LOOKING BACK
PART 1: LESSONS OF THE PLURALIST CONSTITUTION
Well, gang. It’s over. This obsessive exploration of pluralism, which I’m guessing left some scratching their heads about what I was up to, I feel has reached a natural point of conclusion.1 Hopefully, at least as a first gesture, in my remarks to follow, I can make some greater sense of it all for the perplexed. (And, thanks to the perplexed who have stuck with me through all of this.)
After completion of A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, I knew that I wanted to flesh out the book’s sweeping argument by digging deeper into some aspect of it. Four possibilities initially struck me. One, and indeed the one that at this point I feel inclined to take on next, was to try and better document the longue durée of the spatial revolution: from the rise of medieval mercantilism, through the Age of Discovery, into (what, following Schmitt, we might call, liquifying) modernity. A second possibility was to do a detailed history of the ebb and flow of the vicissitudes of the managerial class – a still intriguing prospect. Third was to examine the comparative role of spatial vs temporal technology and production processes — the former displacing the latter, and how reconstitution of the latter might support restoration of a pluralist constitution. And finally, the choice I wound up making, was to do a deep dive on what I’ve come now to call the pluralist constitution; what was the history of such and what can be learned from that history for manifesting pluralist ambitions into the future.
Of course all four topics were intertwined, but they were also sufficiently parsable (if that’s a word) for analytical purposes. Long time readers here may recall that, late last year, I actually started originally down the first path, (see here). But an intuition that I did need to more fully flesh out the nature and history of this alternative political paradigm of pluralism plunged me down a proverbial rabbit hole, which consumed most of the current year.
Theoretically, “pluralism” was helpful as a regulative ideal, which provided a critical lens through which to assess the spatial revolution, space biased civilization, mass society, the modern habitus, the culture industry, and the hegemony of managerial liberalism. And such theoretical insight was immensely valuable as part of the phenotype wars analysis’ aspiration to better understand the condition of the contemporary world. However, that analysis had an additional objective: exploring the prospects of a strategy for offsetting the worst possible outcome of the present arc of the phenotype wars’ resolution.
If though I was serious about such an objective – not content with a theoretical precept, but wanted to understand pluralism as a genuine and legitimate political alternative to simply taking up lodging within Lukács’ Grand Hotel Abyss (much as we’d disagree upon the orientation of the suites’ view) – I would have to gain a far deeper appreciation of just what in historical fact this pluralism really was. It seemed to me that only then could I ponder a context for its relevance in our present circumstances.
This post, then, will tease out some of the lessons which I feel I’ve learned from this year-long exploration of the pluralist constitution. I’d originally had a more complete transitional post composed for here, but it began (as so often has been the case recently) to get very long. And I’m determined to get back to more bite-sized pieces, so that readers don’t feel like a dissertation confronts them every time they open an email from this Substack. In that spirit, I will post a separate (part 2) piece to conclude the transition which will offer some thoughts on where I see things going from here. There’ll be a brief housekeeping break to begin that one. But for now, what are the takeaway lessons from this exploration of the pluralist constitution?
In truth, there’s too much to provide a thorough accounting here. That will be the job involved in thinking all this through in the new book (details below), but there are several high points of recognition that can be recapped within the limitations of a Substack post. The first thing I’d mention is my deepened understanding of the very notion of a pluralist (what in the early posts I called the medieval) constitution. While many sources contributed to this deeper appreciation, I’d mention in particular the work of Fritz Kern.2
My use of the phrase “pluralist constitution” is precisely meant to generalize and redirect the lessons learned from the medieval constitution to other historical contexts – with the proviso that obviously medieval perspectives and relations cannot simply be dropped wholesale into fundamentally different historical contexts. It is more about learning the lessons of that constitution and reflecting upon what conditions of the reapplied context might be leveraged in the interests of a reconstituted pluralism. But, again, before one can hope to start looking at those opportunities, it was essential to understand, in concrete historical terms, just what medieval pluralism was in practice.
