Who Is the Man in the Middle?
It is appropriate that we welcome Douglas Farrow as a new contributing editor to Touchstone in this issue, as he authored both the editorial and a feature story, which he first presented as a conference talk one year ago.
Farrow’s January/February 2010 Touchstone cover story, “The Audacity of the State,”was one of those Touchstone articles that put the hooks in me for this journal. After finishing that article, I drew the picture above to help me recall a central part of Farrow’s thesis.
There are two possible answers to the question, “Who Is the Man in the Middle?”, depending on how you see things.
For philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, the man in the middle is the individual, who will never be free to do what he wants until he breaks the chains that bind him and crushes those constraining pillars of church and family once and for all.
Douglas Farrow sees it differently. In his view, the man in the middle in this diagram represents the state, whose tyrannical tendencies can only be restrained by church and family as the two pillars of our political freedom—pillars because “they do not concede to the audacious and immodest state the total authority it craves” (cf. Psalm 2:2–3).
J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
subscription options
Order
Print/Online Subscription
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Order
Online Only
Subscription
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on politics from the online archives
37.5—Sept/Oct 2024
The Death of Conservatism & the Negative World by J. Douglas Johnson
32.2—March/April 2019
on Properly Rendering Things to Caesar & to God by Peter J. Leithart
more from the online archives
30.5—Sept/Oct 2017
The Christian Cure for What Ails Modern Politics by David Bradshaw
27.4—July/August 2014
The Bible, Sacred Theology & the Mind of Christ by Patrick Henry Reardon
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
