Since the beginning, we Americans have been concerned about the end of our republican freedoms at the hands of a tyrant. Whether colonists decrying George III, anti-Federalists staring suspiciously at the Constitution, or Whigs wringing their hands over King Andrew I, we have a long and proud tradition of gazing at the navel of freedom and wondering if it’s still there. 

The reality, of course, is that you don’t really have to “wonder” if you’ve lost the republic—like being poor, everyone in the circumstance knows it. This is one of the lessons of the first few paragraphs of Tacitus’ Annals. In this dour, grumpy review of the first decades of the Roman Empire, Tacitus gives us seven signs that the republic is well and truly dead. 

1. Honesty about the current government is not permitted.

Tacitus’ stated purpose in the Annals is to tell the truth about a time in Roman history when contemporary historians were either so terrified of a living tyrant or so furious at a recently deceased one that they couldn’t write accurately about events they had lived through. Because he lived over a century after the beginning of Augustus’ rule and at least a generation after the death of Nero, there was no one left to care if he wrote the unvarnished truth about the first generations of Roman Emperors.^[1] Attempts to do so at the time did not end well for the writers in question.^[2]

This gives us our first sign that a republic is dead: you cannot tell the truth about the governing regime. History might be safe enough if it concerns the distant past, but speaking freely about those currently in power carries dire consequences.

2. Great men are no longer tolerated.

The broad theme of Tacitus’ works involves exploring the role of a competent and moral man in the new imperial order. His writings are full of the kinds of men who, under the Roman Republic, would have entered lists of the great heroes of the past. Suetonius Paulinus, Germanicus, Corbulo, and, of course, Agricola all would have been remembered alongside Camillus and Scipio Africanus had they lived two centuries earlier. 

Instead, their best-case scenario is being shuffled off to the far corners of the Empire to languish in obscurity. At worst, they are executed when their competence and decency begin to outshine the popularity of the Emperor. This was a feature of the Empire, not a bug.^[3]

A second sign that the republic is dead is the fact that capable and ethical men must not stand too high above the crowd. They can do their jobs quietly in the background, but they are in danger from the autocrat at the top if they shine brightly. 

3. Leadership increasingly focuses on the autocrat.

Every nation, democratic or otherwise, will have a class of people who do the day-to-day work of running the government. In the Roman Republic, this class was a combination of elected officials and the Senate (itself composed of former elected officials). Because they were elected, these officials had to keep one eye on the people and maintain at least a facade of public-minded independence. 

After the transition into an Empire, those officials looked to the Emperor for everything.^[4] The Senate especially was quick to bow, horrified even by the suggestion of independent action separate from the blessing of the Emperor.^[5]

This is a third sign that the republic is dead: political leadership will not act without the permission of the autocrat. 

4. Democratic culture increasingly focuses on the autocrat.

Under the Republic the people elected magistrates. Yes, elections were heavily tilted in favor of the wealthy (they used a weighted voting system). And yes, partisan politics crept in and ruined everything towards the end.^[6] Yet the people did still get to choose. Who was going to win an election was never a foregone conclusion. 

On his accession, Augustus began the process of chipping away at the people’s power by reserving the sole right of nominating candidates for office (sometimes allowing minor offices to have genuinely competitive races). Tiberius ended even the facade of popular choice by moving elections from the assemblies of the people to the Senate. And since the Emperor was in charge of nominating candidates for office and the Senate was made up of former officials, the Emperor was now calling the shots all the way down. 

Having stated this fact, Tacitus then gives us a peek into the response of the common people to this imperial action: “Nor did the people complain of having the right taken from them.”^[7]

This is both chilling to read and perfectly understandable—think for a second about everyone you know, online or in person. How many of us would genuinely complain in any meaningful way if they were told they never needed to bother voting again? The Roman people had already abdicated their power; in reality, the end of the form of freedom meant nothing to them. 

We need not get into the weeds of Roman government here—though we should at least note how little the old Republican institutions mattered for Rome under the Empire. The election of Consuls, Praetors, and Quaestors is no longer a matter of any real public concern. Our point is that, like the aristocrats, the people are also looking to the Emperor for the day-to-day operations of the state. Democratic political culture is as focused on the Emperor as the leadership class. 

5. Military culture is entirely focused on the autocrat. 

Most importantly, and where Tacitus focuses most at the beginning of Book I, the military was well aware of who was in charge in Rome. Early in his reign, Tiberius sent his son to quell a mutiny on the northern border of the Empire. When Tiberius’ son told the mutineers that he would take their requests to the Senate,^[8] the soldiers promptly rioted and demanded a hearing by the Emperor himself. They were not interested in either the Emperor’s son or the worthless Senate.^[9] The mutiny ultimately went nowhere, but the point was clear—and this is the fifth sign that the republic is dead: the military cares only for the opinion of the autocrat. 

6. Time and memory

Rome’s prior experiments with autocracy had been relatively brief—Sulla and Julius Caesar, for example, had each held sole power for less than five years. Even during their rule, there was active opposition to their decisions. After they retired or died, there were enough people who remembered how the Republic worked prior to the reforms of these Dictators to fill the offices of Rome and keep some kind of stability in the state. 

Augustus, however, created a different situation:

He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past.^[10]

To his credit, Augustus was a brilliant administrator and established a bureaucratic apparatus that remained intact for nearly two centuries. When he finally died of extreme old age, so much time had passed that “there was a younger generation, sprung up since the victory of Actium, and even many of the older men had been born during the civil wars. How few were left who had seen the republic!”^[11]

Our sixth sign that the republic is dead is that it does not return after time has passed. Reasons for this may vary from the experience of the Roman Republic. Of course, bloodshed and the age of the autocrat do not have to be the reason. Perhaps all the republic-minded individuals have fled, given up, or moved into the private sector. The point is, the passage of time establishes and reinforces the fact that the republic is dead. 

7. The problem of succession

The final sign that the republic is dead is the big problem of the Roman Empire—and one which they never successfully solved: who takes over when the autocrat retires or dies? Over the next four centuries, numerous attempts were made to solve this problem. Through all these efforts, one thing remains very clear: the decision is not in the hands of the citizen body. We’ve seen the people lose the right to elect the lesser magistrates; time also reveals that they have no role in selecting the final authority in the Empire. 

This is made clear when Augustus chooses Tiberius,^[12] and it remains clear over the next several centuries. The military chooses the next four Emperors (Caligula through Vespasian), then there is an established biological succession (the Flavian Dynasty), then an adoptive succession (the “Five Good Emperors”), then biology again, then the military again, then biology again, then fifty years of chaos and civil war (the Crisis of the Third Century). The old Republican electoral institutions that gave voice to the people play no role in choosing the next head of state. This ultimately shows us that the republic is gone. “Thus the state had been revolutionized, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality.”^[13]

This is the end of Tacitus’ introduction and the beginning of the Annals proper. It is also an overstatement—the Roman Republic wasn’t particularly moral, and the Roman Empire wasn’t particularly immoral (it did survive Tacitus by nearly three centuries; something a totally dissolute government could certainly not have managed). Instead, both the Republic and the Empire were incredibly well-structured systems that each managed to survive and thrive in ways that most nations have not, preserving and amplifying the strengths and weaknesses of the Roman people. 

My point is not to argue with Tacitus on the morality of Rome (I’ll leave that to Augustine). My point is merely to highlight the fact that the Roman Republic was well and truly dead by the time Tiberius took the throne in 14AD, and every single Roman alive at the time knew it for all the reasons discussed above. 

As Americans, until we come to that point, we do not yet need to eulogize our own Republic. It may be tottering in the hands of a succession of immoral geriatrics, we might be horrified at the incompetents we keep choosing to vote for, and we might be increasingly ignorant that how something is done is as important for republican freedom as what is done. Still, we have not yet checked the boxes that Tacitus identified in our Republican and Imperial predecessors. We can still speak the truth about our government with little fear of reprisal. Our various cultures (aristocratic, democratic, and military) still look to electoral processes as the basis of ultimate authority. And most importantly, time is still on our side. We do not know who will govern the nation, state, county, or city after the next election. We do, however, know that the choice is not yet in the hands of a single person. We may not be able to predict when this will happen, but if Tacitus is any use as a guide, we will certainly know once the moment has passed. 

Coyle Neal has a PhD in Political Philosophy from Catholic University of America. He lives and teaches in rural Missouri and is the author of Echoes of Antiquity: Hellenistic Thought in a Politically Changing World.

[1] Annals, I.1; Histories, I.1

[2] Just ask Seneca, Petronius, Lucan, or Ovid.

[3] Tiberius, for example, began his reign with the execution of potential opponents. Annals, I.6

[4] Annals, I.7

[5] Annals, I.12-13

[6] One of Augustus Caesar’s claims about his legacy was that he had solved the problem of partisan politics for all time. See Res Gestae Divi Augusti.
To be fair, Rome under the Emperors did not in fact fight over elections ever again… See Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture for a thorough–very thorough–discussion of this point.

[7] Annals, I.15

[8] Augustus had upheld the facade of involving the Senate in military matters, so Tiberius’ son wasn’t out of line in making this offer.

[9] Annals, I.25-27

[10] Annals, I.2

[11] Annals, I.3

[12] Reluctantly, if Tacitus is to be believed. Annals, I.3

[13] Annals, I.4

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Plainness, Sancho, for all affectation is bad (Llaneza, Sancho, que toda afectación es mala).

– Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes addresses perennial concerns about human nature and reality, the snare of confusing appearance with reality, man’s quest for love, and reflections on life and death with a timeless, melancholic embrace of beauty. Cervantes makes the passage of time and man’s often overzealous regard for the world a picaresque, devil-may-care, animated puppet theater. This is true of his shorter Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Novels); Don Quixote displays Cervantes’ philosophical and literary perspicuity and acumen.

Don Quixote makes life the protagonist. The affirmation of life is truly Don Quixote’s quest. The venerable knight-errant seeks more than life from his life. He is a man who does not want to squander the time that he is allotted to live, thus concocts a plan that aims to squeeze from life nectar that is sweeter than life itself.

Granted, the affirmation of life and the quest to demand more than life from the immediacy of lived experience can at times exhaust itself in disappointment and disenchantment. That is a risk that people who seek more than life from life must recognize and appropriate. Don Quixote is cognizant of this.