It’s also worth briefly mentioning here that, as I learned from Jacob Levy, this project had a family resemblance to that of Montesquieu (see here and here).3 In dramatic distinction though — operating at cross-purposes — he was the pivotal figure in a monist move to consolidate the political pluralism of the medieval constitution into the monist Constitution of an undivided sovereignty: ostensibly embedding within itself separation of powers that, within the medieval pluralist constitution, had been genuinely heterarchical loci of power. However, whatever may be claimed about Montesquieu’s application of this move during the 18th century, by the time of the 20th century such separation of powers pretense, most famously embodied in the U.S. Constitution, had been completely captured by a common class of intellectual and managerial phenotypes who – while admittedly sometimes using these mechanisms to resolve intra-class conflict, mostly – puppeted these purported separation of powers into a ventriloquist charade of adversarial institutions. (See here and here)
Effectively, Montesquieu’s move constituted a taming, a domestication, of the pluralist constitution within the hegemony of the spatial revolution’s aspiring monist sovereignty: a revolution within the form (for a teasing out of this term, see here). And in the process there was a pluralist-denying shift from constitution-thinking to thinking about the Constitution. Montesquieu’s move, among other effects, then, tended to reduce the constitution to a matter of the law – and a rather positivist conception of law at that.
Given that context, it might be appreciated how important I have found the work done here over the last year on legal pluralism. For me, the most impactful book reviewed during the creation of this series was certainly Paulo Grossi’s sweeping history of European law.4 Long time readers will know that I initially had entered upon this exploration of the pluralist constitution deeply informed by the reading of many books by Robert Nisbet5: an influence well illustrated in my book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars. In some striking ways Grossi contributed to a deeper appreciation of many of Nisbet’s observations and premises.
The first thing to mention in this regard was Grossi’s deep analysis of the foundation of customary law during the middle ages. Grossi observed that such legal practice grew out of the unique demands for reconstituting law in the face of the collapse of the Roman Empire, in the 4th and 5th centuries. A very different kind of law, though, was required for the world that emerged in this post-crash arc of that phenotype wars spiral. Key to these developments was a radically different human confrontation with nature.
Grossi characterized the guiding worldview rooted in this new confrontation as reicentrism, which he described as a belief in the centrality of the res (‘thing’), and of the totality of things that make up the world. For the harsh conditions of life under which the early medievals found themselves, a legal order was required that stuck close to the hard lessons of material life. Abstract principles of law – however lofty or ambitious – simply had no place in a reicentric world. For example, property rights simply could not provide a socially survivable structure if informed by purportedly elevated principles directed at some allegedly “just” conception of the social good. They simply had to work in the real world context of what succeeded in providing for the material needs of life in a society surviving on the margins of subsistence. (See here.)
Along these lines, Grossi did provide an intriguing gloss on Nisbet’s recurring theme, addressed in so many of the latter’s books, on the conflict between such customary law and the eventual revival of Roman law. Nisbet though tended to depict this conflict as a kind of tug-of-war in which those who profited from Roman law’s resuscitation of monist sovereignty and liberated commercial markets eventually yanked the defenders of customary law’s legal pluralism into the world of spatial modernism. Grossi though provides some valuable context which reveals that the story was less a tug-of-war than a contingent response to disruptive historical circumstances. The key consideration in these developments was the initial reopening of the long distance trading routes – which is to say the early sparks of a rekindled spatial revolution (see here).
The consequentialist factuality of the reicentric, customary law of the middle ages, under these newly emerging conditions, in the very same spirit of pragmatic realism which had inspired that reicentrism, now found itself compelled to adapt to the emerging conditions on the ground. As a society almost exclusively organized on agrarian foundations began to change into one increasingly informed by mercantile and commercial considerations, the law appropriate to assure the optimum leveraging of resources too required reconsideration.
