This short book might have been shorter, and stronger, with more disciplined exposition, but Moskos explicates the core of the matter well enough. The public, or at any rate, the legislators, want prisons to do three quite distinct things: to punish, to reform, and to contain criminals. Happily, perhaps, the modern American prison represents the summit of human achievement on the third score. As Moskos puts it, “through technology, experience, and an unhealthy dose of inhumanity we’ve pretty much mastered the art of keeping people behind walls.” But incarceration is considerably worse than useless as a tool of reformation, and only a sadist (or, at best, someone who has not made the proper study or effort of imagination) could call it a means of rational and proportionate retribution.

Moskos shows quite easily why this is so. Prisons do not reform because they collect hardened and desperate people and require them to socialize each other in an atmosphere of constant coercion, fear, and drug addiction, or else they impose a solitude that destroys sanity; they interrupt such legitimate income and healthy social influence as these people might have enjoyed; they encumber them with a stigma that makes it unlikely that they will enjoy legitimate income in the future. The typical prisoner is thus shaped, handled, and released (if he is released) like a boomerang.

Prisons, at least in their current form, are an inappropriate means of punishment in a republic committed to the rule of law, because in addition to the fairly definite and reasonable penalty of “tightly restricted movement,” they also inflict the pain of anxiety about a large set of possible sufferings of indefinite intensity, duration, and frequency. Prisoners, with good reason, live in fear of mutilation, rape, repeated beatings, death, disease, psychological torture, humiliation, loss of valued relationships and goods, and catastrophic reentry into society. Even if you suppose that immersion in such a nightmare is proportionate punishment for some very grave crimes, what percentage of the 2.3 million Americans behind bars have committed such crimes?

We should also remember that this punishment unjustly hurts people besides the convict. In the first place, natural affection as well as moral and religious beliefs lead many to value the lives, health, and company even of the wretches that prisoners are generally presumed to be. This, however, is not the only source of injury. Moskos lays it out clearly and amply: “Even bad people have some attributes that help their family and community function. From behind bars a prisoner can’t be a father, hold a job, maintain a relationship, or take care of elderly grandparents. His girlfriend suffers, his baby’s mother suffers. Their children suffer. Because of this, in the long run, we all suffer.” We all suffer because families and neighborhoods fray for want of parenting and productive labor, creating a country that is poorer and, ironically, more hospitable to crime.

This last point suggests a major theme of In Defense of Flogging. Prisons do not merely fail to punish or reform, but they also cost us mightily. If the social cost just indicated seems too abstract or indirect to seize your attention, consider the cash alone: “Estimates put corrections spending at somewhere between $60 billion and $78 billion. Either amount could safely be called ‘real money.’ . . . Nationwide, on average, it costs $26,000 [per prisoner] for each year of incarceration.” Although the cost is somewhat flexible (and indeed varies considerably across American jurisdictions), there is a necessarily high baseline: “Prisons are not expensive because they ‘coddle’ prisoners . . . prisons cost so much because we have to keep people alive while holding them against their will. . . . Prisoners require human observation and intervention, and it’s not a nine-to-five operation. . . . To have one guard on duty 24/7 requires six employees (taking into account three shifts, weekends, and holidays).”

If it is granted that this status quo is unacceptable, the next steps in the reasoning are simple enough. Some small percentage of criminals must be contained in the interests of basic social order, so let us contain them. Rehabilitation in prison is rare, accidental, and indeed, even miraculous; since prison does nothing reliable to that end, we must give up the goal or find some other means. If the justice and wisdom of using the many and various tortures of incarceration as punishment is doubtful, and if it is clear that prison is egregiously expensive, then we must consider alternatives. As the title of the book indicates, Moskos recommends that we add flogging—caning, to be exact—to our repertoire of punishments.

