Another of Bryce’s rigorously thoughtful posts. A splendid recovery of the associational, covenantal, federal side of American freedom. But I think it risks making pluralism too innocent. The central state can dominate, and so can townships, churches, parties, families, and covenants. Liberal freedom exists in the uneasy tension between checking centralized sovereignty and local authority. Locke’s contradiction may be less a defect to overcome than a recurring liberal condition. We need impersonal law against patriarchs and intermediate bodies against the state. The task is not to complete the Revolution by choosing one contract but to sustain institutions that keep both dangers visible simultaneously and politically. - Thanks, Bryce, for provoking good thought.
William, thank you! I love how you put this: "to sustain institutions that keep both dangers visible simultaneously and politically." Yes. I've been reading Eric Foner again on the Civil War Amendments, and I was struck with how local assemblies require as a balance, from his point of view, a federalism between the individual and the federal government, mediated by the courts. This revised federalism is beyond that celebrated in Arendt's On Revolution. Balance--at least every time I've tried it--requires tension and sometimes contradiction. (Maybe that's why I've been avoiding Tai Chi.) Thank you for the gift of your considerate pushback and the conversation and thinking . . . and rethinking . . . it encourages.
Thanks, in turn, Bryce. “Balance requires tension and contradiction”—there’s the principle in a nutshell. Maybe that is why Tai Chi remains safer for me as a metaphor.
The tempting truism is that there is no “me” without “us.” But that is also where things become difficult: solidarity can become conformity, and difference can become mimetic rivalry. Pascal says it better: “The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.”
I really appreciate the effort you put into making clarity seem effortless.
Another of Bryce’s rigorously thoughtful posts. A splendid recovery of the associational, covenantal, federal side of American freedom. But I think it risks making pluralism too innocent. The central state can dominate, and so can townships, churches, parties, families, and covenants. Liberal freedom exists in the uneasy tension between checking centralized sovereignty and local authority. Locke’s contradiction may be less a defect to overcome than a recurring liberal condition. We need impersonal law against patriarchs and intermediate bodies against the state. The task is not to complete the Revolution by choosing one contract but to sustain institutions that keep both dangers visible simultaneously and politically. - Thanks, Bryce, for provoking good thought.
William, thank you! I love how you put this: "to sustain institutions that keep both dangers visible simultaneously and politically." Yes. I've been reading Eric Foner again on the Civil War Amendments, and I was struck with how local assemblies require as a balance, from his point of view, a federalism between the individual and the federal government, mediated by the courts. This revised federalism is beyond that celebrated in Arendt's On Revolution. Balance--at least every time I've tried it--requires tension and sometimes contradiction. (Maybe that's why I've been avoiding Tai Chi.) Thank you for the gift of your considerate pushback and the conversation and thinking . . . and rethinking . . . it encourages.
Thanks, in turn, Bryce. “Balance requires tension and contradiction”—there’s the principle in a nutshell. Maybe that is why Tai Chi remains safer for me as a metaphor.
The tempting truism is that there is no “me” without “us.” But that is also where things become difficult: solidarity can become conformity, and difference can become mimetic rivalry. Pascal says it better: “The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.”
I really appreciate the effort you put into making clarity seem effortless.