“an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition…and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted.”

Whilst this is a good description, it is also woefully insufficient to explain what is being presented through this concept of traditions. Traditions in the sense that he was advancing are probably best understood through the framework of Imre Lakatos’s scientific research programmes, in which a research programme is understood as a historically continuous succession of related theories, unified by enduring commitments and rules governing their further development.

There are obviously a great number of corrections and alterations needed before Lakatos’s methodological model can be applied beyond the sciences, but the basic structure of MacIntyrean traditions can already be found here.

What really needs to “go” is not so much this conceptual framework, but the name “traditions”.

If one were to try to explain MacIntyrean traditions to another person not versed in the relevant literature, the first thing they would assume is that you are talking about rolling cheese down a hill or eating turkey at Christmas.

This is what the word “tradition” means in modern usage. It means an old thing which is continually done because it is done. If you were to approach people of a slightly more academic bent, they might also understand traditions in the conservative Burkean sense, or perhaps even the Chestertonian sense.

This is still entirely missing the point.

Instead of fighting an obviously unwinnable battle over the meaning of the word “tradition”, it would be far more sensible to admit that an entirely new term is needed for this particular concept.

At present, my preferred substitutions are “interpretive complex”, “iterant interpretive complex”, or “inherited interpretive complex”. But I am still very open to other suggestions, because all of these have weaknesses.

For any potential replacement, I have some criteria which I think are absolutely necessary. The first is that the words used must be carefully selected so as not to smuggle in liberal ontological claims. The best way to establish this is through a simple examination of their etymological histories.

The second is that the selected words should have no common-usage baggage which might result in the term being misunderstood through that usage, as has happened with “tradition” in MacIntyre, or “history” in Hegel and Fukuyama.

The third is that it must accommodate internal complexity and disagreement, as well as disagreement with what exists outside it.

And finally, it must suggest continuity through change without implying either stasis, as seems to have happened with Burkean traditions, or inevitable progress.

When trying to explain and understand any phenomenon in the physical world, it is necessary to make an assessment of its constituent parts. This is no less the case in biology than it is in chemistry and physics, nor, and this is key, in understanding how human orders function.

The rise of modernity, or at least the thought that marks modernity, is premised on just such a question. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thought increasingly focused on the question of anthropology, and it is at this time that we find the development of the forms of state-of-nature thinking which underpin the ontological claims of modernity.

The purpose of my last book, Themis, was in part to start a quarrel with liberalism/modernity (functionally the same thing) over just this point.

Before we move into that, we can look at what it was that, in a broad sense, the state-of-nature theorists were claiming and why they were claiming it.

The State of Nature

The state-of-nature theory of human orders is extraordinarily simple. It consists of three acts.

The first act begins with a mass of individuals who possess certain capabilities.

The second is a form of agreement, covenant or election through which political authority is established.

The final act places this authority above them, from which point it can determine law.

This basic structure holds across Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and so on, although the status of the account and the authority produced differ considerably between them. By the time we get to Rawls, the device is explicitly presented as a moral and political thought experiment rather than an account of historical origins.

The state-of-nature theorists differed over the nature of the individual in the state of nature (whether he was violent, free, naturally sociable and so on) and over the precise form of the authority created. They did not, to any serious degree, abandon this three-part movement from prior individuals, through agreement, to political order.

It is this underlying theoretical structure that forms the basis of liberalism.

What is Wrong with this Model?

There are many ways by which this state-of-nature model could be attacked, and the one I employed in Themis was to treat it as a scientific hypothesis. This creates an immediate problem because most state-of-nature theorists did not present it as a testable scientific hypothesis, while later liberal proponents frequently insist that it was never intended as a historical account at all. My counter is that the model underpins social sciences which do claim to be scientific. Its supposedly hypothetical individuals, interests and acts of consent are continually treated as real explanatory units. It is perfectly warranted to ask whether those units could have existed and whether the process being used to explain political order is coherent.

If we treat it as a scientific hypothesis, we need to do at least two things. The first is to locate evidence. The second is to test the theoretical coherence of the model itself irrespective of evidence. This is what I did.

The Evidence

There is no evidence.

Or, to be more precise, what evidence the early state-of-nature theorists took as evidence—such as accounts of native peoples coming out of the Americas in the time of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau—was filtered through profound misunderstandings on the part of the Europeans recording and interpreting it.

The nature of this error can be explained very simply. Native peoples lived in orders in which a metapersonal realm of spirits and gods existed all around them and acted much as our states do for us today. The metapersons had concrete effects on their lives. The natives genuinely acted as if they were real in the same way we act as if the abstraction of the sovereign state is real. Europeans arriving from Christian orders in which a secular and religious divide had formed could not fully understand this, and so all they saw was a collection of people living without government yet still managing to organise themselves.

I will put this in an image to make it clear.

This is a catastrophic error. This is not evidence of a state of nature. There is no state of nature here.

Even if they fundamentally misunderstood what they saw, this does not discount the possibility of a state of nature existing further back in the past. The next step is to look to historical accounts to locate it.

According to state-of-nature theorists, where would this be? Seeing as thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke accepted biblical accounts (or at least presented them as authoritative) when discussing the history of man, we first need to address them. If we apply the biblical account, we are really talking about the Garden of Eden and the generations following it, none of which provide the required condition of unrelated, pre-political individuals. If we discount this and refer to history as we know it, we cannot see a state of nature in the medieval period, the classical period, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age or the Neolithic.

If we go back even further, we still have zero proof of a state of nature. What little evidence we do have points towards something very different, which we will look at in another post.

So at this point, we can reiterate. We have zero evidence for a state of nature.

Nothing.

Neither, for that matter, do we have evidence for an election of a sovereign leading to a sovereign order comprised of former individuals.

There is again, nothing.

Zero.

The formative underlying model of modern liberalism, subsequently imported into much of the social sciences, is based on zero historical evidence.

How about Theoretical Coherence?

There is no coherence. It makes no sense.

Putting aside the issue of there being no evidence for the state of nature, what can we say of the theoretical coherence of the state of nature?

To assess its coherence, we again need to look at the three acts in this play and assess the necessary conditions that would have to hold for it to be feasible.

First, is the existence of individuals of the kind demanded by the state of nature possible?

Second, how feasible is it that they would be able to agree collectively to political authority?

Third, how could that authority govern if the previous conditions held?

The Individual

If we begin with the individual, what would be required for such an individual to exist in the state of nature? He would need:

• A bounded and continuous self, distinct from every other person and from the surrounding world.

• Personal interests existing independently of any prior social order.

• An individual will capable of initiating action and making choices.

• Means–ends reason capable of comparing possible actions and consequences.

• Recognition of other individuals as beings of the same general kind.

• Language and shared concepts sufficient for communication and deliberation.

• Memory and foresight sufficient to learn from the past and anticipate future dangers.

• Some capacity for cooperation without already possessing political authority.

Some of these capacities could plausibly be described as pre-political, although not necessarily pre-order. Memory and foresight, along with a basic capacity for means–ends reasoning, could largely be treated as evolved cognitive capabilities. The same might be said of some rudimentary form of individual will and the recognition of other human beings.

When we arrive at language, cooperation, personal interests and the formation of ends themselves, however, the wheels fall off the wagon.

These are not capacities that can simply be placed prior to order. They are formed within an order and become intelligible through the traditions inhabited by those who belong to it. Much of the confusion comes from conflating human characteristics that are not dependent upon any particular order: hunger, thirst, sexual appetite and so on, with characteristics that cannot exist outside one: language, symbolic understanding, socially constituted interests and ends extending beyond immediate bodily appetite.

Once we separate these two sets of characteristics, the state-of-nature argument loses any serious theoretical coherence. Its individuals must already possess the language, concepts, ends and forms of mutual recognition required to act together. Yet these are precisely the things that can only have been produced within an existing order. The model does not begin prior to order. It begins with the products of an order and then pretends that the order itself has yet to be created. This is not a paradox or anything of the sort. It is a rank error.

For a necessarily limited illustration of what happens when a human being is denied the social conditions required for linguistic and conceptual development, we can look here. Genie was not a human being outside order, nor can a single case of extreme abuse tell us what prehistoric humanity was like. What the case does show is that language and the developed self do not simply unfold from an isolated biological organism:

The Election of the Sovereign

If we put aside the problem of forming an individual without any prior order and look directly at the election of the sovereign, the problems of the state of nature increase exponentially. Here is a list of necessary preconditions for such an election to occur:

• A shared understanding of the problem they are attempting to solve.

• A shared concept of what a sovereign is.

• A recognised procedure through which discussion and election could occur.

• Criteria determining who may participate in the election.

• A means of identifying and evaluating possible sovereigns.

• A rule determining what counts as agreement: unanimity, majority or something else.

• Recognition of the result as binding upon those who opposed it.

• The capacity to make promises that bind future conduct.

• An accepted means of transferring rights or powers to the sovereign.

• Confidence that others will also recognise and obey the result.

• Some way of resolving disputes about the procedure or its outcome.

• A distinction between legitimate authority and mere superior force.

And, of course, they would somehow have to descend upon the same physical location without prior communication or a shared language, almost as if they possessed telepathy.

Why? And why at that particular time rather than at any previous point in the state of nature?

The state-of-nature theory in its purest form wants us to believe that an entire population of Genies—the feral child raised in a room by herself who could not develop full linguistic capabilities—might spontaneously descend upon the same spot at the same time and engage in a sophisticated discussion about the election of a sovereign: a concept not fully articulated until the sixteenth century by the French jurist Jean Bodin.

Right.

The Sovereign

Even if we disregard the impossibility of producing state-of-nature individuals and then having them elect a sovereign, we are left with the sovereign himself.

What exactly is he supposed to do after being elected as a sovereign?

He has somehow been placed above the population and is now expected to make law and maintain order. But issuing a command is not the same thing as governing. For the command of the sovereign to operate as law, everyone involved must understand who the sovereign is, who is authorised to interpret his commands and why they remain binding when the sovereign is not physically present.

The sovereign would also require officials. He would need messengers, judges, soldiers, tax collectors and administrators. The powers of these people would have to be distinguished from their private capacities.

None of this can be produced merely by the sovereign announcing it. His announcement can only have the intended effect if the population already possesses the language, concepts and practices required to understand it as an authoritative act. They must already know what an office is, what jurisdiction is, what law is, what obedience entails and what it means for one person to act in the name of another.

The problem becomes even clearer when the sovereign dies. Why should the authority granted to one particular person pass to his child, an elected successor, an assembly or anybody else? Any rule of succession must either have been established beforehand or be decided afterwards. If it was established beforehand, the founding population had already created constitutional law before the sovereign began making law. If it is decided afterwards, some authority other than the sovereign must possess the power to determine who the next sovereign will be.

We arrive, then, at precisely the same error encountered in the previous two acts. The individual supposedly existing before order already contains the products of order. The election supposedly creating authority already requires authoritative procedures. The sovereign supposedly creating law can govern only through concepts, offices and practices that must already exist.

At every stage, the state-of-nature model takes the products of an existing order, places them before that order, and then presents them as its cause.

What is going on here?

Presentism.

I think the key to understanding what has occurred with state-of-nature theory is to note that other orders have developed this kind of thinking and made this kind of mistake at other places and times. In China, India and Greece, comparable forms of thinking can be found during periods when the overt ritual structure of an order is being decomposed into one that is far more centralised. Thinkers existing in a new order shaped by money and coinage, literacy, and an increasing focus upon a shared centre or authority rather than more diffuse temple centres then begin to reinterpret earlier orders through their own lived experience.

The underlying mechanism seems to be that the people creating these theories take the human beings they see around them, along with their characteristics and understanding of themselves and the world, and project them back in time or onto surrounding orders which have not centralised in the same way. Aristotle could take the individual of the Greek polis, strip him of government as Aristotle understood it, and then place this individual in the past or among surrounding “barbarian” orders. In much the same way, Hobbes and Locke took the individuals of their English orders and cast them back into the past and onto native orders.

If, as we see in Jouvenel and Hegel, these individuals developed in conjunction with centralised structures, Hobbes was taking one element of this process (the individual) and using it to explain the other: centralised authority in the form of the sovereign.

Historians have a term for this—or rather, two: presentism and retrojection.

No Evidence, No Theoretical Coherence—So Why Has it Not Been Disregarded by the Social Sciences?

The State of Nature is an ideological construct disguised as fact. (Yes, I know Marx figured this out.)

Unfortunately for us, the categories through which modern people understand human order were largely formed during the same period in which the state-of-nature model was being developed. The individual, interest, will, consent, agreement, and sovereignty are consequently not treated as concepts requiring explanation. They are treated as the basic furniture of reality: the facts from which explanation begins.

But the state of nature cannot provide factual ground from which to proceed because it is not itself factual. It is a complex accumulation of projections, misunderstandings and theoretical evasions. Historically produced characteristics are projected backwards and declared natural. Concepts derived from an existing order are placed before that order and then used to explain its creation. Whatever cannot be accounted for is simply smuggled into the model as an innate human capacity.

To put it bluntly, this is the ideology of the emerging liberal order disguised as an objective account of human reality.

This does depend upon what we mean by ideology. If ideology merely means a consciously invented set of political doctrines intended to deceive, the claim is too strong. Hobbes and Locke did not need to know that they were projecting the products of their own order backwards, and the state of nature does not need to be a deliberate fraud in order to perform an ideological function. I am using ideology in a Marxian sense, later developed differently by Mannheim: a historically particular form of thought which presents the conditions and categories of its own order as natural, universal and prior to history. Under that definition, the state of nature is an ideological construction. It takes the historically produced individual of the emerging liberal order, removes the history that produced him, and makes him the origin of the order from which he actually emerged.

Even if we refuse the Marxian language, the claim still holds under a functional definition of ideology: an account which legitimates an order by making that order appear to arise naturally from the consent of prior individuals. In this sense, the state of nature functions as a political myth. Calling it a myth does not mean that every theorist believed it to be a literal historical event. It means that the construction organises political perception and supplies an account of why the resulting order may rightfully command. What I would avoid is calling it merely a lie or claiming that every use of the device was presented as empirical fact. The stronger claim is that a non-historical model has repeatedly supplied supposedly factual categories to disciplines which then treat those categories as natural features of human existence.

We are consequently faced with the daunting task of reconceptualising how human orders and authority actually developed while working through a vocabulary that continually forces us back into the theoretical system derived from the state of nature.

To see the implications of this, consider my earlier use of the word cooperation. I wrote that the state-of-nature individual would require “some capacity for cooperation.” This sounds completely innocuous. Human beings obviously act together, so why would cooperation present any difficulty?

But the word has already interpreted the activity before we begin examining it. Cooperation does not merely mean that several people participate in the same activity. It invites us to imagine separately constituted individuals, each already possessing his own ends, who subsequently decide to coordinate their actions in pursuit of some shared result. The individuals exist first; the cooperative relationship comes afterwards.

That may describe certain activities within a modern order. It cannot be projected backwards as a neutral description of how all human beings have always acted together. A person participating in a sacrifice or fulfilling a kinship obligation is not necessarily an independent individual who has decided to “cooperate” with other independent individuals. His identity, ends and obligations may exist only through the practice in which he participates.

Simply by using the word cooperation, then, we can silently place the liberal individual before the order and make the order appear to arise from his decision to associate with others. The state of nature returns through the vocabulary being used to criticise it, and we can keep doing this with such concepts as the individual, interests, consent, economics, altruism and so on.

This is why it is so difficult to struggle out of this mess.

At this point, it would seem that we have two broad options. We could continue using the vocabulary of English-language political theory and what currently passes for reality, or we can carefully investigate our language to establish which parts force us to smuggle in conceptual and theoretical assumptions which derail our attempt at genuine understanding.

If we choose the second option, we are in a far safer position to look at older orders and the progression of human orders and authority without having liberal modernity ideologically colour the account in advance. But we also face the problem of no longer being comprehensible to those who still operate solely within the liberal framework and take these concepts as simply given features of reality. It is yet another daunting task.

In a previous article, we looked at the constitutional crisis currently engulfing the UK from the position of the political “right,” and more specifically from that of Reform and, to a lesser extent, Restore. The Conservative Party was conspicuously omitted, for reasons which should become clear.

This post will approach the same problem from the position of the Labour Party and the permanent state apparatus whose centre of gravity appears to lie somewhere around the Cabinet Office and SW1. It will also require us to bring the Conservative Party back into the picture. At this point, I will cease using the labels “right” and “left,” since they obscure more than they reveal.

The previous post left Reform, or anyone else attempting to return the British constitution to something resembling its pre-1997 form, in a position of extreme difficulty. Labour and the permanent state face a different, and in some respects still more serious, problem. They have inherited a constitutional transformation whose intended direction was interrupted by Brexit, but which cannot easily be completed, abandoned or reversed.

To understand what has happened—or at least my interpretation of what has happened—we have to work backwards from the reforms themselves, the organisations which promoted them and the statements made by those involved. This is necessarily difficult. There was no single meeting at which the new constitution was drawn up in its entirety. There did not need to be. Overlapping networks of people, working through different institutions but sharing roughly the same assumptions, were quite capable of moving in the same direction without agreeing upon every detail.

What appears to have developed was a broad agreement among influential sections of the British political, legal and administrative classes that the UK needed to be incorporated more deeply into the emerging European order. This may sound obvious, but it is useful to be precise about what is being claimed.

By the 1980s and 1990s, much of this programme was already visible. It included devolution, reform of the House of Lords, the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, a greater constitutional role for the judiciary and the progressive replacement of inherited constitutional conventions with explicitly formulated legal principles. Charter 88, the Labour–Liberal Democrat constitutional discussions, the Cook–Maclennan agreement and the established devolution campaigns were all parts of this environment.

The election of New Labour in 1997 provided the vehicle through which much of this programme could be enacted. Blair and the Labour leadership were not passive instruments, and this does not absolve them of responsibility for what followed. The point is simply that the intellectual and institutional preparation preceded their election. New Labour adopted the programme and implemented it. It did not invent it from nothing.

The reforms were presented as separate acts of modernisation. They were nothing of the sort. Together, they amounted to the construction of an alternative constitutional settlement.

The older British constitution had been centred upon the Crown-in-Parliament: Crown, Commons and Lords acting within an inherited order whose ultimate origin was treated as lying beyond the reach of any particular constitutional author. Parliament enacted statutes, and the common law undoubtedly changed, but legitimate constitutional action was still presented as taking place within an order which had been received rather than consciously manufactured.

This is what is meant by the language of law existing “from time immemorial.” It did not mean that no new laws could ever be enacted. It meant that the authority to make and interpret law was itself understood as inherited. Neither king, Commons nor Lords had simply sat down and authored the constitution from first principles. Their authority depended upon their position within an order whose beginnings could not be located in a particular decision by a particular collection of individuals.

This distinction was central to the constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century. The question was not merely whether laws could be made, but where authoritative lawmaking power lay, whether the king possessed a power independent of the inherited law, and whether any part of the constitution could place itself outside the order through which its authority had been received. The king was not the sovereign author of the constitution. He occupied an office within it and was himself beneath the law.

The Human Rights Act represented a movement towards a very different conception. It was enacted in 1998 and came fully into force in 2000, incorporating the rights contained in the European Convention into British law. Formally, it did not abolish parliamentary sovereignty. British courts cannot generally strike down Acts of Parliament under the Human Rights Act. They can interpret legislation in accordance with Convention rights where possible and issue declarations of incompatibility where it is not.

The deeper change was the introduction of an explicitly formulated and consciously authored body of principles through which inherited law and political action would increasingly be interpreted. These rights were written by identifiable people, at an identifiable time, for an identifiable postwar purpose. Whatever universal moral validity is claimed for them, their legal formulation is not from time immemorial. It is an authored constitutional instrument.

The distinction concerns what made law authoritative and intelligible in the first place. Under the older constitution, legislation took place inside an inherited order. Under the new settlement, that order could itself be judged against abstract principles whose authority came from somewhere else.

A complicating factor was the Diceyean theory of parliamentary sovereignty. Dicey had isolated the legal capacity of Parliament to make or unmake any law, while also recognising the existence of constitutional conventions and political restraints which prevented this capacity from operating as an unrestricted power of constitutional creation.

The problem began when this abstract legal description became an operative theory of the constitution. Once Parliament was imagined as possessing an unlimited capacity to make law ex nihilo (which is also how Reform appears to understand it) it could use that capacity to reconstruct the inherited order from which its own authority had arisen. One element had been abstracted from the constitution and then mistaken for the source of the constitution.

This is why the reforms of the New Labour period were so consequential. Parliamentary sovereignty was used as an instrument through which Parliament could transfer interpretative authority, alter the composition of the Lords, establish devolved legislatures and reconstruct the relation between the courts, the executive and the legislature. The inherited constitution was not defeated by some external power. Its own institutions were used to author a replacement.

Much of this was publicly announced. The remarkable thing is that the scale and coherence of the transformation were barely recognised by the rest of the constitutional order.

The Conservative role is particularly revealing. Conservative governments criticised the Human Rights Act, proposed replacing it and eventually conducted the referendum which led Britain out of the European Union. Yet they left almost all of the post-1997 constitutional architecture in place. They did not reverse devolution, restore the hereditary Lords, remove the Convention from domestic legal practice or reconstruct the older understanding of Crown-in-Parliament.

The differences between Labour and the Conservatives are real, but they occur inside the post-1997 settlement. Neither party can reconstruct what preceded it. Even when the Conservatives attacked particular consequences, they remained trapped inside its categories.

The ECHR is not an EU institution. Britain joined it before joining the EEC, and the EU has still not acceded to it. This legal distinction should not obscure what actually happened. The ECHR, EU law, devolution and domestic human-rights law became parts of the same emerging constitutional environment. Authority was dispersed across jurisdictions and then enclosed within a transnational legal order.

Devolution was especially important. It transferred authority away from Westminster and created new constitutional entities whose competences developed during the period of EU membership. Scottish and Welsh home-rule traditions long preceded the EU, but devolution operated more easily while the UK and its constituent administrations remained inside a common European framework. Authority could be dispersed internally while many common rules continued to be supplied externally.

Referendums were alien to the ordinary operation of parliamentary government because they introduced a rival source of authority: the directly expressed will of the electorate. Their emergence in modern British politics was closely connected to questions of territorial sovereignty. The first major referendum was the Northern Ireland border poll in 1973; the first UK-wide referendum concerned continued membership of the EEC in 1975. Devolution referendums followed in 1979 and again in 1997.

Referendums did not simply originate with the European issue, but they entered British constitutional practice through disputes which the inherited institutions could no longer settle through their own authority. They supplied an external legitimating principle (popular sovereignty) precisely where the authority of Crown-in-Parliament was no longer regarded as sufficient.

Brexit brought the contradiction to a head. The referendum was not designed as the final act of New Labour’s constitutional programme. It was called by a Conservative government under pressure from its own party, UKIP and a growing public revolt against the direction of European integration. Nevertheless, it became a retrospective popular judgment upon the wider settlement which had developed since Britain entered the European project.

The establishment lost that judgment.

Brexit removed EU membership without dismantling the internal constitutional arrangements which had developed around it. The political and legal classes responsible for operating those institutions also remained. Britain had left the EU, but the domestic constitution had not been returned to its previous form.

This is the position in which Labour and much of the permanent state now find themselves. Their defence of the Human Rights Act and the ECHR cannot be explained merely as a sentimental attachment to human rights, although that attachment is undoubtedly genuine in many cases. These instruments form part of the remaining structure which connects Britain to the wider European legal order. To abandon them would not simply alter immigration policy or the treatment of individual cases. It would accelerate the dismantling of the constitutional settlement which has been built over the past several decades.

Remaining within the ECHR does not amount to de facto membership of the EU. It does, however, preserve part of the legal and ideological framework through which renewed integration might later become possible. More importantly, it prevents the British state from having to confront the far more difficult question of what constitutional order should replace it.

Many Labour politicians undoubtedly believe in human rights. Their sincerity does not explain the institutional function of human-rights law. It supplies the new settlement with a source of authority external to the older British constitutional inheritance and relatively protected from ordinary electoral change. Decisions can then be presented as legal necessities rather than political choices for which someone must take responsibility.