It’s important to say that Moskos seems to mean this seriously. There are some slight hints of retreat, as when he describes his argument as “more thought experiment than policy proposal,” and his light, slightly crude, popular tone, combined with his wearisomely frequent insistence that he himself finds flogging very distasteful, sometimes gives the book a tentative and embarrassed feel. But there is no real question that (i) Moskos thinks caning better than incarceration and (ii) can’t think of anything better than caning. The conclusion is irresistible.

Flogging a la Moskos would be an option offered to convicts who are not “imminent and grave” dangers to society and administered only to those who have been declared medically fit to withstand the trauma; a trained flogger would inflict a prescribed number of strokes to the buttocks in the presence of witnesses, including a doctor who would order the flogging stopped if the criminal’s health seemed in serious jeopardy. It would be intensely painful and leave permanent scars; the former is precisely the point while the latter is a tolerable side effect. Moskos is confident that given the choice between, say, five years in a mysterious and sinister place, separated from all you know and love, and intense but brief pain and humiliation, most people would choose the latter. The suggestion of flogging may seem deliberately extreme, a punishment suggested to underscore just how bad prison is, but is there any other punishment that “punishes the guilty, provides the convicted with a halfway decent chance of a future, expresses society’s disapproval, and satisfies a victim’s sense of justice?” He is inclined to doubt it.

The obvious objection that flogging is cruel is met with the obvious (and to my mind satisfying) answer implied above: cruel compared to what? (By way of supplement one may add that a culture addicted to pleasure cannot reliably distinguish between justice and cruelty.) But this obvious objection is not the only one. Some argue that punishing mostly black prisoners with the lash would be racially insensitive, given our legacy of slavery. Pragmatists say it would be ruled unconstitutional, while the gruffer sort of conservative suggests that it wouldn’t be harsh enough. Finally, there is the claim that flogging, whatever its inherent moral qualities, would lead us toward a more brutal culture.

In response to the charge of racial insensitivity, Moskos makes a surprising move. Having throughout the book faulted the prison system for disproportionately affecting poor minorities (he does not hesitate to make dark allusions, calling prison a “peculiar institution”), he is prepared to take a faintly Marxist tack: he positively welcomes the chance to heighten the contradictions of our egalitarian society by presenting the spectacle of blacks being caned (though perhaps whipping would be a bridge too far).

As for constitutionality, the author is hopeful. Despite the recorded statements of even so un-therapeutic a character as Justice Antonin Scalia—who said he could not imagine himself “upholding a statute that imposes the punishment of flogging”—Moskos does not think that there is a constitutional barrier to his idea. He points out, rightly enough, that principals can still beat disobedient schoolchildren, but he supplements this with the less convincing suggestion that flogging might escape constitutional restrictions if it is voluntary. It is true that there are many unwise activities that are legal conditional upon consent, but so long as caning counts as punishment administered by the state (and legal reasoning seems to demand that it be so understood), how can it avoid the test of the Eighth Amendment? This critical question is for lawyers to debate.

Those who think flogging too soft are first invited to “debate the appropriate number of lashes.” But to the hardcore, Moskos can offer nothing but an earnest (if funny) exhortation to examine their own souls: “If you want all convicts to suffer the worst possible pain imaginable (including but not limited to rape and insanity), if you think prisons are great precisely because they torture so cruelly and horribly, then you need to take a deep look at your own humanity, because you might be a very evil person.”

Much energy, perhaps too much, is devoted to insisting that flogging “is not a slippery slope toward amputation, public stoning, and sharia law.” He does not say what seems probable enough, that a successful experiment with flogging might indeed lead to a greater range and variety of corporal punishments. But so long as proportionality, transparency, the rule of law, and human health are respected, what would be so bad about that? The sole problem, it seems, is that corporal punishments provide starker, simpler images to the squeamish. Perhaps the vaunted mildness of the modern era has no moral significance other than the fear of the sight of blood, which is compatible with any degree of wickedness. Thus we tolerate or even endorse what we find difficult to imagine or easy to euphemize, whether it happens in the darkness of a cell or in a private office between a woman and her doctor.