It was in this context that the reinstatement of Roman law became increasingly attractive. Unlike Nisbet though, who was inclined at times to frame the story as between white hat customary law and black hat Roman law, Grossi shows that on the contrary the initial integration of Roman law was undertaken by medieval jurists who were extremely sensitive to consequentialist factuality within the law. Indeed, his description of them suggests that far from being spatials, they were still temporals in phenotype, simply trying to come to terms with the legal challenges of the nascent sprouts of the spatial revolution entailed in the gradual opening of the long distance trade routes (see here).
The legal project of the medieval jurists aimed at a pragmatic integration of Roman law into the existing legal pluralism of the medieval constitution. In trying to balance the virtues of each in light of the challenges of the real world, their effort at marrying Roman to customary law was itself an expression of medieval legal pluralism. The hegemony of Roman law over customary, in Grossi’s telling of the story, only solidifies with the rise of the Humanists at the time of the Renaissance (see here).
As the medieval jurists, whom Grossi also calls the scholastics, continued in their pragmatic, makeshift bricolage attempt to harmonize the legal conditions of the emerging commercial revolution with the reicentrism of customary law, their application of Roman law increasingly came to be seen as stilted, inconsistent, and ultimately irrational. The motives for such a judgment were varied, from Nisbet’s princes and merchants who stood to handsomely profit from a more aggressive application of Roman law and its definition of property; to the true believers, with their deep intellectual commitment to legal abstractions of justice: Grossi’s Humanists. These were the real vehicles for the ultimate triumph of monist law and spatialism over pluralist, customary law and temporalism (see here).
Through Grossi’s telling of the story, these Humanists were the first cadre of spatialist (if not first spatial) jurists to emerge from Europe’s millennium long spatial revolution. Grossi had so much more to say, I could easily exhaust this entire post with a description of incredibly valuable insights I took from his remarkably condensed history of European law. But there were many other lessons, from other authors in this series, perhaps of more practical strategic or tactical consideration, that I’d want to at least briefly review. One such insight, that dramatically reoriented the way I’d been thinking previously, gradually emerged from my reading of Mack Walker’s book on the German hometowns.6
It was in the context of the increased understanding of time biased society offered in Walker’s book that I came to appreciate that while I’d long been skeptical – even dismissive – of the notion of popular sovereignty, there was a temporalist-pluralist version of such an idea which in fact was practicable, while not subject to the kind of monist sovereign capture which has been characteristic of managerial class ventriloquism. Recognizing this potential though required lifting one’s thinking out of the default managerial class framing of politics, as inexorably discursive, and appreciating the power of recursive social action. To the degree that elites are kept anchored within a gemeinschaft community, they are subject to the social control exercised by the recursive social action of that community. And, indeed, the same principle applies in disciplining “representatives” at up-scaled political orders. (On all the points in this paragraph, see here.)
That was of unprecedented insight for me. On the other side of the scale, there were lessons learned that served to reinforce what I’d already known. For example, Walker’s treatment of the quality and form of life in the German hometowns, and their related guilds, put a considerable amount of flesh on the bone of the theoretical position I’d teased out in A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars. He goes into great detail describing the customs, privileges, and obligations that informed life within these temporal institutions.
This entailed a view of “communal freedom,” which involved among other considerations a requirement of enforcing particular temporalist values, such as sobriety, capacity for a “citizen’s livelihood,” and social decency (see here). From Black, through Walker, to Bieto, this theme of the pluralist corporate institution as a builder of character, dignity, and generally high moral standards — in Walker’s case enforced through control over town citizenship and marriage approval — have been repeatedly emphasized.
That though was hardly the only such example. My earlier-in-life work, studying North American populism (see here), and recognizing how those late 19th-early 20th century exercises in institutional, even heterarchical, pluralism eventually were smashed on the rocky shores of a deceptively alluring mass electoralism (see here), was reinforced through my exposure to Bowen’s and Elbow’s discussions of Social Catholic corporatism.7
In an impressively parallel process, there too, early efforts at building institutions and elaborating the theoretical foundations of such pluralist practices eventually succumbed to the temptation of the political shortcut of trying to realize their ideals through mass electoralism. As with the North American populists, though, the result was frustration within a context of tactical compromise and strategic cooptation, finally resulting in a dissipation of resources and energy, leading to demoralization and movement disintegration. (see here and here).