The problem is that this settlement now suffers from a serious issues of legitimacy. The electorate rejected continued membership of the EU, but no equivalent process has authorised the post-1997 constitution as a coherent whole. Its component parts were enacted separately, under different electoral mandates, and generally presented as discrete reforms. The public has never been asked whether it accepts the transfer from an inherited parliamentary constitution to an articulated rights-based order embedded within a wider European legal framework. Nor is it clear that such a claim to legitimacy is even proper.

I will deal with the underlying question of law in a separate article. For now, the point is to identify the constitutional project and the contradiction produced by Brexit.

The Labour and SW1 “Solution”

The obvious solution for the establishment that favors the EU would be to seek explicit public authorisation for renewed integration, but another referendum could destroy the project altogether. Abandoning it would require the British establishment to recover a constitutional language it no longer possesses. It will consequently continue as it has done: indirectly, through treaties, administrative decisions, judicial interpretation and reforms whose ultimate purpose is never presented whole.

Proposals for further Lords reform, greater devolution and some form of written or codified constitution must be understood in this context. Considered separately, each can be presented as a technical improvement. Considered together, they offer the possibility of completing another stage of constitutional transformation without presenting the electorate with the underlying question in a recognisable form.

The problem is that Labour has no realistic prospect of achieving the kind of sustained electoral dominance which would allow this to be done securely. It is attempting to preserve, and perhaps restart, a constitutional project while facing an electoral revolt against many of its consequences. The Conservatives, meanwhile, remain trapped between rhetorical opposition to the settlement and their practical inability to imagine anything outside it.

The British state is left defending a constitution which was never presented to the public as a constitution while pursuing a European orientation which the public rejected. It cannot complete the project openly without risking another defeat. It cannot reverse it without repudiating the assumptions through which its own personnel understand political and legal order. The only remaining route is a succession of piecemeal measures, each presented as a technical necessity rather than another part of the constitutional transformation.

This does not resolve the constitutional crisis. It merely ensures that the crisis will continue while becoming progressively more difficult to acknowledge.

And this is before we turn our attention to the condition of the EU itself, or to the wider state of the world. Many of the assumptions upon which the project of European integration rested no longer appear to hold.

The European project developed under unusually favourable conditions. The Americans provided security, cheap Russian energy supported European industry, and expanding global trade supplied both markets and inexpensive manufactured goods. Demographics were still favourable enough to sustain taxation and welfare spending. The United States, meanwhile, was willing to tolerate a European bloc which accumulated trade surpluses while contributing comparatively little to its own defence.

Almost none of this can now be relied upon.

The EU is now stagnating. Productivity growth is poor, energy is expensive, much of the technology upon which it depends is American or East Asian, and its population is ageing into already strained welfare systems. European industry is caught between rising input costs and foreign competitors with cheaper energy, deeper capital markets and stronger technological sectors. At the same time, its states are supposed to rearm, finance an ageing population, maintain their welfare systems, carry out an energy transition and absorb the infrastructural and fiscal costs of immigration which is not producing the surplus originally promised for it.

The EU’s own institutions now admit much of this. The Draghi report was an official acknowledgement that the European economic model is losing competitiveness and requires enormous additional investment merely to prevent the gap with the United States and China from growing wider. The Commission’s programmes on competitiveness, energy and defence are attempts to answer problems which can no longer plausibly be described as temporary.

The demographic position is still more serious. The EU population is ageing and will eventually begin to contract. What growth remains is increasingly sustained by immigration, yet much of that immigration appears to place additional pressure upon the very welfare systems it was supposed to preserve. It has also created political and constitutional conflicts over borders, national identity and the distribution of resources. Immigration can theoretically increase the number of workers. It cannot repair low productivity, housing shortages, weak capital formation or the loss of strategically important industries.

The EU also remains dependent upon the United States for much of its military security. The war in Ukraine has revealed both the limited capacity of European defence industries and the extent to which European states allowed their conventional military strength to deteriorate. Rebuilding that capacity will require substantial expenditure at precisely the point when the fiscal position of several major European states is becoming more difficult.

It is unclear which of Britain’s present problems deeper integration is supposed to solve. Britain has low productivity, high energy prices, a weakened industrial base, deteriorating public services, mass immigration, demographic ageing, fiscal strain and military overstretch. These are also European problems. Closer alignment might remove some barriers to trade and investment, but it will not provide cheap energy, reconstruct British industry, restore fiscal discipline or repair the state.

The project now threatens to attach Britain to an order undergoing the same exhaustion as Britain itself. The British establishment continues to regard the EU as an external source of stability, authority and competence. Yet the EU increasingly needs its member states to provide the military, fiscal and political capacities which it was supposed to add to them. Britain would not escape its crisis by moving closer to Europe. It would combine its crisis with a larger one.

None of this precludes cooperation with European states. Britain can remove trade barriers or coordinate defence and energy policy without submitting itself to another constitutional order. Cooperation has identifiable purposes. Integration has become a purpose in itself, with every new crisis recruited as an argument for completing it.

The danger is that the constitutional project will be completed just as the material conditions which once made it appear viable disappear. Britain would surrender what remains of its capacity for independent action in exchange for membership of an order which is itself losing the capacity to act.

It would be like rushing to join the Soviet Union in 1987 or the Holy Roman Empire in 1800.

In a previous post, in which I was exploring why thought relating to political traditions is so poor, I utilised the symposium that was conducted on Fukuyama’s End of History thesis back in 1989.

The purpose of that post was to demonstrate that, when it comes to the realm of political thought, people in the modern world, or rather, the liberal world, seem incapable of engaging in anything approaching coherent discussion. I did this by imagining what would have been required for that symposium to have been conducted in an orderly way comparable to that seen (normally) in the functional sciences. This would have required the following five criteria to be met:

First, at a bare minimum, every participant would have needed to be fully versed in the model in question: Fukuyama’s model.

Secondly, participants should have been able to distinguish the model from its conclusions. You cannot simply say, “I don’t think this happens.” You have to address the mechanism being proffered.

Thirdly, each participant should have been able to explain their own explanatory framework. Without being able to do this, comparisons would not have been possible.

Fourthly, participants should have been able to identify points of incompatibility between their frameworks and Fukuyama’s.

Fifthly, these models should have been compared against shared phenomena in order to assess their relative strengths.

I subsequently assessed all of the participants according to these criteria, barring Robin Fox, who was the only one who appeared to think in anything resembling these terms.

As can be seen, the abject failure demonstrated by the respondents was nearly universal.

In that post, I approached this merely as a means of explaining why I had utilized an immanent critique in my book Nemesis. In this post, I want to look further at why seemingly none of the respondents fully understood Fukuyama and his argument, despite representing the cream of the crop of America’s intellectual establishment.

This brings us to a larger issue than merely Fukuyama and that is the relative indigestibility not merely of Hegel, but also of Marx and, by extension, much of the thought of continental Europe in the twentieth century to the Anglosphere, especially to the Americanized element of this Anglosphere. This is not to say that there were no Hegelians or Marxists in the Anglosphere. The UK developed a fairly interesting and influential Hegelian tradition leading up to the First World War. In the United States there was relatively little. America absorbed fragments of Hegel without ever developing a durable Hegelian tradition capable of displacing, or even seriously challenging, its dominant liberal anthropology.

The importance of this becomes apparent once we identify the central distinction separating Fukuyama, and Hegel from most of their critics. Fukuyama’s model presupposed a historical subject. His critics, almost without exception, presupposed an essentially finished subject moving through history. They could imagine institutions changing, ideologies competing, wars occurring and political systems rising and falling. What they could not readily imagine was that the human actor experiencing these things might also have been historically produced. That actor must have, surely, been the individual as understood by American liberalism in all cases, from the very start.

It is worth pointing out that I am not a Hegelian. I think the Hegelian system represents a drastic misunderstanding of the Jouvenelian process in which competing elements of various orders engage in conflict, with centralisation driven primarily by inter- and intra-order conflict. Hegel, famously, placed this process within a sort of Christian framework given it a teleology which I don’t hold to. Of greater importance for this post, however, is what I do share with Hegel: the understanding that the human subject is continuously changing and does not possess the universal characteristics assumed by liberalism. It is precisely at this point that we can see why Hegel, and Marx after him, proved so unintelligible to the Anglosphere and especially, once again, to Americans.

In Britain, possessed as it was of an inherited political and institutional order of considerable depth, it was at least possible for a serious engagement with Hegel’s claims to take shape. British Idealism became a substantial intellectual tradition before being displaced by G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and the approach to philosophy that developed around them.

The character of this rejection followed a similar path in both Moore and Russell. Neither answered the Hegelian claim by providing an alternative account of how the apparent elements of thought acquire their identity within a historically developing whole. They instead changed the direction of explanation. Moore detached goodness from the purposes, practices and forms of ethical life through which particular goods had previously become intelligible, before declaring it a simple and indefinable property comparable to the colour yellow (yes, really.) Russell approached apparently unified objects by decomposing them into logically distinguishable elements, properties and relations. Hegel had attempted to explain how the apparently independent element was produced within a developing whole. Moore and Russell began with the element and treated the whole as something to be reconstructed from it.

The result was not that either man explicitly defended the sovereign liberal individual. It was that the philosophical tradition they helped to establish lacked the categories required to explain how the individual could be constituted by an inherited historical order. History could be reintroduced as a collection of facts concerning the element, but not easily as the process through which the element became what it was. British philosophy did not refute Hegel so much as reorganise itself around a method within which the Hegelian question appeared confused or illegitimate.

But, again, at least in Britain such a conflict occurred. There had been a substantial British Idealist tradition for Moore and Russell to attack. In the United States, Hegelianism never acquired comparable institutional or intellectual purchase. There were the St Louis Hegelians for a period during the nineteenth century, and Hegelian elements survived in American pragmatism, most importantly in Dewey and Mead, both of whom rejected the idea of an individual fully constituted prior to social life. Dewey’s influence upon education and progressive liberalism was immense. Yet pragmatism did not displace the autonomous individual as the ordinary starting point of American political explanation. Dewey reached the threshold of that conclusion and then turned the machinery of historical formation into a programme for manufacturing liberal subjects, meaning it was accepted right up until the point it threatened the underlying anthropological basis of American liberalism.

Given this state of affairs, what happened to Fukuyama was entirely predictable. He presented an American audience with an argument whose central terms belonged to a Hegelian philosophy of history, but the audience possessed no common intellectual language through which those terms could be understood. “History” was then interpreted as a sequence of events, the “end” of history as the cessation of those events, and liberal democracy as a collection of institutions whose worldwide adoption Fukuyama was supposedly predicting. A claim about the historical development of consciousness and the exhaustion of rival principles of legitimacy was translated into the only form in which American political thought could readily receive it: an empirical forecast that the American political system had defeated all competitors and would now spread across the world.

The American misunderstanding of Fukuyama was not accidental or merely a result of intellectual carelessness on the part of the End of History symposium organizers. Fukuyama presented an account in which the liberal individual appeared as the result of a historical process to an audience for whom that individual constituted the beginning of political explanation. His respondents could understand liberal institutions spreading, retreating, succeeding or failing. What they could not readily understand was the claim that the subject inhabiting those institutions had itself been produced through history.

Liberalism does not ordinarily present its individual as the product of a particular order. It presents him as the human being who remains once the artificial encumbrances of order have been removed. His capacity to recognise himself, identify his interests, compare alternatives and choose his commitments is treated as prior to the traditions through which any actual person learns to perform these operations. History happens to this individual, but it does not substantially constitute him.

To say that this individual is historical is not simply to add another fact to the liberal account of him. It is to remove the entity upon which the account depends. If the liberal individual was produced by a particular historical order, then he cannot serve as the universal material from which all orders are constructed. Liberalism becomes one tradition among others, possessing its own anthropology, its own epistemology and its own peculiar conception of the person.

This is why Fukuyama’s critics translated his thesis into a prediction about the future of American institutions. They did so because they could not recognise the actual object of his argument: the historical development of the subject for whom those institutions had become intelligible and legitimate. The symposium did not simply demonstrate that Fukuyama had been misunderstood. It demonstrated why an intellectual order founded upon the supposedly universal individual could no longer understand an argument about how that individual had come into existence.

From the various statements made by leading members of Reform, it would appear that the party has arrived at two broad conclusions regarding the condition of the British state. The first is that decision-making authority has migrated towards courts, quangos, regulators, international bodies and other unelected institutions which are substantially insulated from democratic accountability. The second is that a growing separation now exists between formal political authority, supposedly located in Parliament and elected government, and the practical capacity to govern. Ministers remain publicly responsible for what the state does, but increasingly lack the institutional authority required to make the state do anything else.

Reform has generally articulated this problem through the language of sovereignty. Sovereignty in their account has been surrendered, dispersed, obstructed or taken away, and now must be recovered and returned. Given the centrality of this concept of “sovereignty” to Reform’s political platform, we might reasonably expect its meaning to be clear. Yet the more closely we examine the statements made by the party’s leading figures, the less clear it becomes what they think sovereignty is, where they believe it should reside, or what its restoration would actually entail.

“Parliamentary sovereignty” is used to refer to Parliament’s legal authority to enact or repeal any law. Elsewhere, sovereignty appears to mean the democratic supremacy of the electorate, the independence of the nation from external authority, the political authority of a government possessing a parliamentary majority, or simply the practical capacity of ministers to implement the programme upon which they were elected. These are politically related ideas, but they are not the same thing. They refer to different forms of authority, possessed by different bodies, which may quite easily come into conflict with one another.

This is not merely an error made by Reform. Reform’s difficulty in explaining what sovereignty means is a particularly visible symptom of a much wider problem. The British state has undergone a succession of constitutional transformations without developing a coherent language through which the resulting order can be described. Parliamentary supremacy, popular sovereignty, administrative expertise, judicial independence, human rights and international legal obligation now coexist within the same order, but there is no generally accepted framework by which their claims can be ranked when they conflict.

Reform has correctly recognised that something has gone seriously wrong. What it lacks is the political theory required to explain what has gone wrong, why it has gone wrong, or what kind of order would have to be established in its place.

Reform’s Missing Constitutional Theory

Perhaps the clearest expression of Reform’s constitutional thinking can be found in Danny Kruger’s article “Restoring Government.” Kruger begins by presenting the constitutional problem as the displacement of elected ministers by unelected officials and institutions, resulting in a loss of effective governmental authority. He describes Reform’s anticipated electoral mandate as conferring “maximum legitimacy” upon the government and identifies the expressed wishes of the public as something which the establishment must not be permitted to countermand.

Elsewhere in the same argument, however, Kruger refers to the “will of Parliament,” the authority of “Parliament, and of ministers,” and finally to Crown-in-Parliament as the body under whose supervision the institutions of the state must operate. At the same time, he maintains that Parliament is the only rightful check upon the executive.

Sovereignty consequently appears in several places at once. It is found in the electorate whose expressed wishes must not be countermanded, in the parliamentary majority produced by an election, in ministers charged with carrying out the resulting programme, in Parliament as the rightful check upon those ministers, and in Crown-in-Parliament as the legal authority under which the institutions of the state are supposed to operate.

Nigel Farage moves between the same positions. In introducing his Bill to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Convention on Human Rights, he began by claiming that the British people had voted in 2016 to “bring back sovereignty.” He then described the purpose of the Bill as restoring “the power of this Parliament,” before referring to both “the sovereignty of the country” and “the sovereignty of our Parliament,” as well as to the ability of voters to determine the future direction of the country. Within the same speech, sovereignty referred to the British people, the nation as an independent state, Parliament as the supreme legislative authority and the electorate’s capacity to determine government policy.

Comparable movement can be found in Robert Jenrick’s arguments concerning the ECHR and the Rwanda legislation. Jenrick has described Parliament’s ability to reject the authority claimed by the Strasbourg Court as a matter of parliamentary sovereignty, while also endorsing the proposition that the supremacy of the House of Commons exists because its authority has been conferred upon it by the people. Parliamentary sovereignty is presented both as a rule internal to the British legal order and as a delegated authority derived from the electorate. The practical purpose of asserting this sovereignty, however, is to permit ministers to implement a particular policy without judicial or administrative obstruction. The argument begins with the people, passes through Parliament and terminates in the effective freedom of the executive to act.

James Orr approaches the issue in a more openly executive manner. His political framework is presented as “pro-nation” and “pro-sovereignty,” with the nation constituting the body whose interests government is supposed to serve. Yet when discussing how a Reform government would exercise power, Orr has emphasised the advantages that would arise from the creation of a new parliamentary party whose leadership possessed much greater control than that enjoyed by the existing parties. The first hundred days of a Reform government could then be used to force necessary but unpopular “nasty cough medicine” upon the country.

Sovereignty begins here as the recovery of national self-government, passes into the authority of a parliamentary majority, and ends with a disciplined party leadership imposing measures upon the electorate which supposedly constitutes the original source of its authority.

It would hypothetically be possible to defend all this by arranging these different bodies into a single chain, although doing so would import a conception of popular sovereignty which sits uneasily with the inherited British constitution. The people are ultimately sovereign. Their sovereignty is expressed through elections. Parliament receives its authority from the electorate. The government receives its authority from its parliamentary majority. Ministers then direct the institutions of the state under the legal authority of Crown-in-Parliament.

If this is what Reform means, the references to the people, Parliament, ministers and Crown-in-Parliament need not be contradictory. They might describe different moments in the transmission of one coherent authority. Reform, though, never supplies this account. Its political language simply assumes that every part of the chain will remain in agreement. Orr’s prescription already demonstrates what happens when they do not: the electorate is sovereign when it authorises the government, but becomes subject to the party leadership once that authority has been granted. Reform has no evident means of resolving this contradiction because it possesses no theory of the relations between these institutions. It seems to have a theory of democratic authorisation, according to which electoral victory confers an overriding legitimacy upon the government, but no theory of how that legitimacy is converted into institutional authority and effective action.

The state is imagined as a chain of command which has been interrupted by the improper intrusion of officials, judges, quangos and international bodies. Remove the obstruction and the sovereign will of the people will once again pass through Parliament and government into policy.

But the British state is not an otherwise neutral instrument which merely awaits the arrival of the proper democratic instructions. Its institutions carry inherited practices, internal standards, legitimating principles and conceptions of their own proper authority. Parliament itself does not possess a will independently of the parties, procedures, conventions and traditions through which parliamentary decisions are produced. Nor do ministers acquire the practical capacity of the administrative state merely by winning an election.

Why Sovereignty Cannot Simply Be Defined (It Doesn’t Exist)

Reform might attempt to resolve this problem by agreeing upon a definition of sovereignty and identifying the body in which it resides. Yet this would immediately expose a deeper absence of agreement.

If Kruger’s references to Crown-in-Parliament are taken seriously, then the electorate does not issue commands which Parliament is constitutionally obliged to obey. Elections determine the composition of the House of Commons and provide political legitimacy to a government, but the resulting authority remains constitutionally mediated through Parliament. The electorate may provide assent, authorisation or legitimacy, but it does not itself legislate.

Farage’s language points in a different direction. If voters possess the right to determine the future direction of the country, and if the purpose of Parliament is to give effect to that determination, then Parliament becomes an instrument of the popular will. Its authority is not final. It is derived from, and subordinate to, the electorate.

Orr’s position introduces a further complication. If an electoral victory authorises a disciplined party leadership to impose measures upon an unwilling public, then the popular will appears principally at the moment of authorisation and may subsequently be overridden by those authorised to act in its name. The people are sovereign when selecting the government, but the government becomes sovereign once it has been selected.

None of this can be resolved by selecting the correct location for sovereignty because the various statements are answering different questions. Legal supremacy, democratic legitimacy, national independence and practical governmental capacity are not quantities of the same substance which can be handed from one institution to another. A body may possess one while lacking the others.

The word sovereignty conceals these distinctions by presenting them as different manifestations of a single underlying thing.

This is especially significant because the concept itself introduces the expectation that somewhere within every political order there must exist an ultimate and unconstrained will. Once this assumption is accepted, the problem of the British constitution becomes a search for the person or institution which possesses that will. Is it the Crown, Crown-in-Parliament, the House of Commons, the electorate, the nation, the government or the Prime Minister supported by a parliamentary majority?

What if its just wrong? What if no such independently existing will can be found? Political authority does not exist prior to the institutional and traditional order through which authoritative decisions become possible. The sovereign does not first possess a will and then use institutions to impose it. What appears as sovereign will has already been constituted through the language, traditions and institutions of the order in which it becomes intelligible.

Reform begins its constitutional analysis at the wrong point. It starts with an already constituted political actor called “the people,” attributes a coherent will to it, and then asks why the state has failed to carry that will out. But an election produces votes, not a self-interpreting command. What comes to be described as the popular will has already been constituted within the political order which claims to receive it. Reform instead treats that order as the passive transmitter of a will which existed clearly beforehand. This conception of the people as a constituent sovereign, standing logically prior to the institutions it creates, is far more at home in the American constitutional tradition than in the inherited British one. Reform appears to import the former while continuing to speak in the language of Crown-in-Parliament.

The British Constitutional Crisis

Despite these criticisms of Reform and its constitutional project, it would be unjustified to treat this as an error peculiar to the party. Reform’s confusion is symptomatic of the constitutional order it is attempting to describe. There is no longer any generally accepted framework by which the competing claims of Parliament, government, electorate, courts, administrative institutions, devolved governments and international obligations can be ranked. Nor is there agreement about the nature of the authority claimed by these bodies.

Reform generally locates the origin of the problem in the constitutional changes introduced after 1997. These changes undoubtedly accelerated the dispersal of authority, but the crisis cannot be understood without considering the transformations which took place across the twentieth century.

The growth of the administrative state transferred much of the practical activity of government away from Parliament and towards ministers, departments, regulators and administrative institutions. Parliament continued to provide legal authority, but it could no longer directly supervise the immense body of decisions made in its name. Powers were delegated because a modern state could not otherwise operate.

The Donoughmore Committee on Ministers’ Powers was already examining the constitutional consequences of delegated legislation and administrative authority in the early 1930s, following the controversy provoked by Lord Hewart’s The New Despotism. The problem was recognised long before the Blair governments. Yet the growth of administrative authority could still be accommodated within the inherited constitutional language. Officials and administrative bodies acted under powers conferred by Parliament. Ministers remained responsible to Parliament for their departments. Parliament retained the legal capacity to withdraw or alter the authority it had delegated.

The constitutional formula survived because the administrative state could be described as an instrument of parliamentary government even where Parliament possessed neither the time nor the knowledge required to control it in practice. Formal authority and effective capacity were already separating, but the separation could be concealed by treating administrative power as parliamentary delegation.

European integration placed the British constitution under a different kind of strain. Through the European Communities Act 1972, Parliament incorporated a legal order whose rules could take priority over ordinary domestic legislation. Courts were no longer simply interpreting Acts of Parliament but determining the application of a body of European law which claimed primacy within the fields assigned to it.

The orthodox answer was that Parliament had voluntarily created this arrangement and could ultimately repeal it. In that sense, European legal supremacy was still said to depend upon parliamentary sovereignty. Yet this produced the peculiar situation in which Parliament had used its “sovereignty” to create a legal order capable of disapplying the ordinary operation of later Acts of Parliament. The doctrine survived, but only by becoming increasingly detached from the practical organisation of authority.

The 1975 referendum added a further difficulty. Legally, it was advisory and could not bind Parliament. Politically, however, it was used to legitimise a constitutional relationship whose significance appeared to exceed the authority of ordinary parliamentary government. The electorate had been invited to decide the question directly.

This introduced a claim of popular authority which the inherited constitution could not comfortably accommodate. If Parliament remained sovereign, the referendum could possess no more than advisory force. If the people had been asked to determine the constitutional position of the country, however, it was difficult to explain by what authority Parliament could disregard their answer.

The ambiguity remained manageable because Parliament, government and the referendum result all pointed in the same direction. It became an open constitutional conflict only after the Brexit referendum, when a majority of the electorate rejected a settlement supported by most of Parliament, much of the administrative state and a large proportion of the institutions responsible for producing legitimate public knowledge.