Some will not bother debating flogging because they continue to hope for prison reform. Moskos is, naturally, in favor of improving prisons, and he has the imagination and breadth of vision to see allies in the most unlikely places. For example, although he judges famously tough Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio to be an “egotistical, xenophopic, opportunistic SOB,” he recognizes that Arpaio’s “tent cities” and chain gangs, meant to be especially harsh and humiliating, are popular with inmates because they provide “emotional and physical release from the monotony of confinement.” His conclusion is priceless: “So I raise my middle finger to you, Joe, but urge you to keep the ideas coming.”

If Moskos is willing (metaphorically) to keep such uncongenial company, it should be no trouble for him to give a fair hearing to rigorous and reasonable scholars like Byron Johnson of Baylor University, whose More God, Less Crime argues that the criminal justice system can and should harness the power of religion. Still, all in all, it is hard to disagree with Moskos’s final verdict that prison reform can do little. True-believing reformers are, he suggests, now in the position of unconverted communists, shutting their eyes to reality. He speaks, with evident yearning, of the “true European-style socialism” that he supposes would allow America to reduce crime and make prisons more humane without resort to flogging, but regrets that Americans (who like “guns, cowboys, individualism, and being tough”) will not stand for it.

Of course, some of us are more sympathetic to the features of American culture that make prison reform difficult. Indeed, perhaps the most effective strategy for Moskos, at least over the long haul, would be a direct and consistent appeal to the American reverence for individual freedom. In its noblest manifestations, this reverence includes recognition of moral agency and responsibility. Those who recognize and affirm moral agency demand that evil be punished, severely, if the crime deserves it, but they also abhor “management” (whether for sake of containment or therapy) that treats the free individual like an unruly beast or broken machine. Such true individualists hate arrangements that destroy or degrade the human person, even for the sake of punishment. They see that properly human rehabilitation is impossible without cooperation and choice. As Moskos says, somewhat belatedly, even criminals are human beings. They cannot flourish without freedom—and that in dangerous quantities.

Stefan McDaniel is a graduate student in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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As Richard H. Immerman observes, however, recent foreign adventures have made it difficult for anyone to maintain that the U.S. is not, at present, in some sense imperial, even if words such as ‘hegemon’ are preferred because they “generate less emotion and controversy.” In Empire for Liberty, he provides compelling evidence that, whether laudable or deplorable, recent American foreign policy is not a historical aberration; objectives meaningfully described as “imperial” have always been a central aspect of American policy. And although American imperialism has always been “inextricably tied to establishing and promoting ‘liberty,’” the vague, shifting, sometimes contradictory notions of liberty invoked have led to national behavior that most contemporary Americans would not consider uniformly admirable.

To make his case, Immerman profiles six influential men whose lives span the history of the American republic: Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, William Henry Seward, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Foster Dulles, and Paul Wolfowitz. Although Immerman does not use this distinction, I will divide this group into two main phases in the history of American imperialism—the progressive and the apocalyptic.

In the progressive phase the dominant imperial perspective was exceptionalist. It presented the U.S. as a great and uniquely free country, destined to spread freedom across North America and act as the harbinger of global progress. There was however, pragmatic acceptance, as unfortunate but stubborn facts of life, of sub-American states and peoples, and the coexistence of rival great powers.

This phase begins with Benjamin Franklin, the earliest theorist of what would later be called Manifest Destiny. God and nature, he believed, willed a great and exemplary empire to dominate North America. In the language of the day, any large jurisdiction comprised of “previously separate units now subordinate to the metropolis” could be called an empire, and this label had no negative associations. Franklin’s North American empire would be great in conventional terms; that is to say, it would be large, wealthy, powerful, and hospitable to the arts and sciences.

