ARTIFACTS TOWARD A PLURALIST TRADITION

PART 3, FURTHER ARCHEOLOGY OF EARLY FEDERAL POPULIST SCHOLARSHIP

As I observed in the first post to this series, my favorite Nisbet book (at least, so far) was his, The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought. Therein, he explores both the intellectual roots of the erosion of community and those theoretical sources which may act as artifacts out of which we might piece together a new communalist, pluralist tradition. Indeed, at the end of the book, he makes an explicit connection with the fount of European pluralism. As I’ve mentioned before, this is a topic I intend to explore more in future posts, but Nisbet is clearly at least adjacent to that tradition.  

As both past and future posts in this series engage in dissecting the origins and nature of the assault on community, in this post I’m going to focus much more on those potential, theoretical artifacts for some kind of pluralist recovery or renaissance. So, in a sense, my archeological efforts are here unearthing Nisbet’s archeology. If that’s not too meta for you.

Given such an ambitious and expansive book, of course, the themes emphasized here have to be selective. And I’ve of course made selections that contributed to our discussions at this substack over the last year or so. I’ll start with some general observations on Nisbet’s pluralism, then proceed to discussions of his treatment of, first, intermediary institutions, then second, the role of federalism in such a pluralist context. As usual in this series, Nisbet will be given plenty of room to speak for himself.

Pluralism

One of Nisbet’s theoretical gurus on the matters of pluralism and its core insights is Edmund Burke (the other is Tocqueville). The basic premise informing both Nisbet’s and Burke’s position is captured in the latter’s catchy observation: “The nature of man is intricate, the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity, and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs?” This idea that no direction of power, however well meaning, however rational, even however virtuous, can legitimately command all of human nature or human affairs, is the central plank of pluralism. Different human needs, and different human affairs, require different, plural, modes of human association.

It's worth mentioning, parenthetically, that Nisbet is appealing to the English tradition of pluralism, which is quite different from the common application of that term in the U.S. context. In the latter, pluralism is more a means, a consideration on the path to a political, policy, organizational, or governance end. A democratic outcome is only legitimate if it accounts for the pluralist nature of the citizenry, or something along those lines. In contrast, the English tradition of pluralism is not discussing a means but positing an end. It is a critique of the existing assumptions about sovereignty.¹ Pluralism in that European tradition is itself a vision of social governance. And it has been rooted in the very kinds of community celebrated by Nisbet in his first book.

Very much building on his own arguments, back in The Quest for Community, Nisbet recognizes the central role of pluralist community as intermediary institutions. Central to their effective fulfilment of such a purpose is the conceptions of authority and function with which all such institutions are invested. This is precisely what gives them their social and psychological legitimacy in the face of an ambitious state, aspiring to expansive power. Some passages provide a flavor of what he’s getting at:  

Authority in society—the larger system of authority and structure of authority within each of the component communities and associations—should be as far as possible from centralization in one single body or individual. How, indeed, can centralization of power avoid dislocating, even atomizing, those associations in society that seek to maintain their functions but see their authority diminished through transfer of powers to some central agency?

What characterizes the pluralist view of autonomy can best be epitomized in the word functional: each group or community within the larger community should be endowed with the greatest possible autonomy consistent with performance of its function and with performance by other groups and communities of the functions embedded in them by tradition or plan.

As we’ll see, these ideas are rooted in rich intellectual schools, available for us to mine for a theoretical pluralist renaissance. Unsurprisingly, the conservative legacy of organic community and tradition is a valuable such school to be drawn upon.

The philosophers of the plural community, however, almost unfailingly treat tradition as something emerging from community, from consensus, from a stable base of social interaction that makes law in the formal and prescriptive sense unnecessary. The plural community, as we find it for the most part in Western thought, and especially in the writings of Althusius, Burke, and Tocqueville, is characterized overwhelmingly by tradition in contrast to law, that is, formal, calculated, and prescriptive regulations.