The reforms introduced after 1997 then dispersed and differentiated authority still further. Devolution created legislatures and governments possessing their own democratic mandates. The Human Rights Act gave Convention rights a powerful position within domestic adjudication and public administration. Judicial independence was institutionally strengthened. Political questions became increasingly susceptible to legal resolution. Appointments, regulation and public administration were placed at greater distance from direct ministerial control.

It would be inaccurate to say that the Human Rights Act simply transferred legal sovereignty from Parliament to the courts. British courts cannot strike down primary legislation merely because it is incompatible with Convention rights. Parliament formally retains the power to leave incompatible legislation in force. But this does not mean that nothing changed. The Act altered the interpretative environment within which legislation is read, the standards according to which public authorities act, and the language through which political decisions are judged legitimate. Formal legal supremacy remained with Parliament while a growing body of practical, epistemic and moral authority accumulated elsewhere.

By the time of Brexit, the British order no longer rested upon a single constitutional tradition. It contained the older language of Crown-in-Parliament, the Diceyan doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, the democratic claim that Parliament derived its authority from the people, the direct popular mandate asserted through referendums, the authority of rights-based legal adjudication, the claims of devolved democratic bodies, and the expertise of an administrative state increasingly conscious of responsibilities not reducible to ministerial command. It is, in effect, a giant mess.

These did not merely constitute different institutions performing different functions within an agreed order. They increasingly represented different answers to the question of what made political authority legitimate in the first place.

So long as these authorities arrived at broadly compatible conclusions, their underlying conflict could remain concealed. Once they ceased to do so, there was no commonly accepted principle by which their claims could be ranked.

This is the constitutional crisis which Reform has encountered. It is not simply that the wrong institutions have seized powers which properly belong to Parliament. The deeper problem is that the institutions of the British order no longer understand themselves as differentiated participants within the same constitutional tradition. They draw their authority from rival legitimating frameworks and possess no common language through which their disputes can be conclusively resolved.

What Would Reform Actually Restore?

Reform proposes to restore sovereignty, but the language of restoration conceals the scale of the decision it faces.

If parliamentary “sovereignty” is to be restored, what is to be done with referendums which claim an authority superior to Parliament? What is to be done with devolved institutions which possess electoral mandates of their own? What is to be done with the Human Rights Act, the ECHR, judicial review, the Supreme Court, independent regulators, statutory duties and administrative bodies whose authority was itself created by Acts of Parliament? If Parliament established these institutions through “sovereign” legislation, does abolishing them vindicate parliamentary “sovereignty”, or merely demonstrate that the concept provides no guidance as to what Parliament ought to create?

Nor can the problem be solved by subordinating every institution to ministers. Ministerial supremacy is not parliamentary “sovereignty”. A government supported by a disciplined majority may exercise effective control over the House of Commons, but this does not make the government and Parliament constitutionally identical. If Parliament is supposed to be the only rightful check upon the executive, while the party leadership controls the parliamentary majority, then the supposed check exists principally as a formal description.

Orr’s emphasis upon party discipline brings this problem into the open. The practical “sovereign” in such an arrangement would not be the electorate, Parliament or even Crown-in-Parliament. It would be the leadership of the party controlling the House of Commons. The electorate would authorise this leadership at an election, Parliament would legally enact its programme, ministers would direct its implementation, and the Crown would provide the required constitutional form.

Perhaps this is what Reform intends. If so, it should say so. But it cannot simultaneously claim that “sovereignty” resides unproblematically in the people, Parliament, government, nation and Crown-in-Parliament. The apparent unity of these bodies would be produced by the organisational power of the party leadership, not by the recovery of some “sovereignty” which had always naturally belonged to them all.

Reform has perceived a real separation between democratic authorisation and governmental capacity. It has also perceived that the modern British state contains institutions capable of resisting, redirecting or absorbing the decisions of elected governments. Where it fails is in assuming that these problems can be solved by returning “sovereignty” to its proper owner because there is no sovereign instrument waiting to be handed back.

What Reform would have to create is an order in which the electorate, Parliament, executive, courts and administrative institutions were once again assigned intelligible and mutually recognised roles. This would require more than abolishing quangos, withdrawing from conventions or asserting the supremacy of Parliament. It would require an account of why these institutions possess authority, what forms of authority they possess, how their conflicts are to be resolved, and what conception of the British order they are collectively supposed to maintain.

It would also require Reform to explain the source of its own knowledge - it becomes an epistemological issue, which authority always is, at base. If judges, officials and regulators are accused of obstructing the popular will by substituting their own judgements for those of elected politicians, on what basis will Reform ministers determine the content of that supposed will? An electoral victory cannot answer every subsequent political question. Nor can the phrase “the national interest” explain who is authorised to identify that interest, through what institutional procedures, or according to which inherited standards.

Without answers to these questions, Reform’s constitutional programme remains an expression of frustration rather than a theory of government. It knows that elected ministers cannot govern as they believe they should. It has identified many of the institutions through which their intentions are frustrated. But it has not explained the order which produced those institutions or the alternative order through which authority could be made effective again.

The question Reform must answer is not simply: who is “sovereign”? That question already assumes “sovereignty” to be a unitary power which can be located in one body and transmitted through the rest of the order. This is what Reform has failed to establish.

The real question is: what kind of British order do you intend to create, and according to what principle will its institutions be differentiated, ranked and bound together?

In Volume I, Part II, Chapter 7 of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville writes:

“The Inquisition could never prevent books contrary to the religion of the greatest number from circulating in Spain. The empire of the majority does better in the United States: it has removed even the thought of publishing them.”

This may be one of the most penetrating observations ever made about the nature of American thought. It belongs alongside Bismarck’s possibly apocryphal remark that:

“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

When the American hegemonic order finally comes to an end, as all such orders do, I suspect future historians will be fascinated by the disparity between its intellectual and material development. American political thought flourished for several decades around the time of the founding and then, despite the country’s extraordinary territorial, demographic and economic expansion, narrowed with remarkable speed. The United States continued to produce intelligent people, technical innovations and an inexhaustible supply of political argument, but very little political thought capable of examining the premises of the American order itself. Probably the only place you will find anything of the sort is in its fictional literature.

Americans have, of course, disagreed constantly and sometimes violently. The Civil War alone makes any idea of an unbroken national consensus absurd. Yet nearly all of this disagreement has taken place within a remarkably stable conceptual enclosure. Americans could argue about the proper extent of rights, the meaning of equality, the limits of consent and the boundaries of individual freedom. What they found much harder to do was question whether rights, equality, consent and the sovereign individual provided an adequate language through which political order could be understood in the first place. It seems to be basically impossible to draw them into questioning this at all. I have given up.

This is what Tocqueville saw. The peculiarity of the American order did not consist in crude suppression. It consisted in producing people to whom certain arguments could no longer occur. The American congratulated himself upon his freedom because no inquisitor prevented him from speaking, but failed to notice that the boundaries of permissible thought had been installed within him at a much deeper level. He could reach any conclusion he liked, provided he began from the premises of the American political tradition.

I suspect this unnoticed intellectual servility, concealed beneath hysterical assertions of freedom and independence, was not incidental to American success. It may have been one of its conditions. A population which regarded itself as radically free while remaining confined within a narrow inherited political language was unusually governable, and it was fortunate enough to inhabit circumstances in which the defects of its order rarely carried the consequences they would have done elsewhere.

The United States acquired control of most of a continent, enjoyed the protection of two oceans and faced no neighbouring power remotely comparable to those confronting the major European states. France had to exist beside Germany, Spain and Italy, across the Channel from Britain and within reach of every major continental conflict. Germany was compressed into the centre of Europe. Russia faced enormous exposed frontiers and repeated invasion. Britain depended upon maritime supremacy and the maintenance of a complicated continental balance. The Americans, by contrast, were permitted to develop under conditions of almost unprecedented strategic indulgence and then mistook the results for a demonstration of the universal superiority of their political ideas.

Space, resources, weak neighbours, continuous territorial expansion and, eventually, naval supremacy allowed institutional incompetence and intellectual shallowness to survive consequences that would have destroyed a less fortunate order. None of this means that geography mechanically created American power or that American institutions contributed nothing to it. It means only that a political system cannot be detached from the conditions under which it produced its results and then held up as a machine for reproducing those results anywhere else. A settlement formed under continental security, abundant resources and unusually weak external pressure contains no obvious political secret for states facing entirely different historical circumstances. Transplant the institutions without the compensating advantages and the deficiencies which those advantages concealed become rather more apparent.

The obvious reply is that the American system was successfully exported to Western Europe and Japan after 1945. Yet these states were not independent tests of American political theory. They were incorporated into an American strategic and economic order following military defeat or exhaustion, protected by American power, linked to American markets and situated within an international monetary system centred upon the dollar. They also possessed highly developed states, educated populations, industrial economies and dense traditions of social organisation. Existing institutional capital continued to operate long after the languages which had produced it were displaced. The post-war settlement could consume the accumulated substance of European and Japanese orders and then attribute the resulting prosperity to the political formulas newly placed over them.

Where American constitutional and ideological forms were exported without these inherited capacities or geopolitical protections, the results were considerably less impressive. The repeated failure of liberal-democratic institutions across parts of Africa, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was treated as an unfortunate problem of implementation. It might more reasonably have suggested that the institutions presupposed a kind of actor, a body of habits and an underlying social order which they could not themselves produce. The constitutional form was exported as though it were a machine which would generate the people required to operate it. When it failed to do so, the failure was attributed to the population rather than the theory.

It is worth asking, in this context, why the towering figure of late American political philosophy is John Rawls. His solution to political disagreement was to imagine persons stripped of knowledge of their inherited position, traditions, attachments and substantive conception of the good, and then to ask what principles these abstracted persons would choose. This is the completion of the tendency Tocqueville identified. Everything historically constitutive of the person is removed and then this unreal entity is just taken as right starting point of thought.

The operation then appears neutral because it has disappeared from view. The inherited person is encumbered, partial and arbitrary, while the abstract liberal chooser appears as the human being as such. American political philosophy has not escaped its tradition at this point. It has become so completely enclosed within it that its own anthropology appears as universal reason.

One can disagree with Burke, Maistre, Herder, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Jouvenel or any other political theorist. What cannot seriously be claimed is that American victory rendered their questions meaningless. Yet this is very often the American response: America became wealthy, America became hegemonic, therefore its anthropology must be true. This is no different in structure from claiming that Roman military victory demonstrated the truth of Roman religion. Historical success is substituted for intellectual justification and any attempt to distinguish between the two is treated as evidence of hostility or envy.

At this point discussion usually becomes impossible. The American defender does not merely reject criticism of his political tradition. He cannot recognise the place from which the criticism is being made, and so must translate every objection back into the only language available to him. A criticism of rights conceals a desire to violate rights. A criticism of democracy conceals a desire for dictatorship. A criticism of equality can only arise from hatred. A challenge to the premises of the tradition cannot appear as an argument because the tradition possesses no categories through which it can be recognised as anything other than moral pathology.

This is the intellectual sterilisation Tocqueville anticipated. It was subsequently carried into Western Europe, where older political languages were not formally prohibited so much as gradually rendered unintelligible. Traditions which had developed through centuries of conflict between crowns, aristocracies, churches, cities, estates and peoples were compressed into the American language of individual rights, democratic legitimacy and procedural consent. Europe remained geographically European while becoming increasingly incapable of interpreting itself except through the political language of its protector.

The material conditions which sustained this arrangement are now weakening. Technological change and the redistribution of industrial power have reduced the value of American geographical isolation. The dollar system continues to provide extraordinary advantages, but it has also permitted the accumulation of debts and external imbalances which are increasingly difficult to correct without destabilising the system itself. Institutional weakness once concealed by abundance has become harder to disguise, while mass immigration has exposed another premise that liberalism was never able to acknowledge. The American and European settlements presupposed populations already formed by particular histories, habits and expectations, even as they presented their institutions as universally operable by human beings considered merely as human beings. They now discover that replacing a historically constituted population changes the order, but have no legitimate language in which to say why. The same abstract individuals are still present; therefore, according to the theory, nothing politically fundamental can have changed.

The resulting crisis is epistemological because the authoritative concepts through which these orders understand themselves are becoming progressively less adequate to what is happening. The American executive must manage fiscal strain, institutional decay and domestic ideological conflict through a language which identifies none of their underlying causes. European and Asian governments must renegotiate their relationship with the United States while continuing to present themselves as sovereign partners within a rules-based order. The United States increasingly treats its allies as subordinate states while expecting them to preserve political systems founded upon the denial of that subordination. These states cannot easily reject American direction because their post-war legitimacy was constructed inside the American order, but neither can they admit their dependence without calling their own sovereignty into question. They therefore cling ever more tightly to the formulas of the settlement at the very moment the settlement itself is being withdrawn.

Much of the European and American establishment appears to believe that it can simply wait. The problem will end with Trump, Netanyahu, Putin or Xi, after which the international order will return to its natural condition: human rights, liberal democracy, American protection and an expanding system of rules. This is fanciful. These figures did not create the contradictions they exposed. They are products of an order whose material foundations and political formulas have ceased to correspond, and removing them will not restore conditions which no longer exist.

The deeper error lies in treating American liberal democracy as a universally valid political science rather than the political language of a particular hegemonic order. Its apparent universality depended upon American power, American wealth and the incorporation of other states into an American system. Its celebrated freedom depended upon forms of internal conformity which Tocqueville recognised almost two centuries ago.

What is ending is not simply an era of American dominance. It is the period during which the historical success of the United States could be presented as proof that its political categories were true. The danger is that neither the United States nor its dependents possess another language adequate to what is replacing it.

The Inquisition prohibited certain books. The American order achieved something more impressive: it created an entire civilisation capable of watching its own foundations disintegrate without recovering the thought of questioning them. And the consequences of that do not appear to be very appealing.

White nationalists speak constantly about the need to form cadres, but they are unable to articulate a serious account of what cadre formation entails. The reason for this is quite simple. They begin with an already constituted political actor but do not know that they are doing so. They take the modern liberal individual for the base reality of the human.

The white nationalist position is probably best articulated in Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto. Beneath Johnson’s argument lies an account of the political actor which is never properly examined. We begin as sovereign private individuals whose capacity to reason, identify interests and choose commitments exists prior to any particular political tradition. These individuals can then be persuaded, through facts and rational argument, that their biological classification entails a common racial interest. Those who recognise this interest can be brought together despite possessing incompatible religions, philosophies, moral systems and understandings of political authority. Through education, media production, community organising and the gradual normalisation of white identity politics, this coalition can be expanded until it achieves cultural hegemony. Political power can then be acquired and used to establish racially homogeneous states.

Johnson is an American, and Americans, as a rule, are the most unreflective people on Earth, followed closely by their British and European liberal converts. The possibility that people may not be sovereign individuals in the manner presupposed by Locke and Hobbes was purged from American thought so long ago that the idea now appears almost incapable of penetrating it. Johnson may reject the conclusions of liberalism, but the human being who inhabits his theory remains liberal man.

What Johnson is doing is porting the logic of democratic coalition-building into revolutionary politics. His movement begins with private individuals, persuades them that they possess a shared interest, aggregates the convinced into a constituency, expands that constituency through cultural campaigning and eventually converts cultural influence into political power. Nothing in this process forms a fundamentally different kind of political actor. It merely changes the opinions held by the actor with whom the process began.

This is why Johnson can conceive of a vanguard only as a leading group of propagandists and organisers. The members of the vanguard possess the correct ideas before everyone else and therefore undertake the work of persuading others to accept them. They may know more, work harder and accept greater personal costs, but they remain the same anthropological type as the people they seek to recruit. They are private individuals who have voluntarily adopted an unusually demanding political preference. The cadre is simply the most committed portion of the audience.

For Johnson, as for the liberal order he inhabits, the individual is not understood as something constituted through initiation and participation in common practices. He is already equipped with the faculties necessary for political judgement before he enters any particular political order. He can acquire new information, revise his preferences and adopt new commitments, but Johnson possesses no adequate language through which to explain how the actor himself might be formed.

This does not mean that liberal institutions are incapable of forming people. Schools and the media in particular all produce characteristic habits, perceptions and forms of judgement. The problem is that Johnson’s political anthropology cannot adequately describe the formative processes upon which his own project would depend. What occurs in practice as formation appears within his theory only as education, persuasion and voluntary commitment. He therefore begins with a person already formed by the liberal order and imagines that the political content held by this person can be replaced while the underlying actor remains intact.

Actual cadre formation begins from a different premise. A cadre is not merely a collection of individuals who have been persuaded of the same doctrine. It is produced through sustained participation in an order possessing its own authorities, standards of judgement, and obligations. Its members learn not only what to believe, but how to perceive, judge and act. They learn what constitutes evidence, whose judgement is authoritative, which ends are worth pursuing, what sacrifices may legitimately be demanded and which means are impermissible even when they appear expedient.

This does not require every member to possess an identical and completely articulated philosophy. No historical cadre has achieved that. It requires sufficient formation within a common order for its members to recognise shared authorities, standards and obligations without translating every demand back into private interest and submitting it to individual ratification. A collection of people who have read the same books is not thereby a cadre. Doctrine becomes formative only when it is borne by institutions, relationships and practices capable of producing and correcting the people who participate in them.

The decisive question becomes not how a collection of sovereign individuals can be persuaded that they share an interest. It is what kind of order could form people capable of acting together before every obligation has been converted into a preference. Johnson cannot answer this because the actor from whom he begins has already been formed by liberalism. His nationalist is not an alternative to liberal man. He is liberal man with a racial preference.

Can Againstism Be the Formative Basis of a Cadre?

No.

I have been pressed on this issue a number of times, and so it is worth outlining precisely what is wrong with the approach.

It is certainly possible to develop a dissident coalition around a shared rejection of the prevailing order. People possessing wildly different and sometimes mutually incompatible positions may come to an agreement regarding what they oppose. But to confuse the formation of such a coalition with the formation of a cadre is to make a category error. A coalition requires only a temporarily shared object of rejection, which each participant may understand differently. A cadre requires a shared language through which its members can identify what the enemy is and explain why it is an enemy, recognise legitimate authority and submit themselves to a common discipline.

Againstism is sometimes offered as a way around the problem in Johnson’s account. Perhaps a common political actor need not be formed through inherited institutions or a prior tradition because the experience of a common enemy will itself provide the necessary foundation. The enemy comes first. The worldview, discipline and organisation then arise in response to it.

Fidel Castro has been presented to me as an example of this process. The underlying premise appears to be that cadre formation was preceded by the common recognition of, and response to, Batista as an enemy. On this account, the seemingly primal recognition of the “other” made the formation of the cadre necessary because “the motivation for people to study Marxist anthropology and Marxist epistemology was the enemy.”

What this position assumes is that enmity towards the “other” constitutes some kind of raw base reality. It attempts to drill down to a simple appetitive response in order to locate a hard, non-normative foundation (the “is” which can then explain the subsequent adoption of an “ought.”) This repeats a characteristic manoeuvre of modern thought. The tradition-constituted character of the political actor is denied so that the analysis can begin from something supposedly concrete and universal.

But an enemy is never encountered merely as an enemy. An actor must already possess a language through which someone can become intelligible as one. To identify Batista as a tyrant, an American puppet, or an instrument of class domination for example was not to provide several descriptions of the same “brute fact”. Each description located Batista within a different inherited order of meaning. Each identified a different kind of political failure and implied a different response. Each therefore encountered a different kind of enemy.

If the common enemy had itself supplied the formative basis of a cadre, these groups should have converged upon a common understanding of political authority, legitimate means, discipline and the order which ought to replace Batista. They did not. Their shared enemy explains why they could cooperate temporarily. It does not explain why one component acquired internal coherence, imposed discipline and eventually defeated, absorbed, exiled or eliminated the others.

The anti-Batista coalition must therefore be distinguished from the revolutionary organisations operating within it. Batista supplied the object against which these formations operated, but he did not supply the traditions, authorities and practices through which their members understood either him or one another.

Opposition to Batista did not arise from some pre-political and semi-animal recognition of an opposing group, comparable to the hostility of one band of chimpanzees towards another. The regime was encountered through inherited expectations. Its conduct exposed a widening discrepancy between what the Cuban political order claimed to be and what, according to these inherited standards, it ought to have been. For at least some of its opponents, this discrepancy developed into an epistemological crisis. The inherited account through which the Cuban order had previously been rendered intelligible could no longer explain their experience of it.

This was not necessarily a single epistemological crisis shared uniformly by the Cuban population. It arose within different traditions, each possessing its own standards and therefore producing its own diagnosis. Constitutionalists could understand the crisis as the destruction of constitutional government, nationalists as the subordination of Cuba to American interests, communists as the political expression of class domination. These were not merely different names attached to an independently perceived brute reality. They were rival explanations of what had gone wrong, produced from within different inherited orders of meaning.

Nor does an epistemological crisis contain its own resolution. The recognition that an inherited account has become incapable of rendering experience intelligible does not determine which rival account should replace it. The crisis may dissolve allegiance to an existing regime and bring otherwise incompatible groups into temporary cooperation, but it cannot by itself provide them with a common anthropology, epistemology, discipline or political end. Againstism describes this moment of shared rejection. It does not explain how a cadre is formed from it.

If some opponents of Batista subsequently adopted Marxism, this was not because the enemy had first been perceived independently of any interpretative order and then motivated them to construct a worldview around their hostility. Marxism presented itself as an answer to a crisis that had already been rendered intelligible through inherited political languages. It offered an explanation of why the existing order had failed, identified the forces responsible for that failure, supplied an account of historical development and located political action within an organised tradition possessing authorities, texts and disciplinary practices. Whether that answer was correct is irrelevant to the present argument. What matters is that the enemy did not generate it.

Nor could Marxism have formed a cadre merely by existing as a set of propositions. Its formative capacity depended upon organisations capable of teaching it, interpreting it, resolving disputes, imposing discipline and distinguishing authoritative doctrine from individual opinion. The movement required people and institutions already capable of carrying the tradition before the tradition could form new participants. This is precisely the dimension that disappears when cadre formation is reduced either to persuasion or to the recognition of a common enemy.

The enemy may provide the occasion upon which traditions are activated, tested and brought into conflict. It may intensify discipline and force people to choose between rival accounts of their circumstances. It may even create the conditions under which a cadre can expand rapidly. But it cannot supply the language through which the enemy becomes intelligible in the first place, and it cannot determine the order which ought to replace it.

In summary, Castro and the Cuban Marxists did not merely offer the dissidents another ideological costume to don after they had already recognised the fundamental division between “us” and “them.” To understand the process in this way is to assume that the dissidents existed prior to and outside of any tradition, and that Marxism was simply an ideological addition attached to an already completed political actor. What they provided was a new tradition and epistemological framework through which the dissidents could inhabit the world.

If we were to examine the ontological presuppositions behind contemporary elite theory, derived as it largely is from James Burnham’s work, it would not be uncharitable to compare its political actor to an android that has suddenly come online (or perhaps even to a character in a computer game). The android already possesses certain characteristics which allow it to function as an elite before it acquires any particular identity. It can distinguish itself from other actors, recognise its own interests, perceive advantages and threats in its environment, distinguish means from ends, calculate between alternative courses of action, organise with others, and recognise control over institutions, resources and decision-making as desirable. Most importantly, it can do all of these things prior to acquiring any particular inherited language through which these objects might become intelligible.

It can subsequently become a Marxist, liberal, nationalist, monarchist, Zionist or fascist, but none of these identities substantially constitutes the actor underneath. They instead provide alternative languages, political formulas and justificatory skins through which an already existing political subject pursues interests which are themselves intelligible independently of those identities.

Of primary importance here is that this elite android is supposed both to know what power is and to desire its acquisition. Neither proposition is self-explanatory. Why should the creature desire power and, more fundamentally, how does it recognise power when it encounters it? To assume that it can is already to assume that it possesses a conceptual scheme through which otherwise very different social relations have been rendered commensurable.