At first Franklin imagined that Britain and her North American colonies would rise together by adopting a new, cooperative imperial model in which the mother country provided the fruits of industry and the Americans farmed and provided a market for British manufactures. For this model to work, Franklin thought, British North America needed more land and security. He therefore advocated aggressive territorial expansion and the political unity among the colonies required to deal effectively with the French and the Native Americans. When it became clear to him that the British preferred to maintain the Americans in strict subordination, he continued to advocate these policies, but with a view to consolidating an exclusively American empire, fit to take its place among the world’s great nations.

But although Franklin and most of the other founders worked toward conventional greatness, they also believed that the United States should, in keeping with the spirit of the American Revolution, be distinguished by a special connection with liberty. It is with this special connection that the complications begin.

It was agreed that America should be in some sense an empire of liberty and in some sense an empire for liberty, but there was no agreement about how it should be each of these things nor about which should take precedence. Confusion about the nature and meaning of American liberty drove controversy about foreign and domestic policy at least until the Civil War. There was, for example, a notable conflict between the localist, agrarian ideal of Jefferson and the nationalist, industrial ideal of Hamilton (Franklin, the nationalist agrarian, split the difference). But there were even more fateful questions. Was slavery compatible with or perhaps even integral to an authentic idea of liberty? Could or should non-Anglo-Saxon peoples be integrated into the Empire of Liberty? When did attempts to expand the sphere of liberty (that is, to act as an empire for liberty) undermine America’s integrity as an empire of liberty?

John Quincy Adams embodied these tensions. He believed that continental expansion was required to nurture and protect the new empire of liberty, and to that end he formulated the Monroe Doctrine as Secretary of State to President Monroe. The republic of liberty would only flourish if Americans had adequate room to move and resources to exploit, and the country needed to drive all potentially hostile powers off the continent (indeed, out of the hemisphere). Expansion, however, had to be limited by two considerations that may seem contradictory to readers who assume that all abolitionists confessed our contemporary liberal universalism, which insists on the political irrelevance of race, culture, and religion. For Adams, it was scandalous that a republic of liberty contained slavery, and he was determined that it should not spread slavery. But Adams also doubted (and in this he was not alone) that large populations outside the Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural orbit were, at least at this stage of history, capable of participating as full members in a free society. For both these reasons he opposed bringing large areas of Central and South America under American control. He spent his last energies fighting “Mr. Polk’s War” in Mexico, and famously declared that the U.S. should be “friends to liberty everywhere” but should not go abroad looking for “monsters to destroy.”

Like Adams, William Henry Seward was a curious compound of abolitionist and ethnocentrist. He considered slavery wicked and “ignoble,” but far from considering ethnic particularism incompatible with the promotion of liberty, he declared, with unsurpassable explicitness, that the two were mutually supportive. He praised the “ruling homogeneous family” of Caucasians that, “having a common origin, a common language, a common religion, common interests, sympathies, and hopes” was in form for dynamic, beneficial action on the world stage. So important was this ethnic unity that Seward preferred it to the claims of justice even within the empire of liberty. During Reconstruction, Seward wrote that the North should “get over this notion of interference with the affairs of the South. . . . I have no more concern for [the negroes] than I have for the Hottentots. . . . They are not of our race.”

Since effective application of the Monroe Doctrine had made the United States secure from foreign domination, Seward was free to focus on America’s role as an instrument of global progress. Although he believed in the objective superiority of republican government, his main concern was to open the world to American capitalism. He believed that commerce had “largely taken the place of war,” and declared commerce to be the foundation of America’s future global supremacy and the chief means by which it would bless the world. He counseled Americans to stay aloof from conquest, having faith that a vibrant America would grow in size and influence by a natural process of “selective osmosis.” Despite being a senator from New York, the “empire state,” he tirelessly advertised the potential of California to serve as the true seat of a glorious commercial empire, and he campaigned for the acquisition of Alaska in the belief that it would serve as a bridge to the Asian market. He hoped that the resulting cultural and economic exchange would revitalize Asia, producing a “new and more perfect civilization.”