However, unsurprisingly, I would hope, to any regular reader of this substack over recent months, Nisbet’s appeal to the intellectual artifacts of a renewed pluralist theory is not restricted to conservative sources. Rather, it also expressly appeals to what I’ve called in earlier posts (see here and here), the right-wing socialist tradition. And, as we also saw, in our archeological dig into Michéa, it is precisely in the popularity of Marxism that the valuable lessons of right-wing socialism have been put at risk of being lost to such a revival.  

we find little or nothing in Marxist writing and in the mainstream of socialist and communist pronouncements, about the kind of matters that profoundly interested such anarchists as Proudhon and Kropotkin and such guild socialists as those who came to intellectual prominence in England especially at the turn of the century: nothing of any significance about the balance between physical nature and social life, the indispensability of localism, the necessity of pluralism in function and allegiance, the values of decentralization, or the crucial importance to man and state alike of diversity in association and the intermediary functions of association.

This then gives us some overview of the range of sources Nisbet is drawing upon here in his archeology of the artifacts of pluralist theory. As always, though, the devil is in the details. So, let’s look more closely into what he unearths from these different traditions about the intermediary institutions.

Intermediary Institutions

To appreciate Nisbet’s assessment of intermediary institutions, it is necessary to also recognize that his idea of an intellectual history of such is not restricted to the writings of individual theorists. Indeed, to have so restricted his story would have been theoretically inconsistent, for his central idea of analysis is that the intermediary institutions arise themselves, out of the long history of organic community, with its grown traditions and customs. It is only once these latter come under assault by the rationalism of what I’ve called the spatials that it becomes of central interest to turn to the individual thinkers, increasingly isolated by the zeitgeist of their time, who become lone voices advocating on behalf of what had previously been the organic, grown nature of such intermediary institutions. A fuller sense of Nisbet’s history, here, is revealed in these passages:

The period of the Middle Ages, whatever else one may wish to say of it, offers a notable example of a society organized along pluralist lines. Without exception the elements we have already seen to be the vital ones of the plural community were abundantly manifest in western European society from the period just following the fall of the Roman Empire down until approximately the sixteenth century. This was close to a thousand years, a very long time during which it was possible for certain structural principles to become very powerful indeed. No single person or group of persons ever had any prior plan or vision of these principles. They were nonetheless real, nonetheless implicative of human lives, and were to be seen in the countless customs and traditions of localities and regions and in the diverse network of functions, authorities, and allegiances that existed in the absence of any central political authority worthy of the name.

True, from the time of Charlemagne there was the so-called Holy Roman Empire; but, in the words of wit that have served all students of the subject, this structure was in fact neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Loose in conception, and impossible to implement, given the lack of either means of communication or pragmatic principles of administration—much less the kind of technology always necessary for large-scale centralization of government—the Holy Roman Empire was little more than a phrase.

Even had there been some organizing genius equipped with the necessary principles of administration and technology, he would have found it exceedingly difficult, certainly by the tenth and eleventh centuries, to make substantial impact upon localisms, regionalisms, and varied forms of feudal organization, each of which tended to be jealous of any outside interference. And by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries towns were springing up all over western Europe, each as jealous as any feudal principality of its autonomy and corporate freedom. And within the towns were the guilds of crafts and trades, along with other urban associations, which insisted upon their proper due of autonomy. At the base of the social structure was, of course, the strong family system, the clan, kindred, and household.

It was then, as regular readers of this substack will have predicted, that the epoch-shattering events of the French Revolution – the first unleashing of a spatial revolution in Europe for over two and half centuries (if we’re counting, as we should, the Reformation). The scale of ambition, though, in its rationalism, progressivism and self-proclaimed universalism, with its abrupt, relentless, total imposition of the Janus-faced regime of individualism/statism, was unlike anything ever before seen in Europe. Nor probably in the world. And it was precisely out of this orgy of the spatials that comes the most famous defense of the world of the temporals, and their historic, traditional society, in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. And, as Nisbet observes, it was precisely the spatials’ rationalist arrogance that most moved Burke:  

It was this aspect of the French Revolution that Burke despised and feared above all others: the resounding effort, in the name of the claimed simplicity of nature, to impose rationalist simplicity upon all the plurality, diversity, and multiplicity of the social order as it is given us in experience. The leaders of the Revolution sought to clear away the confusion, as they saw it, of traditional society in France, which fell in their category of the hated “feudal,” and to replace the whole of this by a politically planned and regulated social order that would be constructed through abstract reason alone.

