In the first article in our series on Axial apologetics, we set the stage for the debate between Axialists and folkish pagans. We laid out the stakes of the debate and the most basic disagreements. To recap, Axialists make three basic arguments:

1. Paganism is self-defeating;

2. Paganism is debased;

3. Paganism is retarded.

The major Axial argument is the first of these three. And in our first article, we laid the groundwork for understanding why the major Axial argument fails even to address those folkish foundations, let alone to undermine them. That major argument is presented in Enas Mathetes’s article Folkish Heathen Apologetics, Part I, Section I, and this article will be devoted to addressing it. The third article will deepen the critique to show just how alone the Axialist is among intellectual authorities, and the fourth and final article in our series will address the other two arguments presented above. We have addressed Enas’s first because once it is addressed, the other two will mostly be addressed as well.

Article Summary

The core claim is that while folkish apologetic defences may work within a continuous tradition, once that tradition is ruptured, it can only be revived through discourse, meaning that folkish paganism derives its revived authority from logocentric appeals to truth. In other words, once a tradition is broken, to reconstruct itself, it must identify its ancestors, its commands, and its continuity through truth-apt judgements external to the tradition. Enas concludes that folkish pagan revival reconstructs selectively and relies on universalist standards of truth and reason rather than particularized tradition.

His key arguments can be consolidated into two.

Argument 1: Biological Descent Is Not Enough

Enas claims that folkish writers conflate biological descent, cultural formation, and rightful jurisdiction. Even in the pre-Christian North, kinship was mediated by custom and ritual incorporation, not just a simple blood fact. Enas cites various Eddic and saga material to show that belonging to a group depended on norms and recognition, not solely on descent. He concludes that the folkish attempt to treat descent as a bridge to ancestral obligation is unstable.

Argument 2: Ancestral Authority Fails Under a Broken Tradition

Enas accepts that the ancestral principle (authorship is authority) binds where authority is proximate and continuously transmitted. However, once a tradition has been historically broken and must be reconstructed, one must first determine who the relevant ancestors are, what they commanded, and how those commands apply now. He claims that in cases of cultic rupture, the ancestral principle cannot make any of these determinations without importing extra-traditional standards of evidence and judgement.

Folkishness does not mainly argue that paganism is true, but that it is ancestrally appropriate for certain peoples—that command, not truth, is what binds a folk to a religion. Enas’s strategy is to argue the case for logos: that propositional reason, thus truth, is deeper than command—that a moral command has no force unless it can be translated into an objective statement that holds for all (i.e., truth-apt content); otherwise it is at best what he calls “group meditation.” Therefore, the article concludes that the ancestral principle cannot be an algorithm that excludes judgement, because it depends on prior standards of correctness and evidence.

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Response to Article

In General

The reader will have already guessed the overall shape of our response based on the concepts outlined in our last article. Broadly, Axial apologetics fails by its own standard: the folkish pagan need not appeal to a purported standard outside folkish standards, because the Axialist’s logocentric case fails by its own measure. It defeats itself by demanding universal standards and then failing to demonstrate that Christianity or any other Axial theology lives up to those standards, or that it can even coherently articulate them. Enas’s incoherence is twofold:

1. Internal incoherence. Enas takes a biblical approach, and in the fields of academic biblical studies and university theology, scholars widely acknowledge that the Bible contains irreconcilable theological contradictions, with the status of these contradictions depending on what lens one analyzes the Bible through—a question which has no intelligible objective answer. The Christian must decide which lens to apply, either arbitrarily or, per factualism, according to his tradition. Citing certain biblical passages or applying certain lenses lends biblical weight to theological voluntarism and, in turn, to imperative ethics, thereby warranting the ancestral principle. Folkish apologists simply follow the Bible to its logical conclusions, but because the Bible is incoherent, its logical conclusions are de facto decided either by the reader (in which case the truth of the Bible is subjective) or by the tradition (in which case the truth of the Bible is relative).

2. External coherence. Folkish apologetics better comports with empirical facts; offers a more robust account of metaphysics, epistemology, and metaethics; and aligns more closely with cognitive science and the broad linguistic trend of academic philosophy than Axial apologetics does.

This series will focus on the question of external coherence, as Christianity’s internal coherence has been sufficiently challenged by others. Folkish apologetics need not advance a neutral standard; it is enough to show how Axial apologetics fails by its own.

On Indo-European Maximalism

We will start with the simpler objections and work our way up to Enas’ main argument. First, the ranking problem: why would the logic of older commands prevailing not simply run back to Proto-Indo-European abstraction? Recall: the ancestral principle yields the rule that the oldest legible command is decisive. It is the oldest legible command, because the illegible command, even if older, cannot be followed. This is a practical limit, and in practice, the vast majority of Germanic paganism goes unchallenged, because it either aligns with Indo-European practices or those latter practices are illegible. But where known Germanic and Indo-European practices disagree, Germanic practices must reform themselves. This is an ongoing debate within the Germanic pagan sphere, but it is what the ancestral principle demands.

On Biological Totalism

Folkish apologetics explicitly accepts that biological inheritance is not a sufficient condition for identity. While we must never lose sight of the fact that it was exceptional, adoption of non-kindred male heirs into the family is found in most Indo-European branches, with the laws so similar between branches that we can plausibly reconstruct this as a Proto-Indo-European practice. Folkishness treats identity as nested and pre-political—family, then clan, tribe, folk, race—and treats command as specific to each of these relations.

However, this by itself is irrelevant to factualism and the ancestral principle. The “ancestral” in the ancestral principle is a metaphor. The ancestral principle does not begin with ancestry and derive authority from it, but begins with authority and determines that it is identical with authorship. We have demonstrated in our article Where Do Pagans Get Their Authority? that this conception of authority is shared by Christians, and we have demonstrated its Indo-European pedigree in our articles Bridging the Is-Ought Gap and Authority a la Carte.

On the Inevitability of Interpretation

The next strategic move is to say that while the folkish apologist is right to deny the Axialist the right to choose his authority via conscience, once interpretation enters, in practice, you choose what your authority means via conscience. The error here is to mistake the incompleteness of a tradition for the illegitimacy of the authority that commands it—the muffled command does not indicate a vacant throne. Conscience does not enter here as a legitimate co-legislator, but strictly as a symptom of failure—a sign that the transmission of the command has become obscured, not that the command itself has surrendered its primordial right to bind.

Imperative ethics distinguishes between first-order commands and secondary moral discourse. The primary commands constitute the actual law, while metaethical propositions merely describe who issued what to whom. The crucial point is that these descriptive reports lack prescriptive power and cannot confer the normative force of the original command.

Enas is right about this, however: to call the ancestral principle purely an algorithm overstates its mechanics; it minimizes the role of conscience rather than eliminating it. Conscience is unavoidable—the need for it arises the moment rightful commands demand contradictory action. But it would be disrespectful, to say the least, to demand of primordial authority that it clarify every last command before we accept them as binding—one does not petition the king for a parking ticket. This is what a heuristic is for. The role of the ancestral principle is to remove the need for conscience where possible, because conscience and judgment are strictly derivative: they serve as tools rather than the source of authority. The difference is that folkishness subordinates conscience in order to maximize obedience, whereas Axiality elevates conscience with the effect of maximizing disobedience.

On Broken Traditions

The broken tradition argument is not a serious argument on its own; the role of the broken tradition is to provide the necessary condition for the “argument from discursivity” (that reconstruction requires logos) to apply. However, it is worth briefly outlining a response to the tiresome claim that because a tradition has been broken, it cannot be restored.1

The most obvious answer to this objection is that broken traditions have indeed been restored. For example, following Vatican II, in 1969, the Catholic Church transitioned from the centuries-old Tridentine Mass, celebrated in Latin, to the Novus Ordo Mass, celebrated in vernacular languages; then, in 2007, Pope Benedict XVI issued the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, officially restoring the older Latin liturgy.

The restoration of the Latin Mass was not invalidated by its neglect because continuity is irrelevant to legitimacy. The relevant question is not whether commands or a body of practices have been continuously followed, but whether they are valid, and the criterion for their validity is that they have been issued by rightful authority. Making continuity the criterion of legitimacy simply privileges whatever currently prevails, with the effect of forbidding restoration of any lapsed practice, no matter how recent. The difference between a continuous tradition and a revived one is simply a matter of continuity, not of validity—this difference does not annul upstream authority. Pagan revival should be understood as renewed obedience to commands that have never been annulled, because interruption does not dissolve ancestral claim.

On Discursivity

We now come to the major Axial argument: that because folkish reconstruction relies on logic, mathematics, coherence, and evidence, it has already entered a trans-folk arena of truth. The strategy is to recapitulate Axial supersessionary theology in the form of an argument: folkish paganism might have been valid on its own terms, but its rupture and replacement have created a one-time, irreversible move into discursivity, and attempts to return to the “Garden of Eden” are impossible since they rely on Axial acquisitions.

Ancient Error is Still Error

There are two issues at play here:

1. The validity of the Axial replacement;

2. The impossibility of return.

We will start with the first of these issues. The Axialist naturally assumes the validity of his replacement theology. However, this theology has no trans-traditional purchase on the folkish pagan because the pagan’s approach is foundationalist. The essential feature of folkish apologetics is that what is subsequent depends upon what is prior for its validity, so whatever Christian or otherwise Axial justifications were presented in antiquity for the original apostasy still rest on pagan foundations. In granting that the pagan originally “saw the light” from within his own worldview, the Axialist has already conceded too much.

If Christianity undermines folkishness, it undermines the basis upon which conversion rests. If it does not undermine it, conversion lacks justification. This is the inescapable dilemma. It does not matter how long ago the conversion occurred—ancient error is still error.

The original conversion to Christianity depended upon tradition-bound arguments. This fact comports with the nature of reason: for an argument to begin to persuade—or even to be intelligible—it must rest on axioms which are intelligible, and intelligible axioms are exhausted by our thrownness. This fact also comports with observed history: the instances of Christianity gerrymandering itself to fit within pagan theologies have been elaborated at length by scholars of religion.

Since the original justifications for apostasy depended on folkish pagan priors, undermining those priors has thereby undermined the justifications. This does not yet mean that paganism is validated—if the Axialist is truly right about the impossibility of return, it means something much darker: that we are left both without paganism and without its replacement. But the Axialist is wrong about the impossibility of return, as we shall see presently. For now, it is enough to grasp that the apostasy is self-undermining: Christianity claims universal jurisdiction, but this jurisdiction was originally derived from particularized jurisdiction, which, per the Christian, has been demolished, and therefore, along with it, the universal jurisdiction.

We have here another conservation law: “conservation of authority”—originary tradition cannot be created or destroyed, cannot be abandoned, but is a structural necessity that upholds the very possibility of justification, and therefore the possibility even of abandonment. In folkish terms, it is primordial. All the Axialist is left with is to say “you can’t go back; we are here now,” which not only does not help his case, but concedes that thrownness is normatively decisive—precisely the opposite of what he wants to say. But can we really not go back? Let us ask a better question: did we ever really leave our tradition behind?

Discourse is Always Tradition-Bound

The apostate faith’s reliance on the originary faith as foundation does not get us back to folkish paganism, but only to the impossibility of the apostate faith. We must address, head-on, the objection that discourse cannot revive folkish particularism, because, as the Axialist points out, we are here now. The folkish apologist replies that even if we are here now, rupture is irrelevant because of the nature of discourse itself.

Let us begin with morality. Morality reduces to commands, and commands are agent-relative.2 They deal not in truth-values but in aptness, a kind of “felicity.”3 They are valid “for me” but not “for you,” i.e., they are particularist and bound to a specific community or relation. Commands are what linguists call performatives—they do not aim at truth; they aim at action. A moral “ought” is not a mere adjective on a fact, but an abstracted command. It is a category of language that, by its nature, cannot be captured by truth-conditions.

As J. L. Austin shows, performatives are “assessable” not by true/false but by appropriateness or felicity.4 We sense that a command like “Feed the baby!” cannot be classified as true or false, only fitting or misfitting. Thus, insisting on a truth‐valued judgment of “ought” statements misconceives their nature. To demand that a moral rule be “true” in the same way as a scientific fact is to ignore that ethical discourse functions as commentary on imperative speech. This contrasts with universal propositions, which must hold for anyone regardless of who utters them.

That is troubling enough for Axialists—that morality reduces to agent-relative utterances means moral universalism is already lost. However, it gets much worse for the Axial logocentrist: even propositions themselves reduce to commands. All our basic concepts are introduced by ostensive naming—pointing plus a command—long before any true-or-false proposition appears.5 For example, a child’s first word learning occurs when a parent points and says, “That’s Dad,” implicitly commanding the child to take that appearance as “Dad.” Such an ostensive utterance is not a propositional statement at all (it has no truth‐value) but an action: it tells the child to associate a name with an experienced phenomenon. All names (i.e., concepts) come from these ostensive definitions, each carrying an implied command (e.g. “take X to be Y”).

In other words, naming is performative: it depends on the speaker’s authority or tradition to attach meaning. Only once we have such names can we form propositions by combining them. The example we gave in our Ethical Relativism for Chads article was the copulative “is” statement: when a child finally says “Rover is a dog,” they have linked two previously learned names (“Rover,” “dog”). This is the first proposition.

Truth and falsity only enter at this stage, after names and concepts are in place. In short, conceptual content and even propositional form arise from commands—truth comes late to the party. All concepts are just names, and all names depend on ostensives and commands—so the predicate relation (“is”) is built on tradition‐bound naming. Since concepts are literally the names we have inherited, no proposition is intelligible apart from those naming commands. Thus, propositions are built on imperatives, which are particularist. This is to say that even propositions depend on tradition, which was implicit in our observation that even the justifications for the apostate faith depend upon the foundations furnished by the originary faith.

Folkish Anti-Logocentrism: From Augustine to the Linguistic Turn in Modern Philosophy

The Christian may at this point attempt to reject the ostensive model of linguistic acquisition as modern and therefore invalid, but if he did, he would disagree with one of the church fathers. Augustine himself, in his Confessions, puts forth precisely this model of ostensive definition:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples; the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of the voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.6

Some 1500 years later, Bertrand Russell formalized Augustine’s ostensive definition model.7 Russell argued that all nominal (verbal) definitions must ultimately rest on ostensive definitions. If you look up a word in the dictionary, it is defined in terms of other words. If you look up those words, you find more words. To prevent an infinite loop, language must attach directly to something outside the self. That anchor is ostension—pointing to a perceived object and naming it. In his 1957 critique of P. F. Strawson,8 Russell noted that ostensive definitions are inherently tied to experience. He famously wrote that “the meanings of all empirical words depend ultimately upon ostensive definitions, that ostensive definitions depend upon experience, and that experience is egocentric.” By “egocentric,” Russell is gesturing toward what we have called agent-relative, or tradition-bound.

But that is not the end of the matter. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein attempts to move beyond Augustine’s ostension, arguing that ostensive definitions are ambiguous. For example, pointing to a red ball and saying “red” could be interpreted ambiguously as a definition of the colour, the shape, the object itself, or the action of holding it. Instead of treating language as a picture, Wittgenstein encouraged us to treat language as a tool. We have left behind the “picture” theory of language and moved to the “tool” theory of language. Discourse is not about the agreement between words and states of affairs in the world, as Plato and Axialists assume, but about the appropriateness, or once again, the “felicity” of the tool being employed. Words are deeds—discourse is about action, thus imperatives, before it is about truth.

Wittgenstein’s loose ideas were formalized by J. L. Austin into a structured linguistic theory that John Searle later refined into his Speech Act Theory, which categorizes language not foundationally as a tool for description, but more fundamentally as a system of actions. Let us set out Searle’s theory to demonstrate how modern philosophy agrees with our folkish framework.

Discourse is enabled by constitutive rules: authority commands you to “take X to be Y.” Searle argued that social reality is governed by rules that create new possibilities for behaviour. While some rules are regulative, like “drive on the left side of the road,” the more foundational rules are constitutive because they define the activity itself.9 Searle uses the formula X counts as Y in context C. Physical paper currency (X) counts as money (Y) within our economic system (C). Uttering a promise (X) counts as placing yourself under an obligation (Y) within a social framework (C). And so on. The important point is that this is how all naming works, even for “objective” facts. To take the example we gave in our article Bridging the Is-Ought Gap:

You have one name for the colour blue, but the Russian has голубой (goluboy) and синий (siniy)—he has been commanded to notice that these are categorically different colours. Fundamentally, the command to notice this and not that, to take X and not Y as a distinct thing is the source of all propositions by pre-rationally supplying us in the first place with subjects that can then be predicated.

In the blue example, A to B wavelength of light counts as goluboy; C to D wavelength counts as siniy. This is how all concepts work: an otherwise raw, uninterpreted perception (X) is collectively accorded the status of an institutional reality (Y), but this translation holds only within a shared world of meaning (C). By stripping away the illusion of objective, standalone facts, we see that Y does not exist out in the wild, but is always socially mediated. Consequently, C is not a neutral, objective backdrop; it is always a tradition-bound social framework. It relies entirely on a community’s historically inherited customs, unspoken rules, and shared habits of mind to give the formula any power at all.

