Political theory

Freedom—the liberation of desire from restraint by other people’s understanding of the good—is central to liberalism. It follows that liberalism is incoherent. The problem is that freedom has to be freedom to do something in particular, and goals conflict. As a result some particular goals, and thus some freedoms, have to be chosen over others. So freedom cannot be an ultimate standard. A substantive understanding of the good always comes first. The writings in this section discuss the contradictions, and the tyrannies and obfuscations, that arise when the attempt is mad

Can Christendom be restored?

Every society is based on some understanding of man and the world that is comprehensive enough to define good and evil, moral obligation, the nature of the good life and so on. But that is just to say that every society is based on a religious understanding.

The issue then is not whether “politics” and “religion” should be kept separate — in the long run they can’t be, the two are joined at the head — but the nature of the established religion and the relation between explicitly religious considerations and more secular issues.

Communism, in its concrete sense as a political movement based on the writings of Karl Marx, has been one of the three main variants of political modernity. The others have been liberalism and fascism. As such it combined liberal goals (emancipation of the individual from restraint) with fascist means (struggle in solidarity against an enemy to be destroyed).

Europe refers to a geographical area and a civilization. In the former sense it stretches in the West from Gibraltar to the British Isles, in the East to the Urals, and on the South to the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Caspian Sea. In the latter sense it has usually been more restricted. Napoleon said that Europe ends at the Pyrenees, and Goethe said somewhere (I believe) that he left Europe when he stepped into a peasant’s cottage. There has always been a question whether Russia or the Balkans are truly European.

The relation between Europe and its offspring has further complicated the question. Is America European?

The question regarding man today is whether man is simply a natural object like any other, the qualities of which can be explained in the same way as those of a maple tree or computer program, and if not, whether he has a particular substantive essence &mdash a necessary character that makes him what he is &mdash or whether he is the being that freely defines what he is with no constraint except acceptance of his own power of choice.

The Catholic view, of course, is that man is different from other objects in nature, and that he has a specific essence that defines the goals for him t

Christendom is the part of the world inhabited by Christians, understood as a polity ordered toward Christ though recognition of the authority of the Church. The ordering of course has never been perfect, but Christ was nonetheless once understood as the principle of unity and the highest possible authority. As such, Christendom endured until the Enlightenment.

The West is a sort of abstract version of “Europe”, which in turn is a secularized version of [Christendom]. As such it is not completely clear what it is or was, except that it wasn’t the “East” (thecommunist world) or the “South” (the Third World). It included New Zealand but not Argentina, for example, and didn’t exclude Japan. See David Gress’s From Plato to Nato for an account of the development of the idea and of the thing itself.

During the Cold War period many conservative and neoconservative publicists pushed “The West” or “Western Civilization” as the main object of conservative loyalty. The impulse has died down somewhat with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the extension of NATO and the EU, continuing mass third-world immigration, the general triumph of multiculturalism, and increasing friction between Europe and the United States.

Tradition is a collective term for the beliefs, habits, attitudes, institutions, stories and so on that grow up among a people living together and give them a common mind and spirit that enables them to make a life together. Tradition is also the knowledge of things that can’t easily be put into words, diffused and made concrete in the life of the people.

Catholics sometimes distinguish

• Sacred Tradition, which is a vehicle of revelation equal to scripture,

This four-part essay was published in slightly edited form in the Summer 2004 issue of Telos (number 128). There is also a *.pdf version of the essay as published. Comments are, of course, welcome.