The phrase “new and more perfect civilization” may stand as the definitive expression of the imperial spirit during the progressive phase. This phase ended in the late 19^th century with a period of atavistic nationalism that made it incontrovertibly false to say, as did President George W. Bush, that the United States “has never been an empire.” The great representative of this period was Henry Cabot Lodge. In a climate dominated by Lodge and his fellow imperialists, the United States followed the European fashion of colonization, annexing Hawaii and the Philippines and otherwise parading American “muscularity.” Lodge embraced much of Seward’s vision for America’s future, but in his view the causes of wealth and liberty were subordinate to a grand notion of national greatness. He did not share the misgivings of men like President Grover Cleveland, who argued that threatening Hawaiian sovereignty represented “a perversion of our national mission.” Lodge dismissed such qualms with all the Enlightenment idealism of Achilles: “We are a great people; we control this continent; we are dominant in this hemisphere; we have too great an inheritance to be trifled with or parted with . . . . I cannot bear to see the American flag pulled down when once it has been run up, and I dislike to see the American foot go back where it has once been advanced.”

The only curb on Lodge’s ambitions for an American empire was his increasing worry that his earlier progressive attitude toward ethnicity had been mistaken. He began to doubt that those outside Seward’s “ruling homogenous family” could be taught the “stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought” needed to integrate into American society or even to make liberal democracy a success in their own territories. Later in his career, therefore, Lodge became an ardent supporter of restrictive immigration policies and entertained belated doubts about the wisdom of annexing the Philippines.

The apocalyptic phase of American imperialism began at the end of the First World War. It was distinguished by a new sense of urgency: the United States should not only strive for power and influence, but should immediately seize and preserve uncontested headship and actively direct the remaking of the world, preferably in America’s image. Unsurprisingly, the rhetoric of anti-imperialism, directed primarily at the British and the French, becomes more common and strident during this phase. After all, advocates of imperial policies sought to reorder the world so thoroughly that American dominance had to be considered fundamentally different from (and superior to) all previous forms of hegemony.

In a sense the first representative of the apocalyptic spirit was Woodrow Wilson, who famously sought to make the world “safe for democracy,” but it is John Foster Dulles whom Immerman chooses to profile. Dulles developed a nuanced theory of international relations that, perhaps uniquely among theories of any kind, managed to combine ideas redolent of both Hobbes and Henri Bergson. In Dulles’ view, the main aim of diplomacy was to maximize security, which he defined as “freedom from attack upon person and property.” The old model of empire, typified by the French and the British, invited insecurity because it boxed in what Dulles terms “dynamic” elements, meaning (apparently) energetic, creative, and ambitious social bodies, such as the Germans after World War I. These dynamic forces naturally resist the imperial yoke, leading inevitably to violent conflict. The United States, however, possessed the “vision” and “creativity” to design, rule, and expand a zone of security (what Dulles famously named “the free world”) in which dynamism was accommodated with a minimum of violence and participants in the system would be protected from the Soviets, who ruled their own zone inhumanely. Although the main levers of control would be diplomatic, economic, and cultural, the ultimate basis of the system would be American military power. Dulles often used the “lofty vocabulary of the Church and of America’s Founding Fathers” but his guiding goal of security was, like the “national greatness” of Lodge, quite compatible with acts that deprived other nations of sovereignty. As Immerman tells the story, the notion of “liberation” as used by Dulles meant nothing more or less than inclusion (free or forced) in the American zone of security. As proof of this, Immerman cites Dulles advocacy for American intervention in favor of Castillo Armas’ counterrevolution in Guatemala. In Immerman’s judgment, the result of this advocacy was a “sorry chapter in the history… of the United States” in which Guatemala was “ ‘liberated’… from its own people…[making] a mockery of the very word liberty.”

