In his consistently superb daily roundup, The Transom, Ben Domenech today kindly takes up an essay of mine from the October issue of First Things. His characteristically thoughtful analysis inspires a few thoughts in response. 

My essay sought to argue that the particular notion of liberty that dominates today’s political debates (permeating progressivism and sometimes apparent on the right too) is too thin and flat, especially because it takes for granted the human person capable of exercising his liberty and respecting that of others. That genuinely free person is a prerequisite for the liberal society, but the liberal society often doesn’t see enabling the formation of such people as its responsibility. That means that liberalism (and capitalism) often requires a type of citizen it does not produce—or at least does not generally understand itself as charged with producing. Liberal institutions can actually contribute to the formation of such people, but they do that especially by making room (in what we generally think of as “civil society”) for a variety of social institutions, some of them pre-liberal and some them quite liberal, that help to form us all, through instruction and habit, into decent and responsible citizens of a free society, and hopefully into even more than that. 

The question of how a liberal citizen is formed has long been on the minds of many of the great social and political thinkers of the liberal tradition. It was, I would argue, at the core of Adam Smith’s work, for instance, and is therefore essential to understanding the virtues of the market system that he helped to define. But that question is too often absent from the ways in which Americans articulate the theories of the free society that we (including we conservatives) understand as justifying our way of life. That means there’s often a gap between our theory and our practice, but it’s not the usual kind of gap by which practice in the real world can never live up to ideal theories. Our gap often works the other way, explaining the extraordinary things America does by reference to theories too shallow to suffice. America is in some important ways better than it says it is and lacks a vocabulary in which to articulate (and therefore sometimes to defend) its most important virtues. As Tocqueville put it, in an extraordinary chapter about “self-interest well understood” in Democracy in America:

I think that in this it often happens that the Americans do not do themselves justice; for one sometimes sees citizens in the United States as elsewhere abandoning themselves to the disinterested and unreflective sparks that are natural to man; but the Americans scarcely avow that they yield to movements of this kind; they would rather do honor to their philosophy than to themselves.

People on the left and right both still do this in our country, even if the philosophies they seek to honor are different. We lack a theory adequate to America. That gap between theory and practice, which I think arises in part from an over-emphasis of the political and an under-emphasis of the non-political, has always been problematic for us, but it has become especially so in our time as a progressivism that appears to be no better than it says it is has begun to aggressively assault some of those crucial civil-society institutions, threatening to undermine the foundations of our liberty. 

My essay argues for a politics oriented toward sustaining the space in which our society thrives—a politics that limits government because it understands that a government that exceeds its bounds betrays its purpose—and for a society oriented toward filling that space with thriving institutions of moral formation. I think our constitutional system is plainly constructed with that understanding of human limitations and human potential in mind, and that this is among the foremost reasons for cherishing and defending that system. 

Domenech generously quotes a portion of the essay, but then suggests that this view would require government itself to fill that crucial space and role. He writes:

The danger of Yuval’s conception here in my view is that it has too little doubt for the capability of government, empowered to enable man to “choose well”, to capably “choose well” itself. A government that frees us from the “tyranny of unrestrained desire” often does so by restraining those desires according to the wishes of whoever holds the reins of power.

The notion of a government that would take this kind of task upon itself is, of course, pretty much the opposite of what I’m arguing for. My essay asks what might be required to sustain (or revive) our free and liberal society, which cannot be understood apart from a limited government. What our politics owes that task is, for the most part, the room to allow the institutions of moral formation to flourish, or in other words, a limited government and a thriving and active society, which are essential prerequisites for liberal freedom. As I wrote:

Not everyone has the good fortune of a flourishing family, or the opportunity for rewarding work, or a liberal education, or a humbling faith, let alone all of these at once. But some combination of these soul-forming institutions is within the reach of most, and the work of reinforcing them, sustaining the space for them, and putting them within the reach of as many of our fellow citizens as possible is among our highest and most pressing civic callings. 

Our politics, and our government, need to be oriented toward this crucial calling, which means they must be friendly to the purposes of our mediating institutions. This means they must neither be hostile to them nor seek to take them over. Killing someone and then trying to impersonate him—which is roughly how the liberal welfare state has tried to approach civil society—is not a way of being friendly. To resist that, we have to clearly see the difference between the imposter and the real thing. Taking “government” to be a simple synonym for “civic calling,” as I fear Domenech did in reading my essay, is among the foremost dangers we need to guard against. (That the essay could possibly be read this way by so thoughtful a reader is, of course, the fault of its author.) 

The education in virtue made possible by our mediating institutions consists of both habituation and instruction, and in both cases helps us see both how virtue is good and how it is good for us—just as Tocqueville suggests. 

Tocqueville titled the chapter from which I quoted above “How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Doctrine of Self-Interest Well Understood.”  Both the means and the end he expressed in that title merit our attention, and would do us good. And a politics aimed at reforming our government to restore its proper boundaries and therefore make it friendlier to the ends of our mediating institutions and better able to give us the room to thrive would do us good too.