The Dissenting Sociologist

The legitimacy of public authority in the United States, more than perhaps anywhere in the West, is explicitly predicated on the juridico-political doctrine of social contract most famously exposited by Hobbes, Locke, Blackstone, and other luminaries of the Liberal canon.  According to this theory, by Nature human beings desire the preservation of their own lives above all other things, and can legitimately do whatever it takes to secure their Natural right to self-preservation. In order to secure the preservation of their lives and property against the constant imminent danger each individual life would be exposed to under anarchy, individuals collectively renounce the right to use force on their own behalf, together with the absolute freedom and independence they enjoyed in the speculative pre-social “state of Nature”, in order to found the State. Read more

One of the most elementary representations of Sovereignty, both earthly and Divine, is the pastoral image of shepherd and flock. The pastoral metaphor of the relationship between Sovereign and subject follows congenially and spontaneously from the human experience of husbandry over animals that, like Man, are highly social, and thus naturally compatible with Man and moreover amenable to being governed by Man to his advantage. This activity, in turn, furnishes a ready-made metaphoric representation of human society ordered under authority- one that comes up repeatedly in the Ancient world, above all in the Bible, where time and time again the Sovereignty of God over His people is styled in terms of a pastor gathering and tending (and sometimes, abandoning and scattering) his flock. Read more

An exchange I once had with a gentleman of the Left concluded in his derision of my social thought as a “general celebration of domination”. This same individual was a self-described revolutionary Marxist whose own doctrine explicitly holds that the final liberation of Man from “domination” at the hands of his fellows will have to be preceded by an all-out class war to be followed by a dictatorship that, to start, will by unvarnished force dispossess the losers of that war of everything they have- but I’ll leave that aside for now. Probably every man of the Right has had to endure some variation of this derision, which has been a standing rhetorical slur on all thought deemed insufficiently Left since at least the age of Enlightenment. Read more

One of the most striking things I have ever heard uttered in American politics in my life was Hillary Clinton’s now-infamous recent characterization of the White working-class partisans of Donald Trump- a figure, for the time being, firmly established in the public consciousness as the voice through which the White working class speaks- as a “basket of deplorables” who are “irredeemable”, and moreover “are not America”. Read more

What do you get when you take a pitcher full of 18th. century European police-State and stir in some vintage Enlightenment ideology all the rage in fashionable high-society circles at the time? You get what was called “Enlightened despotism”– an especially toxic cocktail in which the inflamed self-aggrandizing hubris of modern Statism at its worst combines with the technocratic and Utopian wish-fulfillment beliefs of modern intellectuals at their worst to create a new kind of sociological poison, which I rigorously term a sociolytic. Read more

The principle that “the wise shall govern the strong” is a law of Nature so basic that human society is inoperable and indeed altogether inconceivable without it. Democracy as such is an illogical Utopian fiction that doesn’t exist anywhere and cannot. In human society anywhere we find it, men in the physical flower of their youth allow themselves to be bossed around by senior men they could easily overwhelm, and legitimate authority assumes the form of a pyramid such that positions of authority, by definition, are fewer to the extent that the scope of authority attached to them is greater. These arrangements are universally justified, one way or another, by the mutual belief that the seniors and the few are more knowledgeable in important respects than the juniors and the many, and therefore rightfully direct the action of the social whole. Read more

The alt-right hardly needs introduction; by this point, its reputation precedes it. Notorious for its transgressive (and uproariously funny) online humour, its crudely insolent and crass populism, its over-wrought conspiracy theories, its facile opinions on race and nation, and its often puerile notions concerning the relationship between the sexes, it is, for all that, a fully-fledged political force right now. While an absolutely unorganized congeries internally, it has nonetheless come to be represented at the level of American national politics by Donald Trump, who in his public style, if not exactly his policy preferences, appears to be its organic political embodiment- and who, it so happens, is the Presidential candidate for one of the two historic governing parties in that country. It has accordingly, if unintentionally, been explicitly acknowledged by the opposition and its propagandists, with the result that the alt-right now has presence in the national consciousness as a household word in ordinary political discourse alongside established categories like “progressive” or “conservative”. Read more

Sirs:

I have already attempted to draw your attention to the philosophical roots of the looming crisis of the State, and wish to direct your further attention to the subject here. You are worldly men of action with precious little time for the luxury of reflection; as such, you may scorn philosophy as so much useless speculation, a fitting pursuit perhaps for some mousy ascetics in ivory towers far removed from the fray of practical affairs, but beneath the dignity of those tasked with getting things done in the real world. And I would readily concur, if there were nothing more to the liberal arts than that. But all practical action is informed by a philosophy. Contra the absurd “materialist” teachings of Karl Marx, the intellect regulates the actions of the physical body that acts, not the other way around; and the intellect, unable to rely on what is innate to it in affairs as complex as politics, is in turn regulated by a philosophy imbued in the intellect through outside learning. Read more

Sirs:

I am but a lowly private citizen, a nobody who represents nobody, who speaks for nobody, and who writes for almost nobody; but I am nonetheless taking it upon myself to point a finger of indictment at you, the public men, the “masters of the universe”, the incumbents of political power.

Please do not mistake my intentions here. I am not some kind of naive and unworldly moral crusader horrified to have discovered that men as we find them sometimes vie for power, prestige, and influence; I am not St. Augustine come to exhort you that Man was originally made for animal husbandry and not lordship; and I am no Utopian daydreamer urging you to step down and let the State wither away in the interest of human “liberation” and the establishment of a land of Cockaigne where everybody says and does whatever pleases them. Read more

Ideology is often thought of simply as factually false information: something that lies, distorts, cooks up non-existent data and then presents it as fact while suppressing actual fact, and so on. This sense of the word, “ideology” is synonymous with propaganda, considered as intentional and calculated efforts to deceive and disinform in the form of e.g. biased media coverage, junk science, disingenuous advertising, political rhetoric, etc. designed to mislead public opinion on this or that issue of the day.

At another, level, more profound and insidious than that of mere propaganda, ideology exerts its influence less by fabricating or suppressing facts than by shaping how the individual subject of ideology makes sense of the morass of facts given in sensory experience. At this level, ideology is less a matter of outright deformation of the factual than of its interpretation, and relies less on mendacious concealment of inconvenient facts than on shaping the perceived significance of those same facts. Read more