The final profile is of Paul Wolfowitz, who combines Dulles’ enthusiasm for the Pax Americana with Wilson’s democratic idealism. His position, Immerman suggests, is best explained as a response to the genocidal and totalitarian episodes of the twentieth century. History, read as Wolfowitz reads it, yields a clear lesson: tyrants cannot be merely “contained.” Against John Quincy Adams, he maintains that the United States has a solemn obligation to cultivate the overwhelming power needed to destroy the monsters who violate human rights. Unlike all the other figures profiled, Wolfowitz gives no indication of ethnocentrism, insisting that liberal democracy is a universal possibility and a universal right.

But although Immerman evidently feels some sympathy for the generosity and humaneness of the neoconservative impulse (at least as found in Wolfowitz), he reserves his most pointed criticisms for the policies it has inspired, which Immerman considers the most classically imperialist in American history. Revelations about American misdeeds in Iraq, both occasional and systematic, have pointed out the perpetual tension in American history between acting aggressively as an empire for liberty and maintaining integrity as an empire of liberty. Immerman closes with the hope (though he does not sound very hopeful) that the election of Barack Obama will lead to an age of humbler American foreign policy that does not sacrifice liberty for sake of empire.

Empire for Liberty is required reading for anyone interested in the history of American self-understanding. Of course, because it aims at exposition and analysis rather than creative contribution to American political theory, Empire for Liberty naturally invites many questions that it does not acknowledge, let alone answer. How are Americans to understand their national purpose? We may wish to dismiss as baseless bigotry the frank and unapologetic ethnocentrism of many who once defined that national purpose, but their views should challenge us to face some delicate problems: Are there in fact cultural prerequisites of our form of polity? If so, what are they? More fundamental still, what exactly do we mean to export under the name liberty, and in what ways and to what extent is it universally attractive and applicable? Is our understanding of the “stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought” among the vastly diverse peoples whom we would rescue sufficient for us to give a reliable answer?

No historian, qua historian, can give us clear solutions, but by bringing us into conversation with some of the thoughtful men who have trod our path before us, they can offer us what Richard Immerman does this book—the gift of provocation.


Stefan McDaniel, a former assistant editor at First Things, is a graduate student in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Berry’s oeuvre is large and rich, including numerous essays on a wide variety of topics, as well as poetry and fiction of a high order. A short essay cannot pretend to exhaust him, even in summary, so I restrict my discussion to a single fruitful notion: Discipline.

Because he finds politicians’ triumphalist comparisons between the U.S. and other countries meaningless and evasive, Berry is sometimes considered anti-American. But he is, in truth, no more anti-American than Dante was anti-Florentine. Only the loving anger of a true patriot could sustain five decades of elegant invective. In “Discipline and Hope,” his seminal exercise in critical patriotism, Berry diagnoses the contemporary United States with chronic despair and prescribes discipline as a remedy. To understand what he means, it will help to forget glib abstract arguments for or against “modernity.” Take the concrete example of the family meal. Why do we feel, intuitively, that gratitude, propriety, and other even vaguer things, oblige members of a household to be present at the major meal of the day?

Berry would say that we still recognize the power and desirability of a certain social discipline called family dinner. This discipline enacts an ideal many of us still believe in, and still hope to achieve—the ideal of the family as the basic human community of mutual care. The family members harmoniously enact the relations of their shared life: they draw on a common store of sustenance (ideally grown or prepared by some of them), they talk, educate and amuse each other, air and solve problems, cement bonds of affection and understanding, and so on.

There are often faster, or more flexible, or more focused ways of doing each of the individual things that family dinner achieves, but the harmonious way in which family dinner achieves them has a different and ultimately superior “efficiency” of its own.

Once such harmonies are broken we reap a host of seemingly unconnected problems that require expensive and complex individual solutions, which themselves create fresh problems. So, for instance, the breakdown of family dinner will probably mean increased recourse to unbearable family meetings or even expensive family therapy sessions to solve family quarrels, which may nevertheless lead to family breakups that fatten the wallets of family lawyers. And since mom’s cooking is usually cheap and healthy, the lack of family dinner should alarm the family accountant and the family doctor.

