Foundations of the Right V: Heteronomy

Freedom is the Problem

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In our last article I said that after I discovered illiberal thinking, “my debates with reddit communists and democracy enjoyers became so easy it was almost unfair.” One of the strongest principles that buttressed my new worldview was what we call heteronomy.

The communist frames himself as an idealist, but when you look under the hood, you find that he simply wants to bring about a world where his own whims are unobstructed. And yet the commie can’t just say this out loud. He must conceal his hedonism under a mask of principle, so he postures as a freedom fighter. Morality, he says, consists in securing the maximum of freedom. But is this really morality?

Morality, if it is anything at all, must bind you in some way. The communist, the liberal, and as we shall see, even some “traditionalists”, tell us that one should be bound only by oneself. But this makes no sense. After all, if one can bind oneself, one can just as easily unbind oneself. If morality depends on the will of the moral agent, then morality prescribes nothing. Morality, by definition, must come from without. This is called heteronomy—a Greek term meaning “law from another”. This simple insight, when applied systematically and without exception, won me every debate I engaged in with these creatures.

As long-time readers of Imperium Press might have guessed, heteronomy is pre-axial or folkish, and its opposite (autonomy) is axial. I recently read an interesting Twitter thread which set out the differences between the Greeks and the Romans by a user “Disco Orpheus”, and Mr. Disco has hit upon a very tidy distinction which maps neatly on to this axial/folkish distinction. His thread is interesting for two reasons: 1) he nails this distinction, but strongly favours the axial; and 2) his conception of the “Greeks” is clearly limited to the classical (axial) Greeks and ignores the pre-classical (folkish) Greeks. But he is on to something. The Greeks of Plato’s time were a different breed than the Romans of any era until very late—and much inferior to them. And one way in which the Greeks differed from the Romans was that the Greeks discovered autonomy but the Romans never really did.

The Romans were always second-rate philosophers, even at their best. They absorbed Greek philosophy but never internalized its individual autonomy in the same way. from the Presocratics onward, the classical Greeks increasingly thought of reason (logos) as something available to the individual mind. Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: all turn law, order, or truth into something that can be apprehended internally, through philosophy. For the Romans, lex and mos maiorum were binding not because the individual sees their rationality, but because they come from outside him—from ancestors, gods, auguries, the Senate, etc.

The Romans much more clearly model a folkish worldview.¹ This world is thick with external law, tradition, omen, and custom. The self does not ground order; order is imposed. Right action means alignment with exterior authority. The classical world turns inward—conscience, reason, and revelation become available to the individual as a universal standpoint. Here, right action means freedom to seek truth that is available to our interiority.

The Roman habit of obedience to tradition and external law matches very closely what we now label right-wing in the deep civilizational sense: law before liberty, ancestral custom before rational critique. For the Romans, law was right because it was law; it was not law because it was right. Roman philosophy is derivative because the Romans never fully abandoned the heteronomous reflex, but this is also their genius—Roman law and institutions lasted because they embodied the folkish (and by extension, right-wing) truth that order comes from outside, not from within.

To bind the will requires a source beyond the will itself—otherwise the “command” is revocable at the very moment of its issuing. A self-command collapses into preference. The autonomy theorist (in its strongest form, the Kantian) says: “To be free is to give oneself the law.”² But this creates a contradiction: if I can both issue and revoke the law, it ceases to bind. Autonomy becomes indistinguishable from antinomianism or lawlessness, the “law” is just another name for my will.

So heteronomy is based and trad—and what’s more, its opposite is not even morality at all. But it also seems to have a problem, one which has been noted by liberals themselves: if you cannot bind yourself, how can you ever hold to a promise? And what kind of morality cannot sustain a promise?

The force of this is objection is rhetorical—it appeals to the lived reality that promising does seem like a paradigmatic case of binding oneself. So how does the folkish moral theorist respond?

A promise is never purely self-imposed. When I say “I promise you,” I don’t simply talk to myself; I am placing myself under the gaze of the other (in folkish societies, the gaze of the gods, the ancestors, and the community). The binding force of a promise comes from this external recognition—the other person now holds a claim on me, and the shared world of trust and expectation stands over me. Even in promising, the obligation is heteronomous. What binds me is precisely that I have placed myself under a relation, something exterior to myself. This is what Bodin means when he says, citing Pomponius, “No obligation can be valid which depends entirely upon the will of the one making the promise.”

This is why oath-taking was traditionally sacralized—it was sworn ritually, before gods, on relics, etc.—the “outside” must be invoked, or else the oath is not binding. And hence the superficiality of Mr. Disco’s account of the Greeks: pre-classical Greeks were an entirely different breed than their later counterparts, and behaved heteronomously. In Homer, oaths are never private; they are always witnessed by gods and men, such as the oath between the Trojans and Achaeans which calls on Zeus and the rivers to punish oath-breakers. Hesiod describes Horkos (Oath) as a daimon who avenges perjury.³ For the Greeks, a broken promise literally summoned an avenging spirit.

A promise is inherently public. For both Greeks and Romans, a promise was not “I command myself”, it was a statement before witnesses, human or divine. And whether in the archaic Greek world or today, a promise transfers obligation from the self to a shared, binding order. That’s why promises are trustworthy: their bindingness comes not from the self but from the external order invoked.

Related to this, social scientists have noted that when people declare a belief publicly, they are much less willing to abandon that belief.⁴ If you doubt this, look at the insane hills that certain radical right influencers have resolved to die on, simply because they announced them one day as an afterthought or a rhetorical flourish. And the radical right is far more sane than the rest of society.

This is not a simple matter of stubbornness, but the iceberg above the water of social expectation. When you declare a belief or stance publicly, you are no longer simply holding a private opinion you could revise at will. You have placed yourself into a network of recognition and expectation. The stance now belongs partly to the others who heard it. To change your mind is no longer just a matter of private choice; it means breaking trust, losing face, or contradicting yourself before witnesses. Even belief, the most private of acts, gains its weight from heteronomy. “I believe” becomes binding when spoken aloud, because it is no longer just my belief but part of a shared moral fabric.

To come back to the issue of promising, once a belief or promise is made known, the other holds part of it. To break it is not just to change my mind, but to betray a relationship. A promise gains its force not from autonomy, but from heteronomy because promising is never mere self-binding—it is the act of placing oneself under another’s gaze. The obligation arises precisely because the promise has left the sphere of autonomy.

As we mentioned in summary, autonomy is not universal but was born in specific times and places. In the European world, that was in Greece, with the birth of philosophy.⁵ Where things get truly interesting is in autonomy’s historical development through Christianity. The classical Greeks gave us this idea, but as happened so often, what the Greeks birthed, Christianity fostered and perfected.