To embrace more than life, Alonso Quijano, a homely man who is enamored of reading and learning, especially books of chivalry, must transform himself into Don Quixote, the “ingenious hidalgo from La Mancha.” 

Quijano becomes aware that his life has become the object of heightened thought and reflection, something he had never considered before. Don Quixote turns the novelty and exploration of the La Mancha region of Spain into an existential justification of life. It is a significant detail of Cervantes’ literary masterpiece that Quijano is a man close to fifty years of age and not a budding young romantic, though the author informs readers that he is “of a robust constitution.” 

Don Quixote’s strong will—his robust Spanish constitution and temperament—is the fuel that animates his trek through the dusty open plains of La Mancha. His mature age has prepared Don Quixote for a life-plan that, while it may appear idealistic to readers, equips the knight-errant-to-be with the wisdom of lived experience and knowledge of the human condition that carries him and Sancho Panza through their seemingly endless array of thorny situations. Don Quixote’s wisdom, which is strengthened by Sancho’s quick wit and proverbs, which become more pronounced as the novel develops, enables both men to return home.

Alonso Quijano, who is soon to transform himself into Don Quixote, plans to do battle with the scoundrels that bring unhappiness to righteous people, right the “wrongs” of the world, and other contingencies that the region of La Mancha throws at him. 

La Mancha symbolizes the world for the venerable knight-errant. Don Quixote’s exploration of the arid plateau that is Spain’s La Mancha region unites Cervantes’ love of books and reading and the life of the mind with the author’s worldly experience. We cannot forget that Miguel de Cervantes was a worldly man. As Cervantes writes, “He who reads much and travels much, sees much and knows much (“El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho”). 

Don Quixote exemplifies Cervantes’ awe and wonder. The Spanish author embraces the immediacy and translucence that is human existence, a sentiment that William Blake puts on display in Auguries of Innocence: “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.” The reflective Don Quixote devises a life plan, an existential concept that many subsequent Spanish thinkers explore, including Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset. 

To want more than life from life is equivalent to desiring a justification for life; Don Quixote is marred by the tension between life, as lived experience, and our capacity for self-reflection. We must not confuse the capacity for existential self-reflection with mere reason. Reason alone does not satiate Don Quixote’s attitude toward life. Reason does not assuage the existential inquietude that Don Quixote desires to satisfy. 

Fighting windmills and seeking an imaginary romance with a girl who lives nearby, Aldonza Lorenzo, whom the knight-errant names Dulcinea del Toboso, fuels Don Quixote’s passion. Fighting windmills and assuaging Dulcinea’s unrequited love only make up a few items of Don Quixote’s animated prospectus of what it means for him to live his life as a waking dream. 

Life as dream, that is, reality as suspended animation that courageous and imaginative people can discern, is a major theme in Don Quixote. We encounter this theme in other Spanish writers and thinkers, including Lope de Vega, Baltasar Gracián, Calderon de La Barca, and in Spain’s most gifted romantic poets. While Don Quixote is a poetic and lyrical novel about life as illusion, it is also a playful work that is prescient about the human condition. 

Cervantes was a worldly man who lost the use of his left hand in 1571 in the Battle of Lepanto, was imprisoned by pirates in Algiers from 1575 to 1580, and worked as a commissary for the Spanish Armada between 1587 and 1588.

Miguel de Cervantes had as full a life as any writer or thinker can accommodate, live through, and retain the necessary vitality and mental clarity to commit to paper. Cervantes’ quest to joust with life makes his Spanish temperament shine through the literary conventions he developed, including his penchant for telling stories within stories and for turning the author into a participant in the action of the novel.

Cervantes was a writer, poet, and thinker. This is perhaps the most astounding aspect of his writing and life that befuddles readers and biographers alike, especially in late postmodernism, when “specialization” has such chic appeal for pampered, would-be writers and thinkers. The lyrical quality of Don Quixote highlights Cervantes’ poetic temperament as a novelist.

Being a writer and a practical man of the world, Cervantes exploits the vagaries and intricacies of life and thought. Though this is not an enviable task that most writers care to cultivate. As a thinker, Cervantes is a stoic Catholic. Setting his sight on the life of the soul, the Spanish author treats the here-and-now with guarded, even comical, disinterest. This makes him patient and perspicuous about the ways of the world and man. Though idealistic in life and love, Don Quixote does not suffer fools, as far as his relationship with other people is concerned. Don Quixote is savvy about what to expect from people.

When Don Quixote sets out to right the wrongs of the world, he takes with him a loyal farmer who lives nearby. His name is Sancho Panza. Don Quixote convinces the pudgy man that “panza” means belly in Spanish, and he should go with him because together they will live a life of adventure. Sancho Panza becomes convinced that he should accompany Don Quixote after the knight-errant promises his future companion and squire-to-be that Sancho Panza will come into the possession of an island of which he will be governor: “In the meanwhile Don Quixote was bringing his powers of persuasion to bear upon a farmer who lived near by, a good man—if this title may be applied to one who is poor—but with very few wits in his head.”

Besides becoming Don Quixote’s loyal companion, Sancho Panza is a central witness to Don Quixote’s exploits. It is Sancho Panza who keeps Don Quixote from falling into greater and graver dangers. Sancho Panza, who is supposed to be Don Quixote’s apprentice in the ways of life and the world, his sounding board for the knight errant’s timeless and life-affirming proverbs, turns out to be a quick understudy. In the second half of the novel, it is Sancho Panza who advises Don Quixote with his elaborate and witty proverbs. Don Quixote is so impressed with Sancho Panza’s witticisms that he tells his squire to use his proverbs sparingly.

Don Quixote’s deathbed scene is one of the most profound and perspicuous life-as-dream dialogues that literature has ever attained. Through Don Quixote, the knight-errant, readers glimpse life with the clarity that the passage of time brings to the lives of poets, thoughtful thinkers, and other seers. Not the least of these is Sancho Panza, who delivers timeless wisdom to Don Quixote about the meaning of human existence.

Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.

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The Growth of the Liberal Soul

Reviewed by Barry Cooper.

In The Modern Philosophical Revolution (2008), David Walsh tells us where he changed his mind on several empirical and philosophical problems. In the Preface he said the book was “the third in a series hitherto unannounced.” He did not mean that one thing randomly led to another but that, looking back from the perspective gained in The Modern Philosophical Revolution to his earlier books, After Ideology (1990) and The Growth of the Liberal Soul (1997), it was evident to him that they formed a “retrospective” trilogy because they all dealt with aspects of a common subject matter, namely modernity, and did so with increasing intellectual penetration. The purpose of the earlier books, he said, “was to deal comprehensively with the character of the modern world” in the sense that the issue of what, precisely, made the modern world “modern” was not self-evident, and thus required analysis. The purpose was not, therefore, to indulge in one more conventional presentation of, or lamentation regarding, the “crisis of modernity.” One reason to avoid such a temptation is that succumbing to it was a way to avoid doing anything other than discuss, chatter, or lament endlessly about the alleged “crisis.” Eventually thoughtless chattering contributes to and helps constitute the crisis. Walsh indicated as much in After Ideology by his choice of subtitle: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom suggested a move beyond analysis towards remediation. To be sure, the ability of “our world” to erupt “into orgiastic homicide” has been often noted, Walsh said, but it is equally “capable of maintaining civilized societies of impressive stability.” Accordingly, it is impossible to do justice to the modern world by emphasizing exclusively one or another set of its attributes. On the contrary, Walsh argued, if we are to understand that element of ourselves that is historical and “modern,” it is necessary to “dwell with the contradictions” and await the appearance of the “inner vitality” of the world in which we live. Such, at least in retrospect, was the aspiration of Walsh’s earlier volumes as well as the “culminating member” of the previously unannounced series.

Walsh’s approach to the question of modernity as requiring meditation on contradictions and paradoxes distanced him from a perspective that argued that, precisely because of the “orgiastic homicide” conducted by modern human beings, it was necessary to adopt a non- or rather a pre-modern approach in order that modern perversities be fully understood. The hermeneutic assumption of such a position is that pre-modern accounts of tyranny, for example, would be (or were) more comprehensive than modern discussions of totalitarianism.

In contrast, Walsh argued that only those individuals who had confronted the most harrowing aspects of orgiastic homicide and found at that point the meaning of existence had the “moral authority” to discuss the truth of the modern world. For this reason, After Ideology was understood by Walsh not as a study of totalitarianism but of the catharsis evoked and even imposed by the experience of a spiritual crisis for which totalitarian domination was a symptom or an expression. His focus was not on the suffering of the inmates of the extermination camps but on the spiritual resilience of the survivors. This necessarily meant engaging with the way in which revealed religion and philosophy were distorted into ideological perversity but also with the way in which spiritual resources were assembled from the experience of totalitarian domination to resist those perversions.

Previous commentators on Walsh’s work, and the author himself, observed that to apprehend a crisis the analyst must be moving beyond it even while it exists as a reality, a horizon within which he or she must operate. Good and evil may be the boundaries of existence, but those boundaries could not be prescribed ahead of time or a priori. Who knew what humans were capable of doing before they actually did it? 

Human historicity thus meant that the character of liberal democracies can be specified as something other than a stage on the way to the crisis for which totalitarianism is the most visible manifestation. Totalitarian ideology and orgiastic homicide conducted by totalitarian regimes were confronted by, and then destroyed, not by “the heroic witness of individuals” but by military and political action, which fact raised a major geopolitical and philosophical question: why did the liberal democracies fight? Why did they not simply accommodate themselves to an admittedly wicked regime in an equally wicked world? This was a puzzle not least of all to liberal democrats whose major purpose appeared to be the enhancement of private satisfactions over public virtue.

The easiest answer to such puzzles simply ignores the question of ethical differences between liberal democratic and totalitarian regimes and considers only their respective and potentially conflicting long-term pragmatic and geopolitical interests. Much has been made, for example, of the “inevitability” of a clash in the Western Pacific between the United States and the Empire of Japan because during the early decades of the twentieth century the two countries had competing and then conflicting economic and political interests in that part of the world. By this interpretation, the rhetoric of liberal democratic leaders was window-dressing. There was no “day that will live in infamy.” Likewise, Churchill’s characterization of Hitler as “a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder” was evidence only of rhetorical overkill. Similarly, no iron curtain ever descended upon Europe and certainly no “evil empire” or “axis of evil” ever existed.