One revealing part of Searle’s theory is the declarative statement. Declarations like a judge saying “case dismissed” or a priest saying “I now pronounce you man and wife” have both a word-to-world and world-to-word fit. In other words, they do not merely describe a pre-existing reality; they change the institutional reality simply by being spoken. When we categorize or name things—even in ordinary statements like “this is a table”—we are relying on collectively accepted rules. Without the social framework of language, we would just be pointing at a collection of unintegrated perceptions. By using a word to categorize the object, we bring the social reality of “a table” into existence, and others agree to treat it as such in order for discourse to hold.10

Because interactions rely on these collectively inherited rules, speech carries an inherent, invisible authority. When you use language, you are drawing on the authority of a system which precedes any agreement. If you refuse to follow the rules of the language game—whether by naming things incorrectly, or failing to abide by the social commitments your statements create—you compromise your ability to participate in discourse. This, and not universality, is the root of even supposed ironclad laws of logic such as the law of non-contradiction. These laws are not commands written across the face of reality, but social prohibitions against undermining the naming order.

The continuum from Russell to Wittgenstein to Austin to Searle seemed to have buried ostensive definition, while radicalizing the relativistic nature of discourse. Even Augustine himself had doubts similar to those of modern thinkers. In his dialogue De magistro, Augustine pointed out that ostension is inherently circular. In this, he agreed with traditional structural linguistics, spearheaded by Ferdinand de Saussure, which views language as a closed, abstract system of arbitrary signs (or, words) that relate only to other words.

Wittgenstein dealt a blow to ostensive definition, but Eric Gans rescued it a generation later by radicalizing Wittgenstein himself. While Wittgenstein argued in the Philosophical Investigations that language is a series of social games and that ostension can be ambiguous, Gans employs the tool theory of language to defend ostension in what he calls Generative Anthropology.11 This anthropological model posits an Originary Scene: the very first human utterance was an urgent, physical ostensive sign meant to prevent immediate tribal warfare, thereby making ostension the most primitive and fundamental form of all human thought.

Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein had already established that language is historically conditioned and bound to cultural traditions. Gans deepens this by showing that discourse derives from a tool specifically designed to preserve communal peace. Discourse is not a neutral system that happens to accumulate cultural baggage over time, but a survival mechanism explicitly built atop a historical tradition of containing human violence. Every piece of human discourse relies on a shared, inherited understanding of what is “sacred” or “forbidden.” This communal agreement prevents us from destroying each other. Thus, discourse can never be completely separated from its specific cultural and historical lineage.12 When the logocentrist claims that engaging in discourse means playing a universalist game, they forget that discourse is simply deferred violence. We can no more call language a neutral, universal framework because we agree to its rules than we could call a peace treaty a universal moral truth because neither side wants to resume shooting each other.

Gans points out that before humans could ever look at the “world” and state “facts,” they had to manage urgent, explosive desires. Language evolved from the ostensive into the imperative long before it ever became a declarative proposition. The proposition only emerged later to describe a world that had already been made safe and stable by commands and taboos. Therefore, logic and factual statements are merely highly refined versions of more primitive commands.

Axial philosophy views authority as something external that corrupts or manipulates otherwise free discourse. Through a Generative Anthropology lens, we see that authority is the absolute prerequisite for speech. In Gans’s Originary Scene, the very first sign is born because a group of proto-humans collectively yield to the authority of a central, sacred object (which represents the threat of total tribal warfare). Because of this, every conversation we have today implicitly respects a shared centre of authority. Even when we argue, we submit to the authority of grammar, turn-taking, and mutual recognition. Authority is not added to discourse later, and it is certainly not arrived at through discourse; authority is the foundation that keeps human communication from collapsing into violence.

For centuries, Axial philosophy treated logos (“discourse determines authority”) as the ultimate courtroom where all arguments are judged. Thinkers assumed that human beings are rational creatures who use objective logic to find absolute truth. Gans totally undermines this metaphysical ideal: logos is not a timeless cosmic judge ruling over human affairs, but a cultural byproduct. This is anti-logos—authority determines discursivity. Logic did not create the human community; the human community created logic to keep from slaughtering itself. Statements are not fundamentally true because they agree with an abstract framework; instead, ideas are deemed “reasonable” insofar as they successfully defer human resentment and promote peace. Gans does not disagree with Searle’s Speech Act Theory, but confirms it. Historically, the development of logic and language required communal agreements. He replaces a cosmic, logical tribunal with a practical, anthropological one: the survival and harmony of the community.

In the third article in our series, we will expand on the lineage we have just sketched, showing that the Axialist disagrees with virtually every important thinker of our time—both on the left and on the right—on the question of universalism.

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For almost all of recorded history, Axial theologies have staged themselves as defenders of authority and tradition, much as modern-day conservatives do. But beneath the surface, a deeper foundation lies concealed. There was something that these theologies once replaced—they were once the revolutionaries, the assailants against all authority and tradition, and they bear the ineradicable mark of their revolutionary past. A leopard never changes its spots, and anti-authoritarianism does not become authority with the “silent lapse of time.”1

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This is the frame of folkish apologetics in the 21st century: Axial theologies are the real anti-authoritarians, the real anti-traditionalists. To displace the originary traditions, these theologies had to posit something beyond them—what modern Axialists2 call “transcendence.” But after the revolution, in order to maintain order, these theologies had to convert themselves into a real tradition; and in order to do that, they had to manufacture a schizoid history which actually places themselves at the beginning. But this cannot quell the revolutionary impulse that lives in their heart, which brings forth perennial attempts to “transcend” themselves, one of which eventually triumphs, and the cycle begins anew.

This folkish framing has forced Axial theologies to reveal that they are anti-authoritarian and anti-tradition—in other words, that they are forerunners to liberalism. Axial theologians thus occupy an unstable position: to their right is folkishness, the consistent defender of authority and tradition; to their left is liberalism, the avowed enemy of these. Caught between these consistent poles are Buddhists, Platonists, Christians, perennialists, and other “middling” Axialists.

The rhetorical move for the middling Axialist is to claim that they really defend both: they are allies of tradition and authority just as they are of freedom and conscience. The structural move is to make tradition and authority answer to something outside themselves, and the form of their argument is the performative contradiction. The Axialist will demand that tradition ground itself in truth, and then argue along the lines of “well, you have to appeal to shared, objective standards of truth just to have a discussion at all, so the fact that we’re talking proves my point.” Sometimes the Axialist will even extend this beyond discourse to language or even communication itself, as though a lion roaring to ward off hyenas from their kill is simply a Christian or Platonist who hasn’t realized it yet. This so offends common sense that even if they could offer a valid logical demonstration, it would only show that logic must bow before common sense.

The goal of Axial apologetics is to move authority and tradition into the realm of discourse, where truth governs authority, not the other way around. This is what is meant by the term logos, taken from the Greek word for “word,” “idea,” or “account.” Folkishness reverses the performative contradiction by pointing out that questioning authority at its foundations both collapses morality into incoherence and renders discourse impossible. The folkish apologist observes that commands presuppose authority and that naming resolves into command, meaning that the predicate relation—the basis of the proposition, thus discourse—depends on authority. This is to say that the command comes before the proposition, and therefore authority is upstream of truth. This is anti-logos, or the idea that discursivity is not at the bottom of right.

Axialists have tried to defend logos by mounting objections to this folkish apologetic. In this article, we will examine these objections to show that they fail to address the framework just laid out. This folkish framework involves several concepts, including Thrownness, Heteronomy, Imperative Ethics, Factualism, and the Ancestral Principle. Far and away, the concept that has received the most attention is the ancestral principle, but it is not the most fundamental. To his credit, Greg Johnson has attempted to challenge imperative ethics, though in the final analysis his objection is that imperative ethics is Jewish, which concedes that the validity of an idea is bound up with the identity of the holder of that idea—in other words, that there are different moralities (or in this case, even different truth claims) for different peoples. This already cannot defend the point that the Axialist wants to make.

But I appreciate the responses because they have forced folkish pagans to clarify our positions. There have been no few responses, specifically to the ancestral principle, which seems to have touched a nerve among Christians, and especially among Orthodox Christians.3 In this series, we will address three articles, all from Christians, which represent some of the more common and/or interesting critiques of our folkish framework.

Summary and Disagreements

The critiques in these articles measure folkish theologies by logocentric (i.e., discursive) standards that the folkish worldview does not grant as ultimate. The first and most philosophically serious article, Folkish Heathen Apologetics, Part I, Section I by Enas Mathetes, argues that paganism is self-defeating—that the ancestral principle and pagan reconstruction depend upon shared standards of truth. The second article, No, Burke Must Not Die by Radical Monarchist, a response to our article Edmund Burke Must Die, argues that paganism is debased—that folkish traditionalism mistakes inherited form for transcendent truth. The third article, The Best Argument Against Paganism by Gene Botkin, argues that paganism is retarded—that a backward-facing ancestral metaphysic will become technologically stagnant and therefore geopolitically weak. These three critiques—that “paganism is self-defeating,” “paganism is debased,” and “paganism is retarded”—effectively exhaust the canon of Axial counter-apologetics, so we will use these articles to show the weakness of the canon as a whole.

All three critics grant, to varying degrees, that tradition, inheritance, and authority have some value; the deeper disagreement is over what finally grounds them. Is religion fundamentally a description of the world, or a set of prescriptions? It is obviously both, so the question becomes: which determines which? Is morality a kind of knowledge, or a domain of imperatives? Is tradition a vehicle of truth, or itself a binding authority? And is binding force measured by uninterrupted transmission, or by upstream authorship? Must civilizational competence arise from Axial universalism, or can it arise from particularist forms?

The folkish worldview says that authority is prior to reason, that morality is imperative rather than discursive, that authorship grounds obligation, and that folkhood is the operative horizon within which commands become apt. The critics reject this. All three argue from some version of a universal tribunal—this is the major fault line. The folkish worldview rejects an ultimate tribunal. This is why these debates feel circular: each camp rejects the first principle of the others. The aim of our series will not be to argue first principles—because this is impossible. The aim will be to show how Axialist first principles fail by their own criteria, and how the critics fail even to grasp, much less address, the first principles of the folkish worldview.

There are minor fault lines as well. First, the question of morality vs. technics. The third article explicitly fuses the two, whereas the folkish worldview distinguishes them, showing that the latter need not look backward even if the former does—indeed, one of the major errors of modernity is to infer moral from technological progress. Second, the question of living continuity vs. revived obligation. The first article claims that a broken tradition cannot claim ancestral authority, whereas the folkish worldview answers that uninterrupted observance cannot be a precondition of legitimacy; otherwise, authority would be annulled the first time one neglects an obligation. Rather, revival is simply the renewed obedience to commands that were never abrogated.

First Principles

All the main objections in the three critical articles have already been addressed in some form in earlier Imperium Press articles. However, each of the critical articles focuses primarily on the ancestral principle, so to show how they fail to address folkish apologetics as a whole, we must lay some theoretical groundwork beyond that focus. We will outline five concepts crucial to the folkish worldview, though there are others.

The Imperium Press Substack currently represents a theoretical reserve of some 400,000 words, so we will sketch only outlines here. For those who want to go deeper, many of the core articles have been catalogued by topic at the Guide to the Imperium Press Substack.

Thrownness

Martin Heidegger’s concept of thrownness refers to our condition of being always delivered over to a world we did not create. It is characterized entirely by its unchosenness—we are “thrown” into a particular family, language, and tradition without our consent. The raw facts of our birth are simply given as an arbitrary, but nonetheless inescapable baseline of reality that can ask for no ultimate explanation or justification for the way it is.

Thrownness emphasizes heritage over freedom because our freedom is bounded by our unchosen and inherited legacy. This underscores its historical character, since we are always situated in a particular time and place. This also underscores its immanence; our thrownness is not a transcendent reality but an event in the world. We cannot step outside of it to gain the detached, neutral standpoint from which transcendence claims to speak. Heidegger argued that an authentic existence requires “resoluteness”: that we accept the arbitrariness of our starting point and own this unchosen inheritance in order to transform the hand of cards we are dealt into a path that is authentically our own.

Heteronomy

Heteronomy is the condition of ethics whereby the moral law is defined by and received from an external authority rather than the moral agent’s own autonomous reason. Morality cannot depend on the agent’s will; if moral obligation required the assent of the agent—i.e., conscience—the concept of duty would fall apart. This is because if one can bind oneself, one can just as easily unbind oneself, reducing morality to personal preference and resulting in antinomianism: the rejection of all moral laws.

For this reason, heteronomy shifts the locus of moral life away from the individual, which highlights the fundamentally public nature of morality. There is a close match here with shame culture—a social order in which the locus of moral authority is external to the individual, making shame, rather than guilt, the primary means of enforcing moral order.

Heteronomy also manifests as strict formalism. Since interiority is irrelevant to moral standing, the letter of the law takes precedence over the spirit of the law. Heteronomy prescribes strict adherence to civic rituals, outward legal codes, and established cultural traditions, with internal motives relevant only insofar as they lead the moral agent to obey these formalities. The moral status of an act is judged by conformity to a rule, not by the intentions of the actor.

Imperative Ethics

Imperative ethics is a metaethical framework that holds that moral utterances properly belong in the imperative rather than the indicative mood. Put another way, imperative ethics holds that commands such as “do not steal” are first-order moral utterances, whereas moral propositions such as “stealing is wrong” or “you ought not to steal” are derivative or second-order moral utterances which cloak a direct command in the guise of a statement about reality: “stealing is wrong” is more properly phrased, “God said thou shalt not steal,” or worse, “I said thou shalt not steal.”

That morality reduces to imperatives means that first-order moral statements are not facts, thereby marking out imperative ethics as a form of non-cognitivism, since imperatives lack truth-aptitude. The command “wash the car” cannot grammatically be true nor false, so morality is fundamentally non-discursive, i.e., not a matter of truth or falsity. Statements about morality can be true or false, such as “Dad said wash the car,” but morality at its foundations operates entirely outside the realm of rational debate or logical truth-valuation.

Imperatives are inherently agent-relative, so their validity depends on the identity of the speaker and audience. For example, when the father says to the son, “go to your room and think about what you did,” this is valid, whereas when the son says to the father, “go to your room and think about what you did,” this is not valid. This agent-relativity stems from the indexicality of imperatives. The foundational imperative is always in the second person (“I” address it to “you”)4—who “I” refers to varies with the speaker, and who “you” refers to varies with the audience. This agent-relativity is also known as particularism—so morality is fundamentally a set of particularized, situational commands rather than a set of universal, freestanding truths.

Some ethical frameworks, sensing the incoherence of propositional ethics (i.e., moral cognitivism), attempt to salvage it by introducing teleology—the belief that natural entities have a telos (an innate purpose or goal)—into ethics. However, this does not avoid imperative ethics, because a purpose or a goal implies an intention, thus a will, thus a command. A natural purpose or end goal is unintelligible without an aiming intellect, which automatically smuggles a commanding will back into the system.

Imperative ethics has deep historical consequences. Because morality is non-discursive (i.e., not a set of truth-apt propositions), it is not a form of knowledge, and because it is not a form of knowledge, it is not cumulative nor capable of being advanced through discovery—thus imperative ethics forecloses on moral progress. In fact, it has just the opposite consequence: morality is inherently retrogressive, with later imperatives depending on earlier, more foundational commands for their legitimacy.

Ultimately, this entire system presupposes a foundational authority that commands but lies outside the realm of discourse, thereby making this authority axiomatic. It cannot be cross-examined or morally justified, because not only does it lie outside all moral discourse, but any moral justifications reduce to its own commands, thus rendering its justification circular. Foundational authority must simply be accepted as the unarguable, non-discursive starting point of all obligation.

Factualism

Factualism is a meta-epistemological framework that holds that, owing to the nature of reason—that something is always in place before reason—our reason is never disembodied but always depends upon an agent and is bounded by a culture.

Factualism does not reject reason, but recognizes that discourse cannot rest on an abstract, self-justifying foundation; thus, factualism subordinates reason to the very foundations that make reasoning possible in the first place. Every rational chain must begin with a brute fact or axiom that cannot itself be derived from reason. When we ask where these foundational axioms originate, factualism answers that authority is primordial. This authority serves as an absolute, non-debatable presupposition and source of axioms.

In attempting to determine the identity of this primordial authority, we are bound by a strict conservation law of authority. We can only evaluate anything on the basis of axioms, which themselves inevitably reduce to some authority; consequently, one can never decide between competing authorities without some authority already being securely in place. To close this loop and begin at all, one must start from where one is, operating entirely within the assumptions one has inherited, which we call tradition, with the result that tradition is total. This total reliance on inherited forms means that our ethical grammar, political instincts, communal structures, and cognitive frameworks are given to us from the outset, strictly forbidding “reason” from ever standing over tradition as if it were an independent, objective tribunal. There is no “view from nowhere”—any supra-traditional perspective from which to evaluate different cultures or histories is explicitly denied by the preconditions of reason itself.

This does not mean that tradition physically creates the world, but rather that it furnishes the names, concepts, and imperatives by which the world becomes intelligible, meaning that all contact with reality—including our very concepts of “the world” and “reality”—reduces to tradition. As a result, metaphysics, epistemology, and our entire architecture of the world’s basic structure are downstream of tradition. Ultimately, it is not that one tradition truly sees reality while another sees it falsely—the idea of a supra-traditional perspective already collapses the conditions that make reasoning possible. Rather, different traditions stand as radically incommensurable conceptual worlds, functioning as the exhaustive preconditions for experience itself.

The Ancestral Principle

The ancestral principle is a heuristic that operationalizes the mechanics of imperative ethics, giving us a rule for adjudicating between commands that disagree with each other. The principle is: authorship is authority—the structural reality of authority is that obligations naturally arise from origin. A command binds because it issues from that which made, constituted, founded, or transmitted the form of life within which one stands.

This logic is essentially a practical application of factualism: an authority is decisive because it is your ontological source, standing in relation to you as begetter to begotten. Paternity is the clearest expression of this reality: the child stands under the father because the child exists entirely by the father’s prior act. This structure also scales upward to the level of a society—peoples speak in the voices of their founders and their divine creators.