While I found Social Catholicism’s critique of capitalism and free markets, on the one hand, and of Marxism, communism, and class conflict as organizing principle, on the other hand, impressively trenchant and prescient (see here, here, and here); and appreciated their search for a new path between these failed options in the form of a recovery of guild corporatism; nonetheless, the delusion that their pluralist, temporalist ends might be achieved through the quintessentially spatial means of mass electoralism and mass democracy rendered that project a historical failure. A similar insight was provided through the exploration of G. D. H. Cole’s elaboration of guild socialism.8
Cole’s attempt to leverage a medieval pluralist institution to mold a thoroughly spatialist vision of industrialism, through the realization of workers’ control, was another example of the foolhardiness revealed by those who have failed to appreciate the fundamental differences between space and time biased societies. Modern capitalism has abstracted the capitalist out of the local, tactile, recursive productive processes manifested by guild-based production. In a world of globalized flows of production factors, the capitalist has become thoroughly spatialized. Whatever role workers’ control might play in that context, the radically incommensurable relation between capitalist and worker within the pluralist guild offered no model for such an intervention (see here).
While the Social Catholics had thought they could transcend Marxian class conflict with their version of corporatist pluralism, Cole thought that, by leveraging guild pluralism, he could drive a “just” resolution of that conflict right up through the middle of the Marxian dilemma. While the Social Catholics aspired to use monist means to achieve pluralist goals; Cole aspired to use pluralist means to achieve monist goals. In each case, though, failure to appreciate the genuine heterarchy of medieval pluralism left them both susceptible to a fatal lacuna: inadequately distinguishing the paradigmatic differences between mass and plural society (see here).
A similar lesson can be drawn from the National Socialist (and other fascist) exercises in guild corporatism. Indeed, across all the series of the last year we’ve seen the same analytical conclusion repeated. While National Socialist rhetoric may have deliberately appealed to the spirit of the pluralist constitution, invoking its symbols, even at times parroting its nomenclature, all the authors agreed that these were empty gestures. Always, when push came to shove, and it came to matters of real power, the National Socialists opted for the consolidation and centralization of monist sovereignty. (See here, here, and here).
For, as I explain in my book, The Managerial Class on Trial, while their commitment level to technocratic-administered markets may not have been sympathetically regarded by our own disciples of managerial liberalism, their movements and the governments they formed were very much strategies of James Burnham’s managerial revolution. These were spatials (and indeed spatialists) caught up in a multi-decade, pan-continental struggle over directional control of the spatial revolution. In that context, one can hardly be surprised that any gestures they made toward pluralism were to end in disappointment for temporals.
Furthermore, as we saw with David Beito’s history of U.S. fraternal societies9, even in those instances where the movement did not make the strategic error of trying to leverage its resources and credibility to achieve pluralist ends through monist means, the impact of the spatial revolution in general and the aspiring monist sovereign of the state could be expected to take aggressive (sometimes even nefariously motivated) actions that erode the pluralist constitution. It’s true that in some instances leaders of the fraternal societies did perceive some intervention of the welfare state as removing a burden from their organizational shoulders.
For the most part, though, the partisans of the fraternal societies recognized that their movement embodied values and principles – which we’d call pluralist and temporalist – that were incompatible with those of unfettered markets, atomistic individualism, government dependence, etc.: i.e., what we’d call monist and spatialist values and principles. However, as we also saw, even those fraternity society temporals who resisted the alluring illusion of short-cutting their politics through the channels of monist sovereignty fell victim to the vicissitudes of the spatial revolution.