If this is beginning to resemble the problem confronted by the state-of-nature theorists, that is because Burnham has reproduced much the same ontological difficulty without apparently recognising that he has done so. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the others were at least compelled to explain what capacities their pre-political individual possessed and where those capacities came from. Locke could ultimately appeal to God, Hobbes to a mechanistic account of appetite and aversion, and Rousseau to a deliberately minimal natural creature endowed with freedom and perfectibility. Their answers may be inadequate, but they recognised that an answer was required. Burnham instead begins with the politically competent actor already switched on, without even the beginnings of an explanation of how such an actor became possible.

Returning to the android makes the difficulty obvious. If an android came online already capable of exhibiting the characteristics listed above, we would immediately ask who had programmed these capacities into it. We would not regard them as explanations of its behaviour; they would themselves be phenomena requiring explanation. Moreover, if its designer had programmed into it particular concepts such as the self, interests and power, what appeared from the android’s perspective to be simply the structure of reality would in fact be an inherited conceptual order. The android would mistake the categories through which it had been constituted for properties of the world itself.

Much as modern people do.

The obvious answer is that no such actor comes online unprogrammed. What the analogy exposes, however, is not merely that the actor requires some language in which to describe interests which already exist. The programming determines what can appear as an interest in the first place. It establishes which objects can be recognised as resources, which relations as institutions, which persons as allies or enemies, which events as threats, and which courses of action as possible or desirable. The inherited order does not merely provide a justificatory vocabulary subsequently placed over an independently constituted political subject. It participates in the constitution of that subject.

At this point, the question of traditions becomes unavoidable. A tradition is not merely one possible ideological commitment selected by an already complete political actor. It is an inherited order of concepts through which the actor learns how the world before them is to be understood. It supplies not only answers but the questions which can intelligibly be asked. Marxists, liberals, monarchists and Zionists therefore do not simply offer different justifications for acquiring the same object called power. They may identify different kinds of actors, recognise different forms of authority, and understand the purposes of political action in fundamentally different ways.

To extract an identical elite actor from beneath these traditions, Burnham must first translate their respective objects into his own language. Yet this commensurability is not something he discovers once ideological appearances have been removed. It is produced by the conceptual scheme through which he conducts the removal. “Power” is therefore not the neutral residue left behind after the traditions have been stripped away. It is the governing abstraction of Burnham’s own tradition.

The problem with the political formula follows directly from this. If the formula is treated as a justification attached to an independently existing relation of rule, then the ruling minority must already exist, recognise itself as a ruling minority, and understand what it possesses as power before the formula appears. The tradition which makes the group, its position and its purposes intelligible is thereby reduced to propaganda produced after the decisive political facts have already been established. Historically, however, the formula is frequently inseparable from the constitution of the ruling group itself. Divine kingship does not merely justify an otherwise secular monopolist of coercion, just as proletarian representation does not merely legitimate an organisation which had already constituted itself independently as an elite. In each case, the inherited conceptual order helps determine who can rule, what ruling consists in, what offices exist, and what the exercise of authority is for.

This does not mean that political actors simply believe whatever their traditions tell them, nor that material interests, institutional position and strategic calculation disappear. It means that none of these can be specified independently of the order within which the actors have been formed. Traditions do not prevent calculation or abolish interests. They make particular forms of calculation possible and establish what may be recognised as an interest.

As I have written before Burnham’s error is not that he looks beneath the explicit claims made by political actors. That remains both legitimate and necessary. His error is to assume that, once those claims have been discounted, the observer arrives at an unmediated political reality populated by organised minorities pursuing power. What he actually arrives at is a description produced through his own inherited categories, whose historical and ontological conditions he leaves unexamined. He subjects the traditions of the actors he studies to suspicion while exempting the conceptual tradition from which the categories of his own analysis have been drawn.

Edit: Let me put my entire argument here in one sentence.

Burnham, in Burnham's own terms, was using categories and concepts from liberalism's political formula as if they were some kind of base, neutral, and universal reality.

When we approach a given text, how we interpret it is going to depend upon a number of factors.1 Putting a copy of the same book, for example, into the hands of an Englishman, a Pakistani or someone from the Congo is going to result in different interpretations of that book, assuming they can all read it. Each is necessarily going to approach its arguments from the traditions they inhabit. If they are aware of this problem, then, with some skill and intelligence, these differences in understanding can be recognised and, even though it may require quite a bit of additional commentary, communication regarding these points can occur.

Unfortunately, this does not normally happen. Imagine, for example, that these three people were to approach a simple story about an individual who tells a lie to a stranger so as to obtain medicine for their mother. English speakers within the liberal tradition are apt to assume that all three people will understand the story identically, as if the words describe neutral matters of fact which are not subject to tradition-dependent interpretation. But what an Englishman, a Pakistani or someone from the Congo understands as a person will not necessarily be identical. Neither would their interpretations of the meaning of the story necessarily be the same. One might interpret it as a tale about an immoral actor, while another might see it as a virtuous tale of familial or clan loyalty.

In addition to people from different traditions interpreting texts differently due to the tradition-constituted nature of their understanding, there is also the matter of the development of an individual within their tradition over time. For example, I read both Machiavelli’s The Prince and Burnham’s The Machiavellians many years ago, and my understanding of these texts, as well as the parts of them upon which I focus, has changed drastically over that time.

The issue here, however, goes further than the interpretation of texts. Traditions do not merely supply different opinions concerning an independently existing political world. They partly constitute what participants are capable of recognising as belonging to that world. A king is not simply an unusually powerful individual upon whom a traditional title has subsequently been placed. The same is true of a noble, a citizen, a priest, a party official or a member of the proletariat. If we remove the traditions which constitute these social objects, we do not uncover the same political actors in a more scientifically purified form.

This presents a particular problem for Burnham because his method depends upon the belief that political language can be stripped away to reveal the permanent realities beneath it. Liberalism, fascism, socialism, democracy and monarchy may describe themselves differently, but beneath these descriptions Burnham finds the same division between ruling minorities and ruled majorities, the same competition for power and the same techniques by which elites secure their position. This procedure appears anti-liberal because it rejects the claims liberal orders make about themselves. Yet the anthropology it presupposes remains recognisably liberal. Political actors appear as already constituted individuals with broadly fixed desires, especially the desire for power, who then employ doctrines, institutions and political formulas as instruments in pursuit of those desires. Their inherited order may affect the language in which they justify themselves, but it does not appear to constitute who they are, what they perceive themselves to be doing or what kinds of political action are intelligible to them.

Burnham treats traditions as though they were clothing worn by an otherwise universal political animal. My objection is not that recurring structures cannot be identified across different orders. Burnham’s attempt to discover them is one of the great strengths of his work. The problem is that recurrence does not establish independence from tradition. Structural analogy does not eliminate the inherited orders through which those positions, purposes and powers are constituted.

Burnham would certainly have denied being a liberal in this sense. Nevertheless, his analysis retains the liberal tendency to begin with an individual who is conceptually prior to the inherited order. The individual may no longer be, for example, Locke’s rights-bearing proprietor, but he remains an independently constituted centre of appetite and calculation, as Burnham’s approval of Adam Smith demonstrates. Burnham replaces the liberal individual seeking security or property with political man seeking power, while leaving intact the deeper assumption that the actor can be understood prior to the traditions and institutions through which he becomes a particular kind of actor. His realism consequently remains dependent upon the anthropology of the doctrine he believes himself to have escaped.

The reason for specifying all of this at the start of this post is that I do not wish the following criticisms of Burnham to be read as some form of debunking or hostile refutation. What I hope it is read as is an attempt made in good faith to inhabit the tradition that Burnham was trying to inaugurate and to correct his approach in accordance with additional resources that he would not have had available to him at the time he wrote.

With that said, we can now get to the point.

Burnham’s Misreading of Machiavelli

Whilst this section is titled Burnham’s Misreading of Machiavelli, this is somewhat misleading, as it is not so much Burnham alone who misreads him as it is many of the academic readings of Machiavelli I have encountered, and I think the manner in which they misread him is telling. This is something I covered in my last book, Themis, but I will repeat much of it here along with a number of other points.

So how does Burnham misread him? In many ways his reading is exemplary. His refusal to focus on the tired and uninteresting “moral” issue is correct, although that is a discussion for another day, as is his recognition of Machiavelli’s focus upon observation and his supplying of examples drawn from across many contexts.

Where the problem really begins can be seen in this passage:

The Machiavellians, “Political Man”

Does Machiavelli indeed present orders as being divided between ruler-types and ruled-types? Yes, he does make this kind of distinction regarding general human nature. Within any order there are only so many particularly ambitious people, and they can be identified and controlled relatively quickly. The rest are passive. But this is not the underlying ontological model which Machiavelli is employing, and I believe it is Burnham’s mistake on this point, repeated by almost everybody else, which allows him to believe that the likes of Mosca are theoretically compatible with Machiavelli when they are not. They may be compatible in their general intention and spirit of inquiry, but not in the political ontology they employ.

Burnham’s reduction of Machiavelli to the distinction between ruler-types and ruled-types should be understood as more than a mere textual mistake. It follows from the categories Burnham brings to the text. Once political actors have been reduced to individuals distinguished principally by their possession of power or their appetite for it, Machiavelli’s king, nobles and people can readily be collapsed into a ruling minority confronting a ruled majority. What disappears in this translation is precisely the structure Machiavelli is describing. The king and the nobles are not simply members of a single ruler-type. They occupy distinct positions in a recurrent relation of tension with one another. The people are not merely the passive remainder over whom these rulers contend, but a third element whose alliance can transform the position of both the executive and the great. Burnham sees two human types where Machiavelli is analysing three different parts of an order and the relations between them.

(Edit: As Infinity Sumitter suggested in the comments, the fact that The Prince is addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici may also explain why Machiavelli identifies only two humours. This is not a description of the whole order from outside, addressed to an impartial third party. It is a description of the order from within and from the standpoint of the prince. The great and the people consequently appear as the two humours with which the prince must contend, while the prince himself is not classified as a third humour because he occupies the position from which the other two are being described.)

So the question is: what framework is Machiavelli using? Machiavelli is actually clear about the model he employs. For Machiavelli there are either republics or principalities. Burnham even notes this:

But I would like to draw the reader’s attention to two things here. The first is something we will return to later in this post, and that is that Burnham is describing Machiavelli as analysing where “sovereignty rests.” This is misleading. Although the intellectual materials from which theories of sovereignty would later be constructed already existed, Machiavelli does not organise his political analysis around the mature Bodinian problem of locating an absolute, perpetual and final authority within the commonwealth.

The second thing is that, as again noted by Burnham, this is complicated by a very odd passage in the Discourses:

What is more important to note is that this happens in only one part of The Prince and the Discourses: Discourses I.2.

I am not a Machiavelli scholar, but having read both of these works in detail a number of times now, it seems absolutely clear to me that Discourses I.2 is an utterly anomalous chapter. It is almost a carbon copy of Polybius and does not cohere with the framework Machiavelli employs throughout the rest of his works.

Whatever its compositional history, Discourses I.2 should not be treated as the master key to Machiavelli’s political ontology. Its Polybian classification is not the framework through which he ordinarily analyses political relations in either of his major works. If this chapter is bracketed as an anomalous deployment of an inherited classificatory system, the remainder of the work demonstrates a remarkably consistent structure which is comparable to the model later developed by Jouvenel. As I wrote in Themis:

If we set aside these familiar but unproductive debates and instead treat Machiavelli as offering accurate observations of human orders, a clear theoretical structure emerges across both The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, one that parallels the model presented here. A case in point is Chapter 4 of The Prince, where Machiavelli contrasts the conquest of France with that of the Ottoman Empire. France, he argues, would be easier to conquer but harder to hold, while the Ottoman Empire, like Darius III’s Persia, would be harder to conquer yet easier to govern once subdued. His reasoning rests on logic which matches the TL model: in France the monarchy depended on powerful barons who constituted semi-independent bastions of authority, whereas in the Ottoman Empire no such parallel centres existed once the ruler was overthrown. In the TL model we would understand this as a distinction between an order in which the lower intermediaries maintained large amounts of power and one in which the upper intermediary had managed to centralise power.

The same structural pattern appears in Chapters 8 and 9 of The Prince. In Chapter 8, Machiavelli describes how Agathocles of Sicily secured authority by eliminating what we can see were the lower intermediaries of his order. Chapter 9 then makes explicit the logic of alliance between the upper intermediaries and either the lower intermediaries or the periphery, echoing the claims of Chapter 4: monarchies reliant on nobility are less stable, whereas those aligned with the periphery prove more secure. This argument recurs in Discourses I.16, where Machiavelli cites Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea, who “cut all the aristocrats into pieces to the greatest satisfaction of the people.” Another instance appears in Discourses I.40, where he criticises Appius Claudius for erring in his alignment with the lower intermediaries of his order, because—

“…those tyrants who have the masses as their friend and the nobles as their enemies are more secure, since their power is upheld by greater forces than the power of those who have the people as their enemy and the nobility as their friend.”

These few cases hardly exhaust the many instances where Machiavelli refers directly to the interaction of these three elements. Such references pervade both The Prince and the Discourses, with one striking exception. In Discourses I.2, Machiavelli reproduces a long passage from Polybius’ Histories VI, where Polybius outlines his theory of anacyclosis—the cyclical progression and degeneration of regimes through monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and ochlocracy before repeating the cycle. The question then arises: how could Machiavelli accept Polybius’ six or more regime types while also adhering to a tripartite structure of human orders?

A further difficulty lies in Machiavelli’s claim that all orders are either republics or principalities. Within the framework of this work, this presents little problem, since Machiavelli’s conception of the republic still presupposes a structure of upper intermediaries, lower intermediaries and a periphery. In relation to Polybius’ anacyclosis, however, the issue becomes confusing. If, as Machiavelli asserts, there are only republics and principalities, why cite Polybius at all? One interpretation holds that Machiavelli regarded the remaining categories as transitory and unstable, and therefore of little consequence. Yet this reading is weakened by his use of the present perfect hanno avuto in The Prince, where he writes:

Tutti gli Stati, tutti i domini che hanno avuto ed hanno imperio sopra gli uomini sono stati e sono o repubbliche o principati.

This translates into English as:

All the states, all the dominions that have had and have dominion over men have been and are republics or principalities.

This sentence is unusually clear, leaving little room for interpretive flexibility and thus placing us at an impasse.

One possible resolution is to assume that Machiavelli treated the Polybian categories as variations within the broader types of principalities and republics: monarchy, kingship and tyranny would thus fall under principalities, while aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and ochlocracy would fall under republics. Yet this interpretation is far from clear and becomes even less so in Discourses I.2, where certain passages could be read as suggesting that Machiavelli regarded some monarchic orders as republics. The case of Sparta is especially telling. At several points he refers to it as a republic—for example, in Discourses II.3, “Lycurgus, founder of the Spartan republic”—yet elsewhere he calls it a principality, as in I.6 when he writes of the “Spartan kings, who, being placed together in that principate.” This inconsistency sits uneasily with standard political categories, for Sparta not only had kings, but in fact had two, and Machiavelli himself refers to them explicitly as re.

The difficulty is compounded by Machiavelli’s praise of the Roman order, which, he observes, possessed a king in practice if not in name through the office of the consuls. Since Machiavelli conceives of republics as possessing a tripartite structure, his terminological looseness here is less problematic than it might appear; he is not using “republic” in the modern democratic sense. For him, republics include an element which functions as a king in all but name, making it understandable that he would conflate the terms, though it remains a source of confusion. The problem deepens with his inconsistent vocabulary: at times he employs different words for what seem to be the same institutions, and at others he uses the same word for quite different ones. His use of stato/i to denote both the totality of orders and their subdivisions, and his tendency to intermingle this term with governo/i for matters previously described as stato/i, is especially problematic.

Returning to the tripartite structure, one might suppose that Machiavelli intended the Polybian categories to be subsumed under the broader division of principality and republic. He does, after all, claim in the Discourses that Rome achieved a kind of perfection by incorporating monarchic, aristocratic and popular elements simultaneously. Yet even here his meaning remains unclear and often convoluted. This brings us to a further, unresolved question: what precisely does Machiavelli mean by “republic” and “principality” in the first place?

Chapter II of the Discourses would seem the obvious place for Machiavelli to provide a definition, given its title, Di quante spezie sono le republiche, e di quale fu la republica romana (“Of how many species are republics, and of which was the Roman republic”). Yet he does not—unless one accepts Harvey Mansfield’s view that Machiavelli means republics founded by a single legislator versus those formed by chance as the “species” in question, an interpretation which is not especially convincing. Sparta again complicates matters, unless we assume Machiavelli uses “republic” merely to denote an “order” or “government,” closer to the original Greek and Latin usage. But if this is the case, we are left to wonder why he employed the term so loosely and why he did not clarify his meaning.

One way to address the difficulties posed by this chapter is to assume, with Leo Strauss, that it contains some form of hidden teaching, as he suggests in relation to other contradictions in Machiavelli’s work. Yet in this case such an interpretation is difficult to sustain, and I remain at a loss to explain what that teaching might be. Another approach is simply to cut the proverbial Gordian knot and disregard the chapter altogether. Several reasons justify bracketing it in this manner: it is extremely difficult to reconcile with the rest of the Discourses and The Prince; its formal classification contributes little to the analytical system Machiavelli ordinarily employs; and nowhere else in either work does Machiavelli invoke the Polybian scheme in this form. If we treat the chapter as an aberration and set it aside, the task becomes far simpler, for in the remainder of The Prince and the Discourses Machiavelli applies the tripartite model with remarkable consistency.

What we have, then, is a relatively short chapter which employs a classificatory system not found elsewhere in either of the two works. Its importance cannot be decided simply by calculating its share of their combined word count, but neither should its explicit theoretical language automatically be treated as the key to everything Machiavelli writes elsewhere. The more important question is which framework he actually employs when analysing concrete political relations, and throughout the overwhelming majority of both works that framework is exceptionally consistent in its employment of a tripartite structure.

If we bracket this chapter, could we really say that Machiavelli is operating with a ruler/ruled model? We could if we focused directly upon the two humours, probably best expressed in Chapter 9 of The Prince, but if we look at the operative model being employed in that chapter, the interpretation becomes unsustainable. Machiavelli begins with two opposed humours, but this does not leave us with a simple division between rulers and ruled. The conflict between the great and the people produces, or sustains, the position of the prince, whose interests are not reducible to those of either side. There may only be two humours, then, but the political relation Machiavelli is actually describing has three parts.

Machiavelli’s discussion in Chapter 9 is concerned with how the conflict between the two humours produces a distinct executive position, and with how the character and stability of that position differ according to whether the prince is established by the nobles or by the people. Across the two works more generally, the institutional organisation of these relations distinguishes the principality from the republic, while their failure to produce an effective arrangement results in disorder.

Machiavelli recognises throughout both books that the prince, or whatever executive position one may wish to call it, exists in a state of tension with the great, which is why it is better for the prince to ally with the people. The maintenance of a ruler/ruled dichotomy is consequently unjustifiable. It also helps to explain the relationship between the Discourses and The Prince. While The Prince examines these relations principally from the position of the prince or executive, the Discourses examines their broader institutional organisation within a republic, where the relations among the executive, nobles and people are organised without their underlying tensions being eliminated. If that sounds suspiciously like the republicanism later found in the United States, there are works which trace Machiavelli’s influence upon it.

Machiavelli and Sovereignty

As was pointed out regarding this passage:

Machiavelli was not advancing an account of sovereignty in the later Bodinian or Hobbesian sense. To present him as doing so is anachronistic. That Burnham nevertheless translates Machiavelli into the language of sovereignty is indicative of the manner in which he brings to Machiavelli an ontology developed substantially later and then comprehends him through its categories.

By introducing the language of sovereignty, Burnham assumes that the relations Machiavelli describes must finally resolve themselves into one supreme authority somewhere within the order. Combined with Burnham’s tendency to treat political actors as individuals who already exist, with largely fixed appetites, prior to the order they inhabit, this changes the kind of political object Machiavelli is understood to be describing.

To return to the tripartite model which Machiavelli repeatedly deploys, he is not asserting that whichever component or arrangement happens to prevail thereby becomes sovereign. The prince, the great and the people are not three possible bearers of a single substance called sovereignty. They are different components of the political order, distinguished by their positions, capacities and humours, and defined partly through their relations with one another. A prince who depends upon the people does not thereby make either himself or the people sovereign, any more than a prince dependent upon the great makes either himself or the great sovereign. Nor does the existence of a prince establish that the prince stands above the order as its final and indivisible source of authority. Machiavelli’s concern is with the configuration of these elements: which supports the prince, which constrains him, which threatens him, and what institutional arrangement emerges from their conflict.

Burnham’s translation therefore does more than modernise Machiavelli’s vocabulary. It silently changes the object being described. A political order constituted through these internal relations becomes an arrangement of individuals and groups beneath an identifiable sovereign authority. Once that translation has taken place, Burnham can treat Machiavelli as though he had already discovered the permanent realities concealed beneath later political formulas. But what appears to Burnham as Machiavelli’s discovery of those realities is partly the result of Burnham having redescribed Machiavelli through categories supplied by his own inherited liberal order.

Advancing Burnham’s Project

None of this invalidates Burnham’s general approach. His insistence that we should not simply accept the descriptions which political orders give of themselves, and that we should instead compare these descriptions with the observable relations through which those orders actually operate, remains entirely correct. The mistake lies in supposing that once the participants’ descriptions have been set aside, what remains is a neutral political reality which can be described without reference to the traditions through which its actors, offices and purposes are constituted. Burnham successfully demonstrates that liberalism, socialism, monarchy and democracy cannot be taken entirely at their own word, but he does not apply the same suspicion to the categories through which he conducts that demonstration. “Political man,” “ruling minority,” “ruled majority” and even “power” are treated as though they name self-evident objects rather than concepts inherited from, and rendered intelligible within, a particular intellectual tradition.

The proper response is not to abandon Burnham’s method, but to apply it to Burnham himself. If political thinkers must be understood partly through the orders and traditions they inhabit, then Burnham cannot occupy an external position from which every political formula is exposed while his own categories remain untouched. His theory must also be examined as the product of a particular historical order, with its own anthropology, epistemology and characteristic understanding of what counts as political reality. This does not mean that Burnham’s observations are false or that his work can be dismissed as merely another political formula. It means that we have to distinguish between what he actually observed and the categories through which he interpreted it.

This is why I have described the criticism as an attempt to inhabit and advance the tradition Burnham was trying to inaugurate. Traditions develop by identifying inadequacies within their inherited formulations and correcting them while continuing to pursue the problems which produced them in the first place. Burnham’s central question—what actually occurs beneath the descriptions political orders offer of themselves—remains the correct one. The problem is his assumption that the answer can be reached by stripping away tradition until we arrive at ruler-types and ruled-types operating beneath it.

Tradition is not merely part of the description concealing political reality. It is partly constitutive of the political reality Burnham wished to explain. Correcting him on this point does not bring his project to an end. It allows us to continue it.

The Machiavellians

Burnham’s argument in The Machiavellians is, in its simplest form, that politics should not be understood primarily through the claims political orders make about themselves. Democracies say that the people rule, monarchies that authority comes from God, socialists that they represent the proletariat, and so on, but Burnham’s point is that none of this tells us very much about who actually makes decisions. His attempt is therefore to get beneath these claims and identify the recurring structure which remains when the ideological language is stripped away. Drawing on Mosca, Pareto, Michels and Sorel, he treats each as having discovered a different aspect of the same underlying political reality, and explicitly presents the principles he draws from them as constituting a common Machiavellian tradition of political thought.

The Italian Elite Theorists and Sorel

Mosca’s contribution is the claim that every society is divided between a relatively small organised minority which rules and a much larger majority which is ruled, with the organised minority holding the decisive advantage if the two come into conflict. Alongside this he introduces the idea of the political formula, by which the ruling minority represents and justifies its rule in terms which are accepted, or at least intelligible, within the wider order. Pareto arrives at something superficially similar but from a quite different direction. Pareto’s account rests on relatively persistent psychological dispositions or sentiments which underlie political behaviour, with the doctrines and justifications offered by political actors appearing as derivations constructed around these more fundamental residues. Michels again arrives at oligarchy from another direction. Although his account contains psychological claims concerning both leaders and masses, its distinctive explanatory mechanism lies in the requirements generated by organisation itself. Large organisations require administration, expertise, delegation, control over information and permanent leadership, and these requirements tend to produce a leadership which becomes progressively more difficult for the membership to control.