Indeed, many liberal democrats found and find language that invoked good and evil embarrassing. The interesting question is: why? Were they uncomfortable with the centrality of ethics in politics (forget about Aristotle) or were they sufficiently unrealistic to find the realism of interests uncongenial? That is, the commitments by many liberal democrats to fanciful expectations of progress (or fear of its mirror image, decline) made the balance between old-fashioned realism, which protected interests, and ethical expectations, which transcended them, a serious problem. One answer: if the focus of politics, including politics among nations, is exclusively on interests and what might be called the economically rational accommodation of them, one is compelled to embrace not simply the grotesque consequence of equating liberal democratic regimes with totalitarian ones, but one is incapable of understanding why liberal democracies bother to fight at all; fighting—war—was clearly not in their national interests when accommodation was an option. For genuine progressives, all interests are fungible, and no threats are existential. However, without understanding why liberal regimes fight, one cannot understand why they exist. As an inevitable consequence, such “rational interest” approaches to politics have had to introduce external irrationalities or “conspiracy theories” as explanations. One example of such external irrationality would be that Roosevelt knew that Japan would attack but did nothing. Walsh however argued that democratic leaders in reality do practice a kind of virtue even if their own self-interpretation on this point may not be particularly coherent.

The Growth of the Liberal Soul began from this commonsensical observation and sought “to address this mystery of inexplicable [liberal-democratic] success” by considering not the fractured arguments in favour of liberalism and its “surface incoherence,” which has been pointed out by generations of opponents and critics, but by considering liberal political practice, “which recurrently called forth an actualization of the virtues indispensable for sustaining it.” Thus, support of individual liberty entailed a refusal to specify how it was to be exercised, in the same way, for example, that freedom of speech does not specify what must be said nor how. Walsh’s point therefore was that the promotion of individual liberty entailed the promotion of a liberty that was not simply the right of an individual. There was an “inward coherence” to liberal practice even if liberal theory was less than systematic.

The obvious point to be made with respect to liberalism or the liberal constitutional soul based on recent history is: it has worked. The “most formidable powers on the world scene” over the past two centuries have been those that invoked natural and human rights. Even critics of liberal democracy who based their criticism on the hypocrisy of proclaiming liberal rights but not actualizing them, supported Walsh’s argument. “Look at African Americans,” they say. “Look at Canadian Indians or Australian Aborigines,” they add. “Look at Pakistani immigrants in the UK.” Exactly. The remedy for the unquestioned imperfection of liberal democracy has never been to advocate repression or increased coercion but to advocate and work towards greater actualization of liberal practices, which implicitly proclaims the reality of liberal virtue, notwithstanding the imperfections or vice of existing liberal practices. Liberal hypocrisy is the bad conscience that leads to liberal virtue. 

That is, liberalism in practice or, as Walsh prefers to say, in “existence,” was more important than liberalism in theory. In The Modern Philosophical Revolution Walsh made several additional analogies to generalize the insight he was describing here. Just as liberalism exists in practice before it exists in theory, or social and political order exists in a more fundamental way than do the discussions of philosophers that aim at coherent accounts of political order, so too “faith is already there even before we begin to believe; otherwise, there would be no way of arriving at it.” Indeed, The Modern Philosophical Revolution was “a study that has sought to be a meditation on the priority of existence over all reflection.” Thus, philosophy cannot have either a pre-philosophical beginning or a conclusion. There are two reasons for this inconclusive conclusion. First, there can be no goal outside the movement that draws our existence towards what we do not know. And second, this is so because we cannot possess intellectually or in any other way what possesses us, a sense of participatory movement.

Looking back again from what The Modern Philosophical Revolution has achieved to After Ideology and The Growth of the Liberal Soul, it is clear why Walsh discovered a “retrospective” unity. After Ideology was able to effect a recovery of the spiritual foundations of freedom as promised by its subtitle by remaining in the present. There was no discussion of a post-ideological world, a world where murderous ideological militancy had somehow receded. This was not a matter of prudence, of anticipating that the conflicts of the Cold War might well be followed by other wars, as arguably has happened at least in the non-liberal world. Rather, it was to insist that the anticipation of a nonexistent post-ideological order would itself be an apocalyptic fantasy.

Likewise, if we look at the non-apocalyptic component of the modern world, namely the practice of liberal democracy, modern history becomes primarily a practical struggle against orgiastic murderers. Walsh could give voice to a devastating criticism of the critics of liberal democracy because they forgot the most important aspect of what they chopped to pieces: there can be no analysis of liberal democracy outside the convictions that underpin it, namely mutual respect for the dignity and rights of others. There is no higher purpose possible than the affirmation of the infinite worth of each human being, of each “person,” and the political consequences of that affirmation: to build that insight into the regimes of self-government. Once that recognition emerges, the stability of liberal regimes discloses itself. Initially, as we saw in practice during the long war that began in 1939 and ended with the deconstruction of the Wall, liberal regimes defended only themselves. But later, in victory, they sought to bring out the best in others. Of course, that carries its own temptations, the first being our response when others refuse what we think are acts of generosity. Our response may express a second and far worse temptation: to try to force the non-liberal soul to be free, which never works because it cannot be done. And here we have seen that the burden of real economic and political interests and of their synthesis, geopolitics, has reasserted its real weight.

Barry Cooper is Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Calgary.

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Reviewed by Joseph R. Fornieri.

In today’s hyper polarized climate, the partisan label of “liberal” denotes either praise or blame depending upon one’s red or blue hue on the political spectrum. Though liberal democracy prevailed over the twin totalitarian perils of communism and fascism in the mid-twentieth century, critics yesterday and today continue to assail its theoretical incoherence and its hollow moral core. Notwithstanding the optimism of some at the dawn of the millennium that liberal democracy’s triumph over competing ideologies heralded “the end of history,” more than three decades later, there are tell-tales signs of its exhaustion and decline. On the right, Patrick J. Deneen is the latest critic who has proclaimed its failure and bankruptcy: “In this world gratitude to the past and obligations to the future are replaced by a nearly universal pursuit of immediate gratification: culture, rather than imparting the wisdom and experience of the past so as to cultivate virtues of self-restraint and civility, becomes synonymous with hedonic titillation, visceral crudeness, and distraction, all oriented toward promoting consumption, appetite and detachment.” On the left, postmodern critics in the universities have dedicated themselves to unmasking the liberal enlightenment’s claim to “self-evident truth” and “objectivity” as a clever pretext for control and domination. Finally, the recent examples of political assassination, antisemitism, demagogic populism and civil unrest all bear witness to a rising wave of “illiberalism” in the west. Will liberal democracy survive as the authoritative understanding of political order in the twenty-first century? If not, then what “illiberal” alternatives can we expect to replace the power vacuum left in its wake? A resurgence of the discredited ideologies of fascism and communism? autocracy? tribalism? feudalism? theocracy? techno-plutocracy? world bureaucracy? Or have the rumors of liberalism’s death been greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain once joked about himself. 

Bearing these questions in mind, we would do well to revisit the new edition of David Walsh’s The Growth of the Liberal Soul reissued by Notre Dame University Press. In this profound work, Walsh engages the friends and foes of liberalism alike to reveal its enduring appeal and resilience. Throughout he urges us to consider liberalism not so much as a stale academic doctrine, but as a lived experience rooted in the core belief of the inviolable dignity of each person as a free and rational being. He proclaims his bold thesis in the book’s new introduction: “The reader who is prepared to accompany me thus far will discover that Nietzsche’s depiction of liberal democracy as the offspring of philosophy and Christianity was indeed correct.” This tantalizing verdict begs for further explanation. How could Nietzsche, who proclaimed the death of God and held liberalism with utter contempt, serve as a guide to understanding its spiritual underpinnings? Perhaps it should be remembered that for Nietzsche the death of God was more than a banal observation of waning religious belief at the dawn of the twentieth century. Rather, it was a philosophical broadside against all attempts to ground morality and politics upon an ultimate foundation that would provide purpose, meaning, and direction to human life. As Nietzsche’s postmodern successors would consistently underscore, all such claims to “objective” and “universal” truth are nothing more than arbitrary impositions of the will to power. Nietzsche embraced the seemingly bleak realization of God’s death with gusto since it heralded the possibility of unbridled human freedom and autonomy. Like Dostoevsky, the only psychologist he once admitted he could learn from, he recognized that the budding secular ideologies of the nineteenth century such as socialism, communism, liberalism, and nationalism all presumed an implicit religious belief in “truth” and “justice.” Nietzsche’s statement from The Gay Science is apropos: “it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seeking after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too from the flame lit that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.” Walsh takes up this challenge in a philosophical jiu jitsu that turns Nietzsche’s argument on its head. While Nietzsche was correct about the foundations of liberalism, he erroneously ruled out its enduring truth and underestimated its resilience as a lived experience. Thus, Walsh seeks to enkindle the glowing embers of liberalism as the offspring of Christianity and philosophy by noting that “the neglect of this spiritual or moral dimension…is the source of the liberal instability.” Walsh’s task is to show how the growth of the liberal soul must overcome this neglect. 

The book begins with a magisterial appraisal of recent liberal thinkers. Most notably, Walsh provides a trenchant critique of how John Rawls’s admirable commitment to the principle of liberal neutrality undermines his own philosophical edifice. In addition, he considers the important contributions of MacIntyre, Dworkin, Nozick, Rorty, Stout, and Flatham. In each case, the evasion of moral truth collapses into a relativism, skepticism, and uncertainty about the very liberal principles the theorist attempted to defend. Walsh reminds us that the liberal penchant for self-criticism and doubt may constitute a source of strength if tempered by a more realistic appreciation of its enduring strength and appeal. His intellectual odyssey of how twentieth century liberal theorists have failed to provide a coherent moral foundation is an education itself and worth the price of the book. In sum, he observes: “Liberal intellectuals are more in the manner of lost souls who carry within them the flickering sense of that for which they search.” By contrast, the contribution of Michael Oakeshott, whose work is too often overlooked in many political science departments, stands out as an exception to the theoretical collapse because he recognized that “liberal society and politics rest on a level of experience prior to liberal conceptual elaboration.” According to Walsh, Oakeshott “presents us with the theoretically most profound account of liberal political order currently available.” Indeed, the effort to find an apodictic rational demonstration for liberalism was doomed from the start since “the moral life is based not on ideals or arguments, but a living practice.” 

