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cris_redondoo's review
challenging
informative
medium-paced
2.5
It was a bit coarse for me, I had a really hard time getting into it and understanding all the concepts.
bakudreamer's review
4.0
' a block universe ' is mention on pg. 80 in the Hegel chapter. ( Interesting ) Berlin on Liberty pg. 103 is amazing
blackoxford's review
5.0
Trump’s Religion
Trumpism is a powerful popular movement. For many, including me, it is a mysterious thing. What holds together an alliance of evangelical Christians, farmers, resentful bourgeoisie, racist nationalists, anti-Intellectuals, and radical nihilists? Surely without a common political philosophy such an electorate must fragment as soon as real policies are formulated. And yet, if anything, Trump’s followers seem more aligned than they did three years ago. What is the real core of conviction that holds these people together?
Isaiah Berlin’s analysis of the historical intellectual roots of modern political society provides some enlightening suggestions. His study of the early 19th century philosopher and man of affairs, Joseph de Maistre, is particularly revealing of the current situation in the United States. Berlin’s acute insights, although written and recorded almost 70 years ago, provide for me a compelling rationale for Trumpism and its international variants.
Maistre was an arch-reactionary. He, even more so than his rough contemporary Edmund Burke, was horrified by what he perceived as the liberal idea of personal freedom underlying the French Revolution and its murderous consequences. Most of his recorded thought involves constructing a rationale for the destruction of all rationality, particularly that of the French philosophes whose Reason had led to the destruction of reasonable society.
For Berlin, Maistre’s philosophy has, just as that of the liberal philosophes, a mystical core: “This is a central doctrine in Maistre: that rationalist notions do not work. If you really want to know why people behave as they do, you must seek the answer in the realm of the irrational.” Immediately, it is clear from this observation why current-day Trumpists suspect not just science and its conclusions about things like climate change, but all experts from economists to political analysts. This attitude is not a consequence of ignorance which might be corrected by education; it is the conclusion of a rather sophisticated logical argument in the same vein as that of Maistre.
This conclusion also conforms with the traditional religious mood in America, which is one of gnostic Calvinism. According to St. Augustine, the mind is an unreliable and fundamentally corrupt organ of all human beings. The mind is driven by desires which cloud its judgments and lead to self-destructive behaviour. It, therefore, must be thwarted as a matter of Christian principle: “Clarity, intelligibility must be put out of court, must be stopped, because it is they which create unrest, criticism, questioning.” Trump, of course, demonstrates this principle every time he opens his mouth. And it is perceived as such by his supporters.
What counts, what holds society together, is one’s culture - those institutional norms and rules of behaviour which have been tried and tested. It is not simply that these are familiar and consequently more comfortable. They have been pragmatically proven to work by their persistence. Political conservatism therefore has a great affinity with religion as an institution that recognizes the value of ritual and liturgy, and the permanence of social institutions themselves. Antiquity is good simply because it is old. “The enemy, as we have seen, is ‘la secte’, the disturbers, the subverters, the secular reformers, the intellectuals, the idealists, the lawyers, the perfectibilians, the people who believe in conscience, or equality, or the rational organisation of society, the liberators, the revolutionaries – these are the people who must be rooted out.”
This social conservatism is accompanied by justified suspicion of those who may not be part of ‘us’ because of race or national background. “Prejudice is simply the skin which humanity has acquired in the course of centuries.” Prejudice, therefore, is not some arbitrary judgment; it too is a pragmatic historical principle which can be abandoned only with extreme social peril. Prejudice, and Maistre refers particularly to immigrants, is not a personal defect but a responsibility for all citizens. It is the first line of defense for civilization. “Maistre’s belief [is] that government is impossible without repression of the weak majority by a minority of dedicated rulers, hardened against all temptation to indulge in any kind of humanitarianism.”
Repression of the weak, both domestically and internationally, demands power, and power of a particular sort: “all greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner; he is the terror of human society and the tie that holds it together.” For Maistre, “Power is divine. It is the source of all life, of all action.” And whoever holds power - whether the upstart Napoleon Bonaparte or the mendacious Donald Trump - has been manifestly designated by God to impose appropriate order on society. Ultimately this is the power to kill, either one’s own or others as necessary. Hence the religious justification for increased defense and police budgets and for seemingly reckless international confrontation.
“Let us look at what is going on round us, Maistre says, let us not look at books, let us look at nature, at ourselves.” Theory, strategy, even language, is inherently bad. With some dumbing down of the vocabulary, Berlin’s summary of Maistre’s national self-reflection captures a coherent political philosophy and could easily form the centerpiece for a Trump rally:
Postscript: For more on Maistre’s influence on political philosophy and law, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1893865294 and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2208130141 and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1813807899
Trumpism is a powerful popular movement. For many, including me, it is a mysterious thing. What holds together an alliance of evangelical Christians, farmers, resentful bourgeoisie, racist nationalists, anti-Intellectuals, and radical nihilists? Surely without a common political philosophy such an electorate must fragment as soon as real policies are formulated. And yet, if anything, Trump’s followers seem more aligned than they did three years ago. What is the real core of conviction that holds these people together?
