God & Freedom
Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order
by Daniel J. Mahoney
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011
(208 pages, $26.95, hardcover)
God and the Atlantic
by Thomas Albert Howard
Oxford University Press, 2011
(272 pages, $45.00, hardcover)
reviewed by James Hitchcock
Daniel Mahoney’s Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order is the best single book for understanding the crisis of American democracy, which is the abandonment of the moral basis without which it cannot flourish.
Democracy requires something beyond itself, Mahoney argues, including “metaphysical claims about human nature, liberty, and natural justice” and “support for the biblical religions that have been a major source of our ethical system, one of self-restraint and belief in something beyond material existence.”
Instead, modern democracy tends to “systematically overcome all external restraints and limitations on the exercise of human autonomy,” making itself bereft of “common memory, shared references, and an awareness of common destiny.” It strives to become a “pure democracy,” based on nothing more than “a vague and empty affirmation of equality and personal and collective autonomy.” Of necessity, therefore, it is destructive of “religion, patriotism, philosophical reflection, family ties or bonds, prudent statesmanship.”
Like many people, Mahoney identifies the worldwide crisis of 1968 (the “culture of repudiation,” “anarchist delirium”) as the point at which a line was irrevocably crossed. But in a sense, that event was merely the culmination of political and intellectual forces that had been building up for three centuries, with Nicolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Friedrich Nietzsche among its obvious progenitors.
On the other side, Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville both saw that the French Revolution revealed democracy’s nihilistic potentialities. But both also saw that it differed from the revolution in America, which was based on an ideal of ordered liberty.
Totalitarian Potentialities
But the roots of the American order are not without their own problems, Mahoney points out. Tocqueville was the first to see how a radical individualism that dissolves all social connections leaves men vulnerable to a “schoolmaster state” that can evolve from “soft” to “hard” despotism, a social atomism that precisely makes totalitarianism possible, even perhaps inevitable. Ironically, although modern democracy conceives of itself as the sworn enemy of totalitarianism, its central tenet—“liberty unbeholden to ends or purposes outside the human will itself”—is at the root of totalitarianism as well, so that liberals have often been uncritical towards totalitarianisms of the left.
“Human beings are free only when they know they are not gods,” Mahoney insists. But modern “secular fundamentalists” now revisit the American Founding to argue, however fallaciously, that it was intended to effect a complete separation of religion from public life. The modern liberal state will not allow public recognition of “the goods of life,” notably the goods of religion, and commands them to be treated as purely private preferences.
James Hitchcock is Professor emeritus of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his late wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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28.2—March/April 2015
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29.3—May/June 2016
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