The next section of the book moves backwards in time to remedy the liberal tradition’s historical amnesia about its own foundations. Here Walsh provides a comprehensive overview of seminal liberal thinkers from the sixteenth to nineteenth century beginning with Hooker, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, and Mill, the last liberal theorist. In particular, he praises Hegel’s view of the “ethical life” for harmonizing individual autonomy with wider duties to the community. At the conclusion of this section, he poignantly expounds Tocqueville’s prophetic warning of liberalism’s loss of higher purpose and its willingness to trade freedom for equality guaranteed by the soft despotism of the nanny state. Walsh encourages today’s liberals to pursue Tocqueville’s task in fusing aristocratic virtue with democratic individualism. The nuances of this comprehensive study of the foregoing liberal thinkers are beyond the scope of this review. Even where one may disagree with Walsh’s benign analysis of some of these thinkers, particularly Hobbes and Hegel, his original and provocative interpretations challenge the usual assumptions in the field of political philosophy. For example, though he acknowledges the important and enduring contributions of Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, he maintains that their recovery of the ancients paid insufficient attention to the redeeming elements of liberalism. Eschewing the ancient vs. modern dichotomy, he reminds us that “[l]iberal order has its roots in spiritual and moral traditions that are premodern.” In support of this claim, one need only consider the mutual influence of Christianity and Roman Republicanism on the liberalism of the American Founders. 

Walsh’s labor culminates in the noble effort to evoke a minimal liberal consensus: “The deepest level of [liberalism’s] appeal is that this is the form of order that speaks to our human dignity as rational, self-governing beings.” The danger is that liberalism will forget its spiritual underpinnings that make freedom both possible and meaningful. Thus, he forthrightly reminds his readers that “It was the Christian idea of the soul whose origin and destiny is transcendent that first made it possible for the individual to stand over against society and the world, as a reality that can never simply be contained by them. This was the source of individual rights. To this, Christianity added the related idea of the equality of all souls before God.” Notwithstanding the separation of church and state and our secular society and culture, “The transcendent dignity of the person may be characterized as religious or quasi religious.” Reprising his profound exposition of Dostoevsky’s “Myth of the Grand Inquisitor” in his first book After Ideology, the precursor to this volume, Walsh reminds us that “The gift of freedom is indistinguishable from the mystery of redemptive divine suffering of freedom.” The Grand Inquisitor’s promise to relieve humanity of the “burden of freedom” conceals his thinly disguised contempt for humanity and his lust for power. The dramatic portrayal contrasts the secular messianism of the Grand Inquisitor with the humble and silent character of Christ who suffers redemptively on the cross alongside humanity. Walsh’s philosophical journey scales the heights of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Christ’s redemptive suffering to understand and appreciate liberalism. 

In conclusion, Walsh is under no illusion about liberalism containing “the seeds of its own destruction.” His task throughout the book is to remind us of what is at stake by ignoring or devaluing the core experiences and yearnings that are part of its enduring attraction. As Churchill allegedly quipped, liberal democracy may be the worst form of government until one considers the alternatives. Walsh’s observation thirty years ago at the time of the book’s publication holds true today: “no more powerful witness to the authority of the liberal democratic ideal can be imagined than the voluntary movement of millions of human beings around the world toward its realization.” As a former doctoral student of Dr. Walsh around the time that this book was first published, he often reminded us that even illiberal regimes like the People’s Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea cloak themselves in the guise of liberal democratic values for their legitimacy. When once asked about the challenge that radical Islam posed to the West, he replied with his characteristic mirthful and mischievous Irish smile by explaining that just as some of the authoritarian and intolerant elements of Christianity in the west were tempered by the liberal enlightenment, so one day there might be an Islamic John Locke who will reconcile Islam with liberalism. In these divided times there is need for further reflection on what we have in common as both human beings and citizens. In reminding us of the moral and spiritual core at the heart of liberalism, Walsh goes far in breaching our ideological divide. Following Thomas Jefferson’s evocation of a deeper unity between Federalists and Republican parties in the highly contested election of 1800, perhaps we should give more thought to saying in our own partisan times that “we are all liberals, we are all conservatives.” To the extent we may do so we owe a debt of gratitude to David Walsh.  

Joseph R. Fornieri is Professor of Political Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Director of the Center for Statesmanship, Law, and Liberty.

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The Growth of the Liberal Soul

Reviewed by John von Heyking.

The publication of the second edition of Growth of the Liberal Soul is a testament to David Walsh’s deep understanding of the history of political philosophy, of liberal theory, and of the depths of the liberal soul. He illuminates why yesterday’s arguments are also today’s and perhaps of all times. The title of the Introduction to this new edition is “The Secret of Liberal Resilience,” and as a sign of that resilience the last sentence contains the provocative claim that Plato was the first liberal! Resilience indeed! 

The debates over the liberal order have many of the same arguments today as nearly thirty years ago. However, there seem to be fewer defenders in the liberal camp today than back then, and today’s liberal critics seem more confident. Even so, as with then, the alternatives to the liberal order rarely go beyond it and when they do they are often unappealing. 

Part of the reason liberal critics enjoy momentum today is the intervening history since the 1990s. Walsh published the first edition in 1997. The collapse of the Berlin Wall gave liberal democrats a boost of confidence, which was perhaps most famously (and erroneously) expressed by Francis Fukuyama’s end of history argument. Walsh’s attention to the crisis of the liberal order even at that time was prescient, and he was in the minority of its defenders in basing his arguments upon premises other than progressive history. In Guarded By Mystery (1999), which he published a couple of years later, he raised the prospect of finding hope when the progressivist hope in history had vanished. I recall some students recoiling in despair over the prospect of not having history to hope in. The Iraq War, the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of populism, COVID, and the deteriorating economic prospects for young people have shot holes into the liberal order’s claims to superiority, and despair seems ubiquitous. Yet, the liberal order proves resilient and the republication of Walsh’s Growth of the Liberal Soul proves a valuable reminder why because it shows how and why the liberal order is not predicated upon liberalism, at least not completely.

Those familiar with Walsh’s more recent work will see in the Introduction to the Second Edition how that later work derives from his thinking about the growth of the liberal soul, and now illuminates his earlier arguments in Growth. For example, his work on the German idealists in The Modern Philosophical Revolution (2008) grew out of his work on the liberals because the former provide a deeper account of modern liberty than the latter who had been covered in Growth. The German idealists seem to have understood well how the practice of the moral life in liberty points towards our obligations to the other, and the inadequacy of philosophical vocabulary to capture fully the essence of moral life. Walsh’s subsequent books on the person (Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being [2015] and Priority of the Person [2020]) elaborate their move towards a metaphysics beyond metaphysics revealed in the modern discovery of the person.

Dostoevsky, covered in his early After Ideology (1990), makes a reappearance in the new Introduction of Growth in Walsh’s appreciation of the Christ figure in the Grand Inquisitor as the paradigm of modern liberty. Walsh observes how the story presents a Christ whom no one proclaims but everyone recognizes. Christ’s response to the Inquisitor with a silent kiss is a sign of his unconditional love for his persecutor. Tom Holland’s recent book, Dominion (2019), demonstrates how modern, “secular” moral life is a product of Christ’s self-sacrifice. But Walsh shows us why: “It was the epiphany of love that arises from nothing more than the pure gift that love always is.” Only in love as pure gift do we realize our full liberty, and only in full liberty can love exist. The ancients’ emphasis on friendship showed they understood this, but Christ’s example shows it in its full purity.

One sees a similar spirit among dissident defenders of liberty, including Liu Xiaobo, whom Walsh cites, and whose motto of “no enemies, no hatred,” he announced at his trial that led to his final imprisonment and death. The example of Liu and other dissidents of totalitarianism demonstrates why self-interest alone cannot explain the liberal order and it is to Walsh’s credit that he shows the pure gift of the person precedes self-interest. 

The Grand Inquisitor represents one of the greatest contemporary threats to liberty which is often referred to as “safetyism.” Walsh’s own critique of COVID restrictions represents this same spirit, though it was more verbose than Christ’s silent kiss. Perhaps the third edition of Growth could include that essay as an Appendix. Walsh identifies safetyism as a liberal “pathology,” as when it shunts conflict to the private sphere. While peace is a political good, liberal democracies need reminding it is not the highest good.

COVID exposed some of the fault lines within liberalism when those skeptical of restrictions appealed to personal liberty while those demanding restrictions asserted more communitarian arguments. Walsh does us invaluable service by showing how the person’s liberty also means responsibility to the other in the form of love and friendship. The person is relation, as one of his latest books is titled (Person Means Relation [2024]). The association of liberty and love can be seen in the Anglo words for freedom and friendship sharing the same root. Walsh renews his appreciation of Tocqueville’s arguments about civil association, which are the purest expression of civic friends working freely within one another to pursue common aims. The liberal constitutionalism of James Madison focuses on coalition building, not DOGE nor populism, as the essence of liberal democratic political activity, because it is the activity of civic friends, as Yuval Levin has also recently observed.

The new introduction of Growth shows Walsh bringing all of political philosophy to bear on the question of liberty and the liberal order. This explains why Walsh avoids speaking of “liberalism,” which is too restrictive in covering the range and depth of liberty’s meaning for us. Plato can be a liberal because the essence of liberty is choosing good over evil. More so than Locke or Mill, the Republic is the book par excellence that asserts this. Walsh rightly notes the ancient/modern divide is somewhat artificial. Kant’s kingdom of ends is closer to Aristotle’s sunaisthesis than usually appreciated. It is also edifying that even scholars of the Republic are coming around to seeing this, with recent books on Plato’s understanding of dignity that extend to the bronze and iron souls.

Walsh illuminates the resilience of the liberal order while also illuminating its fragility, or at least a vulnerability that deserves special attention. The liberal order is predicated upon the civic friendship of persons who as pure gift are irreplaceable and have absolute worth and dignity. He defends the New Deal as an important accomplishment of the state defending persons against arbitrary and absolute economic powers. The state had to grow more powerful to protect the weakest among us. Yet this argument was also made during COVID, which Walsh saw as the state going too far in turning persons into pincushions. The obligation to protect the weakest among us seems to incentivize aggrandizing Leviathan as their protector, leaving arguments to restrict Leviathan’s power to protect as an immoral abdication of its obligation to protect the weakest. St. George must not be hindered in his quest to slay all the dragons.