Isaiah Berlin’s analysis of the historical intellectual roots of modern political society provides some enlightening suggestions. His study of the early 19th century philosopher and man of affairs, Joseph de Maistre, is particularly revealing of the current situation in the United States. Berlin’s acute insights, although written and recorded almost 70 years ago, provide for me a compelling rationale for Trumpism and its international variants.
Maistre was an arch-reactionary. He, even more so than his rough contemporary Edmund Burke, was horrified by what he perceived as the liberal idea of personal freedom underlying the French Revolution and its murderous consequences. Most of his recorded thought involves constructing a rationale for the destruction of all rationality, particularly that of the French philosophes whose Reason had led to the destruction of reasonable society.
For Berlin, Maistre’s philosophy has, just as that of the liberal philosophes, a mystical core: “This is a central doctrine in Maistre: that rationalist notions do not work. If you really want to know why people behave as they do, you must seek the answer in the realm of the irrational.” Immediately, it is clear from this observation why current-day Trumpists suspect not just science and its conclusions about things like climate change, but all experts from economists to political analysts. This attitude is not a consequence of ignorance which might be corrected by education; it is the conclusion of a rather sophisticated logical argument in the same vein as that of Maistre.
This conclusion also conforms with the traditional religious mood in America, which is one of gnostic Calvinism. According to St. Augustine, the mind is an unreliable and fundamentally corrupt organ of all human beings. The mind is driven by desires which cloud its judgments and lead to self-destructive behaviour. It, therefore, must be thwarted as a matter of Christian principle: “Clarity, intelligibility must be put out of court, must be stopped, because it is they which create unrest, criticism, questioning.” Trump, of course, demonstrates this principle every time he opens his mouth. And it is perceived as such by his supporters.
What counts, what holds society together, is one’s culture - those institutional norms and rules of behaviour which have been tried and tested. It is not simply that these are familiar and consequently more comfortable. They have been pragmatically proven to work by their persistence. Political conservatism therefore has a great affinity with religion as an institution that recognizes the value of ritual and liturgy, and the permanence of social institutions themselves. Antiquity is good simply because it is old. “The enemy, as we have seen, is ‘la secte’, the disturbers, the subverters, the secular reformers, the intellectuals, the idealists, the lawyers, the perfectibilians, the people who believe in conscience, or equality, or the rational organisation of society, the liberators, the revolutionaries – these are the people who must be rooted out.”
This social conservatism is accompanied by justified suspicion of those who may not be part of ‘us’ because of race or national background. “Prejudice is simply the skin which humanity has acquired in the course of centuries.” Prejudice, therefore, is not some arbitrary judgment; it too is a pragmatic historical principle which can be abandoned only with extreme social peril. Prejudice, and Maistre refers particularly to immigrants, is not a personal defect but a responsibility for all citizens. It is the first line of defense for civilization. “Maistre’s belief [is] that government is impossible without repression of the weak majority by a minority of dedicated rulers, hardened against all temptation to indulge in any kind of humanitarianism.”
Repression of the weak, both domestically and internationally, demands power, and power of a particular sort: “all greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner; he is the terror of human society and the tie that holds it together.” For Maistre, “Power is divine. It is the source of all life, of all action.” And whoever holds power - whether the upstart Napoleon Bonaparte or the mendacious Donald Trump - has been manifestly designated by God to impose appropriate order on society. Ultimately this is the power to kill, either one’s own or others as necessary. Hence the religious justification for increased defense and police budgets and for seemingly reckless international confrontation.
“Let us look at what is going on round us, Maistre says, let us not look at books, let us look at nature, at ourselves.” Theory, strategy, even language, is inherently bad. With some dumbing down of the vocabulary, Berlin’s summary of Maistre’s national self-reflection captures a coherent political philosophy and could easily form the centerpiece for a Trump rally:
“At the end of positivist, optimistic periods of human construction, in which men rise up and say they are about to cure all the world’s ills by some economic or social solution, which then does not work, there is always a penchant for reaction on the part of ordinary people, satiated by so much false optimism, so much pragmatism, so much positive idealism, which become discredited by the sheer pricking of the bubble, by the fact that all the slogans turn out to be meaningless and weak when the wolf really comes to the door. Always, after this, people want to look at the seamy side of things, and in our day the more terrifying sides of psychoanalysis, the more brutal and violent aspects of Marxism, are due to this human craving for the seamy side – something more astringent, more real, more genuine, meeting people’s needs in some more effective fashion than the rosy, over-mechanical, over-schematised faiths of the past.”
Postscript: For more on Maistre’s influence on political philosophy and law, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1893865294 and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2208130141 and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1813807899
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