, if it is true that resistance to arbitrary aggression is a condition of obeying only ourselves, it is more deeply true, when man is in any degree civilized, that, in order to obey yourself as you want to be, you must obey something very different from yourself as you are (134).

The distinction is between the drive of passion, or the untamed will of the uncivilized, and the expanded, more permanent and institutionalized will that comes with civilization. The lustful passion, for example, and its thoughtless understanding the objects of its satisfaction, is something that is momentary and trivial (however powerful). On the other hand, the institutionalization and transformation of such a desire -- in the family -- is the generalization of that will.

That impulse, in passing into family affection, has become both less and more. It is both disciplined and expanded. The object presented to the will is transformed in character. Lawlessness is excluded; but, in place of passing pleasures, a whole world of affections and interests, expanding beyond the individual life, is offered as a purpose and a stimulus to the self. . . .

In every case we are led up to the contrast of he actual indolent or selfish will, and the will, in as far as it comes to be what its nature implies, namely that which we have spoken of as the real or rational will embodied in objects which have power to make a life worth living for the self that wills them (138-9).

Further, he writes elsewhere:

The point of these suggestions is to make it clear that, while plurality of human beings is necessary to enable society to cover the ground, as it were, which human nature is capable of covering, yet actual individuals are not ultimate or equal embodiments of the true particulars of the social universal. We thus see once more that the given individual is only in making, and that his reality may lie largely outside him. His will is not a whole, but implies and rests upon a whole, which is therefore the true nature of his will (163).

There is a difficulty in Bosanquet's use of Rousseau. There is no logical reason to believe there is such as thing as a "natural man." All men are born into families and into communities that shape and mold the will from birth, and even before it. Therefore, the "natural man" seems a contentless abstraction from the experience of an alienated, often mistaken for the natural, will. "Natural" in the context of the argument presented in this set of essays refers to the existence of families and larger communities bound together in mutual affection, manifesting this in tradition and custom, that is, in patriarchal social authority. The family and the ethno-community are inseparable in history, for the ethno-community relies on the family as its conduit reaching through the generations, as the family needs the larger group for economic well being and physical protection. "Natural" in this sense is a positive good, it is the sheer existence of such institutions, outside of which the individual is rationally inconceivable. Therefore, one can see a radical fissure between the idealism of Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel or Bosanquet, and the "natural law" vision of the community found in many visions of Hederian ethno-nationalism. Therefore, what Bosanquet means by the "natural will" is what a Hederian or Burkian might mean by an "alienated will."

It might make more sense to conceptualize this not in the pseudo-anthropological way Rousseau does in his Second Discourse, but rather to consider the modern reality of the sociopath, the will that has been released from traditional restraints, the common good of the Hederian ethno-community. There is no idea of the "natural man" in any anthropology worthy of the name, but there is an idea of the will refusing to be molded according to the common good, thereby not actually being a rational will at all, but little more than a bundle of impulses that need external controls lest it destroy itself. Such a will is not, in actuality, human, but is sunk into the often blind chaos of the fallen natural world. To call what Bosanquet refers to as the "natural will" as "an individual" is to equivocate on this important and abused word. It is not an individual, but, outside of the clear physical similarities to the civilized man, it is an animal.

The transformation from the "natural will" to the civil will is a useful distinction, but only insofar as the "natural will" is considered from the perspective of alienation: the condition man finds himself in as the culture around him breaks down, is the will being subject to either internal or external slavery to impulse. In fact, it is a problematic approach to politics to begin with an isolated individual, for it is purely a figment of method and thereby an a priori construct. All ideas of personhood, whether degenerate or healthy, is the result of certain communal arrangements, not a "raw" nature, which is another such product of the modern mind, as all cognition occurs from the point of view of a socially conditioned conceptual apparatus, not direct perception.

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Bosanquet makes an extremely important distinction between "association" and "organization." For classical liberalism, the former is the nature of politics. "Society" is the merely the juxtaposition of individuals among one another, each with its own "individuality." The state, therefore, becomes the umpire that adjudicates between the completing claims and demands of these essentially disconnected individuals and groups. An organization, however, exists with a specific purpose. It is connected by a tangible essence, that is, individuals are linked by a certain quality. In the human mind, there is a distinction between a association and an organization of ideas. The former can be created at will through the judicious use of controlled stimuli. There need be no essential connection between the ideas and perceptions. However, in terms of mental organization, a set of ideas become such because the ideas share a common root or core, a quality that makes than actually contiguous, rather than contingent and random: "In mind, as in the external world, the higher stage of association is organization. The characteristic of organization is control by a general scheme as opposed to influence by juxtaposition of units" (152).

Such organizations are multiform within the society as well as within the mind. For nationalism, the idea of the State (again in Hegel's sense) is that entity that maintains social unity in the face of, though not in opposition to, the functioning of the various organization in modern society. For the human mind, there must be an overarching organization that is capable of maintaining the truth that one is still talking about a flower when one views it under the heading of economic utility, aesthetics or organic chemistry. In both cases an overarching unity must be maintained. Therefore, the elements of a "state" must be in existence for any social system to function. Bosanquet writes:

The actual reality of the school lies in the fact that certain living minds are connected in a certain way. Teachers, pupils, managers, parents, and the public must all of them have certain operative ideas, and must be guided according to these ideas in certain portions of their lives, if the school is to be a school (159).