Conversely, the kingdom of ends that recognizes the absolute worth of the person is in tension with the sometimes coercive means to protect the person. So much of today’s “woke” politics stems from past attempts to use coercive state power to advance liberal ends. The later era sees the violence of the past but not always the cause. The absolute worth of the person can also be used as a bludgeon to coerce others into recognizing them or showing “respect,” and any perceived shortcoming in that effort is seen as violence.

Compounding the problem is the insight Walsh draws from Christ’s silent kiss of the Grand Inquisitor. At its deepest core liberty is silent. It is the gift that cannot be given. Nor can liberty be enforced. Inner liberty as a gift is radically different from the external “chains” that either enslave or free us. It is the silent gift of inner liberty that makes finding the right amount of government power so challenging to determine. The defense of inner liberty seems always to come as the long-awaited response and corrective to the modern state’s interventions whose inner limits get overlooked so long as the weakest remain vulnerable.

Yet the resilience of the liberal order seems rooted in the invisible power of inner liberty, as expressed by Christ’s silent kiss of the Grand Inquisitor: “The silent unaccusing Christ had said nothing and thereby had said everything…. The One who has endured all the evil that flows from the misuse of freedom has already evinced a victory that cannot be taken away.” The Grand Inquisitor has no response to “the silent unaccusing Christ” and therefore knows his efforts were baseless. If liberty is the pure gift that cannot be given, even less can the illusions that undermine liberty be imposed. Like the protagonists in Vaclav Havel’s plays, they may understand their game is an empty shell. The “auxiliary precautions” as Madison called them are there to manage the to-and-fro of inner and outer liberty. One course correction begets another, but within the constitutional framework predicated upon the dignity of the person.

Sooner or later those empty, illusory, and illiberal shells implode but their failures do not justify the liberal order, any more than the myth of historical progress did. Walsh’s radical defense of the liberal order entails arguing that the justification for the world’s most successful political form cannot be on any worldly basis. 

The paradox of liberal resilience consists of its resilience residing on a level that does not measure resilience.

John von Heyking is Associate Director and Professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University.

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NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It

Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.

NextGen Marxism is one of the most informative and relevant books I have read in years. It addresses issues that lie at the heart of political and cultural divisions now evident in America. As the authors write, “the social upheaval we are experiencing in the United States today is the result of a zero-sum view of the world…in which the open exchange of ideas is replaced by a rigid orthodoxy…in which people are reduced to their skin color or sexual orientation.” As the authors explain, the prioritizing of race and gender is not an end in itself but the means of fomenting conflict with the goal of securing power. This strategy is a familiar technique of Marxist politics stretching back through Black Lives Matter, radical environmentalism, the radicalism of the 1960s, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Lenin, and to Marx himself. What the authors refer to as “NextGen Marxism” can be understood as a direct descendant of a long line of Marxist theory and practice. 

The object of NextGen Marxism, as always with Marxism, is to instill a sense of grievance in a particular population and to foment a crisis within society at large with the intention of securing an opening for leftist “solutions.” In this way, the left is following the familiar playbook of those in the past who have applied the same procedure: identify a real or supposed grievance, fuel confrontation and anger, and then “ride into power through elections, promising stability and utopian change,” but delivering only repression and permanent control. It is no accident that the left has endlessly repeated the mantra of “chaos” and, more recently, the lack of “affordability”: these are versions of the conventional leftist rhetoric of social disorder and lack of equity deployed in the service of obtaining power. 

All such grievances should be understood as “fronts in a larger war” with the intention of “seeking to dismantle capitalism and the political order.” Cultural Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci recognized, after the failure of leftists to seize power by force in Germany and other Western European countries during the 1920s and 1930s, that capitalism could be undermined by a determined assault on institutions and culture, including the political order, the church, the family, and the rule of law. What one sees today in America and in other countries is precisely this sort of Gramscian dismantling of the established order in an effort to make way for totalitarian Marxist rule. 

Clearly, the Founders of our nation understood the crucial role of these institutions and cultural traditions in terms of preserving benevolent order and freedom, or, more precisely, as what Ellis Sandoz has described as “an antimodernist recovery and rearticulation of Western and English constitutionalism.” It was perhaps inevitable that the long war of Marxism against capitalism would come to center on the United States, a nation with a strong and longstanding constitutional system in the service of precisely those institutions that Marxism seeks to destroy. 

The concept of “warfare” is not too strong a term to apply to this conflict. As with every major feature of NextGen Marxism, the conception of opposed forces with no room for compromise is deeply rooted in Marxist theory and practice. Marx himself portrayed capitalism as entirely evil and in need of elimination, not reform. Indeed, any tendency toward reform is invariably greeted with derision by leftists and associated with those, like classical liberals, who would defend established institutions and who themselves need to be “canceled.” That tendency of radicals to turn on liberal reformers has been on display in American politics for many decades, but it is more pronounced now than at any time in the past. The problem is that this oppositional mentality takes the form not just of healthy debate but of physical violence, as one has seen in this country and throughout a long history of genocidal campaigns in Marxist countries from the Soviet Union to communist China, North Korea, Cambodia, and many other countries, but genocide and unrestrained violence against political foes are the logical result of a bifurcated vision of the world. 

It is not just political opposition but the entire culture of the past that Marxists wish to destroy. One of the finest sections of NextGen Marxism is its discussion of the thinking of Antonio Gramsci and his influence on followers, especially in the United States. “The object of Gramsci’s lifework,” the authors write, “was to transfer hegemony from the capitalist, the parliamentary democrat, and the faithful to the worker,” and not just “the worker” but to activists who sought total state control of the economy and of the private lives of workers themselves. In the pursuit of this utter transformation of existence, Gramsci sought to play the long game of infiltrating educational institutions, the media, corporations, and government, and gradually turning them against capitalism and religion. 

It is not difficult to see Gramsci’s legacy in the millions of American Marxists who have exploited similar tactics of gaining a foothold in power, often on false pretenses such as environmental justice, racial equality, women’s rights, and most recently “opportunity,” only to revert to their hard-left ambitions of state control (with, of course, themselves as central agents of that control). It is disturbing to realize just how far these ambitions go, for they include not only political control but complete censorship, elimination of religious freedom, corruption of the franchise, confiscation of private property, and an end to the rule of law. Given the opportunity, there is little doubt that today’s radicals would establish permanent rule and total stranglehold over the lives of every person. 

Among ideological descendants of Gramsci, the authors single out the adherents of Critical Race Theory (CRT), American Marxists who, particularly following the inflammatory murder of George Floyd, gained influence from racial divisions that they themselves exacerbated at every turn. Yet, as David Horowitz put it, “the issue is never the issue” (quoted on p. 98). It is not racial justice, gender equality, environmental progress, or other forms of social justice that Marxists seek to achieve: it is totalitarian control with race, gender, class, or environment as the pretext for achieving it. 

In American politics, the authors focus on Herbert Marcuse, Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Eric Mann, Abbie Hoffman, Isadore Rubin, Angela Davis, C. Wright Mills, Harmony Goldberg, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project. One might also include the useful idiots in the media, such as Bill Moyers, who at every turn abetted the rise of Marxism in America. During the 1960s, the Students for a Democratic Society played a pivotal role, and many of its members and adherents continued to influence later radicals who would feature in the emergence of the current generation of Marxists. NextGen Marxism includes a detailed history of the destructive activities of SDS, including dozens of bombings and murders, and an informative account of the intricate web of its associations and influences that continue to this day, such as the close relationship of activist Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. 

In addition, the assault on the established order must include undermining the traditional family and conventional ideas of gender, and once again the theorizing of such a transformation can be traced back to Marx and his socialist predecessors, even to Rousseau and Plato, and it holds a prominent place in the thinking of Lenin, Lukács, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, to name a few. This line of thinking has evolved to yield an influential body of thought in the United States, culminating in Critical Race Theory, which itself has grown into what is known today as “woke” thinking, a “benign term for what it truly entails, which is obliteration of anyone who dares to dissent from the new intellectual orthodoxy.” Once again, violence and censorship are accepted as the means of gaining power. 

In regard to education, Gonzalez and Gorka make it clear that Marxists have largely gained control of administration and teaching and that education is being employed as a means of undermining the family. Certainly, in many school districts, the rights of parents to be informed and have a say in their children’s education are ignored, as for instance in teaching and counseling regarding gender identity, often with children who are too young to comprehend what is being imposed on them. Many of the practices now common in public schools—including, in some cases, support for adolescent transgender surgery—run counter to traditional ideas of gender and to traditional morality, but when parents object, they are met with the same censorship and canceling that typifies Marxism in all areas. 

The scope of NextGen Marxism is too broad even to be suggested in a short review. Gonzalez and Gorka have performed an important service in bringing together a wide range of fact and theory and in establishing a coherent line stretching directly from Marx through many important figures to the present day. Their knowledge of this history is impressive, as is their perceptiveness in unraveling the countless connections between Marxists of the past and their present-day followers. The importance of what they have to say cannot be overestimated. NextGen Marxism is a book that should be read by everyone who is concerned about the direction of our constitutional democracy and our traditional culture of capitalism and religious faith. It could well serve as a textbook in upper-level classes on American politics and culture. It is a book that takes aim at the heart of the ideological struggles taking place in America today, and that clarifies and connects many strands of Marxist thinking. 

As Gonzalez and Gorka write in their conclusion, what we face today is a reemergence of Marxism, the legacy of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, that shares “a constructivist view of the world that denies nature, and is at war with reality.” The constructed reality that Marxists wish to establish in place of past traditions and beliefs is truly frightening, and all persons of good will need to unite in opposition to it.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

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Reviewed by Clifford Angell Bates, Jr.

Waller R. Newell’s The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country (2nd edition, Independently Published, 2025) is not simply a reissue of a book first published by William Morrow in 2003. It is a renewal, a statement of moral clarity in a culture that has forgotten how to speak about virtue without embarrassment. The timing of this edition could not be more significant. The early 2000s were an era of action; young men proved themselves in service and sacrifice during the Global War on Terror. But the young men of the 2020s and 2030s, the “Zoomer” generation, are seeking guidance of a different kind. They are not on the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan; they are on digital battlefields of distraction, isolation, and confusion. Where the earlier generation learned about reclaiming the manly heart, the current one searches for meaning.