When applied to conflicting commands, this logic yields a clear rule: the oldest legible command is decisive. This rule operates as a kind of transcendental argument—the principle that a thing derives its authority from authorship is not only a justification, but the very structure of all justification. To argue anything at all is inevitably to invoke a tradition, which is implicitly to invoke the ancestral principle; without it, you simply would not be here.

The ancestral principle often, but not always, functions algorithmically. The goal is to minimize the invocation of conscience, because without an external anchor like the ancestral principle, the alternative is invariably to make oneself the judge of authority, while denying that this self-legislation is even happening, even denying it to oneself. Rather than permitting endless philosophical debate, this principle is offered as a procedural rule for bringing debate to a close; it is a way of minimizing private, subjective, post hoc rationalization in the selection of authorities. This motivation—the reduction of private conscience to avoid subjectivism—underlies all of the previously discussed concepts. The core worry driving this system is that reason and conscience are far more likely to lead to unconstrained caprice than is obedience to authority.

Conclusion

Let us return to the beginning of this article. The Axialist postures as the defender of tradition and authority by claiming that true authority must submit to an external, transcendent standard. This strategy subordinates the command to discourse, which in turn subordinates the particular to the universal. Consequently, this shift reduces the public relation of authority, subordinating it to a private metaphysics of identity, ultimately replacing hierarchy with equality.

Put plainly, private conscience is repurposed from moral scaffolding to moral cornerstone. The Axialist shifts the role of conscience from a necessity invoked when tradition underspecifies duties to the foundation that holds up the whole structure of right. There is a reason why rampant subjectivism never emerged in the ancient world but only in Axial modernity. The consistent application of logos has brought us to the point where every man is his own king, where he dares to judge that which sits on the throne. The civilizational result has been to enshrine subjectivism in the name of objectivity.

It has been necessary to lay this groundwork due to the persistent misunderstanding of the folkish position, as though it consists merely of the ancestral principle. Next week, we will address the first of the three articles and show how it fails to counter folkishness.

While you’re anticipating the next article, why not dig into the back catalogue? I’d recommend starting with the Introduction to the Imperium Substack. Then move to the Guide to the Imperium Substack, which has catalogued many of the core theoretical articles by topic. It wouldn’t hurt to brush up on these, as next week we will be drawing many of them together.

Thank you all as ever for your support. This blog is key to our organization. We couldn’t do it without you.

— Mike

We normally follow articles on this Substack with the audio versions narrated by yours truly. However, last week we posted a dialogue between three characters, and since I am not a voice actor, it doesn’t make sense to render it as an audio performance. Therefore, in place of the usual audio version, we are posting this week the introduction I wrote for the Imperium Press Western Canon Series edition of Aesop’s Fables. We will be back to our regular article schedule next week.

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At the end of his work Man and Technics, Oswald Spengler proclaimed, with haunting resonance, “Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.” We are born into this time and must follow the path to its “destined end,” like the Roman soldier at Pompeii who died at his post. Spengler was one of the great anti-utopians of the modern era, but he was anti-utopian in a grand and tragic way. Some 2,500 years before, a Greek anti-utopian thought that optimism was cowardice, but wrote his observations in a very different mode.

The governing assumption in Aesop’s Fables is that the practical limits of reality do not disappear because one has a fine idea. This assumption is inherently reactionary: beings have natures, and wisdom begins by recognizing them. Aesop’s Fables treat the world as governed by permanent constraints rather than redeemable by man’s (or beast’s) ambition. But the fables are not cynical. They allow gratitude, mercy, courage, and justice. But they never entertain the dream that human—or animal—nature can be remade.

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Thus, the fables may be read as one of the West’s great anti-utopian works. Again and again, Aesop shows noble language the facts it would prefer to forget. Equality must reckon with claws and teeth, and reform must reckon with the hungrier flies that follow the old ones. The fables teach that optimism is indeed cowardice: that those who survive are those who place what things are before what they might become.

Aesop’s work is often counted among “children’s literature” along with folktales, proverbs, and other traditional material,1 but as with all such material, it is placed at the beginning of education not because it is elementary, but because it is elemental. From the corpus of Aesopic fables we can sift at least three core motifs which lay the foundation for a proper moral education—a foundation worth returning to throughout life.

Nature as First Law

Before Aesop is political, he is ontological. The fables assume that beings have natures, and that these natures are not conformable to our wishes. George Fyler Townsend’s preface, included in this volume, says that the fable depends on each creature preserving its recognized character: the fox is cunning, the hare timid, the lion bold, and so forth. This is the metaphysics of the fable-world. For Aesop, the first political error is anthropological—or rather zoological. Disaster begins when one forgets what kind of creature one is dealing with.

The most obvious example is “The Farmer and the Snake,” where we learn that the predator’s nature is not annulled by compassion. The Snake, warmed back to life, wakens also to its “natural instincts” and kills the Farmer, whose last words are that he is rightly served for pitying a scoundrel. The fable-form itself depends on such stable creaturely types. The fables assume that beings have enduring natures, and that wisdom begins in recognizing them before it is too late.

This becomes explicit in “The Raven and the Swan”, where the Raven tries to acquire the Swan’s whiteness by changing his habits of washing, only to starve; the moral is blunt: “Change of habit cannot alter Nature.” You can wash the raven, train the monkey, or marry the cat, but as Horace tells us, nature will ever hurry back, and burst through your foolish contempt in triumph.

There is also a scorn for resentment in Aesop that would convulse the Marxist. In “The Fox Who Had Lost His Tail,” the maimed Fox turns his private deprivation into a universal programme: because he has lost his tail, he advises all foxes to cut off theirs. This is an extraordinary little fable about ressentiment disguised as reform. The resentful creature is not content merely to suffer his wound; he tries to turn it into a prescription. But Aesop is not entirely pessimistic about improvement—many fables punish not aspiration as such, but resentful imitation. The Ass wants the Lap-dog’s privileges and is beaten not for ambition but because he is deluded about his own limitations. The utopian sees the world as a blank field of self-creation; Aesop sees it for what it is.

Still, Aesop’s world has no room for the idealist who would “change nature” if nature is unjust, as one feminist put it. Indeed, he tells us that the language of liberation is spoken most eloquently by those who simply want access to prey. In “The Wolves and the Sheep,” the Wolves ask why there must be “internecine and implacable warfare.” They blame the guard-dogs and promise treaties of peace; the Sheep dismiss the Dogs and are eaten. This is no mere childish lesson, but one in political realism: we learn that rhetoric is to be judged by incentives and appetite.

The Cure Worse than the Disease

Within a world of essential natures, we might be forgiven for mistaking Aesop for a conservative. But Aesop does not advocate stasis; his political wisdom is more severe than that. He asks: what will this change unleash? what replaces the old evil, if evil it was? after the first success, what next? In this way, he is the first expositor of Chesterton’s Fence.

“The Frogs Asking for a King” illustrates this point with comic force. The Frogs first receive a harmless log, then an easy-going Eel, and finally, after repeated petitions, a Heron who eats them. The fable is counter-revolutionary not because the existing order is wonderful, but because the desire for change calls forth a more dangerous one. It would be one thing to say “obey your king.” Aesop’s point is subtler and darker: revolution against the status quo is dangerous when one has no theory of consequences. The Frogs know what they hate, but not what it is that the object of their hate is holding back. We see the same in “The Fox and the Hedgehog.” The Hedgehog offers to remove the flies tormenting the Fox, but the Fox refuses because the present flies are at least already satiated; if the Hedgehog drives them away, hungrier flies will come.

The fables are obsessed with such second-order consequences. Utopian thinking often imagines the removal of one evil, but Aesop asks: what comes next? This motif is made most explicit in “The Hawk, the Kite, and the Pigeons.” The Pigeons admit the Hawk to defend them from the Kite, and he kills more of them in one day than the Kite could in a year. The moral is spelled out for us: “Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease.” “The Trees and the Axe” reinforces the point. The Trees give the man an ash-tree for an axe handle; thus armed, he fells the whole forest, and the old oak concludes: “The first step has lost us all.” We see that concessions granted to satisfy a principle often empower the very force that will destroy the order that granted them.

Aesop cares not whether a political wish is noble, but whether it has reckoned with its own cost. This is not to say that ambition is dismissed outright—the Crow in “The Crow and the Pitcher” survives by invention. But invention succeeds only when it works with the reality of stones, water, and beak—not when it conforms to a moral abstraction.

The Political Need for an Executor

Most importantly, the fables repeatedly show that an ambition is worthless unless it is joined to effective agency. Aesop is deeply hostile to disembodied political speech.

“The Hares and the Lions” prefigures the political realism of Thucydides’ Melian dialogue. The Hares argue for equality. The Lions do not answer with a theory of hierarchy, but that the Hares’ words are good, but lack “claws and teeth.” That is the whole Aesopic theory of unenforced justice: a moral proposition without force is little more than noise. “The Mice in Council” makes the same point in parliamentary form. The plan to bell the Cat is excellent until the question turns to who will actually do it. No executor appears, and therefore the scheme is null. We could also point to “The Farmer and the Cranes.” The Farmer’s empty sling first works at first, but once the Cranes discover that the threat is empty, they ignore it. Only when he loads the sling with stones does his will decide the exception. The moral says, “If words suffice not, blows must follow.”

Nor is the crowd a reliable source of order. A scene reminiscent of modern democracy comes to us in “The Fox and the Monkey,” where the beasts elect the Monkey king because he dances well; the main difference from ancient times being that his unfitness ends up actually being exposed by the Fox. “The Kingdom of the Lion” gives the positive, almost absolutist counter-image. Peace among natural enemies becomes possible only under a strong Lion who issues a royal proclamation establishing a universal league among the beasts. Peace among unlike beings can only exist by sovereign force—another political lesson for the modern world. Aesop presents justice not as an abstract order that governs automatically, but as something that must be enacted. It needs an executor, whether god, king, farmer, dog, or cunning fox, else nature and appetite rush back in to fill the political void.

This agentic notion of justice is worth dwelling upon at some length. In Aesop, justice prevails only when a will acts. Not all the fables say “might makes right,” though “The Wild Ass and the Lion” explicitly does. But across the fables we can draw out a deeper lesson: right without an agent is inert. A moral claim that lacks claws or teeth is no claim at all. “The Wild Ass and the Lion” is almost a miniature treatise on absolutist political economy. The Lion and the Wild Ass form an alliance; both contribute something real: strength on one side and speed on the other. But when the spoil is divided, the Lion takes the first share because he is king, the second because he is partner, and the third because refusal would be dangerous. Distribution is a sovereign act. The Ass may have a moral claim, but the Lion is the court of final appeal. “The Lion, the Fox, and the Ass” repeats the point even more brutally. The Ass divides the booty into three equal shares, as if justice were equity. The Lion devours him. The Fox then gives almost everything to the Lion and keeps the smallest possible portion for himself. Asked who taught him this “art of division,” the Fox answers that he learned from the Ass’s fate.

Yet this is no mere worship of power. In “The Wolf and the Lamb,” the Wolf wants to eat the Lamb but first seeks a plea “which should justify to the Lamb himself his right to eat him.” The Lamb refutes every accusation. The Wolf eats him anyway, and the moral concludes: “The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.” The Wolf could have eaten the Lamb without making trial, but he produces accusations, claims injury, and asserts his violated rights. But all of this is theatrical because the verdict has already been willed: the legal argument is decoration retroactively fitted to an appetite. Aesop is too subtle to think that tyranny disdains justice entirely—tyranny is power wearing the costume of justice. The same structure appears in “The Cat and the Cock.” The Cat wants to eat the Cock, so he searches for a “reasonable excuse.” The Cock answers the accusations, but the Cat concludes that, despite the Cock’s “specious apologies,” he will not go without his supper.

The fables involving the gods deepen this voluntarist reading because moral outcomes are explicitly framed in terms of divine will. “The Goods and the Ills” give us the closest thing to a metaethical statement that the archaic Greek world produced. In it, the Goods are driven from earth by the more numerous Ills and appeal to Jupiter for “righteous vengeance” and for an “indissoluble law” to protect them. Jupiter grants the request and decrees that Ills shall come in troops, while Goods shall enter human dwellings singly. Moral reality is here explained as the result of a divine legal act: Jupiter’s decree is not subject to evaluation in terms of good or evil, but constitutes the very order of good and evil.

“Jupiter, Neptune, Minerva, and Momus” illustrates the dependency of judicial office. The gods appoint Momus as judge over their creations, but when his judgment proves envious and fault-finding, Jupiter drives him from the office and expels him from Olympus. The interesting point is not whether Momus is right or wrong in detail. The point is that judgment is an office, and office is delegated by a superior will. Momus can judge because he has been appointed; he ceases to judge when Jupiter removes him.

With the focus on the fixed nature of the Lion, the Fox, the Ass, and all other creatures, one might be tempted to frame Aesop as having some rudimentary idea of natural law, but Aesop is less “natural law” than “command and consequence.” He certainly believes in moral patterns: ingratitude meets with punishment, arrogance falls, etc. But these patterns are always dramatized through agents, not brought about in the nature of things, as in the Stoic conception of the Logos, where living contrary to reason naturally results in internal ruin without the need for an external executioner. The Man kills the Flea because “no evil, whether it be small or large, ought to be tolerated.” Mercury rewards and punishes the Workmen. Jupiter decrees the distribution of Goods and Ills. The Lion’s proclamation creates peace. Moral order prevails, but only intermittently, and only when some agent has the wherewithal to impose it.

The fables do more than defend hierarchy—they show that hierarchy is the very condition under which justice can appear at all. Without the king, the dog, or the farmer armed with the sling, the world reverts to appetite. But the terrifying corollary is that if the agent of justice is himself wicked, justice becomes indistinguishable from predation. The Wolf with a legal argument, the Lion dividing shares, and the Cat seeking a “reasonable excuse” all show the nightmare version of the same principle: where will is sovereign, everything depends on the character of the will. In this way, Aesop proves anything but childish, but far more sober than many philosophers who tell themselves bedtime stories about “the Good.”

What is the Moral of the Story?

The practical advice lies upon the surface of Aesop’s Fables, but the deeper moral commitments lie far below. Aesop is rarely “normative” in the modern philosophical sense. He does not usually pause to say: this state of affairs is just, and therefore should be loved. More often he says: this is how things go; therefore govern yourself accordingly.

Aesop always endorses prudence, but may condemn the state of affairs that called for it. This is why many fables feel morally cold. Aesop may condemn the predator, but he is often more interested in teaching the prey not to be stupid. “The Wolves and the Sheep” is concerned to teach that peace-talk from predators must be seen through the lens of their nature. His prescriptions are prudential, but we can abstract from them a second-order prescription: do not act on the hope that wolves have ceased to be wolves. Of course, some fables do seem to endorse hierarchy, station, and tradition, as “The Crab and the Fox” does. The Crab leaves the shore for a meadow and is eaten; at death he admits that by “nature and habits” he was adapted for the sea. The moral explicitly tells us that “Contentment with our lot is an element of happiness.” Sometimes Aesop clearly says: accept limits and stay in your place.

Even the “might makes right” case in “The Wild Ass and the Lion” is nuanced. The Lion takes all three shares, but the phrase “Might makes right” is clearly less a moral endorsement than a bitter maxim of survival: among lions, “right” is whatever the lion can enforce. Equity may be just in the abstract, but equal division with a lion is suicidal. That is not quite “the lion deserves everything,” but closer to “never mistake a relationship of force for a relationship of law.”

This reading of the “might makes right” reconciles it with an otherwise irreconcilable fact: Aesop’s moral sympathy is often seen in the voice of the victim. In “The Boys and the Frogs,” the boys are merely playing, but the Frogs cry out: “what is sport to you, is death to us,” which shifts sympathy toward the Frogs. In “The Boy Bathing,” the drowning boy tells the scolding traveller to help first and lecture later. The moral says, “Counsel, without help, is useless,” which insists that moral speech must actually help rather than harangue. Aesop is hard, but not cruel. He will side with helplessness when helplessness speaks wisely.

And of course, Aesop is not all hard truths—some fables teach real virtues. “The Ant and the Dove” teaches gratitude: the Dove saves the drowning Ant, and the Ant later saves the Dove from the birdcatcher. “Mercury and the Workmen” rewards honesty. “The North Wind and the Sun” explicitly says, “Persuasion is better than Force.” Clearly Aesop has a moral vocabulary beyond strength. And yet, even in these “softer” fables, the right do not rule merely by being right, but by being effective.

The morality in Aesop’s Fables is prudential before it is ideal: the fables condemn ills, but they do not imagine that condemning them makes them disappear. The fables give us no prescription for ridding the world of wolves or hunger, but they do show what wisdom requires in a world where wolves and hunger are permanent facts. Aesop tells us that the world is hard, and that morality begins when one stops pretending that it will ever be otherwise.

Liberalism is a morally vacuous ideology. It has been observed that one can reduce the liberal to autistic screeching with half a dozen well placed “whys.” If you’re not careful, you may find yourself on the wrong end of the following conversation:

Why is judging people for things they can’t change bad?
“Because they should be free to choose who they are.”

Why is freedom good?
“Because we’re naturally autonomous creatures.”

Why is autonomy good?
“Because if you’re not autonomous, you’re no longer a person.”

Why is personhood morally relevant?
“Because we’re all human.”

Why is human the relevant category?
“Because all persons have a measure of dignity.”

Why is that so?
“You go to jail now.”