In this book, and even more so across so many of his others, Nisbet makes great use of the arguments and insights of Burke. That particular artifact toward a renaissance of the pluralist tradition, though, is hardly surprising, as Burke is renown for his defense of the “little platoons” of organic community, grown institutions, and tradition. Another source, though, that might be more surprising for some readers (it was for me) was Nisbet’s heavy reliance upon Tocqueville. And this was not only in the latter’s book on the Old Regime, pre-revolution, but perhaps even more Nisbet emphasized the second volume of the more famous book, Democracy in America. He says that Tocqueville:

saw the Revolution and the tidal wave of its democratic consequences as the culmination of a slow development of political power that had begun in western Europe in the late Middle Ages. Indeed, Tocqueville’s overall philosophy of history rests on this vision. He saw democracy, in other words, as a chapter in, not the history of freedom, but, rather, the history of power. Democratic power, he thought, precisely because of its mass base, would doubtless prove to be more formidable, a greater threat to local, associational, and individual liberties, than any preceding form of political power, even the so-called absolute monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In Nisbet’s reading, Tocqueville anticipates the long-term social costs of the aggressive, ambitious, expansionist rationalism, characteristic of the French Revolution, and which will ultimately bring us under the regime of the managerial class’ administrative state. In that regard, Nisbet quotes Tocqueville:

After having thus taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the more original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. . . . Such power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Given Nisbet’s own close association of the rise of the Janus-faced regime, of atomized individualism and liberated statism, with the role of war and the military, as seen in the last post on The Quest for Community, he draws our attention to Tocqueville’s own insight into the connection between the “democracy” of such a Janus-faced regime and the recent history in the change of European warfare:

Whereas in Europe before the Revolution, war had been relatively limited in size of armies, types of objective, and overall intensity, the rise of the revolutionary mass armies changed all that. Side by side with universal manhood suffrage in revolutionary France went universal military conscription of men. Although democracies may be slower to engage in war than are dynastic monarchies, they are more likely, once war is under way, to extend its duration as well as its social, moral, economic, and political scope. The effect of democracy is to give a mass basis to war and also to moralize it—that is, to endow it with spiritual and moral objectives which serve to hide underlying material conditions.

And, like Nisbet and Burke, Tocqueville too is seen as perceiving the means to avoid such socially destructive outcomes in pluralism. Nisbet says that, in pluralist associations:

Tocqueville saw powerful means of achieving for citizens the strata of intermediate association and allegiance that would arrest both the tendencies toward social atomization resulting from the impact of democratization and industrialization on traditional society and, at the same time, the tendencies toward the monopolization of economic and social function in the central government invariably preceding or accompanying monopolization of power, as his observations in Europe had taught him.

And, in Tocqueville’s more optimistic moments, he saw operating in America just such a promise of pluralism. Nisbet again quotes him:

There is only one country on the face of the earth where the citizens enjoy unlimited freedom of association for political purposes. This same country is the only one in the world where the continual exercise of the right of association has been introduced into civil life and where all the advantages which civilization can confer are procured by means of it.

Of course, though, in his more pessimistic moments, as noted above, Tocqueville feared that democracy was ultimately doomed to undermine this very same, promising prospect of pluralism. While drawing upon Tocqueville on behalf of a pluralist tradition may not be entirely anticipated, for a figure – right or wrongly – often characterized as a conservative, as was Nisbet, a surely more surprising move was his drawing upon the rich tradition of what I’ve called on this substack right-wing socialism (see here, here and here).

In this book, Nisbet’s purview of right-wing socialism is limited. He only makes passing reference, for instance, to the guild socialists, like G. D. H. Cole, who would provide substantial further evidence in the direction of his case for a rich, pluralist set of artifacts to be recovered. Mostly, instead, Nisbet focuses upon the anarchists, especially Proudhon and Kropotkin. I mentioned in the last post Nisbet’s fondness for citing Proudhon’s cri de guerre, “Multiply your associations and be free.” Nisbet saw in the anarchist tradition a clear example of an effort to push back against the dissolution of intermediary institutions, in favor of consolidating central power.

of vital significance to anarchist thought, was the cooperative and communal movement, manifest in many hundreds, even thousands, of ventures ranging from consumer cooperatives such as the famous Rochdale Society, founded in 1844 in England, to the intensely communal associations into which thousands of men and women threw themselves, along with their money, property, and children, forming utopian societies dedicated in one degree or another to the anarchist ideal of renunciation of formal government. Despite the understandable tendency today to think of the nineteenth century exclusively in terms of its economic individualism, capitalism, and burgeoning national states, the fact is that no other period in all history vies with it in the number of books and articles, missionaries, and other spokesmen, and actual examples dedicated to furthering the ideals of practical socialism in the form of utopian communities.