Sorel presents an even more awkward case for Burnham’s synthesis because his distinctive contribution is not primarily another explanation for the existence of ruling minorities at all. His account instead turns upon the role of myth in constituting and directing collective political action. The syndicalist general strike is not, for Sorel, primarily a prediction about what will literally happen which can subsequently be compared with events and judged true or false. It is an encompassing image through which a group understands its struggle and is moved to act. Burnham incorporates this into the Machiavellian tradition by treating Sorel as having identified another recurring feature of political life: rational doctrines alone do not move political collectivities, whereas myths can integrate groups, organise their energies and direct action. But this already sits somewhat uneasily beside the other theorists. Sorel is not simply offering another causal mechanism by which elites come to rule. He is examining the symbolic constitution of political agency itself.

The problem is that Burnham takes the convergence of these thinkers upon a series of phenomena which he regards as characteristic of political life as evidence that they are describing different aspects of the same underlying reality. But this is rather like taking Aristotle, Newton and Einstein, observing that all three dealt with what we now group under the heading of gravity, and then concluding that they therefore belonged to the same theoretical school. That each was attempting to account for some of the same observable phenomena does not mean that they agreed about what those phenomena actually were, what caused them, or what sort of world had to exist for them to occur. The common object of explanation does not establish a common ontology.

Burnham makes something very close to this mistake with Mosca, Pareto, Michels and Sorel. Pareto grounds his explanation in human psychology and the persistence of non-logical dispositions; Michels in the consequences of complex organisation; Mosca in the advantage which organised minorities hold over majorities; and Sorel in the symbolic forms through which collective action becomes possible. These accounts are not necessarily incompatible, but their compatibility cannot simply be inferred from the fact that they overlap. Michels does not require Pareto’s residues to generate oligarchy, Mosca does not merely reproduce Michels’ account of mass organisation, and Sorel’s theory of myth is not obviously an explanation of elite rule at all. They might be brought together within a larger account, but Burnham does not provide one. He translates each thinker into a vocabulary of recurring political mechanisms and then treats the possibility of making that translation as evidence that they have all discovered parts of the same reality.

The Tradition Problem

This problem becomes worse once the question of tradition in the MacIntyrean sense is introduced, because Burnham’s entire procedure depends upon the assumption that one can strip away what political actors say about themselves until one reaches a more basic political reality beneath it. There is something correct in this procedure, because there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the account an institution gives of itself is also an adequate explanation of how that institution actually operates. The problem lies not in refusing to accept the claims of participants at face value, but in assuming that because those claims do not adequately explain the distribution of power, the relevant objects can therefore first be identified independently of the inherited traditions through which they are rendered intelligible.

This is where Burnham’s idea of elite rule begins to function as a kind of brute underlying reality, and I do not think this can be sustained. A medieval bishop, a Bolshevik party official, or a senior modern civil servant can certainly all be described as members of elites if the term is defined abstractly enough, but this does not mean that there exists some socially prior thing called an “elite” of which all of these people are merely historical variants. They were not generic elites who subsequently took on these roles as a disguise. They are what they are only within the traditions and institutions which make those offices intelligible.

This creates an especially serious problem for Mosca’s political formula, although the problem needs to be stated carefully. Mosca does not simply treat political formulas as cynical inventions imposed upon the ruled by an already constituted ruling class, and Burnham himself recognises that political formulas are necessary to the integration and maintenance of a political order. The difficulty is deeper than this. Mosca nevertheless retains an analytical distinction between the ruling minority as a social fact and the political formula through which its rule becomes legitimate and intelligible. From a tradition-constituted position it is this distinction which becomes questionable.

A medieval king does not first exist as a generic member of a ruling minority whose position is subsequently rationalised through an ideological account of kingship. What it means to be a king is already articulated through an inherited Christian, dynastic, juridical and institutional order. The same problem appears with a Bolshevik cadre. The Bolshevik does not first exist as a generic political elite and then adopt Marxism-Leninism as a useful political formula with which to legitimise an independently existing position. Marxism-Leninism supplies part of the conceptual order through which political knowledge and what kinds of action can be understood as legitimate in the first place. The issue is then not merely that the political formula influences or sustains an already existing elite. It is that the intelligible identity of the elite itself may already presuppose the symbolic and institutional order which the concept of the political formula places analytically after it.

Sorel makes this difficulty particularly visible from within Burnham’s own collection of thinkers. If a political myth is capable of constituting a group as a historical actor, giving form to its aspirations and organising its perception of political struggle, then it cannot easily be reduced to a secondary ideological expression laid over an independently identifiable political reality. The revolutionary proletariat understood through the myth of the general strike is not simply a pre-existing collection of individuals to whom an effective piece of propaganda has subsequently been supplied. The myth participates in constituting the collectivity as the sort of political actor it becomes. Sorel therefore does not merely provide Burnham with another example of the gap between political rhetoric and political reality. His account raises the prior question of how political realities become intelligible and actionable to participants in the first place. In this respect Sorel comes much closer than Burnham appears to recognise to undermining the very distinction between underlying political reality and secondary ideological representation upon which Burnham’s synthesis depends.

The same difficulty can then be turned back upon the theorists themselves. Mosca, Pareto, Michels, Sorel and Burnham are not observers standing outside inherited traditions who have independently discovered a political reality previously obscured by ideology. Pareto arrives with a positivistic inheritance and a particular conception of psychology. Michels arrives through the experience of mass socialist parties, parliamentary organisation and modern bureaucracy. Mosca is operating within a different nineteenth-century language of political sociology, ruling classes and constitutional development. Sorel brings with him syndicalism, Marxism, Bergsonian influences and an account of myth which already sits awkwardly with Burnham’s conception of an objective political science. Burnham himself comes out of Marxism and recasts all of these writers through the language of political realism. What he presents as their common discovery can therefore just as easily be described as his translation of several partially incompatible intellectual traditions into his own vocabulary. He then takes the fact that they can be translated in this way as evidence that his vocabulary represents what was really there underneath them all.

A large amount of modern elite theory seems to have inherited precisely this problem. Mosca, Pareto, Michels, Burnham, Jouvenel, Schmitt and so on are frequently placed alongside one another as though their underlying theoretical differences are merely incidental. The difficulty is that these thinkers begin from very different assumptions about human beings and political order. Once those assumptions are ignored, apparent agreement at the level of observation is mistaken for agreement at the level of explanation.

None of this requires abandoning the original methodological instinct which made these writers useful. It is entirely legitimate to begin from observed political behaviour rather than accepting the participant’s own account as the final explanation of that behaviour. The mistake is to infer from the inadequacy of those claims as causal explanations that they are merely ideological additions to an order which can be completely described without them. If the actors, institutions and forms of authority being examined are themselves constituted within inherited traditions, then there is no tradition-independent political reality lying beneath them in quite the form Burnham requires.

I think almost all of this political area is comprised of scam artists, grifters, or intelligence agencies running one dumb operation or another, either to create tactical disturbances or to undermine disturbances. The result is a kaleidoscope of mentally deranged people and narratives which comes across as something akin to a surrealist circus.

There are, and this is a woefully incomplete list, people hawking egg recipes, lecturing Americans on bodybuilding and guacamole, running sex cults, spamming Irish nationalism at Americans, Spiderman exegesis…it’s a circus that is a fine counterpart to the left-wing circus, but at least the left wing one is orders of magnitude more intelligent.

This brings me to Jason Arday. I had studiously ignored this nonsense, as it is obviously some sort of culture-war nonsense drummed up by the Thielverse, but there is something adjacent to it that has long bothered me.

Did Arday make stuff up and engage in plagiarism? I assume so, but I also kind of don’t care. Did all the people promoting him wildly beyond his capabilities know this? Almost certainly. They aren’t stupid, for the most part. The left is full of people who can read and follow complex arguments. I would wager nearly 100% of them knew perfectly well that Arday was full of it, but they had quotas to meet, boxes to tick.

Now let’s flip this on its head and look at the “right”.

How many Ardays do you think exist in the right-wing sphere?

How many people on the right are just making stuff up, plagiarizing, operating with IQs barely above a glass of water, whilst being wildly overpromoted?

At the top? Pretty much all of them.

Here is where my issue comes in. Whilst I do not doubt that left-wing people, all these liberals, have no issue comprehending that Arday was as dumb as rocks and a DEI token, how many on the right get that people like Matt Goodwin, Mike Cernovich, Keith Woods, Auron MacIntyre, etc. are comparable to him? I’d say the fraction of people on the right self-aware of this is far, far smaller than the fraction of people on the left who understood what Arday was.

Take Goodwin, for example. Goodwin clearly had ChatGPT write an entire book for him, and yet it seems to have had little effect on his clout on the right. This was after spending the better part of his career being basically a Hope not Hate activist.

As for Cernovich, I refuse to even read, let alone offer criticism of, his work and that goes for his contemporaries like Candace Owens. Such literary genius as Gorilla Mindset, Danger & Play: Essays on Embracing Masculinity, and MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again is an embarassment.

I have zero doubt that if you put Arday’s academic output beside this, even accepting the plagiarism and fabrications, Arday comes out on top.

But what about the serious thinkers, like Keith Woods, the wonder boy of the white nationalists?

I don’t think there is much space between Arday and Woods.

Arday sat around making stuff up about race whilst presenting himself as a serious thinker, and Woods…sits around making stuff up about race whilst presenting himself as a serious thinker. Both were/are obviously highly effective self-promoters and display serious levels of narcissism.

Woods’ book Nationalism: The Politics of Identity is a good window into this. I haven’t read it, and I won’t read it. What I have done is skim some of the Substack posts that make up the work(it’s a collection of Substack posts) dip into some of the nuts and bolts of the claims being made, and conclude that it’s a waste of my time. I don’t care for any autistic crying that I have to read it cover to cover to “understand” it. I have limited time and a large reading list to catch up on, so no, I won’t.

Does Woods present a new political theory, worldview, ideology, or anything of the kind? No. That is evident from even a cursory skim.

Does Woods synthesize positions into something coherent, at least? Not really.

What Woods does is give a list of things he likes, listed here:

He then presents these things as cohesive without giving any serious account of why they are. We have some ethnonationalism, Platonism, classical republicanism, some race realism, some Schmitt and so on… he might as well have thrown in his sock-colour preference and it wouldn’t have made much difference.

I’ve seen this before. I can tell, without reading any further, that this book will be a colossal waste of time. Why do I need to read a book which simply amounts to Woods listing what he believes? Why should I have to read about what Keith Woods believes?

Now, the obvious counterpoint to this would be that he makes the case in some of the posts that what he believes is rooted in some kind of reality, and so is not really merely his beliefs. Prominent among this seems to be a really garbled claim that nationalism, or something, predates modern nationalism, hence his preferences are really reflections of reality. But, again, I just can’t be bothered to go into detail on this because I can see where it is undoubtedly going to go. I am assuming, and it was pretty much confirmed from my skimming, that he is messing around with definitions, not dealing with the underlying issues of misrepresenting orders based around sacrifice, ritual, and ancestor descent, and just projecting categories backwards (retrojection/presentism).

Just reading this post, for example, felt like I was suffering a stroke.

I don’t understand what he is saying, I can’t follow the arguments, and I get deeply confused midway through. Its like a written equivalent of this image:

This isn’t a reading comprehension issue on my part.

Consider the following paragraph:

So they weren’t “nationalist”, but “ethnicity and tribal kinship” were central, and so we can identify “national identities”. This is gibberish. And then he decides later that, actually, they did have nationalism:

It seems, as best as I can tell, that Woods does not understand the different definitions or how these definitions fit into different traditions, and is instead using them all interchangeably. Or he is disputing the claims of modern theorists that there was nationalism here, as per the following?

But he already conceded that, so I don’t know what he is saying, and neither does he.

Then we have Auron MacIntyre as the last of my examples. Auron, like Woods, has been feted by much the same people as a rising star of the right-wing intellectual sphere. His book, The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, released in May 2024, seems to be a large part of the proof of his intellect. There are a couple of problems with this, and the fact that it wasn’t even partly picked up until the left got wind of him is really symptomatic of how disingenuous the Arday thing is.

Here is the bibliography for the book.

I have seen 5,000-word blog posts with longer bibliographies.

In fact, here is Arday’s Understanding Race and Educational Leadership in Higher Education: Exploring the Black and Ethnic Minority (BME) Experience, published in a SAGE journal. It’s about 6,000 words, and this is his bibliography:

• Adams (2017), Guardian article on absence of Black academics in senior roles

• Adserias et al. (2017), diversity and organisational leadership in higher education

• Aguirre & Martinez (2006), Diversity Leadership in Higher Education

• Ahmed (2012), On Being Included

• Alexander (2018), “Breaking Black”

• Alexander & Arday (2015), Aiming Higher: Race, Inequality and Diversity in the Academy

• Anderson (2008), Driving Change through Diversity and Globalization

• Andrews (2016), Guardian piece advocating Black Studies

• Arday (2017), UCU report on BME doctoral students

• Arday & Mirza (2018), Dismantling Race in Higher Education

• Ashe & Nazroo (2016), Race at Work Survey analysis

• Bhopal (2014), BME academics and inequality

• Bhopal & Brown (2016), BME leadership/support networks

• Bhopal & Jackson (2013), BME academics, identity and career progression

• Bush, Glover & Sood (2006), BME educational leaders

• Chun & Evans (2009), diversity in higher education

• Cohen, Manion & Morrison (2011), Research Methods in Education

• Davies & Gannon (2006), Doing Collective Biography

• Equality Challenge Unit (2015), HE equality statistics

• Equality Challenge Unit (2016), HE equality statistics

• Gillborn (2015), critical-race analysis of education reform

• Gronn & Lacey (2006), leadership selection and “cloning”

• HESA (2016), staff ethnicity statistics

• Iverson (2008), institutional diversity discourse

• Jarboe (2016), women in HE leadership

• Kezar & Eckel (2008), leadership and diversity agendas

• Law (2017), “Building the anti-racist university”

• Leadership Foundation (2015), ethnicity and HE leadership

• Leathwood, Maylor & Moreau (2009), BME staff in higher education

• Leonardo (2002), whiteness and critical pedagogy

• Miller (2016), “White sanction” and BME academic promotion

• Mirza (2017), women of colour in the academy

• UK Parliament (1976), Race Relations Act

• UK Parliament (2010), Equality Act

• Pilkington (2011), Institutional Racism in the Academy

• Pilkington (2013), institutional racism in HE

• Rollock (2012), racial microaggressions in academia

• Rollock (2016), Guardian article on racial equality in universities

• Shepherd (2017), women and HE leadership

• Shilliam (2015), blog post on Black academia in Britain

• Singh & Kwhali (2015), BME leadership in higher education

• Smith (2012), Key Issues in Social Justice and Education

• Sue (2010), Microaggressions in Everyday Life

• Tate & Bagguley (2017), “Building the anti-racist university: Next steps”

I think its Arday > Auron Macintyre here.

Ok, you might say, Arday’s work was largely copied, not original, made up on the fly without any real concern for academic standards.

Sure.

Now I want to present a series of events and leave the reader to draw conclusions here.

In 2019 I wrote my book, Nemesis, which extended Bertrand de Jouvenel’s model to analyse more recent developments such as human rights, civil rights, and Black Lives Matter.

Here is me talking to MacIntyre about Jouvenel’s model on 24 Jul 2021.

Now here is MacIntyre in the comments of a video dated 18 Mar 2021 on Jouvenel.

So this establishes a number of things. One, he hadn’t approached Jouvenel until this point. Two, he was fully aware of how I had adapted Jouvenel from the YouTube interview where I discuss it directly with him.

So the order, as he admits here, is this:

• 2019: Nemesis is published, extending Jouvenel’s model into contemporary areas including civil rights, human rights and BLM.

• March 2021: MacIntyre publicly states that he knows of Nemesis and knows that it draws on Jouvenel.

• July 2021: MacIntyre speaks with me directly about Jouvenel’s model, giving him direct exposure to my interpretation and applications.

• May 2024: The Total State appears, with Jouvenel providing a major part of its explanatory structure and that structure being applied to contemporary progressive politics, including civil-rights politics. The published bibliography contains only about 13 entries, including Jouvenel, Pareto, Mosca, Schmitt, Burnham/Francis-adjacent material, a YouTube video and a Substack post; Nemesis is not listed. MacIntyre’s own subsequent description of the book begins from Jouvenel’s proposition that power centralizes by eroding rival social authorities.

Then you have the following things which are overtly present in Nemesis and The Total State which are not present in Jouvenel, or are, at best, merely implied/underdeveloped:

• The public/private distinction as a mechanism that conceals the actual structure of power.

• Power operating culturally by selecting and institutionalising ideas rather than simply issuing orders.

• Human rights/NGOs/social movements as instruments of geopolitical power and international centralisation.

• Contemporary identity politics as an elite–periphery centralising mechanism.

I’m sure there are more points, but I think this is sufficient.

I am not acknowledged anywhere in the book.

I’ll leave the reader to come to their own conclusions as to what has happened here.

What I will say is that here is a supposedly serious new right-wing intellectual work whose bibliography is barely a bibliography, whose author demonstrably knew about an earlier work applying the same source-model to some of the same contemporary phenomena, and whose audience apparently displayed no curiosity about any of this while simultaneously treating Arday’s scholarly deficiencies as proof of the corruption of the opposing intellectual establishment.

OK.

NB:

Another example I could have included, among the wide range of examples, would have been Bronze Age Pervert’s body of work, but that would be like kicking a corpse in the nuts after this savage, unrelenting beatdown:

Lex Scantinia

A Historical Criticism of Costin Alamariu's "Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy"

I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy…

Read more

3 years ago · 246 likes · 25 comments · Roger Morrison

Power Is Power?

I have never seen Game of Thrones. So I do not know the context or the characters, and I am not going to speak to any of that. What I will do is make a point regarding how stupid this entire discussion is and the premise that “power is power”. I do not know if the author of the book wrote that, or if it was the screenwriters for the show, but whoever it was is not saying anything particularly intelligent.

The central focus of my criticism will revolve around the position of queen. Here I will disregard the issue of gender and simply approach the queen as the holder of sovereign monarchical office, so for my purposes I will treat it as basically synonymous with king in the modern and early modern sense.

What is actually supposed to be meant by “power is power”?

It is obviously tautological off the bat and so, by itself, meaningless. But people who repeat it clearly seem to think it contains some sort of profound observation. The problem is that they never seem capable of explaining what that observation actually is. We are therefore left trying to infer the assumptions which sit behind it from the manner in which they speak.

The basic position seems to be that power is somehow irreducible. It is just a social fact which does not itself require explanation. Closely attached to this is the idea that power is ultimately a matter of coercive capacity, and that this is in some sense primitive, something which exists prior to the particular social order in which it appears. The form through which this power is exercised then becomes largely incidental. Kingship, office, institutions and so on are merely different containers for something more fundamental called “power”.

I keep using qualifying language here because the people making this argument are entirely vague. They leave everyone else to conceptualise their priors for them, and often seem not even to recognise that they have priors which require explanation. Power simply exists. It is primitive. It does not have to be predicated on anything.

The problem is that if this is the case, then why did the woman in question need to become queen?

When she gives an order and people act in accordance with it, are they acting because of who she is as an individual, or are they acting because she is queen?

If it is simply her, then queenship is largely superfluous. She should possess approximately the same capacity to command before and after obtaining the office, assuming everything else about her remains the same. But presumably she does not. Presumably becoming queen radically changes what she is capable of making other people do. Otherwise there would have been little point in pursuing the position in the first place.

The obvious reply will be that becoming queen gives her control over armies, officials, money and institutions. But this does not answer the question. It simply pushes it one step backwards. Why does becoming queen give her control over these things? Why do the soldiers now follow her orders? Why do officials carry out her commands? Why does the occupation of this particular position alter the behaviour of large numbers of other people?

You cannot answer this by saying that she has power, because their changed behaviour is precisely the thing which the word “power” is being used to describe. You have simply renamed the phenomenon and then presented the name as an explanation.

This is where “power is power” becomes nonsense.

Her capacity to command rests on occupying a socially recognisable and intelligible position. People are not responding to her merely as a particular human being. They are responding to her as queen. They know what a queen is, they know what their own position is in relation to the queen, and they understand particular things she says as commands because they are uttered from that position.

This is not a minor detail which can simply be stripped away to reveal some more fundamental substance called power underneath. It is the thing which makes the exercise of political power possible in the first place.

If you want to reduce all of this to coercion, the problem becomes even more obvious. The queen is powerful because she controls the army. OK, so why does the army obey her? Because the generals obey her. Why do the generals obey her? Because she can have them punished. By whom? Ultimately, by people whose obedience is the very thing we were supposed to be explaining. You end up moving in a circle.

At some point you have to explain how people come to recognise certain persons as capable of issuing commands, certain words as commands rather than requests, and certain positions as carrying obligations for other people. Coercion by itself cannot explain coordinated coercion, because before you can have an army acting as an army you already require some account of how all of these people are orientating themselves in relation to one another.

This does not mean coercion is not real. Obviously it is. A man pointing a gun at someone can make him hand over his wallet. But this tells us almost nothing about how a monarchy works.

There is an enormous difference between a robber saying “give me your wallet or I will shoot you” and a queen ordering an army to move. In both cases you can use the word power if you want, but using the same word does not demonstrate that the phenomenon is the same. In one case the explanation may be immediate physical threat. In the other, thousands of people who may never have met the monarch, and may never meet one another, organise their actions around something they understand as a legitimate command issuing from an office.

That is the thing which needs explaining.

And this brings us back to the most basic problem. What exactly is “power” supposed to be here?

Is it a thing? Does someone possess a quantity of it? Is it a relationship? Is it merely the ability to make another person do something? If it is that, then what produces this ability?

People talk about someone “having power”, “gaining power” or “losing power”, and because of this the concept begins to take on the appearance of some kind of substance which individuals possess. But this is a consequence of the grammar. It does not tell us what power actually is.

If by power we mean the capacity to reliably produce particular conduct in other people, then we immediately have to ask how that capacity is constituted. There is no reason to assume in advance that the answer will be the same in every case.

And the example of queenship seems to demonstrate that it cannot be.

The character in the clip does not first possess some generic thing called power and then pour it into the position of queen. The position itself changes what she can do. It changes how other people interpret her actions and how they understand their own relation to her. Without that position, and without an order in which that position is intelligible, much of what we describe as her power simply does not exist.

A crown sitting on a table does not command anyone. Nor does a woman become capable of commanding an army merely because she physically places it on her head. There has to be an order in which the crown, the office and the act of becoming queen mean something to the people involved. Its not like the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings.

Once that exists, however, all sorts of actions become possible which otherwise would not be.

This is why “power is power” ultimately mistakes the thing which requires explanation for the explanation itself.

We observe that a queen gives an order and people obey it. We call this power. We then explain their obedience by saying that she has power.

Nothing has been explained.

Why does this person have the capacity to issue commands? Why are her words understood as commands? Why do people act in accordance with them? Why does the authority survive the death of the individual occupying the office? Why can a child inherit a throne despite being personally incapable of coercing almost anyone? Are we supposed to believe that the woman in the clip could physically coerce a grown man?

That last point alone creates enormous problems for the primitive coercive account. An infant king or a woman may be one of the most helpless people in the entire kingdom while nevertheless sitting at the centre of a political order which continues to organise itself around his position.

Whatever political power is, then, it clearly cannot simply be reduced to one individual possessing a primitive capacity to dominate another.

Political power is not simply something which exists before the order and then happens to express itself through different institutional forms. At least a very substantial part of what we call political power is constituted by the order through which it becomes intelligible.

Red King

A Reply to C. A. Bond

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17 days ago · 3 likes · Red King

This response to this post is going to be necessarily complex. As such, I will break it down into various sections to allow the reader to assess them separately.

On Marx and Marxism

Much of the criticism in the post revolves around a divergence between Marx and Marxism. In particular, focus is placed on the divergence between Marx and Stalin with regard to the stages of Marxist revolution.