For this reason, Newell’s Code of Man speaks to them with rare power. In a world flooded with online influencers, “red pill” rhetoric, and algorithmic posturing, Newell offers something older, wiser, and far superior: a code of manliness rooted in the Western tradition of virtue, character, and service. His message is that true manliness is not a pose or performance; it is the integration of moral and intellectual excellence, what he calls “the manly heart.”

Newell’s thesis is simple and profound: modern society has forgotten what manliness truly means. We now associate masculinity with either brutality or weakness, what he famously calls “the Wimp versus the Beast.” Both extremes, he argues, are false. The “Wimp,” molded by the culture of sensitivity and self-doubt, denies his natural drive for excellence and strength. The “Beast,” reacting to that denial, indulges in aggression and selfishness. Between these two caricatures lies the genuine man, courageous, disciplined, loving, proud, devoted to family and country. He writes, “The virtues of character required of us by Love, Courage, Pride, Family and Country work together to infuse the souls of men with a coherent path to self-respect, satisfaction and happiness.” True manliness, in Newell’s view, is not dominance but direction—not conquering others, but mastering oneself.

This classical vision of manhood rests on what he calls integritas, from the Latin for wholeness: “A man’s life should be a whole comprised of the sum of its parts … honesty, rectitude, probity, trustworthiness, faithfulness and self-control.” These qualities, Newell argues, have been mocked as outdated but remain the foundation of human dignity. The manly life is one of unity—of mind and heart, passion and reason, love and duty.

At the heart of Newell’s book is a vision that reaches back to Plato’s Phaedrus: the soul as a chariot pulled by two powerful steeds, passion and courage, guided by the reins of reason. “Without the power provided by the two horses guided by the charioteer, the chariot will not be able to move … the image teaches, there has to be a symbiotic cooperation between the mind and the passions led by reason.” This image becomes the moral architecture of The Code of Man. Reason alone is sterile; passion alone is chaos. Together, disciplined by virtue, they produce greatness. The man who learns to govern himself, Newell insists, becomes capable of governing in every other sense, as father, citizen, soldier, or leader.

Such men are not born but made, through moral education, the shaping of character, and the cultivation of the five cardinal virtues that structure the book: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, and Country. Each represents a dimension of the soul that must be trained and integrated. Love perfects courage; courage sustains love; pride guards both. Family and country give those virtues direction and purpose.

Newell’s analysis of modern culture is unsparing. He argues that the West has entered an era of “historical amnesia,” in which it has forgotten that manly virtue was never synonymous with macho aggression. “For most of our past tradition, ‘macho’ behavior—coarse, belligerent, brutish—was considered unmanly, the very opposite of true masculinity.”

In his view, both radical feminism and the self-styled “men’s movements” of the late-twentieth century distorted masculinity in opposite ways. Feminism, especially in its “difference” form, romanticized women as bearers of all virtue and men as sources of all vice. Meanwhile, the men’s movement, from Iron John to drum circles, offered a sentimental parody of virility that “ran the risk of reacting to feminism’s balkanization of the sexes by embracing it.” Both, Newell says, abandoned the true code—a union of reason, courage, and moral purpose.

He writes bluntly: “It is essential to recognize that the answer to men’s perplexities about the meaning of manly behavior is not the further extension of the feminist project … Before boyish excesses can be curbed, they must be allowed to reveal themselves, otherwise they will be driven underground only to explode later in toxic form.” In other words, suppressing masculinity creates the very pathology we now call “toxic.” For Newell, the solution is not to tame men but to educate them, to restore the link between strength and virtue.

The 2025 edition of The Code of Man arrives at a cultural moment Newell could not have anticipated in 2003. Then, the crisis of manliness was overshadowed by real wars and real heroes. The millennial generation, coming of age during the Global War on Terror, sought manly purpose not in libraries but in service, military, civic, and physical. Those who read about virtue were a minority; those who lived it wore uniforms.

Today’s young men, the Zoomer generation, inhabit a different battlefield. Their world is digital, fragmented, and disorienting. They face a constant stream of “manhood content” from influencers, podcasters, and algorithmic gurus offering quick formulas for dominance or success. What they rarely encounter is a serious moral and philosophical guide, a vision of manliness that connects strength to honor and desire to duty. In that sense, the new Code of Man is precisely what this generation needs. Newell’s voice offers what the internet cannot: depth, dignity, and continuity with a civilization that once knew what it meant to form men of character. His emphasis on love, courage, and civic pride speaks directly to young men weary of cynicism and irony—those who sense, as Newell writes, that “the history of all civilizations and countries shows that war can spark a period of soul-searching, stocktaking, and moral regeneration.”

The new foreword explicitly situates the book in the contemporary debate about “toxic masculinity” and “gender fluidity.” Newell is not dismissive, but he is firm: “What is now called ‘toxic masculinity’ is a perverse and destructive force that is the direct opposite of the traditional Western understanding of true manliness.” For Zoomer men trying to reconcile masculine identity with moral integrity, such clarity is not reactionary, it is liberating.

The power of The Code of Man lies in its fusion of erudition and accessibility. Newell is a scholar, but he writes like a man who has taught and listened. His examples range from Plato and Aristotle to Fight Club and Casablanca, showing that even modern pop culture, in its confusion, still longs for ancient virtues. He writes, “Through pop culture, we often experience the guilty pleasure of vicariously enjoying ways of life that are forbidden to us by our prevailing social orthodoxies.” The task, he says, is to redeem that longing, to direct it toward truth rather than nihilism.

Newell’s style is moral without moralizing. He does not plead for understanding; he commands respect. “Manliness,” he writes, “is not mere aggression or conquest but the energy of the soul rightly ordered toward the good.” In this way, he restores dignity to a word that modern culture has made suspect. Newell’s vision is not for weak men trying to appear strong but for strong men who wish to be good. That distinction—between strength and virtue, gives the book its authority. He reminds readers that “the only possible antidote to distortions of manliness lies in recollecting its history and true original meaning.”

Code inevitably invites comparison to Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness (2006), the other great modern treatise on the subject. Mansfield, a Harvard political philosopher, defines manliness as “confidence in the face of risk.” His analysis is brilliant, but it is also detached, a philosophical anatomy of manliness rather than an education in it. Mansfield’s tone is ironic, urbane, and at times elusive. His book challenges the intellect but does not move the heart.

Newell’s Code, by contrast, is the manual Mansfield’s theory needs. It brings manliness down from the lecture hall into the world of love, work, and duty. Mansfield speaks to scholars; Newell speaks to men. He writes for the reader who senses that masculinity has been cheapened and wants to recover its meaning through action, virtue, and culture. Where Mansfield analyzes, Newell inspires. His book, grounded in the Great Books but written in living language, carries the fire of a teacher rather than the detachment of a theorist. If Mansfield’s Manliness is the intellectual blueprint, Newell’s Code is the architectural design, vivid, moral, and inhabitable. For readers seeking not just understanding but transformation, Newell’s work is superior in reach, tone, and relevance.

Newell closes his foreword with the words of Jefferson: “Happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them … it is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.” That, for Newell, is the true pursuit of happiness, not pleasure, but purpose. His book is not nostalgic; it is restorative. He does not call men back to the past but forward to the virtues that have always made civilization possible. To be a man, in his code, is not to dominate but to serve, to master oneself in order to be worthy of others’ trust.

In an age of confusion, that message cuts through noise with the clarity of a trumpet. The Code of Man is not another online sermon or lifestyle manifesto. It is a return to first principles, the idea that courage, reason, love, and honor form the core of a man’s soul, and that civilization depends on cultivating them.

In this new edition, The Code of Man stands as a definitive guide for a generation searching for meaning amid moral drift. It offers something the internet cannot: a coherent tradition, a moral vocabulary, and a spiritual direction. For Zoomer men, it is the antidote to confusion, a reminder that being a man is not about asserting power but about earning it through service, integrity, and courage. Newell writes, “The false identification of manliness per se with macho crudeness shuts the door on this entire pedagogical project.” He reopens that door and invites modern men to walk through it.

If Mansfield gave manliness a philosophy, Newell gives it a code, a path to walk, a set of virtues to live by. His book is the rare synthesis of wisdom and vitality, teaching that the highest form of strength is the strength to be good. For a generation searching the web for answers, The Code of Man offers something better: the wisdom of civilization itself.

Clifford Angell Bates, Jr. is University Professor in the American Studies Center at Warsaw University in Warsaw, Poland, and an instructor in the MA Diplomacy and International Relations program at Norwich University. He is the author of Aristotle’s Best Regime (2003) and The Centrality of the Regime for Political Science (2016). X: @CliffordBates12 YouTube: @cliffordbates Substack: https://cliffordangellbatesjr240849.substack.com/ 

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Reviewed by Godefroy Desjonquères.

Reading Chantal Delsol’s Prosperity and Torment in France as a French person is a discomforting experience. As Delsol rightly points out, the French people are haunted by the memory of their former grandeur, and having their biggest flaws so bluntly exposed to their powerful ally cannot but trigger a sense of patriotic irritation. Of course, it is all the stronger given that Delsol’s assessment is, as often, very much on point. Her book provides Americans with an excellent entryway into the peculiarities of the French mindset and the causes of their political troubles.

Delsol takes as her starting point the contradiction—which in France has inspired numerous essays in recent years—between the nation’s objective prosperity and the pervasive sense of dissatisfaction among its people. Of course, France is not as prosperous as it once was, and the present political situation, which has crystallized over the past few months around the increasingly problematic issue of our spiraling debt, provides objective grounds for concern about the country’s situation. Yet this does not alter the heart of the matter: the French did not wait for the crisis to start complaining, and, as Delsol shows, the malaise runs deeper.

The strength of her analysis lies in her ability to highlight the great diversity of causes behind this malaise, while simultaneously demonstrating their underlying coherence. France’s shortcomings—statism, individualism, corporatism, egalitarianism, etc.—feed into and reinforce one another, even in their apparent contradictions. She paints France in the manner of an impressionist, layering broad strokes drawn as much from her vast erudition as well as her personal opinions and experience; and though some of these strokes, taken in isolation, are open to debate, the overall composition proves undeniably compelling. 