And for Nisbet, the key groundbreaking thinker in this renaissance of anarchist community-building was Proudhon, thanks to the two central pillars of his thought.

Proudhon advanced two major principles of reform and positive revolution—both of which were to take deep root in the anarchist movement everywhere and, by late in the century, to influence Kropotkin strongly. The first was what Proudhon called mutualism; the second was federalism.

By mutualism Proudhon meant, in the first instance, an economic system that would, he hoped, replace capitalism. It would be based upon common ownership of property and upon a system of free credit and equitable exchange arising directly from the communal associations in which workers and all other members of society would for the most part live.

federalism is, and has always been, a vital element of the pluralist view of legitimate authority. But it is also a vital element of anarchist doctrine, nowhere more resplendently expressed than in Kropotkin’s works, which we shall come to shortly.

To the growing bigness of things economic and political, Proudhon opposed the necessity of a society based upon small groups and communities. These would be only loosely connected in a commune, which would be the next-highest level of organization. Each group whether a family or a local or work association—would be sovereign over all matters affecting it alone. There would be no masses of individuals each directly related by a potentially tyrannous conception of citizenship to the all-powerful central state.

Nisbet seemed to be even more impressed with Kropotkin, who was deeply influenced by Proudhon’s mutualism (in addition to his federalism). Indeed, Kropotkin, a natural scientist, took mutualism beyond a political ideal, or even historical source, to the level of a biological axiom. In probably his most famous book, Mutual Aid, Kropotkin dissects the propensity for mutual aid, initially among other animals, and then up through the various stages of human experience. In this book, to quote Nisbet:

The prime goal of reconstruction, Kropotkin thought, was, first, to forget the catchwords capitalism, revolution, and socialism, each conceived as an absolute, and then to work in any one of scores of ways for the ascendancy in society of the principle of mutual aid, building on such examples of it, like the guilds, village communities, cooperatives, communal experiments, and so on, as are already present, though in too small number.

The point of Kropotkin’s book is to demonstrate conclusively that the major constitutive processes in human history—the hallmarks of what is distinctively human, what has been most universal and, indeed, has survived the longest—far from being individualism, competition, and struggle, have in fact been the very opposite of these: community, cooperation, and mutuality.

Perhaps the more practical book of Kropotkin’s, in this regard, though is his vision of an integration of industrial development into a more thickly social set of organic and dispersed communal associations in his Fields, Factories and Workshops. The centralization of industry in urban areas, Nisbet argued, had less to do with the inherent requirements of productions than the desire to exercise control over workers. Kropotkin proposes instead the vision of an industrial village, rooted in traditional communities. Kropotkin’s vision of localist, communal renaissance, then, is not a pastoral arcadia. To quote Nisbet:

The point is, not that machinery be repudiated but that it be assimilated into social contexts within which not only machinery but human personality and human relationships prosper. It is, above all things, the “industrial village” that Kropotkin sees as the sole hope of any humane, life-giving assimilation of technology and industry.

And he quotes Kropotkin from that book:

Why should not the cottons, the woolen cloth, and the silks, now woven by hand in the villages, be woven by machinery in the same villages, without ceasing to remain connected with work in the fields? Why should not hundreds of domestic industries, now carried on entirely by hand, resort to labour-saving machines, as they already do in the knitting trade and many others? There is no reason why the small motor should not be of a much more general use than it is now, wherever there is no need to have a factory…

So, drawing upon a wide range of thinkers – Burke, Tocqueville, Proudhon, and Kropotkin are just a sample – Nisbet finds in the multiplicity of association the best guarantee against the atomization of society, and thereby the best check against the undivided power of the sovereign state, doing its best to embody Rousseau’s General Will. In both a review of history and theory, Nisbet finds the artifacts to reimagine both what has happened and how best the present might be reconceived in the interest of human thriving and freedom.

