Anti-Climacus

Points small and large, today, taking this James Poulos as our text:

* "I suggested that the bonds of citizenship and friendship, parochial as they are, were better ways of coping productively with the absurdity of our need of and our desire for sociability." No one but a very extreme cosmopolitan (or utilitarian) would deny this. Though Peter Singer makes a nice whipping boy, I have doubt as to how many people actually make decisions in the manner he'd prefer (even if, nota bene, they describe themselves making decisions that way). Solidarity and 'world citizenship' are best understood as metaphors intended to unsettle our notions of exactly how far the 'parochial' can go. I also remain unconvinced (says the admirer of Trotsky) that there's anything wrong with solidarity, from a theoretical perspective. It may cause all sorts of problems in practice, but there's no idea that doesn't.

* It's less of a feature of this argument, but always worth remembering, that sovereignty and nationality are late-arriving political concepts. The arguments of those who would treat them as essential categories want to extend those categories as far back in history as they can, but that's no reason to believe those claims are true. Take, for example, sovereignty, usually traced back to Bodin and Hobbes. A doctrine of sovereignty is not a standard feature of international law until Wolff at the earliest, and one could well argue that it does not exist in its present form until the UN Charter. Conservatism, which is so hesitant to embrace any over-arching theory of politics, and quick to recognize the local and the particular, should be the first to do a careful historical analysis to determine what's essential and what's particular. There's no reason, I'd submit, to think of nationality in its contemporary sense as being in any way essential (and, if one looks to politics as it is practiced, many reasons to think it's not).

* I have very mixed feelings about appeals to Burke and Tocqueville, and not just because I have doubts about their usefulness as theorists. "As Tocqueville said, x" where x is any particular sociological or political observation, is at best one stage in an argument (especially when it's an empirical claim, but especially when it's a normative claim). There's an unfortunate tendency in conservative political theory to, as it were, leave the rest of the proof as an exercise to the reader, and this weakens the strength of the argument for those who are not inclined to recognize the authority of those two figures.