This global picture is shaped by a few central ideas, the most important of which runs as follows: French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, “a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.” But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy. How so?

Chantal Delsol traces this love of ideology to the tradition of centralization, which has been at the core of France’s political formation since long before the Revolution. When every aspect of daily life is governed by an omnipotent central power, all that is left to the elites are metaphysical quarrels and imaginary republics, which come to be confused with life itself. Solzhenitsyn showed in The Red Wheel that the French Revolution was “prepared, nurtured and inspired by intellectuals.” It is hardly surprising that these intellectuals, whose thought had seldom been tested against reality, remained blind to the concrete conditions in which their ideals might take flesh. The “republican universalism” to which the nation has laid claim since the Revolution is a striking case in point, one that Delsol analyzes with great subtlety. Fraternity, she shows, is the French Republic’s attempt to breathe life, in the age of individualism, into an ideal that is historically and philosophically holistic: the exaltation of a civic friendship with a tangible, almost corporeal dimension, meant to foster authentic communion between modern individuals. In the mind of these thinkers, such an ideal could only be universal in the proper sense of the word—a brotherhood not of the French people, but of all men. 

Such an ideal is obviously contradictory: “it crumbles by its very utopianism. Indeed, every friendship concerns specific circles: one cannot be a friend to all of humanity.” Yet that is exactly what revolutionary France claimed to be, and it is the ideal that continues to drive contemporary France. To this day, for many French intellectuals, being French is not a particularism, because it is first and foremost a question of values, and values are universal. We are but the vanguard of a universal brotherhood. As Delsol rightly points out, such a sentiment can only endure in the face of reality in the debased form of a tepid compassion, whose universality is possible precisely because it is utterly devoid of political substance. 

This naïve exaltation of unity, which goes hand in hand with a strong egalitarianism and a natural distrust of differences, is essential to Delsol’s explanation of what she sees as France’s democratic immaturity. Democracy rests on the possibility of distance and dissent, something with which France was never at ease. From Bonaparte to De Gaulle, we have a natural attraction towards providential figures that claim to embody the common good and national identity beyond partisan disputes. In Chantal Delsol’s view, attachment to unity turns against democracy when it reaches this intensity. At this point, one is reminded of Carl Schmitt’s analysis of political life: when the only party one claims is that of humanity itself, one’s opponents can never be political adversaries to contend with, but only ideological enemies to be destroyed. As Chantal Delsol shows, Emmanuel Macron embodies this French perversion of republicanism against democracy: because he claims to transcend the divide between left and right, the far right is the only enemy he acknowledges, an enemy that he routinely identifies with evil itself. His electoral results prove the effectiveness of the tactic.

Against this corrosive vision of politics, Delsol argues for the irreducible relevance of the political divide between right and left. She endorses David Goodhart’s opposition between the “anywhere” and the “somewhere” as its relevant contemporary expression, geographically and symbolically embodied, in France, in the opposition between Paris and the Provinces. Delsol has long been an advocate of rootedness and patriotism as conditions of possibility of democracy. In this regard, she belongs among the important conservative thinkers of contemporary France, such as Pierre Manent and Rémi Brague, whose works remind us that the universal can only exist and be embodied through the particular. 

She nevertheless sets herself apart by a distinctive insistence on federalism as an indispensable condition for genuine rootedness and a properly functioning democracy. As Daniel Mahoney rightfully points out in his introduction to the book, she is a truly original and unclassifiable thinker in the French intellectual landscape. Prosperity and Torment offers an interesting defense of this federalist position by showing how these two flaws—the naïve universalism and the refusal to engage in democratic confrontation—are linked to the complete absence, in the French political tradition, of any authentic sense of subsidiarity. 

This might be one of the starkest differences between France and the United States, the latter’s political tradition being rooted, as Tocqueville saw two centuries ago, in the importance of its intermediate bodies. On the contrary, France was built on the relentless effort to diminish the importance of these bodies, an effort initially undertaken by the Capetian kings and brought to its peak by the French Revolution, which went so far as to make it illegal to “instill in citizens any intermediary interest, to separate them from public affairs through a spirit of corporatism” (loi Le Chapelier, 1791). This radical position fosters individualism and, in turn, a loss of the sense of personal responsibility. Contemporary France is plagued, Delsol argues, by the refusal to hold citizens responsible for their own well-being, the State being blamed—and willingly blaming itself—for every negative aspect of their daily life. Hence the complete inability to control public spending: our current financial situation is but a consequence and a symptom of our deeper political issues.

As I suggested earlier, Delsol’s analysis stands out for the breadth of its perspective. Her essay covers topics as varied as corporatism, the French love for status and strikes, immigration, religion and secularism, populism and the role of intellectuals, Jacobinism, and the EU. Her point of view, while always informed, is presented in a very personal manner and suggests an informal discussion one might have with an American friend or colleague. This makes for an engaging and pleasant read, and certainly a thought-provoking one. If that friend or colleague holds France’s interests at heart, he might very well be alarmed by the harshness of her diagnosis. 

In The End of Christendom, Delsol’s civilizational pessimism was balanced by her religious hope. Prosperity and Torment in France, which focuses primarily on politics, offers no such consolation. Its conclusion is all the darker because, if one follows Delsol’s demonstration, any solution can only be implemented in opposition to our deepest and most longstanding historical and political instincts. Delsol’s work opens with a quotation from Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution, which provides a lucid description of the French people, “more capable of genius than of common sense.” This is both cruel and flattering—the pride of the French extends even to their most harmful traits. Earlier in the same passage, Tocqueville had described another of these French traits, one which might help spare us from despair: “naturally fond of home and routine, yet, once driven forth and forced to adopt new customs, ready to carry principles to any lengths and to dare any thing.” Impossible n’est pas français…

Godefroy Desjonquères is a doctoral candidate in political philosophy at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His dissertation focuses on the political philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. He recently translated MacIntyre’s Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity into French (Presses Universitaires de France, January 2026).

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The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life

Reviewed by Gary Hartenburg.

Heidi White’s debut book, The Divided Soul: Duty and Desire in Literature and Life, unites a memoir in fragments with a syllabus of literary works on the question of how to harmonize our duties and desires. A partial list of the works on White’s syllabus includes the Aeneid; the parable of the prodigal son; Hippolytus, by Euripides; Anna Karenina; Henry IV, Part 1; Pygmalion; Kristin Lavransdatter; Les Misérables; The End of the Affair (the only work discussed in two places); and the poem Autumn, by Rilke. Most chapters in The Divided Soul consist of White’s explanations of how these works help us understand the conflict between duties and desires. These explanations constitute the majority of the book, but its potency lies in the interplay of those accounts and the fragments of her life’s story.

Division, dilemma, and conflict stand in the way of harmony, unity, and happiness, a point White announces in the introduction (“Stories as Icons: How Literature Reflects the Divided Soul”). Great stories “dwell upon the mystery of one immense dilemma”; they concern a “primal division,” which is also a “primary and underlying division” as well as an “aching division.” Such division results from an old and “senseless separation” and is experienced in life as “tension between duty and desire.” The division is so deep and violent that White describes it in tectonic terms—the divided soul is “fractured along the fault line of duty and desire”—and militaristic ones—we are “at war with ourselves.”

The division specifically between duty and desire is the one that White keeps clearly in view throughout the book. She acknowledges that this is not the only conflict; there can be conflicts between two desires and between two duties; for example, hunger and health, family and homeland. The conflicts between duty and desire often arise from the disordering or distorting of either duty or desire, or both. The conflicts are the focus of most chapters, for example, in chapter 5 (“The Turning of the Wheel: Death and Tragedy”), which contains White’s account of Anna Karenina: “The novel takes us inside the interior worlds of Anna, her husband, Karenin, and her lover, Vronsky, exploring the division between duty and desire that destroys them all.” According to White, we ourselves instigate conflict in many ways; the conflicts are not the result of circumstance. Sometimes conflicts “arise” because we avoid duties or cannot overcome obstacles to attain what we desire. The shirking of duty indicates that these conflicts will not be solely internal but will also be external—between men and women, in families, and among citizens.

The good news is that the reconciliation of duty and desire is possible, largely because of the priority of goodness and its attendant order over wickedness and its corruption. One of White’s starting points is that “both duty and desire are intrinsically good,” and she expresses the intrinsic goodness with metaphors of depth and age. Disordered desire, for example, lies on a “deeper desire” that is nonetheless “sincere” for being deeper, and “underneath all the false images lies a right longing.” The metaphor of age is tied to the biblical account of the fall—given in some detail in the introduction—which succeeded a time when “duties and desires were wholly unified” and “altogether unified,” a time in which Eve’s soul possessed an original “internal cohesion” and when “duty and desire united in harmony.” In light of this intrinsic goodness, The Divided Soul refuses to be a treatise on how to eliminate either duty or desire.

If not eliminate, then what? In the first half of the book, the emphasis is on harmonization: “Duty must harmonize the dissonance in the desiring soul.” In chapter 7, White introduces the practice of submerging desire in duty. But how to understand that? The image ready to hand at many places in The Divided Soul is baptism, which symbolizes death by water and resurrection through coming up out of it. Still in chapter 6, we do not have articulated baptism imagery, but White hints at it by stating that Henry IV’s speech “stirs deep waters.” Later, in her recapitulation of The End of the Affair, White reminds readers of Sarah’s early baptism and its continuing postmortem effects, points which she did not mention in her first analysis of that novel in chapter 2. And in her treatment of Eustace Clarence Scrubb in chapter 11, she glosses the finale of his undragoning: “the Lion immerses Eustace in the cleansing waters, and he emerges a boy again. This is, of course, Eustace’s true conversion, when he is baptized into a new and truly human life.” In plain language, desires must be baptized not by lions but by duty, and in her exposition of Galahad in chapter 7, she imagines him as someone who “completes the quest because his desires are as pure and noble as his duties.” As Galahad reveals, “Our true duty is to keep Christ’s commandments, and our true desire is to unite with Him in an eternal paradise.” (Frodo’s quest similarly reveals the necessity of “the unity of desire-and-duty.”) But “to be one with God means we must be at one with ourselves,” so the freedom from internal and external conflicts comes from uniting oneself to the Father, which is the goal of human life.

Thus, another bit of good news is that the reconciliation of duty and desire turns out to encompass both the attempt to become happy and to know our fathers.

