Two Sovereigns
I am in the final stages of publishing a book on the 45 years between my 1965 high school graduation and 2010. I analyze what has happened as a result of the multiple cultural revolutions of the 1960s. One of the key points therein is the rise of the autonomous individual unfettered by tradition, community or virtue. One of the interesting occurrences over that time period was how there has become an imperial self as well as an imperial state.
Robert Nisbet, a key thinker of the 20th century, posited such an outcome long ago. He believed that a more powerful state is the nearly inescapable outcome of radical individualism. He argued that human beings are communitarian and social beings. They need communities. He also argued that modern liberalism was centered on the individual to the detriment of tradition, institution and virtues. All past vestiges of control over individuals would have to go for the individual’s freedom to flourish. Is there any community left?
For the ancients, especially embodied in the work of Aristotle and Aquinas, the idea of an unfettered self was unheard of. Their context of freedom for the individual was conceived within limits of the community in which he lived and worked. To be a human being required other humans and standards to dictate behavior. The “modern” thinkers conceived of liberty as the end with each person being free, ungoverned and non-communitarian. There was a state in that way of thinking, created by the individuals for the purpose of guaranteeing and extending liberty.
The extending component was accomplished by eliminating as many limitations on individual freedom as possible. So, for true liberty to exist there was needed a state, agreed to through the Social Contract, to eradicate all impediments to the freely choosing autonomous individual. Modern liberal thought has embraced the state as the only organization to which loyalty is owed for it alone can bring about the sought fulfillment of liberty. A vast apparatus of state has grown over the years, not to oppress but to facilitate freedom. Any previous existing institutions [family, church, local communities] not onboard with the new way of unlimited freedom by the sovereign self are marginalized or privatized.
But how does this work today? Does not the state represent a limiting factor on the individual thus requiring elimination? Karl Marx thought so but could not pull it off. Nisbet pointed out another conundrum. Regardless of how modernism tried to eliminate community limitations … human beings still needed membership and belonging. This was provided by membership with other nameless and faceless individuals in the concept called the USA. Of course, to maintain such a large community, more power had to be centralized in the state with the concomitant decrease of authority by all other institutions. It all seems like a paradox, but it works, doesn’t it? The imperial self and the imperial state together.
So far, so good, or is it? With a bankrupt central government; a morally bankrupt populace of individual philistines; and an almost vanished system of institutions and communities to meet the individual needs of people, what is next? Our government is tied in knots with the political types seeing each others blood in the water and waiting for the expiration of the other in the 2012 federal election. I think it was Russell Kirk who said politics is the art of the possible. The political parties seem entrenched in their ideologies. Nothing seems possible today.
Nisbet believed that Statism is the logical consequence of individualism. So we have together the sovereign state and the sovereign individual. At present, there seems no appetite by either the state or the individual for limitation of their authority. And, because all other mediating institutions for the benefit of an individual in community have withered or are marginalized by the state, the bureaucratic state is indispensible for the individual. Everyone knows you cannot be two masters or bosses. Likewise, there cannot be two sovereigns. If Nisbet is correct, under the new boss liberty for the individual will not be guaranteed or expansive.