The other dimension of this restoration of the pluralist tradition, aligned with recent discussion on this substack, is Nisbet’s emphasis in this book (more than any of the others I’ve read) on the tradition’s concern for the role of federalism.

Federalism

In examining the role of federalism, Nisbet draws our attention to some of the important thinkers in the pluralist tradition, which includes several we haven’t yet discussed. He certainly does give full credit, as noted above, to the contribution of Proudhon – often called the father of modern federalism. And he does so in a distinctly pluralist context, particularly rooted in the idea of associational function:

Proudhon, unlike Marx and his followers, had profound faith in family, specifically the patriarchal family. This group the oldest and most basic representation of mutual aid and of the unforced social bond, would be the key community of the anarchist social order. From it would arise, however, a federal structure of organization and authority: through local community, industrial and agricultural working association, province, all the way up to the central government.

Indeed, Nisbet cites a passage from Proudhon, which emphasizes that for the latter federalism is at the very heart of his concept of anarchy:

Anarchy is, if I may be permitted to put it this way, a form of government or constitution in which public and private consciousness, formed through the development of science and law, is alone sufficient to maintain order and guarantee all liberties. In it, as a consequence, the institutions of the police, preventive and repressive methods, officialdom, taxation, etc. are reduced to a minimum. In it, more especially, the forms of monarchy and intensive centralization disappear, to be replaced by federal institutions and a pattern of life based on the commune.

As noted, Nisbet explores some fascinating thoughts on federalism in several other thinkers whom we haven’t addressed here: for example, Bonald² and Lemannais. This post though is already stretching much too long to do these thinkers justice. However, we’d be remiss if we neglected to address just one more important theorist of federalism. Indeed, if one is going to call Proudhon the father of federalism, then Johannes Althusius must be federalism’s grandfather. In Althusius' writing, Nisbet finds all the key virtues of a federal pluralism, including the focus on intermediary associations and the functional nature of federalism.

Althusius was an important political theorist, who probably doesn’t receive today the attention he deserves. He debated the contractarians and sovereigntists of his time – and irritated some that came later (most notably Hugo Grotius). But as Nisbet notes, his lasting legacy has been his pluralist vision of federalism.

For Althusius, as for the later pluralists, federalism is a means of governmental decentralization based upon natural or traditional communities, each of which, along with the formal organs of political government, will participate in the governmental process.

the distinctive, original genius of Althusius is not in his theory of contract or even of popular sovereignty, impressive though his statement of each is for his day. It lies in his conception of the principle of federation, whereby all power, all authority in any form — religious or lay, governmental, provincial, city, collegial, or whatever — would manifest itself through intermediate associations, through layers of function, authority, and allegiance that would act, at one and the same time, as buffers for the individual against the remote, centralized, and collectivist power of the state and as means of diversifying the social bond.

This lengthy passage from Althusius, cited in Nisbet’s book, is worth quoting in full, as the final word in this brief introduction of federalist thinking in the pluralist school:

For it cannot be denied that provinces are constituted from villages and cities, and commonwealths and realms from provinces. Therefore, just as the cause by its nature precedes the effect and is more perceptible, and just as the simple or primary precedes in order what has been composed or derived from it, so also villages, cities, and provinces precede realms and are prior to them. For this is the order and progression of nature, that the conjugal relationship, or the domestic association of man and wife, is called the beginning and foundation of human society. From it are then produced the associations of various blood relations and in-laws. From them in turn come the sodalities and collegia, out of the union of which arises the composite body that we call a village, town, or city. And these symbiotic associations as the first to develop can subsist by themselves even without a province or realm. However, as long as they are not united in the associated and symbiotic and universal body of a province, commonwealth, or realm, they are deprived of many of the advantages and necessary supports of life. It is necessary, therefore, that the doctrine of the symbiotic life of families, kinship associations, collegia, cities, and provinces precede the doctrine of the realm or universal symbiotic association that arises from the former associations and is composed of them.

Thus far, in my earlier discussions of federalism, I’ve restricted myself to geographic jurisdictions. However, this medieval emphasis upon the federation of functional associations, we’ll see, is commonly invoked in the pluralist tradition. It may very well bear some consideration in future discussions.