It was not enough to forsake the path of spatial technique; success would have required a greater vigilance against and awareness of the precarious place of heterarchical pluralism within the modern habitus of the spatial revolution. If, as I pondered in my book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, some resuscitation of temporal institutions, grounded in the pluralist constitution, might be a plausible means for today’s temporals to prepare themselves for a softened landing amid – what the book concludes seems likely to be – a social or civilizational collapse (acknowledging that not all collapses are as dramatic as that of the Romans or Mayans), then the lessons of this past year’s deep dive into the history and theory of that pluralist constitution would strongly suggest the importance of avoiding the pitfalls of those who came before.
Attempting to regenerate pluralism through monist institutions, including sovereign Constitutionalism and mass electoralism10, or operating indifferently to the associated implications of spatial modernism would seem to be a recipe for failure. The spatial revolution has vanquished the pluralist constitution for a reason. Attempting to take on the spatial revolution head-on would be as quixotic as it would be counterproductive.
That lesson then leads us to the compelling question of how exactly might a resuscitation of islands of pluralism be achieved amid the material reality of the expansive ocean of the spatial revolution – without falling into spatial modernism’s many traps: being lured into its cultural seductions, political logic, or administrative webs? Attempting to answer that question, to my mind, leads us to the next step in the long scholarly project of this Substack. And that step is addressed in the second part of this pivotal post on the new direction of this Substack. So, if you don’t want to risk missing that, and haven’t yet, please…
And if you know someone who you think would be interested in these kinds of topics, please…
Meanwhile: Be seeing you!
In truth, there was another whole set of posts I had been considering, revealing the deep temporalist, pluralist sensibilities informing the independence movement in 18th century America, including the war and the struggle over the 1787-89 Constitution, which continued to percolate into the 1850-60s, captured in the historiography of Mel Bradford. But, I’ve come to feel that as interesting a historical example as that would be, it probably wouldn’t add much to the theoretical understanding of pluralism. And, I also suspect that — refracted slightly differently — that material may prove useful in the next phase of this Substack’s intellectual journey. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; back to the main text!
Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages (Clark, N.J: Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2013).
Jacob T. Levy, “Montesquieu’s Constitutional Legacies,” in Montesquieu and His Legacy, ed. Rebecca E. Kingston (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2008); Jacob T. Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Paolo Grossi, A History of European Law, trans. Laurence Hooper, 1st edition (Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
Just to mention the most influential: Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, First Edition (Wilmington, Del: ISI Books, 2010); Robert Nisbet, The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (New York: Pocket Books, 1983); Robert Nisbet, Tradition and Revolt, 1st edition (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2018); Robert Nisbet, Twilight of Authority (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000); Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, 1st edition (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2017).
Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Cornell University Press, 2014).
Ralph H. Bowen, German Theories of the Corporative State (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company Inc, 1947); Matthew H. Elbow, French Corporative Theory, 1789-1948: A Chapter in the History of Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953).
G. D. H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated, 1st edition (New Brunswick: Routledge, 1980).
David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967, New edition (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
It perhaps worth noting that I’m writing these words just days before the U.S. Presidential election, which many perceive as decisive in determining the direction of the country. One way of framing that fork in the road, is that the election of one side will enhance temporalist values: e.g., ending the war against freedom of religious practice; ceding of the administrative state’s social engineering powers over children to families; and (maybe?) a revival of heterarchical federalism (the Dobbs ruling might be regarded as grounds for such optimism). Whatever the outcome of that election, which (probably) will be known by the time you read this: the lessons learned through this series, and in the history of North American populism, suggests — while temporalist restorations are possible (see the many that swept 19th Europe following the initial eruption of the French Revolution and Bonapartism) — in broad strokes the long spiral of the phenotype wars ever moves toward greater space bias, until the inevitable collapse. As alluringly possible as the appearance of a clean, overnight (relatively speaking) victory may seem through mass electoralism, surely a key lesson from the scholarship of the last year (and much from before that) suggests that the state and mass electoralism are the homefield of the spatials. And any victory which temporals might imagine coming from the ecstatic, cathartic redemption of an electoral happy ending needs to be moderated with a clear-eyed acknowledgment of that homefield advantage. Long term, monist means are unlikely to deliver pluralist ends, even in the mid-run.
Very interested in Part 2.