As a work of Marxological criticism, I would concede many points in the reply regarding Marx’s thought and how it stands in relation to later developments within the Marxist tradition. I am not in the slightest bit “anti-Marx”, as in the man and the thinker. To be frank, I think most post-Marxist thinkers, including Engels, were second rate at best, and this is what seems to have led to the divisions which occurred between Marxism, fascism, and Nazism.

So, if the argument is to be “Marx wouldn’t have agreed with most, if not all, of the decisions later Marxists took when addressing theoretical questions”, I’m fine with this. But I would correct this by pointing out that this is not really Stalin’s misunderstanding of matters. There was, by this point, a long tradition of Marxist thought premised on these stages of economic development. In fact, Lenin’s work on the role of imperialism was an attempt to account for why these stages of development had failed to result in the supposedly inevitable revolutions. This is not simply Lenin, either, as Nikolai Bukharin initially operated from this framework too. It was also, as far as I am aware, fairly standard doctrine among mainstream Marxists such as Kautsky and Plekhanov. But I am not a Marxist scholar, so I wouldn’t be able to cite the precise history of how this developed.

If the direction of discussion is to be the misunderstandings of later Marxists, and the decisions and directions taken in response to questions raised by Marx and Engels’ theoretical claims, that is, the Marxist tradition as it developed, then that is one thread which can be followed from this reply. But it wouldn’t be a hostile discussion.

In fact, the connection between my work and Marx is perfectly correct and can be understood when you approach it through the two key influences on this work: Alasdair MacIntyre and Bertrand de Jouvenel. Alasdair MacIntyre in particular was an avowed Marxist prior to becoming a Thomist:

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/on-having-survived-the-academic-moral-philosophy-of-the-20th-century/

After Virtue, p. 215

On Power, Jouvenel, p. 9

So the claim that I have “disproven a mechanically deterministic Marxism [but] not disproven Marx himself” is something I am happy to accept.

Epistemology, or, Truth

In private discussions, the author has expressed frustration with my reference to epistemology, so I will instead refer to truth. I will do this because the connection between my work and Marx becomes clearer at this point, as does its role within Marxism and in Marx himself.

The reason this matters to the disagreement with Marx is that I am not proposing another variable within historical materialism. I am questioning the epistemological conditions under which the variables employed by historical materialism become intelligible to historical actors in the first place.

What I am ultimately arguing in Themis is that political theory, and politics more broadly, is ultimately centred around the question of truth. To make the case, I will present a very brief and horribly simplistic history which puts Marx in his context so we can see why he is such a focal point.

• In older orders, truth was accessible through metapersons: gods, spirits, ancestors.

• In later pagan orders, this continued, and access to truth was through sacrifice and ritual.

• In later monotheistic orders, truth was accessed through scripture and the priesthood.

• Then dispute over this scripture occurred. This was a dispute over access to truth. On one side, this was claimed to be mediated by the Church and correct interpretation. On the other, through direct access by readers.

• People from this same area then developed accounts of truth radically centred on the individual, unmediated by anything, as with Descartes.

This is where Hegel, and Marx, enter. They point out that this account cannot possibly be correct because how we access truth (our epistemology) is mediated by X, Y, and Z.

Once this point is conceded, that our access to truth cannot possibly be unhindered and unmediated, as held by modern philosophy and liberal accounts of politics, then the next point of debate is what these points of mediation actually are.

The continuity of this centrality of truth is hidden by the different ways in which differing orders express this process. And yes, I am perfectly aware that creating a single category here and then using it to blanket all of these orders is seriously problematic, but it is a simplification I am willing to make here.

Once you recognise that this issue of truth is central, then you begin to have some answers as to what the nature of power is. Stable and intelligible authority cannot ordinarily be reduced to possession of coercive capacity because the exercise of coercion itself has to be located within an order that identifies persons, offices, commands, obligations, and legitimate objects of force. The capacity for coercion may exist independently, but the recognised entitlement to command coercion is intelligible only through the order which identifies offices, obligations, jurisdiction, and legitimate objects of force.

This question of truth, and who or what an order recognises as standing in a position of privilege in relation to it, determines the positions of the various actors, as it does the acceptable means of coming to decisions within that particular order. In our order, truth is still seen as accessible to the individual, and as such our political institutions and means of coming to decisions are designed in accordance with this.

In Marxism, the liberal claim that formally equal individuals can simply aggregate their judgements politically is undermined by the prior claim that consciousness and political interests are conditioned by class relations. And so these orders had different political institutions that accorded with that.

How the human actor is understood to access the truth, under what conditions, and what limitations there exist, informs how that order, and who is intelligible as a figure of authority forms.

Now, where I really break with Marx is on this point - Marx correctly recognised that the liberal individual is not an epistemically unconditioned observer. Marx identifies the decisive conditions of that mediation principally through material and class relations. Themis asks whether those relations are themselves already intelligible only from within inherited symbolic, linguistic, institutional and traditional orders.

And this is where the real discussion is with Marx.

On Material History

Bond’s Jouvenelian alternative hinges on the idea that historical materialism cannot account for the autonomy of the state. His alternative ultimately risks making the state do the explanatory work that a vulgar Marxism makes “the economy” do.

This, I think, is a genuine case of theoretical misunderstanding rather than a misrepresentation of my position, because I do not claim that the state can “make itself independent of the material relations which sustain it, just as those material relations cannot be independent of the state.”

Yes, material factors constrain political action. No, I have never argued that the state exists autonomously from the material relations which sustain it. More importantly, however, the state is not the “centre of the order” in the model developed in Themis. This was precisely one of the corrections Themis made to the earlier Jouvenelian framework: the centre is the external point of reference around which the order becomes intelligible, while states, institutions, classes, and other organised actors occupy positions within that order.

The proposed symmetry between vulgar Marxism and my account therefore does not hold. I am not replacing “the economy determines politics” with “the state determines the economy”. My argument is that material relations, institutions, and political actors are reciprocally constituted within an order whose categories determine how those relations are understood and acted upon in the first place.

So, as a criticism of a simply Jouvenelian model, it is reasonable. As an argument against my more mature position in Themis, it isn’t. But that position is highly complex and unorthodox, so its not surprising it is causing confusion.

Let me preface this by saying that this is not a defence of Nigel Farage. I have my own problems with Farage and with Reform, and I increasingly think that the next election is his to lose, which he sometimes appears determined to do. But I find the Count Binface situation genuinely repellent. There is something deeply unseemly about turning Clacton into the stage for another round of Westminster comedy at precisely the moment when large parts of the country are experiencing politics not as entertainment, but as an increasingly immediate source of anxiety and material decline.

Perhaps my reaction is sharpened by a broader frustration with British public life. It is now 2026, and despite everything that has happened over the past quarter of a century, remarkably little of the personnel has changed. Britain has passed through 9/11, the Iraq War, the transformation of the country through mass immigration, the financial crisis, the constitutional reconstruction that accelerated after 1997, Brexit, Covid, the deterioration of the fiscal position, the small boats crisis, collapsing public services and a sustained fall in confidence in the state’s capacity to perform even its basic functions. Yet the same people, or people formed by precisely the same political generation, remain everywhere.

Alastair Campbell is still a fixture of political commentary. Edwina Currie still appears in public debate. The present Labour government contains figures such as Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper, John Healey, Douglas Alexander and Pat McFadden, while Andy Burnham remains one of the party’s most prominent alternative leaders. All of them belong, politically or institutionally, to the world created by New Labour. The Conservatives are hardly different. Boris Johnson continues to move through public life as though the consequences of his own period in government were somebody else’s responsibility. Around them sit the permanent institutions of Whitehall, the Cabinet Office, the civil service, the media and the wider policy establishment, all populated by people whose careers have survived one failure after another.

At some point the obvious question has to be asked. When exactly do these people go away?

A functioning political order needs some mechanism by which failure produces consequences. It needs some way of retiring exhausted ideas, discrediting people who repeatedly misjudge events and making room for people formed by different circumstances. Britain increasingly seems incapable of doing this. Instead, political failure becomes another stage in a career. Ministers become commentators, commentators become advisers, advisers return as ministers, former politicians become television personalities and everybody continues circulating through the same institutions.

The intellectual continuity is even more striking than the personal continuity. Much of British politics still operates within assumptions inherited from around the turn of the millennium. Economic growth is expected to emerge from asset inflation, population growth, consumer spending, cheap credit and expanding government expenditure. Social problems are addressed by adding another programme, another regulator, another quango or another administrative layer. When circumstances change, the underlying political imagination rarely changes with them. The same ideas are reheated and served again by essentially the same people. This is where Count Binface becomes more than an irritating joke.

There has always been an irreverent element to British electoral politics. The Monster Raving Loony Party belongs to a recognisable tradition. There was something understandable about it in the political atmosphere of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Politics seemed remote from ordinary life. House prices were rising, credit was abundant, employment appeared relatively secure and the country possessed the appearance of prosperity. Much of that prosperity proved illusory, as 2008 subsequently demonstrated, but people did not know that at the time.

Politics could therefore be treated as something faintly ridiculous. Most people had lives to get on with. They woke up, watched Big Breakfast, went to work, earned a tolerable income, paid taxes that remained within what seemed like a comprehensible range, went shopping, visited the pub, watched television and occasionally remembered that an election was happening. When voting day arrived, they devoted whatever attention they had available to deciding whether the slightly unpleasant man in the red tie or the slightly unpleasant man in the blue tie should run the country for the next few years.

In that environment, the joke candidate made sense because politics itself did not seem existentially serious.

But it is not 2003 anymore.

That distinction matters more than almost anything else. Britain in 2026 is not a prosperous and broadly confident country whose citizens can afford to treat politics as an amusing sideshow. People are confronted constantly by the consequences of political decisions. Housing costs consume enormous proportions of incomes. Taxes are high. Public services are strained. Wages have stagnated relative to living costs. The fiscal position is precarious. Immigration has transformed communities at a speed that many people neither expected nor consented to. Crime, policing, infrastructure, healthcare, housing and the capacity of the state have all become subjects of persistent public anxiety. The ordinary person can therefore no longer retreat easily from politics. Politics follows him home.

It is present in his rent or mortgage payment, his electricity bill, his tax burden, his commute, his waiting time for a doctor’s appointment, the availability of school places, the changing character of his neighbourhood and the increasingly visible difficulty the state has in controlling its own borders. He may desperately want to ignore politics, but politics has ceased to ignore him. That changes the moral character of political comedy.

A joke that is harmless in a stable and prosperous order can become grotesque in a deteriorating one.

And it is grotesque.

Clacton is not an abstract constituency being used as the backdrop for a television sketch. It contains communities experiencing some of the most serious deprivation in England. The Jaywick and St Osyth area has repeatedly appeared at or near the very bottom of official deprivation measures. These are communities in which questions about housing, healthcare, employment, crime, public services, immigration and the allocation of state resources are not material for political entertainment. They shape people’s actual lives. And this is what makes the spectacle so difficult to stomach.

The joke is not being made from outside the political order by people mocking power. It is being encouraged, celebrated and circulated by many of the same political and media institutions that have spent decades participating in the government of the country, defending its assumptions, explaining away its failures and moving effortlessly from one crisis to the next.

The traditional joke candidate mocks the powerful. Count Binface in Clacton is mocking the electorate.

The people living there are expected to understand that this is all terribly funny. They are expected to appreciate the irony, enjoy the costumes and participate in another round of British political whimsy. Meanwhile, many of the people laughing have secure incomes, institutional status, property, professional networks and an ability to insulate themselves from the consequences of the policies they discuss. Its as much of a “let them eat cake moment” as any.

There is a point at which irreverence ceases to be irreverence and becomes decadence. There is a point at which the refusal to take politics seriously stops being evidence of a healthy society comfortable enough to laugh at itself and becomes evidence that the people inhabiting its political institutions have failed to notice that the order beneath them has changed.

The political culture still behaves as though it inhabits the world of 2003. The electorate increasingly understands that it does not.

Perhaps that is the real significance of the Count Binface episode. It is a tiny example of a much larger failure of political perception. The people who have occupied British public life for the past twenty or thirty years remain psychologically trapped inside the political world in which their careers began. They retain its assumptions, its humour, its social codes and its sense of what constitutes respectable public opinion. They have watched the material circumstances around them deteriorate without substantially altering their understanding of politics.

They have not adapted because, institutionally, they have never really been required to.

Nobody retires them. Nobody discredits them permanently. Nobody clears the stage.

And so they continue performing.

Are Restore “splitting the right”? Is Reform’s failure to agree to Restore’s stipulations a problem? Who should we “follow”: Lowe or Farage? Is the online right capable of organisation? Etc. Etc.

I am not saying that these are unjustifiable questions. The problem is that they are almost never followed through to the next question in the logical train of thought, the question that might actually lead us somewhere significant. What, for example, is it supposed to mean that Restore is “splitting the right”?

If, as evidenced by Restore’s demands, being correctly situated on the British right is understood to require:

• Mass deportations of illegal migrants, including women and children;

• Reversing demographic changes sufficiently to make white Britons a majority again;

• Holding a referendum on restoring the death penalty;

• Implementing severe austerity measures in pursuit of a “self-sufficient Britain”;

• Excluding former Conservative ministers from a future government;

and Reform rejects one or more of these demands, then in what sense is there a “splitting of the right”? What is the defining set of positions that supposedly constitutes “the right” in the first place? And if such a set of positions exists, why has it not already been formulated, defended and agreed upon?

But let us imagine that we were somehow able to agree upon this mythical set of unifying right-wing principles. Imagine that we possessed a sufficiently “big tent” conception under which Restore, Reform and the various other factions and personalities of the British right could all recognise themselves as belonging to some common political project. The next question would then be unavoidable: what kind of institutions, and what kind of constitutional ordering, would such a political project require?

We can use Restore’s five demands to illustrate the point. What, precisely, are these demands actually demanding?

The first immediately requires that we develop an account of who belongs to the political community and who does not.

When it comes to illegal migrants, the question is relatively straightforward, or at least it should be. The same is broadly true of questions concerning access to social housing or requirements concerning language. If anything, by ordinary standards of political obligation, the burden should fall upon those who support imposing such costs upon the existing British population to explain why they are justified. (spoiler: Its always appeals to morals that don’t have serious grounding in anything.)

With demographic security, however, matters become considerably more complicated. The category “white British” is itself symptomatic of the problem. A more fundamental question needs to be asked as to how the British population came to be displaced into a racial subcategory of its own political community, and by what authority people admitted into the country under often highly contested circumstances were subsequently granted a “British” status that transformed the meaning of the category itself. British people thereby become “white British,” while populations whose genealogical inheritance, cultural formation and historical relationship to Britain may be entirely different are incorporated within the undifferentiated category of “British.”

If citizenship is something more than an administrative status, then by what account of British political membership was citizenship extended, and what obligations of assimilation, loyalty, inheritance or participation accompanied it? What, in other words, makes someone a member of the British political community rather than merely the possessor of a document issued by the British state?

We can put many of these questions aside for the moment and dismiss them, if we wish, as details to be hashed out later. But doing so only reveals the much larger question being skipped over. Who, or what, is actually going to do these things? And under whose authority?

At this point we have already moved beyond the level of policy. We have passed into political theory, which is precisely where these arguments almost never progress.

If, as appears to be the case with Restore, the grounds for political authority are being placed largely within electoral democracy, then this creates serious difficulties for its constitutional position. It is a dangerous foundation upon which to rest because the principle can immediately be turned against those invoking it. Were Labour, for example, to convene a referendum tomorrow on banning Restore, on what grounds would Restore object? If the answer is that some questions cannot legitimately be decided by referendum, then we need a principle explaining which questions can and cannot be decided in this manner. Why, in that case, should the death penalty be subjected to referendum while other fundamental constitutional or political questions are not?

This opens a much broader question concerning the place of referendums within the British constitutional order because, viewed from a sufficiently wide perspective, they do not fit comfortably within it at all. The first UK-wide referendum was the European Communities membership referendum held on 5 June 1975, employed to provide direct popular legitimation for Britain’s continued participation in a process of European integration that sat uneasily with the inherited constitutional order. The Brexit referendum provides as good an opportunity as any to put that particular genie back in the bottle. Referendum started with the EU, and they end with it.

More importantly, however, what theory of authority makes a referendum binding in the first place? If Parliament is sovereign, why does Parliament need a referendum? If the people are sovereign, why is Parliament entitled to determine when, and on what questions, the people may exercise that sovereignty? If a referendum derives its authority from Parliament’s decision to hold it, then it supplies political legitimation but does not constitute an independent source of constitutional authority. If, on the other hand, the referendum expresses a popular sovereignty superior to Parliament, then the uncomplicated doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty has already been abandoned.

The same difficulty reappears in Restore’s fourth demand concerning drastic austerity. Again, a policy demand skips over prior questions of authority and legitimacy. What, precisely, would have to be altered within the British constitutional and administrative order to make such a programme viable? Both Reform and Restore have made noises about reordering the British constitution, but neither appears to have developed a coherent constitutional project capable of explaining what is to be changed, according to what principle, and by what realistic mechanism those changes would be implemented if electoral success in the Commons were achieved.

It is all very well appealing to parliamentary sovereignty, but, as with the referendum question, this becomes extremely dangerous once the principle is universalised. What prevents a future Labour government from turning exactly the same doctrine back upon them?

If Reform or Restore intends to treat parliamentary sovereignty as some kind of constitutional magic wand, something that can simply be waved so that the remainder of the governmental infrastructure must fall into line, then Labour can wave precisely the same wand. If parliamentary competence is itself sufficient to confer constitutional legitimacy, then a great many of the constitutional changes that Reform and Restore object to were legitimate simply because Parliament possessed the legal competence to enact them.

This is the problem they have to confront.

At least Reform appears to have a somewhat better grasp of the difficulty through figures such as Danny Kruger, although even there the theoretical foundations remain tenuous. It would seem considerably wiser to turn the questions of legitimacy and authority back upon Labour and upon the constitutional transformation that has taken place particularly since 1997. The process obviously reaches further back than this, but 1997 represents a serious point of acceleration. Rather than merely asserting that a future parliamentary majority possesses the authority to undo these changes, the question should be why those changes were legitimate in the first place, according to what conception of the British constitutional order they were undertaken, and by what authority institutions fundamental to that order were transformed.

That would force the argument onto much firmer ground. It would move the discussion away from the bare legal competence of Parliament and towards the prior question of what makes a transformation of an inherited constitutional order legitimate.

The easier path, however, is simply to cry “parliamentary sovereignty,” whatever that is supposed to mean, and apparently leave the matter there.

The fifth demand, concerning the exclusion of former Conservative ministers from any future government, raises exactly the same problem from another direction. Why should they be excluded? By whose authority? I am not disputing that there may be very good reasons for excluding them. I can think of numerous ones. But the principle needs to be stated.

If the answer is merely that the electorate dislikes them, then no constitutional principle is involved. But if the argument is that these officeholders participated in the corruption, destruction or abandonment of an inherited political and constitutional order, then something far more significant has been conceded. A standard of legitimacy has been invoked that is independent of both election and parliamentary enactment.

And once that standard has been invoked to exclude certain people from the political project, it also begins to provide an answer to the earlier question of what the organising principle of that project actually is. At that point we are no longer talking simply about “the right” as a collection of parties, personalities, voters and policy preferences. We are beginning to talk about adherence to a particular conception of political order.

These are the questions that can be seen poking their heads out from the current fracas, and eventually they are going to have to be answered.

Until they are, there is not yet a coherent “right” to split. There are personalities and collections of preferred policies, but no agreed account of the political community, no agreed account of the source and limits of legitimate authority, and no agreed conception of the constitutional order through which those principles are supposed to be realised.

Until these questions are addressed, and until a meaningful theoretical framework is developed containing a coherent account of authority, legitimacy, and constitutional order, this nonsense will simply continue.

The British right will continue attempting to settle political questions at the level of policy, personality and electoral organisation when the disagreements beneath them already presuppose unanswered questions concerning political membership, authority, legitimacy and constitutional order. So long as those questions remain unanswered, arguments over whether Lowe or Farage is “splitting the right” amount to little more than arguments over the organisation of something that has yet to establish what, in any serious political sense, it actually is.

I will still be reachable by e-mail (chrisbondTW@protonmail.com) and comments on this Substack.

The first difficulty is that most existing attempts to model human behaviour begin from assumptions that are themselves inherited from liberalism. This does not mean that every economist, game theorist, or computational modeler is consciously committed to liberal political philosophy. It means that the basic unit entering the model is usually an already constituted individual agent. The surrounding order may alter the costs of action or change the incentives confronting the individual, but the agent remains conceptually prior to the order in which the agent acts.

This allows liberal models to formalise interaction among agents with considerable sophistication in very limited circumstances. What they have far greater difficulty formalising is the process through which an agent becomes the kind of being capable of possessing those preferences, recognising those incentives, understanding those institutions, or interpreting a situation as requiring a choice at all.

The problem is therefore not that liberal models are incapable of formalisation in the ordinary sense. They are among the most extensively formalised intellectual constructions ever produced. The problem is that they tend to formalise the behaviour of an agent whose constitution remains outside the model. The agent is treated as a black box. Inputs enter, decisions occur, and outputs follow, but the internal formation of the agent’s categories, obligations, perceptions, and purposes is either assumed in advance or reduced to a small number of variables chosen for the convenience of the model.

This black box must remain unusually open because any serious attempt to bound the agent risks breaching the ontology from which the model begins. The liberal individual must possess at least the theoretical capacity to stand apart from inherited roles, obligations, languages, and authorities. The agent may happen to be influenced by these things, but cannot be fully constituted by them without ceasing to resemble the individual presupposed by liberal theory. If the agent’s purposes, perceptions, and possible actions are formed by structures that precede the agent, then the individual is no longer the self-sufficient starting point of the order. The explanatory direction has been reversed. Order no longer emerges from individuals who precede it; individuals emerge from orders that precede them.

This is one reason attempts to explain human order from within liberal assumptions tend either to leave the agent underdetermined or to introduce constraints that the originating ontology cannot adequately explain. The agent is formally bounded by things such as preferences, cognitive limitations, or strategic circumstances, but the origin of these bounds often remains external to the model. They are parameters imposed by the modeller rather than relations through which a historically recognisable human subject is formed.

Marxism represents an important partial departure from this structure because it attempts to bind the individual through class and relations of production. The agent is no longer entirely prior to the order. Class position shapes the individual. Yet Marxism never fully escapes the liberal problem. It retains too much of the individual and too much of the abstract human subject beneath the class position, while reducing the formative structure of order to an account centred upon production. The attempt to bound the agent is genuine, but the boundary is too narrow. I do not believe that human beings are formed only through their position within production, nor can their obligations, categories, identities, and perceptions be derived solely from economic relations.

The model proposed in Themis begins from a different premise. Human agents do not enter an order as complete and autonomous units. They are formed within languages, traditions, institutions, obligations, relations of patronage, inherited practices, and structures of authorised knowledge. These do not simply restrict the actions of an otherwise finished individual. They contribute to the production of the agent itself.

Language establishes distinctions before the agent begins consciously reasoning with them. It makes certain objects and relations visible while leaving others difficult to articulate. A tradition supplies inherited standards by which claims are judged, actions are interpreted, obligations are recognised, and anomalies become intelligible. Institutions place agents within durable relations whose demands cannot be reduced to momentary preference. Patronage determines which traditions are carried, protected, modified, or deprived of the material conditions necessary for their continuation. Epistemological authority determines who or what is authorised to declare something true, lawful, binding, legitimate, or obligatory. The centre or metaperson provides the point in relation to which these obligations and authorities become organised as a public order.

Within such a model, the agent is neither an empty vessel nor an unbounded chooser. The agent possesses capacities, but these capacities are formed and directed within an inherited field of intelligibility.

This creates the possibility of a different kind of formalisation. Rather than asking only how an individual acts when confronted with a set of incentives, it becomes possible to ask how different configurations of language, institutional position, epistemological authority, patronage, and obligation produce different classes of possible action. The task would not be to eliminate agency by treating individuals as mechanical outputs of structures. It would be to model agency as situated, bounded, and constituted.

