On Political Particularism and Universalism
On Political Particularism and Universalism
The conservative fight against the Left often wrongly fights for twentieth century liberalism
One of the key characteristics of the authentic right-wing approach to political affairs its is rejection of political universalism. Universalism is the essential character of contemporary political theory and while it has its origins in the Enlightenment, its most recent manifestation grew up in the context of twentieth century America. Americanism is one of the most developed types of the universalist approach to political problems.
One of the things that I argue in my essay “The Triumph of the Political” is that libertarianism is a purist and logically consistent form of universalism whose opposition to the American Ideology is that the latter is inconsistent, hypocritical, and involves completely untenable axioms (such as equality). But they are both still universalistic and reject what should be considered a sine qua non of Rightist thinking: political particularity.
One of the problems of post-WWII conservatism is that it largely abandoned, under the influence of Leo Strauss, particularity and began to embrace a universalist political ethic. This is one of the reasons Paul Gottfried and others in the 1990s began to distinguish between paleoconservative and neoconservative. Traditional conservative thought over the last three centuries warned against the excesses of ideologically driven political pursuits and the necessity of particularity and context.
Universalism thus refers to idea that there is a set of political absolutes applicable to all individuals, independent of their particular situation or experience. In this view, all persons are thought to be primarily members of the human race and only secondarily members of smaller subdivisions of nations, tribes, or historically derived sociopolitical units. Political universalists therefore deny the primacy of roots. They prefer to hold up the constructs of an abstract humankind, absent those contingent conditions that they view as artificial.
The universalist conceives of the ultimate standards of just and good societies as more fundamental than existing tensions; the politically and culturally specific supposedly stands in the way of our participation in a just world society. Politics, as that which deals with the particularistic and historically conditioned, is petty and the result of man’s refusal to affirm the universal principles by which he can be set free. Thus, for the universalist, human progress depends on transcending political distractions and advancing universal standards that allow human beings to achieve true dignity and equality.
This conservative-particularist approach to political priorities values historically rooted institutions, organic hierarchies, and inherited socio-political customs. Such inherited customs include rights, obligations, and political procedures that are aspects of specific social orders and their members. Thus, the particularist disposition perceives social problems not through the lens of universal abstractions and political ideals that transcend specific issues, but focuses rather on the peculiar needs and conditions of the varying interests within an actual, real-world political order.
Importantly, such particularities are seen as deriving from the historical experiences that shaped them. Particularism therefore rejects such decontextualized concepts as “humanity,” “global justice,” and “human rights.” Particularism keeps itself open to the use of power, if the situation calls for it, to combat enemies of the social order even if it calls for suspending political conventions in times of peace.
Particularists would never, for instance, let the universalist rhetoric on free speech bind them from taking political action against something like widespread pornography. It knows that free speech is a political value, that makes sense within a homogeneous society with a common sexual ethic. It is not a universalist, absolutist principle. The needs and requirements for the preservation of one’s society take precedent over universal political values.
Thus, as threats change in their significance and velocity, the tools that can be leveraged to address these threats also change. For instance, Franco’s military confrontation with the socialists and liberals was born out of the effects that he calculated of the stakes in the Spanish revolution. His decision would have ignored the rhetoric of universal political values in order to save the particular Catholic and Spanish character of his nation.
Particularism is of course, fine with the concept of “rights” and liberties. But sees them as manifestations of history and the outcome of political and social dynamics. They can be informed by transcendent ethical convictions, but they must become embodied, defined, and applied through the struggle of the historical process. This, for example, is why Edmund Burke would oppose Paine’s “rights of man” while the Founding Fathers, for the most part, considered their rights as belonging to them because they were Englishmen, to whom were passed on English rights. And America was indeed created so as “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” They never had in mind the application of universal human rights to vast swaths of mankind outside the Anglo-Saxon cultural framework.
Significantly, both the American civic religion and libertarianism are universalist. They both hold that universal supra-political standards are more important than the protection and continuity of historical and particular ways of life, at least if those ways of life are deemed to conflict with assumed uni- versal standards. While American civic religion sees the administrative state as the mechanism for administering freedom and prosperity over and against the unenlightened forces within the world, libertarians see the free market, absolute individual property rights, and individual pursuit of subjectively valued interests as the vehicles for a better world. But in both cases, existing traditions, customs, restrictions, and contexts must be sacrificed to an abstract cosmopolitanism.
This means that libertarians and classical conservatives oppose our American civic religion of universality and equality for different reasons. The classical conservative (opponent of the universalism of the French Revolution) fights the administrative state because of its crusade against traditional ways of life and long-established identities. But the libertarian dissents from the prevalent American way of thinking not in the name of particularities and traditions but because of the administrative state’s war on the free market and individual self-determination.
One of the things that has been made manifest, for example, as anti-White rhetoric of the Left becomes a near-total war against European-derived people, is that the counter-campaigns in conservative circles seeks to reestablish the equality of all individuals, the color-blindedness of American civic society, and the universalistic conception of the American nation. The problem with conservatives is that they have abandoned any commitment to the historical meaning of the American people and have adopted the very outlook fought for by the liberals and leftists of the mid-twentieth century.