Conclusion

In concluding this lengthy post, I’ll cite just two more quotations from Nisbet, providing an overview of the mission and insights of this rich book, The Social Philosophers. Here he identifies the roots of our theoretical drift into statist monopoly of power, as well as the resources from which a more pluralist world may yet still be imagined.

first Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, then the legislators of the French Revolution and, following that great event, the philosophical radicals in England, who took their point of departure from Jeremy Bentham: all, without exception, saw the elements of medievalism as their hated enemy and in the centralized political state the context of lasting liberation from these medieval elements.

In kinship, religion, social class, local community, region, guild, monastery, university, and various other types of community lay, then, the medieval system of federalism, one that can be truly described as a communitas communitatum. We must not idly glorify this system in the act of merely describing it. It has too often been romanticized. Beneath its federal structure, despite—or even because of—its functional autonomies and corporate liberties, there could be, as we know, cruelty, deprivation, exploitation, and by modern standards a very low level of life and literacy. Nevertheless it is precisely this medieval pattern of social and political life that furnishes the background, the context, and, most important, the actual themes of what we call the plural community in modern Western social thought. Without exception, from Althusius through Burke and Tocqueville to Max Weber³, it is the general medieval set of social and political principles that supplies the substance of pluralist reactions to the modern centralized, bureaucratized, and collectivist state.

Just maybe, what can still be imagined, may yet be imagined into renewal. In any event, this book of Nisbet’s is an extraordinarily rich resource of ideas from the legacy of federal pluralist thinking. Yet, dear reader, you might be surprised to learn that I’ve actually elided what may be the most impactful factor in the story told by The Social Philosophers. For that story deserves, and requires, a dedicated post of its own. And that’s what is coming next. So, if you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know anyone else who might be interested in these topics…

1. As Paul Hirst put it in his introduction to some emblematic selections from the English tradition: “American pluralism considers associations as part of a process of political competition and tends to treat the state and government as intermediary networks through which competing interests strive to influence policy and through which the objectives of the dominant organized interests on any particular issue are carried out...” English Pluralism “is less a doctrine of political competition than a critique of state structure and of the basis of the authority of the state. The English pluralists challenged the theory of unlimited state sovereignty and of a unitary centralized state embodying such sovereign power in a hierarchy of authority.” Paul Q. Hirst, ed., The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G.D.H. Cole, J.N. Figgis and H.J. Laski, 1st edition (London: Routledge, 1994).

2. Bonald is especially interesting in his efforts to meld federalism with monarchy, as the superior form of government.

3. Parenthetically, while I haven’t addressed it here (though I mentioned it in passing in the last post), Nisbet does point to sociology (e.g., Comte, Tönnies, Simmel, Durkheim, Weber) as a source for such recoverable pluralist artifacts as discussed in this post. And, indeed, he wrote a whole book — that I’m now reading — The Sociological Tradition, that further deepens insight into that connection. Also, worth mentioning, in both that book and the one discussed in this post, Nisbet surprised me by including Hegel in his pantheon of pluralist sources. Long time readers of this substack will recall I’ve been somewhat dismissive of Hegel — at least as Marx adopted what I perceived as the worst elements of Hegel’s thought. I was then a little surprised to discover Michéa's fondness for Hegel (see here). So, imagine my dazed confusion to find that Nisbet too held up Hegel as part of this anti-French Enlightenment, pluralist tradition. Apparently, I read the wrong Hegel book. For those interested, this is what Nisbet says in The Sociological Tradition: “In Hegel the influence of the idea of community is seen most strikingly in his Philosophy of Right, the work which, above any other single piece of writing in early nineteenth-century German philosophy, created the effective setting within which German sociology was later to arise…Philosophy of Right is an essay in rationalism, but it is a very different kind of rationalism from that of the Enlightenment — in either Germany or France. Hegel was a conservative, and the conservative cast of his social thought was shaped largely by the dominant role that the image of community held for him. His criticism of natural rights individualism, of direct and unmediated sovereignty, his rejection of the equalitarianism of the French Revolution, and his denunciation of contract as the model of human relationships are all predicated on a view of society that, like medieval society, is concentric: composed of interlocking circles of association — family, profession, local community, social class, church — each of which is autonomous to the limit of its functional significance, each of which is held to be the necessary source and reinforcement of individuality, and all of which, taken together, form the true state. The true state, for Hegel, is a communitas communitatum rather than the aggregate of individuals that the Enlightenment had held it to be.” So, take that McConkey.