Bosanquet Platonizes the nature of social institutions. For him, what is necessary for an institution to be an institution, i.e. function the way it was intended, is that each operative individual be bound to all others by a certain set of core ideas. These core ideas become the very essence of the institution, that one element that is necessary for it to be (that is, act) the way it is supposed to. The State, therefore, is the institution of institutions in this respect, bound together in a "cluster" of cognitive associations which derive from communal custom (as Hegel believed), representing historical experience and shared meanings crystallized in language. The state, considered in this way, must, therefore, take into itself at lest the residual of ideas that bind together more "subordinate" institutions.

For nationalist theory, the notion of the "real" will is something embodied in the spirit of the laws and institutions of the State. For Bosanquet, the State exists only as such to the extent it takes the multiform clusters of associations and renders them objective, i.e. properly representing the general will in their particularity. Such clusters are nothing more than the product of a national psyche, a national tradition objectified in concept, concepts that eventually take their place as "institutions." Of course, nothing could be farther from the modern idea of the culture being subjective, and therefore of no account, and social administration, dedicated to markets and expansion, being objective and "real." Neither Hegel nor Bosanquet subscribed to such an Anglo-American idea of the culture/state complex. As with Herder, Hegel and Bosanquet consider the State not merely a formal set of institutions, but the objectification of the ethno-nation, the objectification of concepts that can only take their reality in the development of shared meanings and historical experience. Therefore, Bosanquet might be considered far more of a Hederian than had heretofore been thought.

What actually has "individuality" is the social system as a whole, which represents our true selves, as opposed to the self of impulse and passion. The nature of the social system, then, is in representing the fullest possible reach of any specific human person, understanding that, considered in isolation, the individual can do very little. When joined with a community, the "ground" that it can cover, and that which the individual consequently can enjoy, is large. The social system is far more a "self" than the isolated ego. Freedom is then something that is quite determinate, something that grows with the development of the social system itself. It is not some "pre-political" stock that one "naturally" has. It is a set of prescriptive actions that have as its end the common good, the transformation of the human will from "natural" to civil; or, more importantly, from the profitless and brutal existence of isolation to the real moral life in community, without which no human life is possible.

The nature of political life is therefore an extension of this principle. The community develops over time, building institutions and ideas that channel the willing of individual men into functions and roles that create a functioning civil life. The concept of "right" is the set of qualities that come to adhere to specific individuals in specific contexts and roles in the process of developing the civic life. Therefore, "rights" as such are not abstractions, something adhering to persons "according to nature," but are rather functions of the nature of the good life, defined by the developmental possibilities of the society in question. Bosanquet writes that this notion of right "forces us away from this false particularization, and compels us to consider the whole State maintained order in its connectedness as a single expression of a common good or will, in so far as such a good can find utterance in a system of external acts and habits" (189). More completely, his theory of political right can be summarized like this:

What comes first, we may say, is the position, the place or places, function or functions, determined by the nature of the best life as displayed in a certain community, and the capacity of the individual self for a unique contribution to that best life. Such places and functions are imperative; they are the fuller self in the particular person, and make up the particular person as he passes into the fuller self. His hold on this is his true will, in other words, his apprehension of the general will. (191)

That is, a society is ordered to a certain good, contingent upon the developmental structure of the society itself. What this implies is a common mind, a common set of bonds that unite the various functions of a society together in the same sense that a student and teacher are united in the same activity of education. The striving for this common good is found in the transformation of the natural will into the common or civil will. Institutions that are functional in this process are permitted to operate coercively insofar as such coercion is commensurate with the good to be received as a result. The idea then becomes that "transformation" of the will is necessary for the society to function and the common good to be built. The nature of that common good is the tie that binds the individuals together into a society, and it is that progress from natural to civil willing that is the principle of mutual recognition among citizens of this nation.

By way of conclusion, the idea of the transformed will is the knowledge of the universal that is hidden in the specifically individual functions of a routinized life. A family is far from merely a biological construction, but becomes a deeply ethical one when parents seek to raise their children to make their own important contributions to the social whole. The raising of children properly is one of the most important aspects of social life. Therefore, the myriad sacrifices parents make to raise children properly is provided with ethical substance with it is considered that the civil health of the nation is dependent upon children growing up to be civilized adults.

The division of labor in economics becomes ethical when it is consciously performed for the service of the whole. One might work to fulfill basic needs, but one also works because one has a unique contribution to make to the smooth flowing of social life. The particular work is infused, by its very nature, with universal significance. Institutions, therefore, do not have a life of their own, but universalize themselves when it is understood that they represent an important function in civil life. Institutions make no sense when they are not making such a contribution. But the nature of this good life, the common good which is defined by the internal development of social life itself, is what then binds these institutions together, that is, they define themselves in accordance with what has come to be considered good; they come to be and function only in reference, ultimately, to the greater good of the society, by filling a certain need or providing an important service.