This is as far as it usually goes with the ordinary liberal, but the committed liberal will at least try to defend his worldview in a more systematic way. What follows is a dialogue between three historical persons that attempts to get to the bottom of the liberal worldview. And what they find—well, you shall see what, if anything, lies at the abyssal depths of this blackest pit.

Dramatis Personae:

John Rawls, liberal moral philosopher, famous for the “veil of ignorance” argument.
Augustine of Hippo, Christian theologian.
Draco, Athenian lawgiver, famous for the Draconian code.
A slave.

Setting: At the edge of Athens, near an old boundary-stone, before dawn.

RAWLS: Is this the place?

AUGUSTINE: There is the altar.

RAWLS: And the man beside it?

AUGUSTINE: Draco, unless the old writings were false. See how the others wait on his word.

DRACO: You have come far, travellers.

AUGUSTINE: We were told we might witness your city’s rite.

DRACO: You may, if you keep silence and cross not the marked stone.

RAWLS: Then we may stay here?

DRACO: There: behind the boundary. You may see. You may hear. You may not touch the barley, the water, or the knife.

AUGUSTINE: That is no hardship.

Slave: Master, shall I bring the basin nearer?

DRACO: No nearer than the stone.

Slave: It is heavy.

DRACO: Then set it down and step back.

Slave: I have washed, lord.

DRACO: You have washed your hands clean. You have not washed yourself clean of your station.

RAWLS: He is not permitted to approach?

DRACO: He is permitted to serve. He is not permitted to stand at the altar.

AUGUSTINE: And this is because he is a slave?

DRACO: Because he is what he is. Because the altar is what it is.

RAWLS: He cannot help what he is.

DRACO: No. What of it?

AUGUSTINE: He is a slave, yet not therefore less a man. Surely your god is not so small that he cannot be God also to a slave.

RAWLS: Why should he be judged by what he did not choose?

DRACO: Because the altar is not cleansed by his innocence. His presence would defile the god. A slave does not become pure because he wishes it, any more than an ass becomes a king by wearing the lion’s hide.

RAWLS: But is he not a moral person?

DRACO: He is a slave. So he was born, so he is held, according to the custom of the fathers and the law of the city.

RAWLS: Why should the law distinguish men by birth?

DRACO: Law begins where a man is born: father, house, gods, city, dead.

RAWLS: No man can claim to deserve his starting place. To be born into this house rather than that one is, from the standpoint of justice, a moral accident.

DRACO: An accident, to be born in one’s own father’s house?

AUGUSTINE: The Lord has made the greater and the lesser, and not all offices are the same beneath His providence. Yet no man should glory in birth, for all men stand naked before the judgment of God.

DRACO: Then we agree that a man should obey what stands above him.

RAWLS: Not quite. That a man is born to his own father is plain enough. But what he is by birth cannot determine what he is owed in justice. What a man deserves must depend on what he has done. How can he deserve what he has neither chosen nor earned?

DRACO: Why do you ask what he has earned? Justice is built upon station.

RAWLS: Justice cannot be built upon what no man can claim to deserve.

DRACO: Your reasoning goes past me like smoke.

RAWLS: The slave did not choose his father, nor the place assigned to him. Blame and punishment have meaning only where responsibility is present. To judge a man for what lies outside his control is to treat an accident as a fault. Birth is morally arbitrary because it is not the act of the person. Justice must begin from the free moral agent, not from the accidents by which one man is placed above another.

AUGUSTINE: Birth is not nothing, but it is not the ground on which a man is justified. What is born of flesh bears the wound of flesh. No lineage saves a man; no station cleanses him; no noble house can stand upright before God. Yet neither does man save himself by his own will. Grace is not wages paid to merit, but a gift. God’s grace does not find men fit for salvation, but makes them so. If morality rests upon will, then it rests first upon the will of God.

DRACO: Birth is not arbitrary. Birth is the beginning. Justice gives each thing what is fitting to it. It is no justice to feed grass to the lion, or flesh to the deer. The right of a thing follows from what it is. Why should the slave’s choice of father matter? I can scarcely understand the question.

RAWLS: His birth cannot count against him, morally, unless it is in some meaningful sense his—unless he chose it, caused it, or could have altered it.

DRACO: You cannot mean that the unchosen is nothing.

RAWLS: Not nothing. But it cannot be ultimate. A man’s parents may shape him, but they do not determine his worth. Birth is not an act. It is not a choice. And what is not chosen should not, by itself, fix a man’s moral or civic standing.

AUGUSTINE: Yet a man inherits more than flesh. In Adam all sinned, and in Adam all die. We are born into a wound older than our own willing.

RAWLS: Precisely my point. No man is pure by birth, noble by birth, or justified by birth. If he is to be judged—by God, by Zeus, or by his fellows—he must be judged by what he has done.

AUGUSTINE: Not so quickly. We inherit sin, but also duties. You did not choose your father, yet you owe him honour. You did not choose your son, yet you owe him care. You did not choose your homeland or your people, yet they enter into the order of your loves.

RAWLS: Yes. Some obligations may be inherited.

AUGUSTINE: Then inheritance is not morally empty. A man may not make an idol of blood or city, but neither may he treat them as nothing. If we inherit duties, why should we not inherit rights also?

DRACO: Duty is received before a man has speech.

AUGUSTINE: It is received from God. Yet in this much, yes: neither duty nor right is made by man’s private act, nor by his willing it so.

RAWLS: Duty must still be justifiable to free persons. This does not mean that no duties are inherited. Children inherit duties to parents; we inherit duties to country; and in some cases we may even inherit obligations chosen by others, such as treaty obligations.

DRACO: How, then, do you say the slave cannot be bound by what he did not choose?

RAWLS: Not all inherited obligation is equal. Inherited rights are legitimate when they preserve the community, but illegitimate when they establish permanent rank. Inherited obligations are legitimate when they arise from membership in a moral order, illegitimate when they make someone guilty by birth alone. The question is not whether inheritance can bind men. Plainly it can. The question is what kind of inheritance is being enforced, and to what end.

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AUGUSTINE: So freedom and autonomy are not, in the end, what is morally deepest?

RAWLS: I do not follow.

AUGUSTINE: Autonomy—you said justice depends on the will of the moral agent?

RAWLS: Yes.

AUGUSTINE: And freedom—you said the measure of justice is how far it enlarges the freedom of the agent?

RAWLS: Yes.

AUGUSTINE: Then there is something deeper than freedom or autonomy at work here.

DRACO: So it is.

AUGUSTINE: Let us speak only of freedom for the moment. It seems we do not defend freedom simply as freedom, but certain ends for which freedom is made the name and warrant. How else could we confess that inherited obligation may bind us, except by denying freedom some part of its claim? Unchecked freedom loosens the bonds by which a people lives. Therefore we must distinguish freedom used rightly from freedom used wrongly; and it is this rightness or wrongness, not freedom itself, that lies deeper. We limit freedom because we seek to preserve some order we judge good.

RAWLS: We might put it more carefully. Freedom is good when it is exercised by persons regarded as formally equal, under conditions that do not produce arbitrary hierarchy.

DRACO: Then equality is the deeper measure of justice.

RAWLS: Yes. I do not see the contradiction. Some uses of freedom are illegitimate because they create unequal outcomes. If that means equality precedes freedom or autonomy, then so be it. No person is born with a natural right to rule another, and no person is born with lesser moral standing. Since no one deserves his natural or social position, justice must begin from equal standing.

AUGUSTINE: This is not false, though it is true for a lower reason.

RAWLS: In what sense?

AUGUSTINE: You are right that worldly rank does not determine ultimate worth. But we must speak carefully of ultimate things. All souls stand equally before God.

RAWLS: Why should that matter here?

AUGUSTINE: A Christian commonwealth may have all manner of rank and station. Yet beneath every earthly rank there is a deeper equality before the Judge of all.

RAWLS: We need not invoke God to make that claim. We could say that persons are ends in themselves because they are rational moral agents. A person may not be treated merely as a tool for another’s purposes. Each person possesses a measure of human dignity.

DRACO: This dignity of yours is thin air. It guards the man only after stripping him of house, sex, people, fathers, gods, and duty. It protects him as a reasoning thing, and so forgets the man himself. You want him both bound and unbound. But the more dignity you give this bare man, the less his inheritance binds him; and the more his inheritance binds him, the less this dignity rules.

RAWLS: The point can be made without relying so heavily on dignity. We might say simply that moral equality produces the greatest happiness. No one’s pain counts for more merely because of rank. Dignity has its place, but to keep the argument concrete we need only say that each person’s welfare must enter the calculation.

AUGUSTINE: Then we return at once to the slave. What if the city prospers by enslaving a few? If man has no dignity before the count begins, the count may consume him. We need some form of the dignity of man—the image of God.

DRACO: Both of you speak of “man” before you speak of father, son, citizen, ancestor, or god-bound house.

RAWLS: What do you mean?

DRACO: Not only have you failed to justify equal moral standing; your own loves deny it. Surely every man does not stand equally in the eyes of every other man. My father has a higher claim upon me than another man’s father. To deny this offends nature more than to deny your equality.

RAWLS: You are confusing two kinds of moral standing.

DRACO: Then distinguish them.

RAWLS: There is universal minimum standing, and there is particular superior standing. Every human being has some claim not to be murdered or treated as mere waste. But some persons have stronger claims upon me because of inherited belonging.

DRACO: Then partiality is harmless? Favouring blood, tribe, kin, household—all permitted?

RAWLS: No. These are serious dangers.

AUGUSTINE: They become sinful when the lesser love is set above the higher. Blood, city, and household are goods, but they become idols when placed above the order of God.

DRACO: Again, both of you flatten the man, though by different roads. One of you speaks of the abstract person; the other of the soul before God. But a man is not first such a naked thing. Duties move outward from the altar and the grave. You owe most to your gods and forefathers, then to your house, then to kin, then to neighbours, and only after that to the stranger.

AUGUSTINE: I would not deny that loves must be ordered. The equality I defend is a doctrine of minimum standing. It becomes false if swollen into equal concrete claim.

RAWLS: Nor would I make that expansion.

DRACO: Yet for both of you, the floor becomes the house. The first thing is still that all are made in the image of God, or that all are free agents bearing dignity. An older order asks whether that floor is truly the first thing at all.

RAWLS: What do you mean?

DRACO: Why should a man, as man, have even this minimum claim not to be used?

AUGUSTINE: A human being is not first an isolated chooser. The slave is someone’s child, perhaps someone’s father. He may become an ancestor. He belongs to a people and bears a name. To treat him as mere material is not only an offence against his will. It is an offence against the order of relations in which he stands.

DRACO: Continue.

AUGUSTINE: He must not be made a tool because he is a human creature. In enslaving him, you do not merely injure “an individual.” You dishonour one of God’s creatures, a soul, a being capable of standing within the sacred order.

DRACO: There is no the sacred order. He stands outside mine.

RAWLS: We need not bring religion into it. A person is not a stone or a beast. He can suffer, worship, and form a conception of his good. He has an inward life. He must therefore be treated as an end, not merely as a means. A human being is a centre of experience. He does not exist as material for another man’s project. His life matters from within. To instrumentalize him is to deny the kind of being he is.

DRACO: But now you return to autonomy—the very thing we found could not be bedrock. This cannot answer.

AUGUSTINE: As I said: to use a person as a mere instrument violates the sacred order. It treats a living soul as dead matter.

DRACO: Your argument turns on what counts as a person. You have already assumed that the morally relevant thing is the human creature as such. In other words, your agent is “man” before he is father, son, citizen, stranger, or anything else. But this too requires judgment. Why should man as such be the one who bears the claim?

AUGUSTINE: That judgment is given in Scripture.

RAWLS: Or by natural law.

DRACO: If one already accepts them. Otherwise these command nothing.

AUGUSTINE: But I do accept them.

DRACO: Then universal moral reasoning has failed.

AUGUSTINE: In what way?

DRACO: Because reasoning about right and wrong has no ground unless something is first taken as given—brute, fixed, not argued beneath. If men are to arrive at any command fit for action, something must stand before argument begins. And no such moral axiom is given merely by thought itself. What lies outside experience is only what follows from the meanings of words. But no man learns whom he must honour, what he must forbid, or where sacrifice is owed, from the meanings of words.

RAWLS: I do not see how that closes the way to universal morality.

DRACO: Moral laws are not written across the face of the sky, waiting for any passerby to read them. They are posited. And by whom? That is the question.

AUGUSTINE: By God.

DRACO: Again, you say this because you stand within a tradition that taught you to say it. And so you answer, despite yourself: morality is patrimony. If we return to the question—whether the moral agent is man, or something wider, or something narrower—it can be settled only within a tradition.

RAWLS: That cannot be right.

DRACO: You may always ask: Why is freedom good? Then: Why is autonomy good? Then: Why is personhood morally relevant? Then: Why is man the relevant kind? Then: Why should equal dignity belong to all men?

RAWLS: Yes. And?

DRACO: And at last every moral order reaches stone. What is bedrock cannot be justified by what lies beneath it. If it could, it would not be bedrock. So every moral order rests finally on something received as given. We hide this when we call our first things pure reason, God, or universal humanity. They are not. They are inherited judgments, formed in time, carried by a people. Morality is bounded—by the city.

AUGUSTINE: The city must answer to God.

RAWLS: The city must answer to justice. Otherwise its law is arbitrary.

DRACO: And if it is arbitrary?

AUGUSTINE: What do you mean by that?

DRACO: The word “arbitrary” is not a curse. Tradition is a chain of injunctions handed down within a people. These injunctions come from somewhere: from a founder, a god, or a founder-god.

AUGUSTINE: As I have said.

DRACO: But you do not follow your own words to their end. The founder-god gave these injunctions by will. If he did not, then they came from outside him and outside the tradition. That will is the god’s judgment. That is what arbitrary means.

RAWLS: Then morality is merely subjective? The god decides what is right?

DRACO: “Arbitrary” and “subjective” are weaker words for what is “definitive.” The trouble with subjective morality is not that commands descend from above. The trouble is that each man’s private judgment claims power to overthrow what descends from above. To be one’s own lawgiver—that is the corruption. Autonomy does not found morality. It dissolves it. Yes, autonomy is the danger. Yes, arbitrary authority is good.

RAWLS: Then any tyrant may do whatever he likes.

DRACO: You have not understood me. The tyrant is not wicked because he commands from himself. He is wicked because he is not bound by the superior command of the high god.

AUGUSTINE: Say “God.”

RAWLS: So this “high god,” as you call him, may be capricious? He may command whatever he likes? You see no difficulty here?

DRACO: If that is a difficulty, I fear a greater one. Once law is severed from a commanding will, every mind that claims access to reason, truth, nature, justice, the Good, or humanity may lay hands upon it. Then inherited command is no longer sovereign. It is placed under appeal.

RAWLS: And why is that a difficulty?

DRACO: Because when you call divine command arbitrary or capricious, you have already smuggled in your safeguard. You speak as though you stood high enough to judge the source of judgment. From below, the founder’s will must be dark. If the founder-god may be judged by some measure outside his will, then he is not sovereign; he is the steward of another law. But if he is sovereign, his will cannot be tried before a higher court. If morality rests on will, then at the root morality is arbitrary. It proceeds from judgment, and that judgment is not judged by those who receive it. This you must learn to endure.

AUGUSTINE: We need not say either that God’s command makes a thing good by bare will, or that God commands it because goodness stands above Him. God’s will is not separate from the good. His will is identical with morality. The dilemma is false.

DRACO: Does God’s will determine morality, or does morality determine God’s will?

AUGUSTINE: That is just what I deny. There is no division between them. God’s will is not lawless. It is identical with goodness and reason.

RAWLS: Then reason may judge law.

DRACO: Worse. Then your God is no lawgiver. He is the herald of something older than himself.

AUGUSTINE: What do you mean?

DRACO: The prophet has told me you are men from the days to come. In your time, he says, men have crafted a moral order that stands above peoples, cults, cities, ancestors, and gods. You—both of you—say there is truth above custom, justice above law, reason above the gods, the Good above every command received from the fathers. Fools. This looked to you like progress. But you did not ask the first question: who interprets this higher law?

RAWLS: The philosopher.

DRACO: Shame. Father and child, husband and wife, god and folk, countryman and countryman—these are bonds not meant to be summoned again and again before an abstract court. They bind because they are not always under trial. But your reason demands that every sacred bond justify itself before it. When the philosopher becomes judge over the city, he plants a permanent revolution in the city’s heart. Even if he commands like a tyrant, he has already bowed inherited life before abstract truth; and in the end that truth speaks with the private judgment of every man.

AUGUSTINE: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? It is the theologian who interprets the higher law.

DRACO: You preserve obedience in your words: obey God, submit to divine law, honour father and mother. But by making submission higher than any ancestral command, you submit again to reason without altar or grave, and call it Logos. You say God’s will must not be arbitrary; that his will is one with his nature; that his nature is perfect reason and perfect goodness. But if God commands a thing because it is rationally good, then God is witness to morality, not its source.

AUGUSTINE: Do you deny God?

DRACO: Not I. You do. The theologian says, “God wills the good because He is good.” Later the philosopher says, “We may know the good without God.” Later still men say, “We may translate the good into rights, dignity, autonomy, equality, and universal moral law.” The tribunal passes from conscience, to reason, to appetite; and at last each man calls his caprice judgment. Irony upon irony. A tragedy fit not for one house, but for a whole people.

RAWLS: Objectivity need not collapse into private judgment. Objectivity is precisely the opposite of subjectivity.