White does not give readers a theory of how to bring about harmony and unity. There is no formula or recipe. Instead, she offers a variety of ways of getting started. One might begin with attention to one’s duties, for “duty must harmonize the dissonance in the desiring soul” and it “fortif[ies] us to reject our baser appetites in favor of joy, which is desire’s true object. . . . Duty transforms desire from tyrant to a guide.” But one might just as well start with virtue, either the virtue of chastity, which harmonizes duty and desire between the genders, or the virtue of fidelity, which is “a potent antidote for the diseases of disordered desire that plague us.” We might also choose to contemplate images such as Odysseus, who is “an icon of harmonious desire” and has a “spirit tempered to endure” (Odyssey 5.239–249), for “it is not duty that motivates Odysseus—it is desire.” With no specific starting point singled out, White’s admonition seems to be, “Start where you are.”

Suppose then that one has decided to set about submerging profane desire in the waters of duty. What happens next is to some degree outside one’s control inasmuch as it depends on what White calls “recognition,” which is both passive and active. It is passive inasmuch as it is a matter of opening one’s eyes and mind to what there is to be seen and cognized, and it is active inasmuch as it is a matter of identifying what one sees and thinks with the notions of good and bad that one somehow already possesses.

White leans on such recognition in both theoretical and practical contexts. The latter are more numerous, though the former also involve recognition, as, for example, a fact of moral psychology that “deep down we intrinsically recognize that duty and desire belong together.” Recognition is also at work in the interpretation of literary works, as when “we recognize that both poems . . . present perspectives that work.” In the practical world of White’s memoir, unlike her sophomoric approach to romance, “a unified soul would have recognized another woman’s prior claim as a compelling obstacle to the object of desire”; that is, a person not subject to the division between duty and desire would have noticed and considered that the college boy with whom she was in love was already spoken for and would have somehow rightly judged that to be a kind of fidelity that ought to be respected rather than undermined. And of her later life White confesses, “What I did not know at the time was that God was carrying my mother and I, just as He is now carrying my children. Much pain would have been avoided if I had recognized that earlier.” In the practical worlds of the literature White analyzes, recognition is likewise crucial. A turning point in Henry IV is Hal’s “recognition that his recent actions conflict with his true nature and a realization of what must be done to recover himself.” In Jane Eyre, “Jane recognizes her divided soul and in [Helen’s] actions she finds a model of virtue to imitate.” In That Hideous Strength, Jane Studdock “recognizes for the first time that she is a person under authority, that the terms of marriage are absolute, and that her spiritual state cannot be extricated from the holy sacrament.” The instances of recognition that White identifies for readers are as numerous as they are spontaneous: there seems to be not so much a clear explanation for them as a deep appreciation of them.

If one cannot guarantee that such recognition will take place, either in oneself or in others, the spontaneity must be a matter of providence. White argues that we must read books that will form our character properly, but was it chance that her grandfather’s bequest included the copy of Anne of Green Gables that saved her life? So much depends on a book taken from the shelf, pages turned with wetted finger to read, “Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow . . . .”

One hopes there are more books to come from White, and though wanting them to be more meaningful than The Divided Soul would seem an enormous burden to place on an author, the reader nonetheless senses that there will be more books from White and that she will find a way to render her first her least.

Gary Hartenburg is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors College at Houston Christian University.

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Antisemitism, an American Tradition

Reviewed by Elan Kluger.

Every political movement has a philosophy of history and recent American politics has offered quite the olio. Barack Obama’s “Hope” was one more instantiation of the Whiggish dogmatic belief in progress; MAGA is oriented to “again”; the 1619 project recasts American history as anti-Black, with the implication that only Black people can redeem this fallen country. Pamela Nadell’s new book Antisemitism, an American Tradition is the yield of her own politically mobilizing philosophy of history. For Nadell, the history of American Jewry is replete with instances of sometimes brutal, sometimes inconvenient antisemitism. The suggestion to Jews is clear enough: be vigilant, America is not your true home. But is this history what the moment needs?

Nadell’s narrative begins close enough to 1619, in 1653. Peter Stuyvesant, founder of New Amsterdam, wrote a letter demanding that that “deceitful race,—such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ,—be not allowed further to infect and trouble this new colony.” He hoped that the new world would facilitate a fresh start, without Jews. Just as America was “stamped from the beginning,” in Ibram X. Kendi’s phrase, with anti-black racism, so, Nadell suggests, America was stamped with antisemitism. With that letter, Stuvyesant “launched the American tradition of antisemitism.” 

Nadell reveals the character of this tradition through her narrative. In Stuyvesant’s case, antisemitism failed. The Dutch East India Company, acting under pressure from the Dutch Jewish community, reported to him that banning Jews did not fall under his purview. New Amsterdam, now known as New York, is now the largest Jewish city, and Stuvyesant himself is the namesake of that famed selective enrollment public high school which has provided many Jews upward mobility. In another point of failed antisemitism, General Ulysses Grant issued on December 17, 1862, “General Orders, No. 11,” which banned Jews from the Southern territories he conquered during the Civil War. Public outcry was enormous and Grant cancelled his plans, and in penance appointed several Jews to his presidential cabinet four years later. The lesson of both Grant and Stuvyesant is simple—the antisemites are out to get us, but we can win if we respond.

However, most of the “American tradition of antisemitism” proffers little hopefulness. Nadell documents the 1915 story of Leo Frank, a factory superintendent in Atlanta, falsely accused of murder by a black janitor and lynched by a mob before his trial. In response, Jews created the national Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the still extant antisemitism fighting behemoth, but “Atlanta Jews even stymied attempts to revisit Frank’s conviction when new evidence surfaced,” Nadell writes. They cowered in fear in the face of antisemitism. 

Nadell’s litany of horrors then switches to the Midwest, with the familiar stories of Henry Ford and Father Coughlin, then to the KKK and the famous neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, of 1977. These incidents are as evil as they are isolated. Instead, more of the “American tradition of antisemitism” seems like the “Seligman affair.” Joseph Seligman, a Jewish banker, attempted to stay with his family in the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs. Although he had stayed before, they rebuffed him as the owner had instituted a “no Israelites” policy, in an effort to attract more WASPs. Press coverage and threats of legal action did nothing to change the policy of the hotel. A violation of civil rights? Yes. But Nadell has to stretch to imply this has anything to do with a tradition of antisemitism. She writes, “Joseph Seligman died in 1880 at the age of sixty, less than three years after he was turned out of the Grand Union Hotel.” Without stating outright, Nadell implies that the incident drew blood. 

But it didn’t—public life raises blood pressure, we all know, but that doesn’t make banning people from hotels anything symbolic of a tradition or comparable to the tragedy of Leo Frank. Rather, getting banned from hotels or country clubs is simply a mild inconvenience. It indicates that most Americans did not treat Jews as fully, socially equal. And of course they weren’t. Judaism was and remains today a religion and a people that do not easily fit the categories of American secular life. Nadell wants to deny this and writes that “philosemitism—liking Jews, admiring Jews, loving Jews—can slide into prejudice.” Nadell suggests that treating Jews in a way that is not identically like the way you treat every other group is inherently antisemitic. But in denying Jews particular characteristics, and therefore closing Jews off from praise or blame, Nadell negates Judaism entirely. America should tolerate Jews, of course, but to try to end all social antisemitism or philosemitism would be to try to end Judaism and turn all members of that community into run-of-the-mill Christians. 

Nadell only hints at this strange theory of antisemitism. To fully explicate it, one could continue to take up examples from Nadell’s history and examine what they indicate. But to do too much of this would replicate her narrative just as much as it would replicate Wikipedia. Antisemitism, an American Tradition is chock full of potted anecdote after potted anecdote. At the book’s end, we have no sense of what exactly this “tradition” is or even what it means for there to be a tradition. All we know is that there were anecdotes of antisemitism in America in the past and in the present. There is no intellectual architecture defining a tradition or its contours.

Nadell declares at the beginning of her history that “antisemitism is the word that readers know signifies Jew hatred. Scholars, of course, argue heatedly about defining Jew hate. After all, making arguments and proving them is at the heart of what we scholars do. Nevertheless…I bypass those arguments. Instead, as readers will discover, the many episodes of anti-Jewish animus discussed in this book speak for themselves.” The problem is that these incidents don’t speak for themselves and we can only speculate. For example, she writes of someone whose roommates declared, “It’s not because you’re Jewish that we don’t like you.” What if they weren’t lying?

Most of the anecdotes are so unsurprising and dryly recorded that one wonders what the book is for, really. The likely answer is that the book is about current debates on Israel. “I did not begin writing this book on October 8,” Nadell admits. Perhaps not, but it certainly amplified her project. She writes of the many recent horrific instances of antisemitism that have cropped up regarding Israel’s recent war, such as the 2024 vandalizing of a Cincinnati Jewish cemetery. And she compares it to a similar event in 1800. Nadell’s final words in the book are “the more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same. Antisemitism remains now and for the foreseeable future an American tradition.” For Nadell, the anti-Zionism of today is just like the antisemitism of 200 years ago. 

With that, Nadell finally unveils her philosophy of history. It is neither unique nor particularly scholarly. Indeed, the closest comparison would be the old-fashioned Zionist historians of the 1950s and 1960s. Occasioned by the recent memory of the Holocaust, they wrote justifiably lachrymose histories of European Jewry. History was for them a record of antisemitism. That is Nadell’s strange sense of American history. There would then be an easy solution: every American Jew ought to move to Israel. In writing a 1619 project for the Jews, Nadell fails in making Jews just as American as Black Americans. Instead, she implies the need for a new exodus. But does Nadell really believe that? Her own life and public comments do not indicate that. 

So we return to the question, why this book and why now? We can declare with certainty that it is never the right time for lazily written histories and now is no exception. More importantly, as American Jews face a country divided about what to say and what to do about an Israel that acts without regard for diasporic desire, what is not needed is more shrill complaints about antisemitism. Instead, we must interrogate our relationship to Israel, and build new models of engagement: with Christians, with Israelis, and with ourselves. 

This book does none of that and like most supposed “anti-theoretical” histories, Nadell substitutes an explanation of what antisemitism is and how to chart it with a tacit theory that antisemitism always exists and always makes life miserable. For those reasons, Antisemitism: An American Tradition is a book best left unread.

Elan Kluger is an editor at The New Critic.

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