The central difficulty is that formalisation produces a temptation to simplify the object until it conforms to the available method. The point should not be to force human orders into whichever mathematical technique happens to be familiar. The method must answer to the relation being described. If obligation is reduced to preference, authority to influence, tradition to information, or the centre to an individual ruler, the formalisation will reproduce precisely the conceptual mistakes that Themis was written to expose.

The project therefore has to proceed from conceptual clarification towards formal representation, rather than beginning with a preferred mathematical apparatus and searching for something upon which to use it. The first task is to state the model’s relations with enough precision that disagreements about them become identifiable. What constitutes an institution in the relevant sense? How is a tradition carried through time? What is the relation between a patron and an intermediary? Under what conditions does a centre become effective? How are epistemological obligations transmitted? What would count as a change in an order rather than a change occurring within the same order? These questions are already implicit in the argument, but formalisation would require their answers to be made explicit enough that they could be represented without ambiguity.

This is unlikely to be the work of one person. It would require cooperation among people capable of understanding both the theoretical claims and the formal methods that might express them. Mathematical logicians, statisticians, computational modellers, linguists, anthropologists, historians, and institutional theorists would each see different possibilities and different dangers. The purpose of such cooperation would not be to decorate the model with technical sophistication. It would be to discover whether the relations described by Themis can be stated with sufficient exactness to produce a genuine science of human orders.

The underlying claim is simple. Liberalism can formalise the choices made by already constituted agents, but it cannot easily formalise the constitution of the agent without surrendering the individual as its ontological starting point. Themis begins from the opposite direction. It treats the human agent as formed within an order and seeks to identify the structures through which that formation occurs. The possibility of formalising the model arises because the agent is no longer an unbounded black box. The agent can be located within relations that shape what can be known, said, desired, required, and done.

Whether those relations can be expressed mathematically remains an open question. But it is now possible to state the problem. A formal science of human orders cannot begin with an abstract individual and then attempt to reconstruct the order from the individual’s choices. It must begin with the relations through which recognisable human agents are produced.

The United Kingdom is undergoing a serious institutional crisis, but the more remarkable fact is that this crisis has produced almost no corresponding intellectual creativity. The country has moved repeatedly from one failure to another, yet no substantial body of thought has emerged which is capable of explaining these failures as parts of a common political problem. There is no serious account of how the governing order reproduces itself, how decisions are actually made within it, why its institutions continue to act against their stated purposes, or what kind of order might replace the one now visibly deteriorating.

One might have expected this intellectual response to arise from either the left or the right. Instead, both remain confined within traditions which have lost the ability to understand the conditions in which they now operate. Corbynism represented an attenuated survival of twentieth-century Labour socialism, retaining its moral language and distributive instincts while lacking either the social constituency or institutional theory that once made such politics intelligible. Its defeat did not produce a reconsideration of the Labour tradition. It merely restored a professional stratum formed within charities and public administration whose political imagination remains bounded by the assumptions of the late twentieth-century liberal settlement. Its members may disagree over the allocation of resources or the pace at which particular reforms should be implemented, but they do not possess an account of political order capable of explaining the institutions through which they themselves govern.

The right is in an even less developed condition. Reform and Restore are vessels for justified anger at immigration, administrative failure and the refusal of governing institutions to answer to the population subjected to their decisions. Yet anger does not itself constitute doctrine. Neither organisation has clearly explained what it understands the British political order to be, where effective authority is located within it, what forces have produced its present behaviour, or what would have to be changed for a different course to become possible. Their programmes therefore tend to remain collections of desired outcomes whose institutional conditions are left unexamined.

This absence of doctrine makes such organisations peculiarly vulnerable to capture. Where a political movement does not possess a coherent account of its own purposes, patrons, foreign interests, media networks and ambitious individuals can supply one piecemeal. The result need not be a single coordinated conspiracy. It is enough that the movement lacks the intellectual means to distinguish assistance from direction, or temporary tactical agreement from the displacement of its original purpose. An empty political vehicle does not remain empty. It becomes an arena in which better organised actors compete to determine what its anger will be made to serve.

The public appears increasingly aware that the problem cannot be reduced to the occupant of Downing Street. The prime ministerial office absorbs blame because it is visible and periodically replaceable, but many of the decisions shaping the country arise from institutions whose personnel and operating procedures survive changes of government. The civil service, security apparatus, judiciary, central bank, regulatory bodies, universities, foundations, contractors and policy organisations participate in forming the environment within which ministers are permitted to decide. This does not mean that all power is secretly concentrated in one hidden committee, nor that these institutions always act in concert. It means that effective political direction is distributed through an institutional order whose continuity is much greater than that of electoral office.

The repeated replacement of ministers therefore leaves the central structure substantially intact. A government may promise lower immigration while continuing to operate through fiscal, legal and administrative arrangements which generate demand for immigration. It may promise national independence while remaining dependent upon external security, financial and legal structures. It may promise to restore family life while sustaining an economic order which requires households to subordinate themselves ever more completely to wage labour, debt service, taxation and asset inflation. The contradiction does not arise simply because particular politicians are insincere. It arises because the institutions through which they must act have already defined the limits of what can be treated as realistic.

The crisis is not uniquely British. The United States has experienced a prolonged revolt against its governing class without producing a corresponding theory of government. Trumpism has been able to identify enemies, mobilise constituencies and disrupt established conventions, but it has not developed a settled account of the American order or of the institutional arrangements by which that order might be redirected. In the absence of such an account, the movement remains dependent upon pre-existing Republican networks, donors, foreign-policy establishments, media patrons and personal factions, each capable of attaching its own purposes to the wider revolt.

The Democratic Party exhibits a different form of the same exhaustion. Its governing language was formed during a period in which expanding credit, increasing asset values, institutional growth and American geopolitical predominance allowed distributive conflicts to be displaced or concealed. Within those conditions, diversity, inclusion and human rights could be presented not as contested political doctrines but as the self-evident moral vocabulary of an advancing order. As those material conditions deteriorate, the party has increasingly responded by intensifying its inherited moral claims rather than reconsidering the order that made them possible. What appears as confidence is therefore often the inability of a tradition to recognise that its explanatory framework no longer corresponds to the world it is attempting to govern.

The intellectual sterility of the present cannot be explained by the stupidity of individual politicians alone. It is partly the consequence of the institutions responsible for selecting, funding and legitimating political thought. Universities no longer reliably distinguish the extension of knowledge from the reproduction of professionally sanctioned positions. The media no longer provides a stable arena in which competing explanatory frameworks can be examined according to shared standards. Governments commission research largely within categories already recognised by the administrative system, while foundations and policy organisations direct attention towards questions whose answers can be absorbed by existing institutions. Intelligence and security organisations have also participated in shaping political traditions, media environments and cultural movements, particularly since the middle of the twentieth century. They developed considerable tactical expertise in cultivating acceptable opposition, redirecting intellectual currents and managing political constituencies, but tactical success does not imply strategic understanding. An institution may become highly skilled at weakening rival centres of authority without understanding what kind of order will remain once those rivals have disappeared.

The result is not simply censorship. It is the narrowing of the imaginable. The modern liberal state does not merely prohibit certain conclusions; it supplies the categories through which political problems become intelligible in the first place. There is presumed to be a state standing apart from religion, an economy administered or regulated by that state, a society composed of individuals, and a legal order whose purpose is to secure their rights. Disagreement normally takes place within this arrangement. One may favour a larger or smaller state, greater or lesser regulation, stronger or weaker rights, but the categories themselves remain largely untouched.

The particular strength of this arrangement lies in the fact that its categories are not ordinarily experienced as the inheritance of a political tradition. They appear instead as direct descriptions of reality. People do not normally imagine that they have been taught to divide the world into state, religion, economy, society and individual. They imagine that these things are simply there. Other orders are then interpreted by projecting the same categories backwards or outwards, so that every people is presumed to have possessed a state, an economy, a religion and some functional equivalent of individual sovereignty, even where the evidence suggests that the people concerned organised reality through radically different distinctions.

This controls the field of possible political alternatives before any explicit argument begins. A proposal which does not conform to the inherited categories can be dismissed as unintelligible, while a proposal which does conform to them is likely to reproduce the order it claims to oppose. Even movements hostile to liberalism therefore commonly remain liberal in their basic anthropology. They imagine autonomous individuals choosing a different government, recovering a different set of rights, entering a different social contract or asserting a different form of sovereignty. They alter the content while preserving the conceptual structure.

The inability to escape these categories is reinforced by the collapse of standards governing political discussion. Frameworks are treated as personal opinions rather than as explanatory structures which can be reconstructed, compared and tested. Participants are rarely required to explain the units from which their accounts begin, the kinds of evidence their categories permit them to recognise, or the circumstances under which their conclusions would have to be revised. Political disagreement consequently becomes a struggle among assertions whose standards of judgment remain concealed. Since no shared procedure exists by which one framework might demonstrate its superiority to another, victory passes to whoever possesses the greater institutional authority, moral prestige, financial support or capacity to impose reputational costs.

Human rights illustrate the problem especially clearly. They are ordinarily presented as moral truths discovered by reason and applicable without substantial alteration across all peoples and orders. Yet their political ascendancy cannot be understood apart from the institutions which cultivated, funded and deployed them. The modern human-rights order emerged through particular states, foundations, legal organisations, universities and international bodies, and it was repeatedly incorporated into geopolitical strategies aimed at weakening rival regimes and subordinating alternative sources of authority. This genealogy does not, by itself, prove every possible universal moral claim false. It does demonstrate that the authority presently enjoyed by human rights cannot be explained solely by their supposed self-evidence.

The distinction is important because the purpose of examining such a genealogy is not to replace one dogma with another. It is to recover the political relations concealed by a vocabulary which presents itself as standing outside politics. Human rights may function simultaneously as moral claims, legal instruments, institutional jurisdictions and means by which particular centres of power intervene against others. Any serious political science must be capable of distinguishing these functions without accepting the doctrine’s own description of itself as the final explanation of what it is doing.

The present crisis therefore consists in more than administrative incompetence. The institutions of the United Kingdom continue to operate through an inherited account of persons, authority, legitimacy and social order which is becoming increasingly incapable of explaining the consequences of its own operation. At the same time, the organisations opposing those institutions remain trapped within the same conceptual world and therefore cannot formulate a genuine alternative. They can demand different policies, different personnel and different distributions of resources, but they cannot yet describe a different order.

The task is not to invent that order in advance. Doctrine cannot simply be dictated before the inquiry from which it is supposed to emerge, because that would convert the project into another attempt to impose predetermined conclusions upon reality. What can be established in advance are the conditions under which doctrinal inquiry becomes possible: independence from the institutions whose categories are being examined, standards capable of distinguishing explanation from assertion, and procedures by which every proposed account remains answerable to evidence and exposed to correction.

The first requirement is therefore not agreement upon the content of a future doctrine. It is the formation of a location from which the present order can become visible as an order rather than as reality itself.

Creating an Alternative Framework — Doctrine

Any alternative political framework would first require a location from which the existing order could become visible as an order rather than as reality itself. This would have to be epistemologically separate from the institutions whose assumptions it intended to examine. Such separation would not necessarily be geographical. The participants might remain professionally and socially embedded within existing institutions. What would matter is their ability to prevent the categories, incentives and standards of those institutions from determining the questions they were permitted to ask or the conclusions they were permitted to reach.

The purpose of such a location would be the development of doctrine, although doctrine should not be understood here as a body of principles decided in advance and subsequently imposed upon evidence. The content of an alternative doctrine cannot be known before the inquiry that produces it. To prescribe its conclusions beforehand would merely reproduce the ideological method being criticised: reality would once again be made to answer to a vocabulary whose authority had already been assumed. Doctrine must instead emerge from a sustained attempt to understand political orders comparatively, to identify the relations concealed by their official categories, and to determine which forms of authority, obligation and institutional organisation correspond to the beings and circumstances actually being governed.

The difficulty is therefore not simply that people of sufficient intelligence must be found. The required capacity is more particular. Participants would need to suspend inherited categories without falling into indiscriminate scepticism, to reconstruct unfamiliar orders through their own distinctions, and to recognise that the concepts through which they ordinarily perceive the world belong to a tradition with its own history and institutional carriers. They would also need to remain engaged in a process whose conclusions could not be guaranteed in advance and whose purpose would not be to confirm the political identities they already possessed.

The decisive point of separation from liberalism would therefore not consist in assent to a predetermined collection of anti-liberal propositions. It would consist in the acquisition of a different epistemological discipline. A participant would have to demonstrate the ability to distinguish between a relation and the name subsequently given to it, between the self-description of an institution and an explanation of its operation, and between the historical origin of a doctrine and the truth of the claims made within it. The same standards would have to be applied to liberalism, to rival traditions and to whatever framework the group itself began to develop.

A useful test would present a prospective participant with evidence concerning an unfamiliar political order and require them to reconstruct it without presuming that its basic divisions corresponded to the modern separation of state, religion, economy and society. They would have to explain how reality became publicly knowable within that order, who or what could issue binding judgments, how obligations were created, and through which practices authority was reproduced. They would then be required to produce the strongest rival interpretation of the same evidence, identify the anomalies that remained within their own account, and state what further evidence would force them to revise it.

The same procedure would subsequently be applied to the contemporary United Kingdom. The participant would have to distinguish the categories through which the order represents itself from the relations through which it actually operates. They would have to explain where effective authority is located, how decisions become binding, which institutions reproduce the governing tradition, and what evidence would demonstrate that their account was wrong. The purpose of the exercise would not be to discover whether the participant had reached approved conclusions. It would be to determine whether they possessed the capacity from which doctrine might eventually be formed.

The maintenance of this discipline would be more important than the preservation of any particular formula produced during the early stages of inquiry. Participants who repeatedly translated evidence into inherited categories without justification, protected preferred conclusions from standards applied to rival accounts, or treated disagreement as proof of moral or intellectual deficiency would not be capable of contributing to the project. This would not mean removing people because they had departed from doctrine. It would mean recognising that the inquiry could not survive if its participants abandoned the procedures by which doctrine remained answerable to reality.

Doctrine would therefore develop provisionally and recursively. Historical inquiry would inform political analysis; political analysis would expose weaknesses in the historical categories being used; practical engagement would reveal relations that theoretical investigation had overlooked. No point could be established at which doctrine was declared complete and insulated from further correction. What would eventually make it functional would not be finality, but sufficient coherence to guide judgment while remaining capable of learning from the consequences of the judgments it produced.

Only when such a framework had acquired enough internal coherence to support education, selection and practical reasoning would cadre development become possible.

Creating an Alternative Framework — The Cadre

A doctrine can persist politically only if it forms people capable of judging and acting through it. The cadre would therefore not merely memorise a series of propositions. Its members would have to acquire the habits of perception and judgment from which the doctrine had emerged. They would need to understand its evidence, reproduce its arguments, recognise the conditions under which its concepts applied, and distinguish faithful application from the mechanical repetition of inherited language.

Cadre formation would require a curriculum, sustained teaching, practical exercises and forms of examination. Yet its purpose could not be reduced to ideological conformity. A cadre trained only to recognise approved answers would become incapable of correcting either itself or the institutions it entered. Its members would instead need to demonstrate that they could analyse unfamiliar situations, reconstruct competing explanations, identify anomalies in their own judgments and revise those judgments without losing the coherence required for action.

The relation between doctrine and cadre would consequently be reciprocal. Doctrine would shape the formation of the cadre, but the attempt to teach and apply it would also reveal ambiguities within the doctrine. Concepts that appeared adequate in abstract argument might prove too vague to guide decisions. Distinctions that seemed clear to their authors might prove impossible for others to reproduce consistently. Cadre development would therefore constitute one of the principal tests of whether doctrine had become a communicable tradition rather than the private vocabulary of its founders.

The greatest difficulties would be practical. The project would require people with the intellectual capacity to understand the framework, the character to act within institutions without being absorbed by them, and the patience to undertake formation whose immediate political rewards might be negligible. It would also require time, organisation and funding. These matters could not be treated as external to doctrine, because the sources of patronage, the conditions of employment and the demands placed upon participants would inevitably influence the kind of cadre the project was capable of producing.

The precise form of training could not be determined in advance. It would depend upon the doctrine that emerged, the institutions in which members were expected to operate and the capacities those institutions required. The essential point would be that the cadre existed to carry a disciplined order of judgment into practice, not merely to supply loyal personnel to an organisation.

Creating an Alternative Framework — Institutions

Neither doctrine nor cadre could survive for long without institutional embodiment. An intellectual framework dependent upon a handful of individuals would disappear when those individuals withdrew, died or entered into conflict. It would therefore require institutions capable of preserving its arguments, transmitting its standards, supporting inquiry and reproducing the people able to act from it.

The first institutions might be comparatively modest. Online publication, remote seminars, private research groups and distributed teaching would allow the project to develop without the immediate costs associated with a permanent physical organisation. These forms would also permit the involvement of people dispersed across different professions and locations. They would not, however, be sufficient indefinitely. Doctrine is transmitted not only through texts but through sustained relationships, shared work, judgment exercised in common and the observation of how experienced members respond to difficulty. At some stage, physical institutions would probably be required if the project were to become more than a loose intellectual network.

The creation of such institutions would introduce dangers of its own. An organisation built to preserve inquiry can gradually subordinate inquiry to its own preservation. Fundraising, reputation, recruitment and internal advancement can become ends which determine what may be said and who may be heard. The institution might then continue to repeat the language of the doctrine while severing that language from the relations it was intended to describe. Institutional design would therefore have to preserve the conditions of correction established during doctrinal formation.

This could not be solved simply by writing constitutional safeguards in advance. The relevant arrangements would have to emerge from experience with the particular people, patrons and pressures involved. The relationship between doctrine and institution would again be recursive. Doctrine would inform institutional construction, while the behaviour of the institutions would provide evidence about the adequacy of the doctrine’s account of authority, patronage, succession and organisational deformation.

The principal obstacles would be financial and political, but neither should be treated as merely technical. Funding always creates relations of dependence, while political recognition can transform an intellectual project into an instrument of actors with purposes of their own. The project would therefore require institutions capable of receiving support without allowing patrons to acquire concealed doctrinal authority. How this could be achieved would depend upon circumstances that cannot be predicted beforehand, but the problem would have to be recognised from the beginning.

Creating an Alternative Framework — Influence

The eventual purpose of doctrine, cadre and institutions would be to affect the governing order. It is unlikely that this would initially occur through the construction of an entirely separate state apparatus. Existing institutions possess accumulated knowledge, administrative capacity, legal recognition and control over the routines upon which ordinary life depends. To discard them wholesale would destroy capacities that any replacement order would immediately have to reconstruct.

The more plausible course would be for people formed within the alternative framework to enter existing institutions and demonstrate their usefulness within them. They would not need to announce themselves as members of a hostile counter-order. Nor would it be sensible to define the project primarily through opposition to everyone already working inside the state. Many existing officials will be aware that the institutions they serve are failing, even if they lack the concepts required to explain why. A framework capable of producing better descriptions, more accurate judgments and more effective action could acquire influence by answering problems the existing order had become unable to understand.

This should not mean concealing a fixed programme until sufficient power had been accumulated to impose it. No such programme could legitimately be fixed before the project had encountered the institutions it hoped to redirect. Entry into government would itself generate evidence, expose mistaken assumptions and alter the developing doctrine. The purpose of influence would therefore be neither entryism in the ordinary sense nor the substitution of one closed managerial class for another. It would be the creation of a capacity within existing institutions to perceive and act upon relations that their inherited categories presently obscure.

The distinction between discretion and deception would be essential. Any political project must exercise judgment about what can be said, to whom and under what conditions. Yet an organisation which gained authority by systematically misrepresenting its purposes would reproduce the same concealed management of traditions that it criticised in the existing order. Its members should therefore avoid unnecessary declarations of hostility without pretending to believe what they did not believe or committing themselves to ends they intended to betray.

Influence would be acquired most securely by becoming useful. A doctrine capable of explaining why institutions repeatedly fail, a cadre capable of exercising judgment rather than repeating slogans, and an organisation capable of preserving knowledge across changes of personnel would possess something the present order increasingly lacks. Existing institutions might resist such a body, but they might also become dependent upon it where their own frameworks no longer produced workable answers.

The process could not be expected to unfold according to a fixed sequence in which doctrine was completed, cadre trained, institutions built and influence finally acquired. Each stage would alter the others. Limited institutional engagement might begin while doctrine remained provisional; the conduct of early cadre would expose weaknesses in selection and training; political opportunities might require institutional forms not previously anticipated. The four elements describe necessary functions rather than a rigid chronology.

The central danger would remain that success within the existing order might assimilate the project to the order it intended to correct. Positions, salaries, prestige and access could gradually become more important than the purposes for which influence had originally been sought. The test of the project would therefore not be whether its members acquired office, but whether their presence made institutions more capable of answering to the realities they governed.

Influence would mark not the completion of the alternative framework, but the point at which its doctrine began to be tested against the consequences of power.

By epistemology, I mean the way an order answers the question of how reality becomes publicly knowable and authoritative. Every political order must contain some account of what is real, some means by which that reality can be interpreted, and some arrangement through which particular interpretations become binding upon others. An operative political epistemology*1 therefore joins together what modern thought commonly separates into ontology, epistemology, and authority. It concerns the reality to which an order understands itself to answer, the means by which that reality is disclosed, and the persons, offices, traditions, or practices authorised to speak in its name.

(* Update. It is probably best to see this operative political epistemology as political epistemology with a hermeneutic structure, but as per note 1, I am unhappy with the terminology here but unsure how to adapt it at present because in many ways I am rejecting these divisions and unifying them.)

Political authority is therefore never merely administrative, legal, or institutional. It always rests upon some prior account of how binding truth is known, who may interpret it, and why that interpretation should possess authority for anyone beyond the interpreter himself. Even an order that denies that political life has anything to do with truth must still determine which descriptions of persons, actions, rights, obligations, and institutions will be recognised as publicly valid. It cannot avoid the epistemological question merely by concealing it within procedure.

This is why ritual-sacrificial orders have to be understood within their own terms as far as possible. For modern people, this is exceedingly difficult. One of the principal barriers is the category of “religion,” but the same problem appears with other modern categories as well. Modern people do not normally understand their own interaction with the world as mediated by inherited traditions in the MacIntyrean sense, and because of this they find it almost impossible to see that earlier orders were not simply defective versions of modern ones. They do not begin by asking what an order understood itself to be doing. They ask where its religion was, where its economy was, where its government was, and then treat whatever they find as an early, confused, or undeveloped form of these supposedly permanent domains.

But this is already to have misunderstood the matter. Ritual-sacrificial orders did not necessarily possess “religion,” “economy,” and “government” as distinct and independently intelligible fields corresponding to the modern use of those terms. These domains were not lying beneath the surface of primitive confusion, awaiting later conceptual clarification. They are modern abstractions retrojected backwards into worlds whose practices were not ordered by the distinctions those abstractions impose.

Etymology and tools such as Google Ngram can help make this visible, not because word history by itself demonstrates the structure of an entire order, but because it reveals how historically recent and conceptually unstable many of our supposedly natural categories are. The modern person assumes that these things must always have existed because he cannot imagine social order without them. He therefore concludes that earlier people possessed religion, economy, and government without properly knowing what these things were. But this is not explanation. It is retrojection. It converts the historical emergence of a category into the gradual discovery of an object presumed to have existed unchanged all along.

The argument does not require us to believe that earlier people were incapable of distinguishing one practice from another, or that ritual, exchange, command, and other elements were fused into an undifferentiated whole. It requires the more modest but more consequential recognition that the distinctions through which modern people organise social reality cannot simply be assumed to have governed the self-understanding of earlier orders. The categories by which an order is analysed may themselves belong to a particular historical tradition, and an explanation that fails to account for their emergence may do no more than reproduce the perspective it ought to be examining.

Ritual-sacrificial orders must instead be approached as orders in which the question of what was true and binding was answered through relations with gods, ancestors, and a general metaperson-inhabited world. Authority within such orders was fundamentally interpretative. This does not mean that rulers never innovated, or altered inherited practices. It means that even political innovation ordinarily had to present itself as the enactment, restoration, renewal, or authoritative interpretation of an order that preceded the innovator.