DRACO: Do not be bewitched by words. We do not find law by worrying syllables until they confess. Look instead. If law belongs to the god of this people, carried through this ancestral order, then it has a place, a people, and a chain of transmission. But if law belongs to universal reason, any man may claim access to it. And if any man may claim access to it, every man may set himself as judge over every command he has received.

AUGUSTINE: Wickedness.

DRACO: That is the irony. The flight from arbitrary tradition gives birth to universal reason; universal reason to private interpretation; private interpretation to autonomy; autonomy to moral solitude.

RAWLS: That is only a slippery slope.

DRACO: No more than a syllogism is a slope. It follows by necessity. The man who says, “I obey reason alone,” ends by obeying himself and naming himself Reason.

RAWLS: What alternative do you offer?

DRACO: That reason become servant, not master. That is the alternative—the only one. Right and wrong are posited, and posited arbitrarily, by a judgment no man may impeach; a judgment, at the root, opaque to us, and irrational only because reason has no throne above it.

AUGUSTINE: Heaven preserve us.

DRACO: Below, rather. At the root of moral order lies something men approach with dread. I have heard that the men of the north call it óðr. We call it theia mania—divine madness. To us it appears as the terrifying darkness of divine judgment. But it appears so only to us, because we stand outside the dwelling-place of the gods, and are not permitted to cross the boundary-stone.

RAWLS: But how shall we know the command is just?

AUGUSTINE: And how shall we know the spirit is divine, and not demonic?

DRACO: You ask as men who stand outside the altar. The god is not made just by our understanding. His judgment is not purified by passing through our reason. Before law is spoken, before the city is founded, before the son knows the name of his father, there is mania: the god’s fire, the first judgment, dark to men because men are not its judges.

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This week marks the 200th article on the Imperium Press Substack. We now regularly rank in the top 50 philosophy blogs on the whole site—often while making the case for a radically folkish and ancestral social ontology. Given how far outside the mainstream that position is, such a ranking is a real achievement; and we have you, the readers, to thank for it. We truly appreciate your support over the years. To celebrate, we are going to examine nationalism from a folkish perspective.

Nationalism has often been examined from the left, usually as an object of critique, as something ugly and superstitious—a remnant of our primitive nature, thankfully outgrown with the march of progress. This is a stunted view, owing more to trauma than informed opinion. Nationalism is a natural and even rational extension of kinship ties to millions of strangers. It has been responsible for building a large part of the modern world.

Nationalism is also a timely subject in light of the early success of Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain—it would have been hard to imagine a party adjacent to the mainstream in Britain 10 years ago whose rhetorical line was “if that means millions go, then millions go.” Nationalism has been on the rise for many years now, and the results are starting to speak for themselves.

And yet this does not mean that nationalism is a wholly good thing. To be sure, it is far preferable to globalism. But nationalism’s heyday is at least a century behind us, and globalism has manifested for a reason. Perhaps there is room for a nuanced evaluation from the right: a sober analysis that does not veer into advocacy.

We have made this sober analysis at book length in our recent release simply titled Nationalism, which is part of our new Fundamentals Series. If you find this article valuable, you will find the book even more so.

A Word About the Fundamentals Series

Before we begin, let us say a brief word about our new book series.

For generations now, the academic mainstream has been systematically misleading people into believing complete nonsense. This is bad enough in relatively hard disciplines like economics—by the time you get to the softer humanities you are reading journalism. This miseducation begins at the very foundation: with introductory works.

Take, for example, the opening paragraph in the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Nationalism:

What is so important about the existence of nations? Throughout history, humans have formed groups of various kinds around criteria that are used to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’. One such group is the nation. Many thousands, indeed millions, have died in wars on behalf of their nation, as they did in World Wars I and II during the 20th century, perhaps the cruellest of all centuries. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to understand what a nation is: this tendency of humanity to divide itself into distinct, and often conflicting, groups.1

Already, before the reader has even encountered the topic, we have questioned its importance; framed it in “exclusionary” terms; invoked conflict, cruelty, and death at every turn—and above all, we have placed in the reader’s mind the supposed “worst evil in history.”

Contrast this to the more sober opening paragraph of the Imperium Press Fundamentals series entry on Nationalism:

Nationalism has profoundly shaped the modern world. It has affected nearly everything, from borders, to wars, to ideas of sovereignty and immigration and identity. Millions of people who otherwise have very little in common have identified with nationalism in one form or another. Anyone who wants to understand modern politics therefore has to understand nationalism. And yet, the moment one tries to ask what nationalism is, or what a nation is, the ground be­comes unstable.2

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One of these is actual scholarship which takes its subject seriously; the other is activism.

Imperium Press has always aimed to be more than a publisher; we want nothing less than to replace the system of higher education. With what?—with real scholarship that will enable students to master disciplines as they actually are, not as political power would wish them to be. The Fundamentals series is an important step in that direction. Again, your support continues to be integral in carrying out our mission, and we are eternally grateful.

This article will articulate a version of the analysis of nationalism contained in our new book on the subject. Needless to say, that book gives nationalism a fair hearing and concludes that it is largely an adaptive phenomenon which contributes positively to the development of civilization. We are not concerned to advocate nationalism though, but rather to examine it with clarity, and a clear view of the subject uncovers serious structural weaknesses in nationalism.

Most readers of this Substack do not need to be told about the virtues of nationalism, so in this article we will focus on the other side: the core weakness in nationalism. We will give nationalism its due, but we will critique it—from the right. To do that, we must first understand where nations fit into the continuum of human belonging.

The Continuum of Human Belonging

Human beings have more than one identity. We may be Englishmen, yes—but we may also be fathers, sons, cousins, Armstrongs, Mancunians, Northumbrians, Europeans, white men, Indo-Europeans, Her Majesty’s subjects, and homo sapiens sapiens. Some of these identities are some near, some distant; some are concrete, some abstract.

We can place human beings on a continuum of identities. Many such continuums could be formulated, but for simplicity’s sake, let us take the following sequence:

family → clan → tribe → polis/city → folk → nation → race → empire → humanity

Right away, we notice that the nation is but one level in a broader field of belonging, not the starting point of social life and not the final possible identity. We can usefully place these identities not only on a line, but also within a series of concentric circles, as in the famous heatmap diagram.

As these identities expand outward, two things happen at once.

First, scale increases. As we move from family to clan up to folk and thence to humanity, more people are bound together, and with this increased scale, greater political and military power becomes possible. We can accomplish larger and larger projects.

Second, immediacy decreases. The more people in your group, the fewer you personally know. You may still be related to them by blood, but this kinship is much weaker, and as we shall discover, it must become symbolic if it is to survive. It is impossible to be loyal to what you do not know, and it is impossible to know millions of people personally, so your loyalty becomes mediated through social institutions, and through social technologies like myth, law, ritual, language, etc.

The core principle is that the wider the identity, the more politically powerful, but the more emotionally abstract and mediated. The larger the scale of belonging, the thinner that belonging is.

Family, for example, is the deepest and most immediate identity. We encounter our family daily. It is personal to us, inherited, embodied. The family does not require ideology to remain together. It is the first school where we learn what duty, loyalty, and sacrifice mean. It is the root of our sense of “mine” and “ours.” No one has to explain belonging—it is obvious. The clan extends family beyond the immediate household, then the tribe joins multiple clans or extended kin-groups into a larger people.

By the time we arrive at the city or polis, though, shared life has changed. It is still kinship writ large, but at this point people are bound together not only by blood, but by civic life—by abstractions such as office and law, and by portable identities such as citizenship. The folk is broader than the city, but usually still below the full nation. This marks another crucial point though—the folk is the smallest unit of belonging where we can develop culture. What is the culture of Boston? We have not arrived at culture yet. What is the culture of New Englanders? That is a folk, with its own customs, stories, law, and way of life. Crucially, the nation depends on the folk. If nationalism hollows out the folk, the national layer must become bureaucratic and ideological in order to hold itself together.

The nation is a late consolidation of these earlier forms, taking kinship feeling from family, clan, and tribe, taking civic order from the polis, and taking culture from the folk—but it scales them to a point where it can defend itself against other nations. The nation is large enough to organize a serious state, but still close enough to inherited belonging that people will sacrifice for it, at least under certain conditions. The nation is the largest form of belonging that can still plausibly feel like an extended people.

We can go beyond the nation too. Race is less politically definite than the nation. It can tap into a sense of kinship across nations, but it is usually too broad to function as a stable political identity by itself. Empire is wider than the nation as well. It may contain many peoples, or even many races across vast territory, commanding impressive military power. But its identity is thinner than national identity, so it depends on a strong state. Humanity is the widest identity, and is perhaps barely even morally intelligible. It can make claims at the level of universality, but it is extremely fragile as a political identity, with almost no direct emotional force compared with family, folk, or nation.

As we proceed upward in this continuum, we are forced to make a trade-off: the lower identities are thicker but smaller, however the higher identities are larger but thinner. The nation sits in the “sweet spot.” Historically, the nation became powerful because it could draw thickness from below, but could enjoy the benefits of scale.

We have said a great deal about the nation, but so far we have not defined nationalism. The nation is a thing; nationalism is a doctrine about the thing. Nationalism takes the national layer of identity and elevates it above the others. It asks us to put our family interest aside for the good of the whole—if your brother were to commit a crime against the public order, the nation would demand that you turn him in. It asks us to put the national interest above our local interest—if Texas is richer in resources than Nevada, the nation demands that these resources be reallocated to keep the whole intact.

To build national unity, nationalism has to subordinate the more fundamental loyalties. This is, to an extent, necessary. A nation cannot function if every lower loyalty refuses to yield. But if nationalism goes too far, it weakens the very identities that generate trust and loyalty in the first place. Nationalism needs the lower identities to nourish it, but it is tempted to treat them as rivals.

The Importance of the Fundamental Identities

What we think of as our singular identity is really a series of nested and mutually reinforcing identities, plural. This is rather obvious—what is less obvious is that these identities are not all equally important to the structure of who we are. And to see this we must see what holds a nation together.

A family can hold together because people know one another, but a nation is too large for direct personal loyalty. Most members will never meet. The nation has to solve a scaling problem, and it does this by extending more fundamental loyalties into symbolic and institutional forms: kinship scales up to peoplehood, local custom becomes national law, etc. The nation is not a literal family, but it borrows the emotional grammar of the family in order to produce what we call thick identity.

Thick identity is a term of art from ethnography and was popularized by Clifford Geertz, an important figure in theories of nationalism.3 A thin identity is something like “we share the same legal status.” A thick identity is more like “we come from the same people, answer to the same dead, and feel the same wounds and victories.” The nation needs thick identity because sacrifice requires more than membership in an administrative body. Men do not usually die for a tax jurisdiction; they die for fathers, children, graves, land, and destiny. The thicker the identity, the less explanation it needs. The thinner the identity, the more coercion required to keep it together.

To grasp the importance of the bottom layers of our continuum of belonging, we must introduce another term: social capital. Social capital is the accumulated trust that allows people to cooperate without being forced at every point, and the key is that social capital is produced below the level of the nation. Trust is something inherently personal; it is produced in families and neighbourhoods, as well as cultic communities. It results from kinship, or else from shared work and shared hardship. The nation draws upon this social capital, but it does not produce it by itself.

We should think of social capital like any other capital—as a resource which must be replenished. Nationalism depends on a reservoir of trust produced by lower forms of life. If nationalism dissolves those lower forms, it drains the reservoir from which it draws its own strength.

Let us summarize thus far. Human beings begin with in-group preference and concrete relational identity, with the immediate family. But we can only scale loyalty so far with purely personal relationships; to extend this loyalty beyond the range of personal knowledge, we must invoke social technologies like myth, law, and symbol—this is how identity is scaled up while retaining its thickness, i.e. its trust. Large-scale cooperation at the national level is enabled only by this trust, which we call social capital, which is accumulated through the lower communities like a reservoir fed by groundwater. The nation then draws upon this reservoir to achieve what cannot be achieved locally.

Ethnic vs. Civic Nationalism

The larger layer of identity that is the nation depends on the more foundational layers in order to function without resorting to coercion. We could look at this another way, in terms of legitimacy. No doubt a polity can hold together by top-down force, but this is inefficient and therefore maladaptive. So much energy (whether spiritual, economic, or indeed ultimately even caloric energy) is spent managing ephemeral problems that the society loses the adaptive advantage of acting as a nation. Legitimacy is an inverse friction coefficient: the more legitimacy a form of life has, the more people will accept it voluntarily.

The legitimacy of a form of life is largely a function of feeling like it is ours. When something is “right full stop”, universally and in the abstract, it lacks natural force, and must be continually reinforced by inculturation. When something is ours, not only is it right, but the moral calculus reverses: ours is not seen in terms of right, right is judged in terms of for us. This—what we will call ours-ness4—gives us a powerful tool to explain what seem like totally incommensurable ideas of the nation: ethnic vs. civic nationalism.

Ethnic nationalism is the least abstract form of nationalism, defining the nation primarily through the pre-political identities beneath it: family, clan, tribe, and folk. Ethnic nationalism says: the nation is an extended people. This means it does not have to invent belonging primarily through the state. The state may protect or organize the people, but the people exists prior to the state. Civic nationalism is the most abstract form, defining the nation mainly through thinner identities beyond the level of the pre-political, in terms of citizenship, law, and creed. Civic nationalism in its modern liberal form says: the nation is a community of shared values. If the nation is defined by values, why should it remain a distinct nation at all? If the values are universal, then anyone who accepts them can belong. And if anyone can belong, then the nation ceases to be a people and devolves to a proposition.5

We can look at ethnic vs. civic nationalism also in terms of ours-ness. In ethnic nationalism, ours-ness comes from being of the same people: this is ours because it belongs to our inherited people. In civic nationalism, ours-ness comes from state membership or public creed: this is ours because we are citizens under the same institutions and profess the same political principles. The irony is that civic nationalism may work when it draws upon an already-existing ethnic nation, but when it tries to stand alone, it cannot hold a population together without coercion. Civic nationalism only survives by borrowing emotional force from ethnic nationalism while denying that it needs it.

Ethnic nationalism is least likely to undermine the roots of nationalism, because it stays closest to those roots. Civic nationalism is the form most likely to undermine nationalism because it detaches the nation from the pre-political identities that make nations thick. Put another way, the more civic the nationalism, the more the state must create the nation out of thin air. The healthy order is that a people makes up a nation, and the nation produces a state instrument. The civic nationalist formulation is that a state produces the category of citizenship, through which the state manufactures a nation. This is why civic nationalism is more costly, more fragile, and more coercive than ethnic nationalism.

The Core Weakness of Nationalism

Ethnic nationalism is closest to peoplehood, whereas civic nationalism is nationalism at its most abstract. The more abstract the nationalism, the more the state has to manufacture it, and this is unstable at its foundation—when the nation becomes a proposition, it has already begun to dissolve as a people.

It would seem, then, that nationalism is stable so far as it is ethnic. This is true. But it does not follow from this observation that ethnic nationalism is entirely stable. As the reader has no doubt guessed, nationalism is not stable, and there is very good reason why it has weakened in the last century, to where it must now be reborn. Why, then, did it die? The answer has less to do with technology or material conditions than with the nature of power.

Extended Analysis Below:

• The essential failure mode of nationalism

• Why Mike no longer considers himself a nationalist

• What a post nationalist right looks like

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Last week we laid out José Ortega y Gasset’s argument in The Revolt of the Masses that what he calls mass man—the trust-fund kid of modern civilization—has inherited what he takes for granted and cannot maintain. Everything we said about Ortega paints him as a man of the right. But a closer reading shows that picture to be complicated—Ortega disagrees with many of the deeper foundations of the political right.

This week we will directly compare Ortega to some of the greatest right-wing thinkers in history: Schmitt, Nietzsche, the absolutists, and the fascists. At the end of this essay, we will compare him to some of the currents in the modern radical right, to people living and working today, in our own circles. If he were alive today, would he be an Imperium reader, a BAPist, a groyper, or something else?

Ortega vs. Schmitt

Ortega forms a relatively neat contrast with Carl Schmitt. Despite both being “on the right,” their disagreements help to situate Ortega ideologically within that broad category.

Carl Schmitt was a jurist and legal philosopher in the Third Reich, one of the greatest legal philosophers of all time. His thought naturally stands far outside the conceptual categories of the modern West, but he was able to see liberalism from the outside in an important way.

Liberalism is generally characterized within academia (such as by David Starkey) as a form of minoritarianism. This does not necessarily mean that it favours ethnic minorities, though in practice it often does. What it means is that liberalism protects smaller groups from larger groups, and from this flows the liberal methodological approach of individualism—the individual being the smallest minority possible. On this score, liberalism is distinct from democracy because it protects minorities (including individuals) from the “tyranny of the majority.”

Schmitt adds another dimension to this view of liberalism that is helpful: in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, he ties liberal parliamentarism to the belief that open and public argument can produce relatively rational law. He sharply separates that from democracy, which for him means the identity of ruler and ruled within a homogeneous people. Once that identity is treated as decisive, Schmitt argues that even a minority—or a dictatorship—can embody the people’s true will. We need not agree with Schmitt on his definition of democracy (which bears little resemblance say, to classical Athenian democracy) to agree with him on the nature of liberalism: at least one essential fact of liberalism is its commitment to relatively open public discourse.

