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.
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more on politics from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
on Properly Rendering Things to Caesar & to God by Peter J. Leithart
33.4—July/August 2020
Our Views on the President Are Not Crucial by S. M. Hutchens
more from the online archives
31.4—July/August 2018
Labels & the Ecumenism of Discipleship by James M. Kushiner
32.1—January/February 2019
Divine Love & the Love of Man & Woman Surpass Mere Consent by Anthony Esolen
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