The one who governed was therefore not simply the one who could command. He was the one recognised as capable of mediating the powers through which reality disclosed its binding form. His authority might include coercion, but coercion alone could not explain the order in whose name it was exercised.

This is the sense in which such orders were epistemological.

Their politics cannot be separated from their account of how truth became authoritative. The gods were not a decorative religious addition to an otherwise political or economic order. They belonged to the structure through which the real itself became knowable and binding. Sacrifice was not merely ritual behaviour surrounding a more basic political system. It was one of the means through which the order discovered, negotiated, and confirmed its relation to the powers understood to govern reality.

Human rulers could possess immense practical authority, but the authority they exercised was intelligible as an office within an order they did not claim simply to have authored.

What seems to have occurred through early modernity is not that interpretation disappeared, but that the relation between interpretation and creation was increasingly obscured and then became entirely confused. Human beings did not cease to interpret an order they had not made. They became increasingly willing to account for authority as though binding obligation could originate in an authorised human will. Law, which had often been intelligible as the articulation of an inherited and binding order, was progressively reconceived through command, consent, enactment, or rights-bearing will.

The modern question became not merely how an order discloses what is binding, but how a human subject, office, or state can produce an obligation that binds because it has been validly willed, enacted, or authorised. The human location at which a decision became final began to be confused with the source from which its bindingness derived.

This is the category error at the heart of modern sovereignty. It treats juridical finality as though it were an explanation of authority. The king, legislature, court, or people may indeed possess the final recognised word within a political order. Every order must contain some means of settling disputes and making decisions. But the possession of the final word does not by itself explain why that word binds. It identifies the point at which institutional argument ceases; it does not identify the reality from which obligation receives its authority.

The modern sovereign consequently appears as the author of what he may in fact only mediate. The legislator can command, punish, and enact, but the deeper question remains whether his act is understood as the disclosure of an order that precedes him or as the production of obligation by virtue of an authority located within the act itself. Once that distinction is lost, law begins to appear authoritative because an authorised human agency has produced it. Positive law then becomes not merely one form in which law may be articulated, but the model through which law itself is imagined.

This is why modern legal theory becomes so revealing. The dispute between Hart and Dworkin is usually treated as one of the great contests in twentieth-century jurisprudence, but from the perspective being developed here it also discloses the narrowing of the modern problem. Hart attempts to explain legal validity through social rules, official recognition, and the institutional practices by which a legal system identifies its norms. Dworkin rejects the reduction of law to a system of recognised rules and insists that legal judgment necessarily involves interpretation, principle, and moral reasoning.

Their disagreement is substantial. Dworkin recovers dimensions of legal judgment that Hart’s positivism struggles to contain. Yet the opposition remains largely enclosed within the horizon of an already constituted modern legal practice. Hart asks how officials identify valid norms within a legal system. Dworkin asks how the inherited materials of that practice should be interpreted in light of principles that make the practice morally intelligible. Neither begins from the older question of how an order becomes publicly binding before it has been translated into legislation, judicial doctrine, institutional practice, or rights-bearing argument.

Hart’s difficulties with so-called primitive law and international law are especially instructive because his conceptual framework inclines him to treat law as properly developed only where institutions resembling the mature modern legal system have appeared. Dworkin avoids some of this narrowness by making interpretation central, but the object of interpretation remains a legal practice already framed through modern institutional and moral assumptions. His account can explain how a legal tradition interprets its own history, but it does not by itself recover the anthropological problem of how obligation becomes authoritative in an order whose sources cannot be translated into the grammar of the autonomous individual, the sovereign state, or liberal principle.

This is not a personal failing of Hart or Dworkin. Nor does it mean that all modern jurisprudence has treated law as nothing more than human command. Natural-law traditions, common-law traditions, historical jurisprudence, and theories of custom have continued to resist that conclusion. The point is that much of modern legal theory possesses immense sophistication once the modern legal order has already been presupposed, but becomes less secure when asked to explain how law is possible before obligation has been attributed to recognisably human institutions or sources.

The problem, then, is not simply that legal positivism is wrong, or that rights-based theories of law are defective, although both may be subjected to criticism. The deeper problem is that modern legal theory frequently inherits a world in which metapersonal sources of obligation have already been erased or translated into human terms. Once gods, ancestors, and cosmic orders have been redescribed as religion, and law has been redescribed as the product of a human institution, the question of law’s origin has largely been settled in advance. What remains is a dispute over which human mechanism should be treated as decisive.

But this is precisely what needs to be challenged. If earlier orders did not understand law as the product of biological will, individual consent, legislative enactment, or state sovereignty, then modern legal theory cannot declare them deficient merely because they do not resemble the modern state. That judgment would not constitute historical explanation. It would take a late form of law, project it backwards as the standard by which all law must be judged, and conclude that earlier orders possessed law only to the extent that they anticipated us.

The more serious possibility is that modernity has not discovered the essence of law but narrowed law into one of its derivative forms. Law, in its deeper sense, is not first of all the command of a sovereign. It is the publicly binding articulation of an order understood to precede those who speak in its name. The central question is therefore epistemological before it is institutional. Who can know what is binding? Who can interpret the order? Through what inherited practices, judgments, offices, signs, or traditions does an interpretation become publicly authoritative?

Once this is seen, political authority itself appears differently. Authority is not merely the ability to impose a decision. It is the recognised capacity to mediate the order through which reality becomes binding for a people. The modern state can obscure this because it presents itself as the source of law while concealing the deeper epistemological structure on which its authority depends. But no order escapes the problem. Even an order that claims to rest upon popular sovereignty, rights, science, markets, progress, or procedural legitimacy must answer the same question. Someone must determine what those terms mean, which claims count as instances of them, and how their meaning is to govern practical judgment.

That is why epistemology is not secondary to political theory but central to it.

Once this is recognised, the major political traditions of modernity begin to appear in a different light. They do not merely disagree about the distribution of power, the design of institutions, or the ends towards which government should be directed. Their disagreements begin earlier, in their respective accounts of the subject capable of knowing political reality and the means through which such knowledge becomes publicly authoritative. What distinguishes one political tradition from another is not simply the conclusions it reaches, but the epistemological structure that makes those conclusions intelligible.

A decisive modern transformation occurred when individual consciousness began to be treated as the point through which claims to truth had to pass. Descartes did not invent the individual, nor did he imagine that truth could be created by an act of human will. God remained necessary within his system as the guarantor that clear and distinct perception corresponded to a reality outside the mind. Nevertheless, the methodological movement of Cartesian doubt crystallised a new image of the knower because it suspended the authority of inherited mediation. The subject was instructed to withdraw assent from what had been received through tradition and ordinary experience, and to reconstruct certainty from what could withstand doubt within consciousness itself.

The importance of this movement was not that Descartes supplied the political doctrines of liberalism in advance. It was that he helped render intelligible a subject capable of standing apart from the inherited order through which he had been formed and demanding that claims to truth justify themselves before him. Truth was no longer first encountered as something made publicly authoritative through participation in an inherited order. Even where inherited authority was subsequently restored, it now had to be restored before the tribunal of a consciousness that had methodologically suspended it.

A homologous movement can be seen in Hobbes. Descartes abstracted the knowing subject from inherited opinion in order to reconstruct knowledge upon a foundation that could withstand doubt. Hobbes abstracted human beings from inherited political relations in order to reconstruct political obligation from individuals imagined prior to order. It is not necessary to claim that the Hobbesian state of nature was simply derived from Cartesian epistemology. The more important point is that both participate in a wider movement of early modern thought through which an inherited whole is dissolved into an elementary human unit and then reconstructed from that unit.

This is the deeper connection between modern epistemology and modern sovereignty. Once the individual could be imagined as conceptually prior to the order within which he had actually been formed, political authority could be represented as the product of acts undertaken by such individuals. The sovereign body appeared as the artificial consequence of wills imagined to possess some prior standing outside it. Authority was no longer understood primarily as the mediation of an order that preceded those who governed. It could be explained as the construction of an order by subjects treated as possessing the relevant authority before that order existed.

Liberalism inherited this reconstructed individual even where it rejected Hobbes’s political conclusions. Locke altered the account of knowledge and gave greater political weight to natural rights, property, and consent, while Kant transformed the subject again by locating the source of moral obligation in rational autonomy. Their differences are substantial, and liberalism cannot be reduced to a simple choice between empiricism and idealism. What joins these traditions is not agreement about whether knowledge originates in sensation or in the organising activity of the mind. It is the normative priority granted to a subject who can be conceptually detached from inherited political order and then employed as the tribunal before which that order must justify itself.

The liberal individual is therefore not merely a biological human being acknowledged to possess private experiences. He is the imagined bearer of a prior epistemic and moral standing. Political institutions must justify themselves before him because he is treated as possessing rights, reason, interest, conscience, or judgment prior to his incorporation into the order whose legitimacy is being assessed. The political world is reconstructed from capacities attributed to this individual in abstraction from the traditions, obligations, languages, and authoritative relations through which actual persons come to understand themselves.

This does not mean that liberal societies operate through individual judgment alone. No order could do so. The private judgments of millions of individuals do not automatically produce a publicly binding account of reality. Liberalism must therefore construct institutions capable of deciding which claims are authoritative while continuing to present those institutions as expressions or protectors of individual freedom.

As liberal orders develop, the apparent sovereignty of the individual is accompanied by an increasingly elaborate structure of legal, administrative, and epistemic mediation. Courts determine the meaning of rights. Legislatures determine when consent has been sufficiently represented. Bureaucracies translate general liberties into administrable classifications. Credentialled authorities determine which claims may enter public judgment as knowledge. The individual remains the declared source of legitimacy, but institutions increasingly determine what the individual is, what his freedom requires, and which expressions of his judgment are to receive public recognition.

The operative epistemology of liberalism therefore sits uneasily beside its declared anthropology. Liberalism begins by denying that inherited orders possess authority over the individual merely because he has been formed within them. Yet it cannot avoid constructing mediating authorities that speak in the language of the individual while remaining beyond the practical control of any actual individual. This contradiction does not destroy liberalism, but it shapes its characteristic development. Public authority must deny that it stands above the individual while continually acquiring the power to interpret the individual’s freedom for him.

The precise institutional form of this mediation changes across liberal history. Locke’s political world is not identical to nineteenth-century constitutional liberalism, and neither is identical to the administrative and rights-based order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet the underlying problem persists. Once the individual has been declared the prior source of legitimacy, someone must interpret the individual in a form capable of becoming publicly authoritative. The authority of the interpreter grows within an order that officially denies the legitimacy of any interpreter standing independently above the individual.

Marxism emerges from within this modern structure but breaks decisively with the liberal account of the subject. Marx does not return to the older ritual-sacrificial world, nor does he restore an inherited metapersonal order. His explanation remains immanent to human history. Yet he rejects the liberal individual as an epistemically self-sufficient starting point. The individual who appears to liberalism as naturally prior to society is disclosed as the product of historically determinate relations. His interests, categories, and perception of reality are mediated by a mode of life he did not create and whose operation may remain concealed from him.

The importance of class theory is therefore epistemological before it is merely economic. Class does not simply describe inequalities in the possession of wealth. It helps explain why the social world appears differently from different positions within the organisation of production. The liberal individual cannot know himself directly because the very terms through which he interprets himself arise within social relations. What he takes to be universal reason may express a historically particular form of life. What he experiences as freedom may presuppose relations of domination that the categories of liberal society obscure.

Marxism is consequently both a rejection of liberal individualism and a continuation of the modern attempt to reconstruct authority upon an immanent human foundation. The individual is no longer epistemically primary, but neither are gods, ancestors, or inherited rites restored. The place once occupied by a metapersonal order is occupied by history (as developed from Hegel) understood through the development of material relations. Political truth becomes knowledge of the movement of that history.

This produces a problem internal to Marxism. Social position does not automatically yield knowledge of social reality. A worker may understand himself through bourgeois categories, while a person of bourgeois origin may come to comprehend the historical position of the proletariat. Class location mediates consciousness, but it does not guarantee theoretical knowledge. Marxism must therefore distinguish between the empirical consciousness of the members of a class and the objective historical significance attributed to the class itself.

From this distinction arises the possibility of a privileged theoretical interpreter. The proletariat does not become authoritative merely because individual workers possess immediate access to truth. Its historical position must itself be interpreted. Marxism therefore confronts the question of how a class may become conscious of what it objectively is.

The party becomes one historically decisive answer to this epistemological problem, although it is not the only answer Marxists have proposed. Through the likes of Lenin, and the development of revolutionary party traditions, theoretical consciousness becomes increasingly associated with an organisation claiming the capacity to disclose the historical meaning of the proletariat even where actual workers do not recognise themselves within that interpretation. The authority of the party arises not simply from class location but from its claimed possession of the theory through which class location becomes intelligible.

The party does not formally claim to create the movement of history. It claims to comprehend and mediate a historical necessity existing independently of its will. In this sense, Marxism reproduces in secular form an interpretative structure that modern sovereignty had attempted to escape. The priest did not create the god whose will he interpreted, and the Marxist theoretician does not claim to create the historical process whose necessity he discloses. The substance of the order has changed radically, but the epistemological problem remains. Someone must determine what reality means and translate that meaning into publicly binding action.

The political traditions that emerged from the crisis of liberalism and Marxism must be understood against this background. Fascism cannot adequately be described as nothing more than a modification of Marxist theory, nor can it be explained simply as an attempt to repair defects in the relation between an economic base and an ideological superstructure. Its intellectual sources were wider, and its hostility to Marxism was real. Nevertheless, fascism became possible within an intellectual world in which Marxism had already helped destroy the liberal identification of the person with the autonomous individual.

Marxism had shown that consciousness could be interpreted as the expression of a collective historical position deeper than individual awareness. Fascist movements accepted the displacement of the liberal subject while rejecting class as the collective subject through which political reality became intelligible. The nation, people, or historical community took its place. The person was no longer understood primarily as the bearer of abstract rights or as a member of an economic class determined by production. He was treated as a participant in a historical people whose unity preceded him and gave his life political meaning.

This was not a simple return to philosophical idealism, nor did all fascist movements possess an identical epistemology. Fascism drew upon nationalism, syndicalism, vitalism, elite theory, wartime mobilisation, political myth, racial theories, and inherited traditions that varied considerably across different movements. Yet a dominant fascist solution to the modern problem of mediation can still be discerned. The people was not to be known by aggregating the private judgments of individuals. It disclosed itself through participation, struggle, sacrifice, movement, and collective action.

Political myth was therefore not merely a false description employed to deceive a population that might otherwise have perceived reality correctly. It was treated as a means through which a people became conscious of itself. Truth was not separated from the activity through which the national community was formed and revealed.

The fascist leader acquired authority within this structure because he was represented as possessing an immediate relation to the historical unity of the people. Liberal institutions appeared false because they fragmented the people into competing individuals and interests. Marxism appeared false because it divided the nation through class and subordinated national existence to a universal theory of economic history. The leader claimed to overcome both errors by articulating the unity that formal institutions and class antagonism obscured.

The leader did not present himself simply as creating the nation by arbitrary command. His will was authoritative because it was represented as the expression of a deeper national will. His practical power might therefore become unlimited while his legitimacy continued to be presented as interpretative. He could command because he claimed to disclose immediately what the people truly was.

Nazism seems to have radicalised this transformation by making race central to the constitution of the political subject. There is a structural resemblance to Marxism, since both seek beneath the apparent autonomy of the individual for a deeper determinant of consciousness and historical action. But race did not function within Nazism merely as an alternative causal foundation equivalent to the mode of production. It became simultaneously a principle of historical agency, a criterion of political membership, an explanation of cultural production, and a standard by which knowledge and morality were judged.

These functions should not be collapsed into one another. Race could be invoked as biological inheritance, the Volk as a historical and political community, nature as the order within which racial struggle occurred, and Providence as the force through which that struggle acquired direction or meaning. Nazism joined these elements without always resolving their tensions. What held them together was the claim that the apparent individual could be understood only as the bearer of a racial and historical reality deeper than his conscious judgment.

The Führer occupied the highest interpretative position within this order. His authority did not rest simply upon legal office or popular consent. He was represented as the person capable of perceiving and articulating the necessities of racial existence with an immediacy unavailable to ordinary institutions. His will acquired the force of law because it was treated as the disclosure of the Volk’s deeper reality. Here again, the apparent creativity of the sovereign concealed an epistemological claim. The leader could command because he was said to know what the people truly was and what its historical existence required.2

The relation between liberalism, Marxism, fascism, and Nazism should therefore not be imagined as a simple sequence in which one doctrine mechanically produced the next. Their relationship is better understood as a series of transformations in the mediation of political truth. Liberalism grounded legitimacy in the individual imagined prior to inherited order. Marxism denied that this individual possessed unmediated knowledge and located consciousness within historically structured social relations. Fascism accepted the mediated character of the person but relocated the decisive collective subject from class to nation or people. Nazism racialised that subject and made biological inheritance a condition of political and epistemic authority.

The continuity among these traditions lies not in a shared doctrine, nor in a direct line of descent, but in the persistence of the problem modern sovereignty claimed to resolve by locating authority within human beings themselves. Each still required some account of the reality that preceded the immediate decision of the ruler and some interpreter capable of making that reality publicly binding. The individual, the class, the nation, and the race did not simply replace one another as objects of political loyalty. Each supplied a different answer to the question of where political truth resided, how it could be known, and in whose name it could be imposed upon others.

The history of modern political traditions can therefore be read not as a history in which mediation was successfully eliminated, but as one in which mediation was repeatedly denied, reconstructed, and concealed.

Modern traditions do not cease to be epistemological because they reject gods or inherited cosmic orders. They relocate the sources of political truth within immanent human subjects and then construct institutions capable of interpreting those subjects. Their epistemological structure is concealed because the interpreter claims not to mediate an order distinct from himself, but to express the deeper reality of the subject in whose name he acts.

The language changes, but the fundamental question remains the same. Who is authorised to interpret reality, through what means is that interpretation produced, and why should it bind everyone else?

Any serious attempt to understand the current political order must begin from this question.

This difficulty becomes more severe when the tradition is not merely institutionalised, but politicised. Correction requires that a tradition be able to recognise failure as failure. It must be capable of seeing that some claim no longer explains what it was meant to explain, or that some inherited category has ceased to make sense of the phenomena before it. Political conflict alters this situation by changing the meaning of failure itself. In a setting governed by conflict, error is rarely allowed to remain an intellectual matter. To admit that a claim has failed may appear to strengthen an enemy, or endanger and disturb the moral self-understanding of the order that the tradition serves. What might otherwise have been an act of rational correction is experienced as a political concession.

This is why traditions often become least corrigible at precisely the moment when their concepts become most useful. A concept that once helped to illuminate reality may gradually acquire another function. It begins to hold a side together and gives moral coherence to an order that would otherwise appear contingent. It supplies language through which institutions can describe their own authority as legitimate and makes the rival appear unintelligible or morally suspect before any serious act of understanding has taken place. Once this happens, the concept is no longer judged only by its adequacy to what it claims to explain. It is judged by the danger that would follow if it were revised.

No conscious dishonesty is required for this deformation to occur. The actors inside the tradition may sincerely believe that they are defending truth. They may experience any challenge to their language as an attack upon reason itself, because the tradition has trained them to identify its own categories with rationality as such. A rival account therefore need not be refuted in order to be disarmed. It can be treated as a symptom of bad faith in some form. Evidence that ought to place pressure upon the tradition can then be redescribed as hostile material. The more threatening the evidence is, the more easily it is interpreted as evidence of the critic’s motives rather than as evidence against the tradition’s claims.

The survival of the state of nature model is best understood in this light. Its continued authority cannot be explained by its intellectual strength. If it were treated as a factual account of the origins of human order, it would collapse under the evidence already considered. The deeper we look into the historical and anthropological record, the less we find anything resembling isolated individuals standing outside inherited order and then generating authority through consent. We find instead human beings already embedded within ritual worlds, and already subject to obligations they did not invent. The evidence does not merely fail to confirm the state of nature. It points in another direction entirely.

Yet the model survives because it does political work. It protects the modern account of the individual by allowing the individual to appear prior to order rather than produced within order. It protects the modern account of sovereignty by presenting authority as something created by human authorisation rather than something transformed out of older sacred and institutional forms. The state of nature is therefore not merely a mistaken theory. It is a protective myth that shelters the categories through which modernity understands itself.

This is why evidence of sacrificial and ritual order can remain politically invisible even when it is intellectually available. Such evidence does not merely add colour to the study of archaic peoples. It challenges the structure of modern political explanation. If the earliest complex orders were not composed of autonomous individuals, and if law was not originally the command of a human sovereign then modernity cannot tell the story of itself in the way it wishes to tell it. The evidence must therefore be kept at a distance. It may be permitted to exist as anthropology, or ethnographic curiosity, but it is not allowed to reorganise the foundations of political theory.

Political conflict also governs historical memory. A tradition does not remember the past as a neutral archive. It remembers in a way that sustains its present authority. It selects ancestors (such as Locke and Hobbes) who make its own emergence appear intelligible and justified. It purifies its origins by detaching them from the conditions that actually made them possible. What cannot be integrated into this memory is either forgotten or redescribed as belonging to the defeated world.

Liberalism is especially vulnerable to this because it so often presents itself as the emancipation of reason from particularity. It cannot easily remember itself as a historically situated tradition produced through conflict and centralising power, because such a memory would make its own categories appear less universal. Its memory is therefore political before it knows itself as memory.

The point is not to reverse the myth and romanticise the older world. That would only repeat the same error in another direction. The older orders were not innocent merely because liberalism misremembers them. The issue is more fundamental. Political conflict determines what a tradition is able to remember about itself and its rivals. In this way, historical memory becomes an extension of political victory.

Retrojection is one of the chief forms taken by this memory. The present is projected backwards so that it may appear primordial. The modern individual is found at the beginning because modernity requires that individual to have been there all along. Sovereignty is discovered in worlds that did not possess it because modern legal thought requires its own categories to be permanent. Modern economic man is imagined behind older forms of exchange because the economy must appear as a natural domain rather than as a historically produced abstraction. The past is made to anticipate the present, and the present then claims authority as the fulfilment of what the past always contained in hidden form.

The same distortion changes the moral status of evidence. In a healthier inquiry, evidence places pressure upon a claim. It may need interpretation, and it may not decide the matter immediately, but it must be allowed to bear upon the question. In a politicised inquiry, evidence is first examined for its political implications. A fact may be judged dangerous before it is judged true. If accepting it would strengthen a rival, or embarrass a patron, then the fact is not necessarily denied. It is placed at the edge of admissible thought. It is treated as the sort of thing that should not be emphasised, not because it is false, but because it leads in the wrong direction.

This moral quarantine is more effective than open denial. Denial invites dispute. Quarantine prevents the dispute from appearing respectable. A fact may remain technically available while becoming unusable. The scholar who draws attention to it appears suspect. The discipline that refuses to integrate it appears responsible. The institution that marginalises it appears to be guarding against danger rather than avoiding correction. In this way, evidence can be neutralised without ever being refuted. It is not defeated as false. It is rendered morally inconvenient.

This must not be confused with the ordinary complaint that inquiry is biased. The problem is deeper than that. No inquiry begins from nowhere. Every tradition thinks through inherited language, and every act of judgment presupposes some account of what matters. The error is not that political conflict contaminates an otherwise pure reason. Such purity has never been available to human beings. The error is that modern traditions often identify the political conditions of judgment only in their rivals. They become acute genealogists of every order, but when their own concepts are placed under the same pressure, suspicion suddenly appears excessive or malicious.

The result is asymmetrical suspicion. A tradition learns to demystify outwardly while remaining mystified inwardly. It treats the rival’s language as an object to be explained, but its own language as the medium through which explanation occurs.

The structure is not difficult to see once one steps outside it, but stepping outside it is precisely what the tradition has taught its adherents not to do.

No neat resolution follows from this issue of conflict. If correction was already difficult because traditions are embedded in institutions, it is more difficult still because those institutions inhabit fields of conflict and the logic and necessity that follows from the conflict may, and usually does, take precedence over the long term health of the traditions.