On that schema, Ortega is liberal in a recognizably Schmittian sense. He explicitly says that the older democracy was moderated by liberalism and law, under whose shelter minorities could act and live. He calls liberalism the political principle by which power limits itself and leaves room for those who think differently. Finally, he praises coexistence with opposition as one of civilization’s highest achievements, which places him against Schmitt at a crucial point. Ortega treats the collapse of discussion and the rise of “direct action” as barbarism, not as a more authentic politics. He says the mass man repudiates the kind of open discussion found in parliamentarism, and he treats that as a civilizational regression. He also says that while complaints against parliament may be justified, the answer is to reform parliament, not to abolish it, and that nineteenth-century parliaments built extraordinarily powerful states. On that point he is much closer to liberal parliamentarism than to Schmittian decisionism.

That said, Ortega is not a liberal democrat in the ordinary egalitarian sense, and this is where the Schmitt comparison becomes useful. His defense of minorities is openly aristocratic: minorities are the “especially qualified.” Society is in its essence aristocratic, and the mass is not fit to rule itself. He defends minority leadership because civilization depends on excellence, discipline, and standards that the average man is by definition not capable of. Put simply: liberalism is different than democracy; Ortega is a liberal, not a democrat.

Ortega vs. Nietzsche

Much in Ortega sounds vaguely, sometimes not so vaguely, Nietzschean. And he is Nietzschean—in part. He was deeply marked by Nietzsche, especially in his early formation and in the tone of his diagnosis of modernity. But the mature Ortega takes several recognizably Nietzschean themes and reroutes them through neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, Dilthey, and his own doctrines of vital reason and historical reason.

The most obvious Nietzschean dimension is Ortega’s critique of the mass. Ortega’s mass man belongs in the same family as Nietzsche’s herd: mass man is the conformist type who is content to be like everyone else and resents what stands above him. Ortega defines the mass as the person who feels himself “like everyone else,” while the select man is the one who “demands from himself more than the rest.” This Nietzscheanism is also seen in Ortega’s rank-ordering of human types. He is anti-levelling, anti-mediocrity, and is convinced that higher forms of life depend on self-overcoming. His contrast between mass and select minorities looks like a softened version of Nietzsche’s higher-man rhetoric, but it differs in an important way: his select man is not simply the one who dominates, but the one who imposes harder demands on himself.

The other main point of contact is perspectivism. Ortega and Nietzsche are often paired here, and not by accident, but with some differences. Although the theme of perspectival truth is commonly associated with Nietzsche and Ortega together, it is misleading to read Ortega as denying any authoritative criterion of truth. Ortega’s perspectivism tries, however successfully, to preserve truth through a plurality and hierarchy of perspectives.

There is also a broader family resemblance in their diagnosis of modern crisis. Ortega himself places Nietzsche among the thinkers who foresaw the coming age, writing in The Revolt of the Masses that Nietzsche “shouted” that nihilism was rising. Ortega shares Nietzsche’s sense that modern Europe faces a spiritual crisis, not just a technical or economic one. He is likewise suspicious of the self-satisfaction of modern man in all its complacent progressivism and levelling egalitarianism.

But Ortega is no Nietzschean. First, he is much more committed to reason. He does not overthrow reason in the name of life; he reformulates it as vital reason and later historical reason. Ortega wants a reason adequate to life, not a triumph of instinct over reason. Second, Ortega is less solitary and less self-creating than Nietzsche. Although his select individual resembles Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Ortega insists that the self realizes its possibilities through absorption in circumstance and through interaction with others, whereas Nietzsche’s highest type often appears as a lonely legislator of value. Ortega’s superior type is far more embedded in history, society, and inherited circumstance. Third, Ortega’s “nobility” is more duty-bound than Nietzschean. Ortega says the noble life is one of service to something higher, a marked difference from Nietzsche’s rhetoric of transvaluation. Ortega is more civic, more sober, and in some ways more classical than Nietzsche. Fourth and finally, Ortega is more historical than Nietzsche. Nietzsche certainly has genealogy and a powerful sense of history’s burden, but Ortega’s mature claim is that rather than having a nature, human beings live as history, as projects in circumstances. Later Ortega moves from a Nietzschean-sounding critique of herd modernity toward a philosophy centred on the constructive management of civilization.

Ortega is Nietzschean in his diagnosis, his sensibility, and some anthropology. His anti-herd elitism, his critique of complacent modernity, his stress on rank, and his suspicion of leveling all bear a Nietzschean stamp. But he domesticates Nietzsche, which the old German would have detested. He turns the explosive Nietzschean critique into something more disciplined, more rational, more historical, and more civically ordered.

Ortega vs. the Absolutists

Ortega can also be fruitfully compared with a much older anti-democratic line: the absolutists. He and they belong to the same anti-demotic family, in that they all think political order collapses when the many cease to be led by some higher principle or superior element.

Their projects overlap, but they are not quite the same. Jean Bodin is really concerned with indivisible sovereignty in a setting of civil war during the French Wars of Religion. Joseph Maistre is concerned about with revolutionary impiety and the destruction of sacral authority, and Juan Donoso Cortés with liberal discussion, paralysis, and a revolutionary-socialist crisis. Ortega’s concern is broader and more civilizational: the object of his critique is a new psychological type produced by modern success itself—the self-satisfied mass man.

Bodin is the odd one out. He is not a polemicist against democracy in the later, nineteenth-century sense of a Maistre or a Bonald. For him, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy are all legitimate forms, differing only in where sovereignty resides. What he cannot tolerate is divided sovereignty: the sovereign must be supreme and absolute in relation to positive law, even if it is bound by natural and divine law. He prefers royal monarchy, but he does not discount democracy outright. His central problem is juridical and constitutional—unlike Ortega, the vulgarity or moral psychology of the masses factors into his thought only tangentially.

Maistre is much closer to an absolutist critique of democracy. He treats society and sovereignty as prior to individual choice. Contract, at least at the level of society, is always illusion. At best, deliberation is merely the “work of circumstance” whereby the divine will shapes the world. Sovereignty is synonymous with infallibility, and government lives through submission and belief, and with monarchy being the most natural form. He sees private judgement and political discussion as corrosive of the national mind, and scrutiny as a corrosive force that will eventually undo the social order. Maistre’s is a theological-political critique. The average man may be spoiled or mediocre or brilliant, but for Maistre democracy is dangerous for a reason other than competence: because it dissolves sacred authority, hierarchy, and inherited political faith.

Donoso Cortés is the closest precursor to Schmitt and, of the major absolutists (Filmer notwithstanding), he comes closest to Ortega in his apocalyptic tone, but he is far harsher and far less liberal. Donoso argues that human beings are naturally depraved and irrational, and due to our inherent irrationality, free discussion cannot yield truth. Discussion is the essence of liberalism and opens a vacuum of doubt, and that vacuum must be filled by dogma, repression, and when necessary, dictatorship. Like for Maistre, for Donoso the mediocrity of the many is beside the point. The issue is that modern liberal society cannot survive because argument itself is politically disintegrative, whatever the virtues of the deliberators. Hence his famous movement from “discussion” to “decree.”

Ortega’s critique is different in kind. His mass man is not simply the demos in a constitutional sense, but the average man who feels no need to demand more of himself and wants to impose his appetites directly. He explicitly says that the mass is not just a class and that there can be mass men even in traditionally elite spheres. His diagnosis is therefore anthropological and sociological, whereas the absolutist diagnosis is constitutional. The crisis Ortega sees comes not from the structure of liberal democracy itself, but from liberal democracy and technics having successfully elevated ordinary life so far that the beneficiary of this success now treats standards, expertise, and inheritance as dispensable.

As we discovered in our comparison with Schmitt, Ortega is a liberal, whereas the absolutists directly oppose the liberal project. The two arrive at similar-sounding conclusions—unmediated popular self-assertion is destructive; political life requires hierarchy, command, and forms not reducible to mere number—but their object is much different. Ortega says “hyperdemocracy” appears when the mass acts directly and without law, but he also says liberal democracy is the highest political form because it protects minorities and opposition. He explicitly treats liberalism as “supreme generosity” and condemns direct action as barbarism. He also treats fascism and Bolshevism not as cures for democratic weakness, but as further expressions of the same mass phenomenon. On precisely this point he stands almost opposite to Donoso, and a long way from Maistre. Put simply: Ortega thinks the disease is the collapse of discussion; Maistre and Donoso think the disease is discussion.

Ortega vs. Fascism

Of all the political movements on the right that Ortega opposes, he opposes fascism most directly. Though the particularly Spanish form that fascism took—Falangism and later the dictatorship of Francisco Franco—postdated the writing of The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega was acutely aware of fascism and addressed it directly in the text. He repeatedly places fascism inside the very pathology he is diagnosing: mass-man politics. He says he is treating fascism only “obliquely,” but what he says is already hostile.

Fascism is, quite straightforwardly, a mass phenomenon. Ortega’s whole framework is built around the distinction between genuine minorities and the mass man, and when he gets to fascism, he does not treat it as the restoration of qualified rule under the former, but the proletarian excretion of the latter. He says that under the sign of syndicalism and fascism there appears a type who does not want to give reasons, nor even be right, but simply wants to impose his opinions. Later he says flatly that fascism is “a typical movement of mass men.” Fascism also belongs to direct action, which Ortega treats as barbarism. Liberal democracy is indirect action: law-bound, mediated discussion according to definite procedures which allows opposing factions to coexist. Direct action is the suppression of all that in favour of immediate imposition. He says fascism is one of those strange modern movements in which the mass man claims “the right not to be right,” and he links this whole style to violence becoming prima ratio rather than ultima ratio. In this, he eerily resembles modern left-liberals who critique the right in saying that one is entitled to one’s own opinions, but not one’s own facts.

Chapter X contains Ortega’s most extended treatment of fascism in the book, and in it he focuses his ire on fascism’s archaicism and what he sees as its anti-historicism. In this chapter, he groups fascism and Bolshevism together as “two clear examples of substantial regression,” as neither are “attuned with the times.” On his account, neither digest the past and move beyond it, but each repeats old forms under a new mask. In this same chapter, Ortega then offers an anti-fascist argument that seems rather bizarre, saying that Europe must go beyond nineteenth-century liberalism—but that the fascist cannot do this precisely because he is merely anti-liberal. In a formulation that seems strange and almost incomprehensible, he claims that Europe must “conserve its essential liberalism” in order truly to overcome liberalism. But the knot is untangled when we keep in view Ortega’s progressivism: anti-liberalism, in his eyes, is a reactive posture and a step backward into a bygone world that can never return.

In Chapter XIII, he treats Mussolini explicitly. Hearing “everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State” should, he says, be enough to identify fascism as a mass-man movement. Mussolini is using powerful state machinery built not by fascism but by liberal democracy, and using it without restraint. Ortega says the actual results are meagre compared with the liberal state, while the danger is enormous: statism normalizes violence and direct action while it crushes individuals and creative minorities, and “burns the future for good.”

Ortega opposes the fascists because he sees nationalism as a dead end and wants Europe to move toward a larger continental political form. Although he wants authoritarian rule, discipline, and command, he wants them inside a civilization of liberal law and mediation. Where fascism advances itself as a cure to the ills liberalism has wrought, Ortega believes that the liberal project can be salvaged.

Ortega vs. the Right

Much of the critique found on The Revolt of the Masses inherently sits on the right side of the political spectrum. Ortega is certainly anti-egalitarian, anti-mass-democratic, hierarchical, and elitist, but he is also opposed to some of the foundational elements of the right-wing worldview. A good deal of the better secondary literature now tends to place him in something like the aristocratic liberal or elitist liberal-Europeanist tradition.

He is strongly anti-restorationist, admitting no way back, and claims that liberalism is “ultimately, something unavoidable, inexorable; something Western man today is, whether he so desires it or not.” For him the past is not something to be emulated even in spirit, but the past tells us mainly what to avoid; hence fascism and Bolshevism are condemned as anti-historical “pseudo-dawns” because they repeat old forms instead of digesting the past and excreting it. This places him in a very unstable position vis-à-vis most of the right, which may be progressive to a degree, but always looks to the past for some sort of model.

His thought also carries notes of civic nationalism. Ortega is anything but a blood-and-soil nationalist; he says that blood, language, and territory are not the foundation of the nation-state, but largely its effects or even former obstacles. The nation is above all a shared future project and leaves unspecified any real criterion for membership. This goes further when he advances supranationalism: he wants Europe to outgrow the old nation-state cage and become a larger political unit, almost a higher-order nation-state. Boundaries do not figure significantly into his thought, while boundaries are arguably the core element in any right-wing worldview. Indeed, in the later nation-state chapters he treats the state as something that begins when man escapes purely natural society, and he explicitly says the state begins in the overcoming and mixing of blood and tongues. He is profoundly a thinker of the civic-political over the natural-familial, regarding the latter as primitive—again his progressivism, at least in degree, pushes him away from a genuine right-wing worldview.

His worldview also has little room for religion beyond a vague sense of the “spiritual.” He certainly does not write like a Maistre or Donoso. In the crucial passage on the “most reactionary European,” he says even the Catholic attached to the Syllabus still carries within himself the inescapable liberal truth of modern Europe. There is no space in Ortega’s worldview for integralism, and little about religion or the spiritual in general. This does not by itself place him outside the right—Nietzsche cannot seriously be considered left-wing either—but taken together with his other disagreements, it does start to paint a picture of someone who does not sit comfortably on the right.

Extended Analysis Below:

Comparison of Ortega to:

• Groypers

• BAPists

• Racist Liberals

• The Alt-Centre (ex-dissident rightists)

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We did a poll on the Imperium Press Telegram channel on the level of interest there is for summaries of Imperium Press texts “in plain words.” Many of you like the normal Substack material—which attempts to break new theoretical ground—but the overwhelming response was that these summaries would be wel…

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Last week we explained how the WEIRD personality (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) is not primordially European. We further showed how the supposedly “foreign” folkways of izzat and asabiyyah answer to perfectly European folkways of honour culture and folkishness.

This week we will show how these folkways are superior to WEIRD. We will further show that the attempt to “progress” beyond them has both made identitarianism impossible and corroded the prosperity that we hold up as evidence of our superiority. We will show how WEIRD was temporary, unstable, and self-undermining. Finally, we will put forth a stronger foundation for our self-esteem than high trust and low time-preference.

To understand the superiority of honour culture and folkishness to liberal WEIRD society, we can turn to game theory.

Game Theory: Why Izzat and Asabiyyah Win and WEIRD Loses

Let us take the two separately and examine their strengths and weaknesses.

Izzat (Honour Culture)

Strengths

1. Deterrence

Izzat operates like a credible threat in repeated games: if you defect (by insulting or exploiting me), I retaliate. This solves the Prisoner’s Dilemma with the result being fewer opportunistic defection attempts. It also lowers the cost of external enforcement and reduces predation in weak-state environments. In essence, it discourages exploitation, at least of the in-group.

2. Solves the Hobbesian cooperation problem

In environments without strong state capacity, individuals risk being preyed upon. Izzat solves this through reputation-based self-help: if harming me is costly, it’s safer to cooperate. Honour becomes an efficient enforcement mechanism. In essence, it creates order where institutions are weak.

3. Public signalling

Izzat solves an important problem of information asymmetry by reducing uncertainty, which reduces transaction costs and actually makes society more efficient. Everyone knows who can be pushed and who retaliates, whose word carries weight and whose kin-group will intervene. This clarity stabilizes social expectations. In essence, it fosters transparency and thus predictable interactions—and predictable interactions are what civilization is built out of.

4. Encourages pro-social behaviour within the group

To retain honour, individuals must be generous. They must avoid shameful conduct. They must keep promises and behave reliably. This creates a positive-sum equilibrium within the honour-group. You don’t gain honour by ripping off your kin but by enriching them—a professed virtue that the identitarian supposedly wants. In essence, izzat boosts internal cohesion and trust.

5. High cost of defection

When one member’s honour is attacked, the group must respond. This creates strong kin alliances and coalition networks that can mobilize rapidly. “What you do to my cousin you do to me” is precisely the bulwark against liberal tyranny. In game theory terms, izzat induces aligned incentives and collective commitment, increasing group fitness. In essence, it produce an abundance of asabiyyah—the two work hand in hand.

Weaknesses

1. Over-retaliation spiral

This is the runaway punishment dynamic that the 4chan anon was worried about. Izzat encourages responses to even small slights, creating escalating retaliation and vendetta cycles. This is a well-worn feature of Greek tragedy and Norse saga. Izzat creates conflict traps.

2. Inefficient honour signalling

The 4chan anon pointed this out too. Individuals must defend reputation even when it is strategically unwise, such as retaliating when the cost outweighs the benefit, or sacrificing resources to avoid losing face. Honour can sometimes override optimal strategy.

3. High transaction costs in mixed groups

Izzat works smoothly within the honour culture, but in interactions with strangers, bureaucracies, and impersonal systems, it creates misalignment, because the izzat code expects public signalling and retaliation, whereas modern institutions expect procedural compliance. This mixed-group inefficiency can be seen as a strength in some cases (it undermines multiculturalism) or a weakness (it undermines liberal, rules-based environments).

4. Fragility: status is zero-sum

Because honour is publicly ranked, izzat tends to create rivalry and status anxiety. Game-theoretically, zero-sum games dominate and reduce positive-sum cooperation. The effect is to reduce cooperative potential outside the kin-group. Again, depending on how you look at multiculturalism, this could be a good or a bad thing.

Overall

Izzat works extremely well under unstable conditions. When central authority is weak and the environment is continuously threatening, honour culture shines. It is an existential necessity when you are the minority—when you are beleaguered by strong kin networks with whom you interact repeatedly, you cannot survive without it. The identitarian right would be wise to note this. It also works under other conditions such as localized economies and high-value reputation markets.

However, izzat becomes counterproductive from the perspective of liberal proceduralism and multiculturalism. In these societies, diverse groups are forced to cooperate across honour-norm boundaries and institutions can reliably punish defectors. Interactions often become anonymous (as in the court system). The racist liberal wants to revive that world, but not only will he fail, but it’s better if he does fail.

In short, honour culture is optimal for tribal worlds but suboptimal for liberal-bureaucratic worlds. This is why it flourishes in the current environment, which is quickly turning into the tribal future—a fragmented, low-trust, neo-medieval context.

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Asabiyyah (Folkishness)

Strengths

1. Solves the collective action problem

Groups with strong asabiyyah can mobilize quickly, and their members are willing to accept personal risk for group benefit. These groups suppress free-riders and punish defectors internally. Game-theoretically, there are high internal payoffs for cooperation and high internal costs for defection. Folkishness enables coordinated, large-scale action that low-cohesion groups cannot match.

2. High trust, low transaction costs

Within the group, trust is high and signalling costs are low. Enforcement is extremely efficient because it is informal and often members self-police. Negotiation costs are low because of shared norms. High trust makes implicit contracts reliable. This creates a high-efficiency coordination equilibrium. Folkishness fosters cheap, fast cooperation.

3. Enables effective aggression against outsiders

Externally, high-asabiyyah groups fight cohesively, and this allows them to deter rivals through credible commitment. They shift from the Prisoner’s Dilemma (low trust, rational defection) to the Stag Hunt (high trust, high reward): social life moves from “everyone defect to protect yourself” into “we can coordinate on high-payoff cooperation because we trust one another.” This allows these groups to expand territory and influence, which is why such groups historically conquer, found dynasties, and displace low-cohesion elites. Folkishness means collective force projection.

4. Reduces vulnerability to external manipulation

In folkish groups, information is shared and members are sensitive to outsiders. Internal policing is strict. Loyalties cannot easily be bought, so game-theoretically, external defectors can’t bribe or coerce individuals away from the group. Folkish groups are mostly immune to infiltration.

Weaknesses

1. Vulnerable to Success

This is Ibn Khaldun’s core insight: asabiyyah is highest in hardship, but success erodes it. Game-theoretically, high resource abundance reduces the need for cooperation and for punishment of defectors. Individual freeloading grows, followed by signalling to external networks such as court, bureaucracy, markets, etc. Prosperity destabilizes cohesion—folkish success plants the seeds for its own failure.

2. Free-rider problem at scale

As group size increases, kin-based enforcement weakens. Personal trust becomes abstract, so monitoring costs rise. Cliques emerge along with parasitic members and political factions, and we get fragmentation and internal betrayal. Folkishness does not easily scale without breaking the cohesion equilibrium.

3. Intergroup conflict

Strong internal cooperation invariably brings with it hostility to outsiders and the inability to trust neutral third parties. In game theory terms, folkishness solves the Prisoner’s Dilemma within the in-group, but accelerates it between the in-group and the out-group, making peace unstable. As with aspects of honour culture, this may be a strength or a weakness depending on your perspective.

Overall

Asabiyyah thrives in the same environment as izzat: the unstable, high-threat ecology of resource scarcity. Folkishness is nigh unchallengeable in small- to medium-sized kin-groups with strong honour norms. When state capacity is low, folkishness is essentially a recipe for state capture. Folkishness struggles, however, in the opposite environment: the low-threat ecology of abundance and scale. At this point, bureaucracy replaces kin enforcement, elites pursue luxury and individualism, and kin-group members are courted by outsiders—brother turns on brother, and families fragment over petty politics. Asabiyyah is game-theoretic high-trust cooperation that enables collective power—but its very success undermines the incentives that sustain it. This is the exact structure of Khaldun’s political cycle.

Sawing Away at the Branch We’re Sitting On

Since that greentext on izzat has made the rounds, the predictable result has followed: white identitarians have snickered and chortled about how debased and stupid Indians are, while their izzat proceeds to short-circuit the identitarians’ civilizational firmware, leaving them exposed and defenseless. A chorus of ululations has mounted up to the heavens that these Indians are parasitizing Western prosperity which could not exist if we lowered ourselves to their level and started playing their primitive game of tribalism. Our ethnic chauvinism forces us to assert as “civilized” the very thing that is undermining our ethnic chauvinism. This is hubris befitting a Greek tragedy.

The sad irony is that these identitarians have it backward—their chauvinism rests on flimsy foundations. They believe that folkways such as honour culture/izzat and folkishness/asabiyyah are parasitical on different, supposedly Western folkways. This has it exactly backward. The higher social trust and good faith assumed in Western societies are built atop a deep foundation of such tribal structures.

High trust is not “natural”; it is compressed kinship. The original solution to the trust problem in Indo-European and medieval Europe was not abstract universalism; it was kinship, oath, reputation, and shared cult. In other words, “high trust” is the late, abstracted surface of a long tradition in which people had thick, redundant reasons to trust one another.

WEIRD-lovers are historically illiterate, or they would know that medieval and early-modern Europe had its own izzat/asabiyyah system. What people call “jeetery” absolutely existed in Europe. The feud systems in Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian lands involved blood-price, honour-price, and wergild, where kin were required to avenge or compensate an injury. Sacred peace (“frith”) existed within the kin group or lord’s hall, but not outside. Violating frith was both a legal and spiritual crime. The medieval comitatus was based on lord–retainer ties which were based in turn on honour and loyalty. This is asabiyyah: warbands as cohesive, tightly bonded units. It is not exotic. A medieval Tuscan clan or a Highland clan or a Saxon village looks, in structural terms, much closer to “third world” honour cultures than to late-modern liberal individualism.

Modern Westerners experience trust as being able to sign a contract with a stranger and mostly expecting it to hold. To us it means being able to walk down the street without bribing police. We assume basic good faith in transactions. This feels like something rational, neutral, and procedural. But the only reason these expectations can function impersonally is because for centuries, people like us (same confession, same ethnicity, same basic folk customs) were the default, and heavy sanctions existed for dishonesty, blasphemy, perjury, betrayal. We went from “I trust you because you’re of my clan” to “I trust you because we’re all Christians” to “I trust you because… well, that’s just what white people do, right?” The revelation is in seeing that the last one is just the residue of the first.

The usual Western critique is that Indians or Chinese import clannishness, patronage, and honour codes, and then they turn around and exploit our universalist good faith. They don’t play by our neutral rules; they use our institutions as battlefield terrain for their group advantage. They certainly do that, but European societies were once run on similar logics of kin honour and group solidarity—we just gave them different names and gradually laundered them through law and theology. This critique is also structurally naïve: those groups still have functioning folkishness and honour systems. We dismantled ours and replaced them with a thin proceduralism that presupposes the very solidarity that this proceduralism has eroded.

So instead of “they’re parasitic on our institutions,” it’s closer to “they still have the underlying social machinery that once made our institutions work.” Western high trust was a late-stage phenotype of deeper tribal and corporative realities. Once those foundations are destroyed, the phenotype cannot be sustained.

But We Were Racist Liberals… Weren’t We?

The objection that looms over this historical lesson is that we seemed to have managed the sweet spot for a time. Somewhere between living in a one-room longhouse with your 47 cousins and antifa murdering whites in the street, there must be a happy medium—mustn’t there? Unfortunately, no. There is at least no stable middle ground.

Extended Analysis Below:

• Why liberalism could not long maintain ethnic solidarity

• Liberalism cost us not only solidarity, but also even prosperity

• Why WEIRD gives us the worst of all possible worlds

• A better alternative to HBD for ethnic self-esteem

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exquofonte has completely understood folkishness and this is the best video essay on it I have seen. I would not normally devote a Substack post to crossposting another creator’s work, but it’s that good.

You are going to see a lot more videos like this as time goes on, and this is the best one yet. He distills 500,000 words of my Substack + book into a 42-minute presentation, and he hits everything important.

If you’re curious about folkishness, start here.

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In the year 2000, white racial consciousness seemed dead and buried. Jewish racial identitarianism was allowed. Chinese, Indian, African, and any number of other non-white identities could be openly celebrated, even to the point of chauvinism. But American History X summarized the general feeling of polite society toward any white folkish sentiments—dumb, plebeian, morally inexcusable, and ultimately, an adolescent phase.

Here we are, a generation later, and the president of the United States is regularly tweeting about “remigration,” and we all know what he means. He doesn’t mean deporting Swedes and Poles. The times, they are a-changin’. White racial consciousness is back.

One of the more curious elements of this renewed white self-assertion is that it is often couched in anti-folkish terms. This often takes the form of celebrating our WEIRD personality—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. This term comes from a book by Joseph Henrich where he explains how the Christian church, in its attempt to put a lid on Europeans’ clannishness, inadvertently created modernity. This took the form of lower kin-affiliation, smaller (“nuclear”) non-extended families, individualism, analytic and abstract thinking, rule of law or logocentrism, “Faustianism,” love of space and freedom, etc.

White identitarians today celebrate this WEIRD personality as essential to us. As they tell it, this personality built the modern world, with its high-trust societies, universal norms, neutral institutions, science, meritocracy, and many other things besides. But this is suicidal identitarianism. In celebrating Europeans as inherently individualistic and kin-agnostic, they undercut the possibility of any real ethnic identity. To say “our folkhood is individualist” is a contradiction in terms—it is to say that the essence of our folk character is lacking any folk character.

In this article, we will show how WEIRD has been a disaster for Europeans. To do this, we will show how it depends on what came before, and that what came before looks an awful lot like what effete identitarians find “icky” in other peoples. We will show how WEIRD could not do anything but corrode folk-solidarity. And we will conclude by showing that we can love our own because they are our own, not because they meet some standard that was invented yesterday.

To begin, let us examine one of the most defensible elements of the WEIRD personality: meritocracy.

Meritocracy: A Case Study in How WEIRD Fails

For it to be possible, meritocracy assumes that quite a few things be in place already. You need a stable moral and social world. You cannot have meritocracy without rule of law, shared norms, and above all, social trust. Meritocracy assumes the existence of high-trust infrastructure. It assumes a world of high solidarity.

But meritocracy is parasitic on solidarity. Meritocracy only works when most people voluntarily obey norms, which is to say that meritocracy needs cultural discipline—precisely the thing it devalues by focusing only on individuals. The contradiction at the heart of meritocracy is that it pretends to be individualist but it depends on group-formed traits. Everything that produces “merit”—intelligence, work ethic, psychological stability, trustworthiness, impulse control—comes from families, communities, inherited norms, etc. These are group goods, not individual achievements. Meritocracy treats these group-generated traits as if they arise spontaneously in isolated individuals. Meritocracy tells people that their identity is purely individual, and that group affiliation is unfair. “Only personal achievement matters,” it says. But once group structures dissolve, trust collapses. Norms go untransmitted, institutions weaken, and coordination problems multiply. The result is that meritocracy eliminates the preconditions for merit.

So meritocracy dissolves its own foundation. But it gets worse for meritocracy. Behind the assumption of “merit” as a social good is the assumption of individualism—that the “meritorious” entity is the particular person. This is not how natural selection works though. Evolution does not select for isolated individuals. Selection pressures operate at multiple levels: they select for individual fitness, yes, but also for group-level fitness—for such things as group cohesion, cooperation, group norms, etc. Traits that succeed at the individual level may fail at the group level—and vice versa. This nullifies the assumption that individual “merit” equates to group success.

It is well known (and a source of constant hand-wringing) in evolutionary biology that ethnocentrism is the dominant strategy—that cooperative groups outcompete isolated high-merit individuals. Across anthropology, history, and evolutionary theory, cohesive groups prevail.1 Meritocracy misunderstands this by assuming that individual excellence translates to collective excellence, but in reality, it is group fitness that translates to collective prosperity, and meritocracy is structurally blind to this.

Meritocracy’s blindness to group strategy as well as its parasitism of the social capital upon which it depends, are two sides of one mutually reinforcing pathology—that meritocracy ignores honour, solidarity, and embeddedness. Recently, a 4chan greentext emerged that illustrates this in stark terms. In it, an anon explains the specifically Indian take on a concept called izzat. In his own words:

Izzat has no direct translation into English. We only have terms that can broach the same concept such as ‘honour’ or ‘reputation’ or ‘face’. Izzat is so much more than that. It’s a zero-sum game of collective honour shared by whole groups of people, all of whom take it very, very seriously. A system like this isn’t just foreign to Enlightenment values, but I’d argue it’s antithetical to every sensible form of governance on the planet. It will destroy any system that assumes good faith.

The problem with the izzat greentext (you should read the whole thing) is that it assumes that meritocracy can stand independent of the social capital generated by honour-shame systems. These systems enforce reliability, promise keeping, self-restraint, and social coherence, producing exactly the behavioural traits that meritocracy assumes. But meritocracy denies the legitimacy of these honour systems.

The West believes that prosperity came from individualism, but prosperity came from exactly those honour systems and thick cultural norms that “racist liberals” find distasteful about things like izzat and asabiyyah. The West believes that group identity is a threat to prosperity by undercutting meritocracy, but group identity—not merit—was the engine of Western prosperity. You’re not meritorious if you don’t win, and you won’t win without these pre-modern structures.

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Let’s take a closer look at those structures.

Izzat and Asabiyyah: What Are They?

Izzat is an Arabic word that literally means “honour,” “respect,” “dignity,” or “reputation.” It refers to publicly recognised honour—how others see your standing, your moral worth, and your family’s reputation. It is a social currency, something that can be gained or lost, defended or avenged. Izzat comes from pre-modern honour-shame societies where family lineage defines identity and public reputation determines where you sit in the social pecking order. It existed before Islam in Arabian tribal culture, before Persian Islamization, and in Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian warrior cultures. Izzat is primarily about how others see you. It’s individualized but also inherited: you carry your family’s honour and can raise or stain it, and as the 4chan anon points out at length, it often triggers personal retaliation to avenge slights and restore honour.

Asabiyyah is related to izzat but distinct—it is the structural force of kin-based solidarity. Variously translated into English as “nationalism,” “solidarity,” “prejudice,” and “group feeling,” asabiyyah is mostly about internal cohesion and the willingness to sacrifice for the group. Where izzat is individual, asabiyyah is collective: the group’s cohesion matters more than the personal honour of any one member. Where izzat exists only in the eyes of others, asabiyyah is held in the hearts of the group. As the 4chan anon further points out, izzat is zero-sum—your humiliation strengthens others—where asabiyyah is positive-sum—more members means more power.

Izzat (what we call honour culture) is the micro-foundation of public legitimacy in a pre- or post-liberal fragmented environment. It regulates behaviour where state authority collapses. The racist liberal finds it a bit uncouth, and so his solution is to try to recreate that state authority, but what the liberal doesn’t realize is that it was izzat, or this honour culture, that built the state in the first place.

The racist liberal will then turn around and call for a high-trust society, as though such things emerge out of the ground from nothing like mushrooms. What the racist liberal doesn’t understand is that you can’t get to this high-trust society but by asabiyyah, the macro-engine of new political orders. Asabiyyah is central to neo-medieval patchworks and para-sovereign formation, it is the “stuff” out of which social capital is built, and determines which groups survive devolution.

The racist liberal likes the flower but hates the root. He calls for high trust, but spits on the folkish foundation upon which it stands. It feels “plebeian” to him. It carries a whiff of “third worldism,” he might call it “jeetery.”2 This is all frankly clownish and unserious. Europeans have been folkish and tribal since the Palaeolithic, no different than any other people. We wuz not closet liberals from the beginning. WEIRD is not primordial, but the result of a universalist ideology infecting a folk for whom it was an especially bad fit, with our high trait openness due to our exceptional phenotypic variation—precisely the kind of folk that needs tribalism for social cohesion, and evolved it specifically for that purpose. WEIRD is not who we are. It is something that arose in the recent past and can be undone just easily as it was done.

To show that honour culture (izzat) and folkishness (asabiyyah) are native to us, let us examine our Indo-European foundations.

Extended Analysis Below:

— What Indo-European concepts izzat and asabiyyah map directly on to

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If I had but one bullet and were faced by both an enemy and a traitor, I would let the traitor have it.

— Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

In 2020, I got hold of an article written by Noam Gidron and Daniel Ziblatt titled Center-Right Political Parties in Advanced Democracies. This article was clearly relevant to the rise of the alt-right and its successor, the dissident right, and I immediately began trumpeting its importance. It took a few years, but it has now worked its way into our discourse, with much of that owed to Joel Davis.

In this article, the authors say that political science has paid too little attention to the weakening of the centre-right. They argue that cohesive centre-right parties have historically helped produce stability, compromise, and above all, containment of more radical right-wing forces. When those parties disintegrate, a space opens up within which radical challengers can thrive. To survive, liberal democracy needs not only a left and a constitutional framework, but also a right that is institutionally integrated into the democratic order. They argue, in effect, that democracy cannot survive without controlled opposition.

This process is not new, but has been going on for centuries. Everyone knows about Conquest’s 2nd law—that an institution not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing—and this has been the main theoretical problem for the right since the French Revolution. One of the reasons why Conquest’s 2nd law holds is that the left has ruthlessly held frame, and the main mechanism by which it does this is to ensure that the only allowable “right-wing” opposition begins from left-wing premises. This is controlled opposition, also known as containment.

The way that the radical right will crush its enemies is not by attacking the left, but somewhat counter-intuitively, by attacking the structural pillar that upholds the liberal order—the centre-right. This is precisely the aim of the Imperium Press Critical Editions series.

The core purpose of the series is to deconstruct the canonical texts of our ideological enemies. It will consist of critical annotated editions of these works, focusing on the internal architecture of their arguments: the sources of authority they draw on, the assumptions they inherit, the structures they presuppose, and the claims of legitimacy embedded in the text. The annotations in the works at times simply clarify historical background, but they also engage in structural analysis—they examine the internal tensions within the text, where it disagrees with itself.

But most importantly, these editions evaluate the text from a clearly declared analytic standpoint—they take a position opposed to the text in some way, and evaluate it from that position. There is no single standpoint: entries in the series can and will differ in their evaluative criteria, depending on the text. But all will be critical and all will undermine the core ideas of these texts. We are not aiming for neutrality here, but for transparency and maximum damage. That’s what critical editions are for.

We believe that this series will be a game-changer for the radical right. Folkish, reactionary, and third position voices have levelled critiques before, and those critiques are often devastating. But now those critiques will be focused on a single text, offering a close critical analysis, line by line, sentence by sentence—eventually, this will span across the whole canon of left and liberal classics. The left has been doing this to us for centuries—but we have something on our side that they don’t: reality.

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The first entry in this series is a load-bearing pillar of conservatism: Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. And to inaugurate the series, we will provide in this article a summary of the critique in our edition.

To begin with, we will lay out the position from which we have critiqued Burke. With that done, we will then move on to the critique itself.

Burke Critiqued From the Right

Ours is not an external, but an internal critique. It does not begin from modern liberal assumptions and then denounce Burke for failing to be a liberal. Rather, it begins where Burke himself begins: by endorsing prescription, inheritance, anti-abstraction, organic society, sacral hierarchy, reverence, and historical continuity. The method is to ask what follows if those principles are applied consistently and without selective exemptions. Burke does not value tradition too much, but not consistently enough.

The first premise is that tradition is total, not merely influential. Tradition is not one source of political knowledge among others, but epistemically total—there is no standpoint, assumption, or axiom that does not ultimately come to us but by tradition. Our moral vocabulary, political intuitions, social forms, and conceptual habits are themselves inherited, and this forbids “reason” from standing over tradition as an independent tribunal. This becomes relevant because Burke sometimes speaks as though he can appeal to reason against French abstraction while still vindicating his own preferred inheritance in a non-inherited way. But there is no view from nowhere—every normative judgment is made from within inherited forms. In essence, we radicalize Burke’s own anti-rationalism.

As we have noted elsewhere, authority is authorship, meaning that obligation arises from origin—a command binds because it issues from that which made, constituted, founded, or transmitted the form of life within which one stands. The basic question is not simply whether a regime is efficient, rational, or popular; the question is: who made this order, and from what source does it descend?

This structure lies beneath every political worldview, even when it is unspoken—divine command, civilizational inheritance, national founding, constitutional succession, and even liberal consent theories all contain some version of this authorship logic. In Burke’s case, this principle lies beneath his language of inheritance, prescription, title, patrimony, and long usage, but he does not pursue the principle rigorously enough. He often appeals to inherited legitimacy without fully tracing the genealogy of the settlement he is defending.

Once legitimacy is treated genealogically, conflicts between inheritances need some rule of adjudication, and the rule is: the oldest legible command has the strongest claim. Where competing layers of inheritance exist, deeper ancestry carries greater moral weight than later accretions. This gives us a way to distinguish between genuine continuity and merely settled deviation. It prevents every successful settlement from claiming equal dignity merely because it now exists—this is the cardinal sin of all conservatism, and this sin descends from Burke. The framework is therefore anti-presentist—it refuses to treat current establishment as automatically authoritative.

Our standpoint is methodologically reactionary. Older inheritances carry moral weight against newer rearrangements simply because those newer orders depend on the older. The point is not that every ancient thing is automatically just; indeed, our framework allows us to critique long-established revolutions. The point is that ancestral depth is the criterion of authority, and that political criticism should not begin by assuming the superiority of the latest settlement. Our standpoint rejects conservatism and endorses restorationism. It is willing to challenge a settled order in the name of an older authority. Burke proves extremely vulnerable here: he often turns out to be defending a comparatively recent arrangement as though it were civilizational bedrock. We say that this is not enough.

The second premise is that ethics is imperative. Moral language is, at bottom, directive. “This is wrong” means, in effect, “do not do this.” “You ought” means “do this.” This metaethics shifts attention away from moral sentiment alone (the final refuge of so-called “natural law” theories) and toward the question of command. If moral language is imperative, then every moral judgment raises the question: who speaks with authority here? A moral theory that does not explain the source of authority remains incomplete. This becomes a direct problem for Burke, who constantly speaks the language of duty, reverence, sacrifice, loyalty, obedience, and restraint, but who also resists naked command and denounces “blind obedience.” This oscillation is philosophically revealing, as it shows that Burke wants the binding force of command without naming the authority from which it comes. What actually stands behind Burke’s moral imperatives? Often very little at all, and certainly nothing with a name.

Burke, for all his anti-rationalism, still carries important residues of the modern liberal horizon. Three are worth singling out:

1. CONTRACT LANGUAGE. Burke’s language of “partnership” (especially between the living, dead, and yet unborn) is rhetorically powerful, but contract talk carries assumptions of consent, reciprocity, and party relation that undermines authority.

2. UNIVERSALIST MORAL LANGUAGE. Burke often justifies institutions in a way that sounds detached from the particular inheritance that supposedly grounds them.

3. THE ALREADY-SETTLED EXCEPTION. Burke condemns redesign in principle while treating the settled results of earlier redesign as morally unquestionable.

These residual modern premises are crucial because they explain why Burke’s position so often contradicts itself.

Unlike us, Burke is a gradualist, not a true restorationist. Gradualism manages change within an accepted settlement, but restoration asks whether the accepted settlement itself is already a deviation from deeper authority. That difference is enormous. A gradualist can preserve corruption simply because it is settled. A restorationist asks whether settlement has displaced rightful origin.

In sum, we criticize Burke against an authoritarian-restorative standard, not a liberal-progressive one. We treat authority as inherited authorship, ethics as command, and ancestral depth as morally weighty, and we use those premises to show that Burke often protects settled exceptions and recent arrangements that his own anti-rupture principles should have exposed.

We now move from our own position to the critique itself.

What Does Burke Get Wrong?

Burke gets quite a bit right. He is right that political order cannot be responsibly constructed from abstract theory or the will of the moral agent, but must instead arise from inherited structures of authority, obligation, and social meaning that develop historically within a living tradition. Where he goes wrong is, by and large, in failing to remain consistent—he is afraid of the real consequences of being a traditionalist. We aren’t.

Across the entire critical apparatus of our edition of Burke’s Reflections, eight critiques can be distilled. They are presented here in outline only.

1. Burke cannot condemn the French Revolution on principle while excusing 1688

Burke’s central distinction between the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 as lawful restoration and the French Revolution of 1789 as unlawful revolution, does not hold up. Once a political nation claims the authority to judge a king, declare the throne vacant, and re-settle succession, the basic revolutionary act has already occurred. Burke tries to preserve 1688 as a special case by redescribing it as recovery, a restoration, or constitutional repair. But this is mere rhetoric, and lacks political substance.

Burke wants the English rupture to appear continuous with inheritance, while the French rupture is described as naked fabrication. His anti-revolutionary posture therefore rests on a politically useful fiction: that England changed fundamentally without “really” changing.

But the deeper problem is that Burke needs 1688 both to be a precedent and not a precedent. He invokes it when it legitimates the English settlement, then empties it of general meaning when revolutionaries might cite it in their own favour. That is the contradiction at the heart of the book.

2. Burke’s doctrine of prescription confuses age with legitimacy

Burke writes as though long possession, inherited usage, and settled custom generate political right—this is what is meant here by “prescription.” But mere duration cannot create legitimacy: a usurpation can become old; a deviation from rightful order can harden into custom; a victorious rupture can, over time, acquire the appearance of natural continuity. None of that proves that it is legitimate in origin.

Burke’s doctrine of prescription is therefore too weak to distinguish between true inheritance and long-settled error. Burke defends not ancestral legitimacy as such, but the existing settlement simply because it exists and has acquired prestige—precisely the move of the “cuckservative,” and the reason why they function as a structural pillar of the left.

In practice, then, prescription becomes a way of protecting accomplished facts. The result is not strict conservatism, but a form of historical quietism: whatever now exists must be obeyed. This is precisely the point at which Burke’s thought ceases to conserve rightful origin and starts conserving victorious outcomes.

3. Burke’s anti-abstraction rhetoric is selective and opportunistic

Burke presents himself as the enemy of abstract politics. He condemns the French for governing by theory, metaphysics, and universal principles detached from historical circumstance. Yet he constantly relies on abstractions of his own. He appeals to ideas like nature, justice, virtue, humanity, moral order, civilization, and true liberty whenever they support his preferred institutions.

The problem is not that Burke uses general concepts; everyone does. The problem is that he acts as though his abstractions are reality itself, while the abstractions of his opponents are ideological fantasies. His anti-abstraction rhetoric is therefore asymmetrical. He does not reject abstraction as such; he rejects hostile abstractions while exempting his own moral universals from scrutiny. This allows him to posture as a practical statesman while smuggling in unfounded philosophical assumptions.

The deeper point is that Burke’s anti-theoretical style is a strategy of disarming rival first principles without acknowledging his own. He attacks doctrine most fiercely where doctrine threatens his settlement.

4. Burke aestheticizes authority instead of grounding it

One of the deepest problems in Burke’s Reflections is that he never fully explains why authority is owed. He is brilliant at describing how authority becomes emotionally persuasive—he writes poetically about prejudice, reverence, habit, honour, beauty, chivalry, loyalty, inherited affection, and social sentiment. But these explain attachment more readily than obligation; they show how hierarchy becomes lovable, not necessarily why this hierarchy is rightful.

Burke’s political imagination is therefore often aesthetic rather than juridical. He clothes authority in grandeur, elegance, nobility, and moral atmosphere. He wants institutions to be obeyed because they are venerable, beautiful, and socially nourishing. But once those feelings erode, he is left without a harder account of why obedience still binds.

This is why our commentary keeps returning to drapery, ornament, chivalry, and sentiment: Burke substitutes social psychology for a rigorous doctrine of legitimate command. He knows how social orders are sustained in the imagination, but he is largely unsuccessful at showing why they remain valid when imagination turns hostile. His theory of authority is therefore emotionally powerful but philosophically thin.

5. Burke never fully escapes the liberal and contractual language he is trying to resist

Burke wants to reject the idea that society is simply a voluntary association of self-authorizing individuals—and in this, as in many other places, we agree with his premise. Yet he repeatedly describes political order in terms of compact, partnership, convention, representation, conditions, and trust. Those terms carry implications he would do better to avoid.

Once society is framed as a partnership or a compact, the question of revision, breach, renegotiation, and dissolution inevitably arises—contracts have parties; partnerships have terms; conventions can be altered; representation can be challenged as inadequate.

Burke therefore fights revolutionary modernity using the very language that made revolutionary modernity possible. Our point is not just that Burke is inconsistent, but that he is historically transitional. He sees the dangers of modern consensualism, yet cannot fully free himself from its conceptual grammar—this is why his theory so often relies on exceptions, evasions, and redescriptions rather than on a clear and unshakeable first principle. He resists modern political premises while continuing to speak in their idiom.

6. Burke’s defense of hierarchy often collapses into a defense of property and the post-1688 ruling order

Burke presents his politics as a defense of order, inheritance, rank, and civilization against speculative destruction. But the real political weight of his argument falls on the side of property, established wealth, and governing elites. Burke is essentially a mercantile apologist presenting as a traditionalist. He praises “permanent property,” social weight, and the political predominance of those with material stake in the state. This shifts his argument away from ancestral legitimacy and toward stabilizing oligarchy.

The problem becomes more dire when set against Burke’s own lament for commercial vulgarity and financial modernity. He mourns the decline of chivalric civilization, yet defends a constitutional order deeply tied to public credit, commerce, and the growing authority of money. In that sense Burke is caught in a contradiction: he dislikes the social spirit produced by modern commercial society, but he politically defends the settlement that empowers it. The result is a conservatism that often looks less like defense of sacred inheritance than defense of a commercial governing class draped in aristocratic language.

Burke’s rhetoric is feudal and sacramental, but his practical politics protect the winners of a bourgeois-constitutional order. This is why in our commentary we press the point that Burke often conserves not tradition, but the post-revolutionary establishment. This is “conservatives conserve nothing,” 250 years in the past.

7. Burke’s religious politics are selective and instrumental

Burke treats religion as indispensable to civil order. He presents it as the source of awe, duty, restraint, and the moral elevation of political life. Yet his treatment of religion is selective. He condemns French irreligion and anti-clerical rupture while naturalizing the violent religious ruptures of English and Protestant history.

Protestant settlement, royal supremacy, confiscation, and ecclesiastical reordering are absorbed into “our inheritance,” while analogous French acts are denounced as revolutionary monstrosities. That asymmetry shows that Burke does not apply his anti-rupture principle consistently across confessional history. At the same time, he often speaks of religion in openly political terms: it disciplines the population, stabilizes labour, solemnizes oath, domesticates ambition, and gives society moral cohesion. This makes religion appear not only valid but useful.

The trouble is that Burke does not keep those claims distinct. He wants religion to be both sacred foundation and social instrument. This produces a lingering ambiguity: is religion binding because it is valid, or because it is politically beneficial? Our commentary presses this tension hard, because once religion is defended mainly as useful, its authority is already undermined.

8. Burke ultimately admits the centrality of exception and force—which weakens his legalist posture

Burke often presents himself as the defender of lawful continuity against revolutionary force, but under pressure he repeatedly acknowledges that politics is sometimes decided in moments where law cannot govern. He admits the role of necessity, force, crisis, suspension, and practical command. He knows that sovereign questions are not always settled by neat constitutional procedure. He knows that in extremis, political actors seize, impose, and consolidate, rather than interpret, legitimacy.

This is the basic insight of absolutism, which he opposes, and it creates a problem for his broader argument. Once Burke admits the decisive role of exception, he can no longer maintain a clean opposition between lawful England and lawless France. He has already conceded that even his favoured settlement involved force, necessity, and extra-normal decision—even as its whole principled foundation claimed to oppose absolutism.

The point is that Burke wants to reserve the logic of exception for his own side alone. He moralizes the exceptions that founded or preserved the English order, while treating revolutionary exceptions as uniquely criminal. But if exception is real, it cannot be made respectable only when it protects the world Burke wants saved.

The result is a theory that publicly venerates continuity while privately depending on emergency politics. Burke is therefore less a pure theorist of legality than a thinker who tries to hide decision beneath reverent constitutional language. Small wonder, then, that American conservatism venerates him so. 1776 is sacrosanct, untouchable in the true ambiguity of the term—both holy and never to be taken hold of again.

Summary and Relevance of the Critical Editions Series

Taken together, our critiques argue that Burke’s political thought is not a coherent defense of inherited authority so much as an attempt to sanctify a preferred historical settlement by disguising its ruptures, inconsistencies, and material interests beneath the language of tradition, reverence, and order. The critical stance proceeds from Burke’s right rather than his left: we accept his emphasis on authority, inheritance, hierarchy, and anti-abstraction, but argue that he fails to apply those principles consistently and ends up defending relatively recent political settlements that his own standards should have called into question.

Burke is a natural starting point for the Critical Editions series. He provides the intellectual template for modern conservative politics. He articulates the core conservative argument against radical political design. He legitimizes reform without revolution. And he supplies a language of social continuity. All of these are important to the right. But in the final analysis, Burke serves the ends of the left. Why?

We return to Gidron & Ziblatt. Their basic claim is that democracy stabilizes when the right is organized through mainstream, system-loyal parties, rather than through actors who attempt to overturn the current settlement. A cohesive centre-right channels reactionary social forces into ordinary electoral competition and institutional bargaining, whereas a weak centre-right leaves space for radical or restorationist movements to emerge.

Burke domesticates the right. He performs a conceptual move that later becomes foundational for centre-right politics: he accepts the legitimacy of the existing constitutional order while defending hierarchy, tradition, and social continuity within it. Earlier forms of right-wing politics aimed at restoration—the re-establishment of older regimes, privileges, or dynastic orders. Such politics remained fundamentally hostile to the new constitutional-democratic framework.

Burke’s position is different. He does not seek to overturn the post-1688 constitutional settlement, but instead, he treats that settlement as the inherited order to be conserved. From Burke onward, conservative politics becomes less about restoring a lost regime and more about preserving and managing the regime that exists—which is always the regime of your enemies. That is why Burke must be crushed.

Burke is a load-bearing pillar of the liberal order. Without him, right-wing politics would constantly be tempted by restorationist projects—monarchy without parliament, nativist privilege without “human rights,” or other forms of regime reversal. But Burke shifts conservatism from restoration to conservation. He transforms the right from a politics of recovering the past into a politics of preserving the inherited present.

Once that shift occurs, conservatives defend the status quo, hierarchical instincts are redirected into the cul-de-sac of “merit,” and the right becomes a participant in the constitutional order rather than its permanent enemy. That is precisely the kind of right Gidron and Ziblatt argue is essential for democratic stability.

The alternative to Burkean conservatism is not a stronger left, but a right that refuses integration into the democratic framework. When the centre-right abandons Burke’s logic of loyal opposition within an inherited constitutional order, the political field becomes more hospitable to movements that promise to reverse modern constitutional arrangements, and restore earlier forms of authority. In Gidron and Ziblatt’s terms, this is when the mainstream right fails to contain the radical right.

Burke’s legacy must therefore be shifted from his critique of revolution to his redefinition of conservative politics as regime-loyal. That is why he has faced the wall first in our launch of the Critical Editions series.

Listen to Part I here.

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