Berry has spent much of his career explaining why creating and preserving appropriate, harmonious disciplines is a political imperative that may require a severe and painful break with our current habits, culture, and policies. He is emphatically opposed to the Bush dictum that “the American way of life is non-negotiable.” He believes that our society secures a number of attractive things (cheap food, cheap energy, national self-esteem, the culture of the car) at an unacceptable price, and it is an elementary civic duty to expose the hidden costs of our practices and sketch superior alternatives.

One excellent example of Berry’s critical strategy is his essay “The Body and the Earth,” where he responds to the triumphant declaration by a former deputy assistant secretary of agriculture that, thanks to industrial agriculture and the free market “95 percent of people can be freed from the drudgery of preparing their own food”:

Connection is health…We lose our health—and create profitable diseases and dependencies—by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. . . . And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems….

The former deputy assistant secretary cannot see work as a vital connection; he can see it only as a trade of time for money, and so of course he believes in doing as little of it as possible, especially if it involves the use of the body. . . . But the society that is so glad to be free of the drudgery of growing and preparing food also boasts a thriving medical industry to which it is paying $500 per person per year. And that is only the down payment.

In agribusiness, as in strip-mining, the university, and countless other areas of modern life, Berry sees our unthinking cultural preference for the usually specious efficiencies of free markets, industrialization, and specialization reinforced by public policy and even public moral and religious authorities. This amounts to the blithe, energetic destruction of all the complex, harmonious patterns of production and exchange that do not merely support but constitute communal health.

But even assuming Berry’s critique is right, what should we do? Here Berry’s thinking is far more nuanced, humble, and “realistic” than many of his critics allege. Although he believes, for example, that the agricultural society of the past was in many important respects more human than our present form of civilization, his vision is not nostalgic. He insists that “we can only begin where we are,” with our particular diseases and particular opportunities to seek health..

Nor, as Michael Stevens and J. Matthew Bonzo point out does Berry anywhere suggest, as some universal remedy, that we “forsake technology and join up in rural communes.” Indeed, to enact such a brutally simple solution that could only reap massive unintended and unforeseen consequences and break life-giving relationships would be to indulge in the same thoughtless violence that Berry sees everywhere in industrial society.

What Berry wants, to put it at its plainest, is for Americans to adopt the discipline of sustained ethical reflection, by which we come to understand what constitutes health for our particular communities (without which, Berry argues in Aristotelian fashion, the idea of individual health is simply meaningless) and the disciplines needed to achieve it. We should take inspiration from the past, but we are always left with the hard work of discerning what is appropriate and possible for us.

Everyone deals with complexities and compromises—Berry makes no secret of his own. This leading “agrarian” freely admits that his farm has never been the sole support for his family, and this enemy of the auto industry admits that without his car he could not be “useful to other people.” But although he sees why we cannot altogether separate ourselves from unhealthy practices and technologies, he insists on the honest and intelligent struggle to expand the zone of health as far as possible. He insists that we individually and communally determine whether each new practice or technology can be properly integrated into other life-giving disciplines. Berry himself, in one of his most stimulating essays, proposes a useful test for evaluating tools, and in his charming essay “A Good Scythe,” he convincingly (and altogether without nostalgia) defends the reasonableness of his belief  that the scythe is superior to the lawnmower.

Romano Guardini explained in The End of the Modern World that man’s increasing mastery of nature and himself requires a new and heroic effort at moral earnestness. He said that the “in the coming epoch, the essential problem will no longer be that of increasing power—though power will continue to increase at an ever swifter tempo—but of curbing it. The core of the new epoch’s intellectual task will be to integrate power into life in such a way that man can employ power without forfeiting his humanity.” Widespread dislike of the idea of gas chambers and nuclear winter is, though reassuring, not sufficient proof that we have achieved the moral seriousness demanded by our power.  To judge by public debates and most private conversations, the American people know how to talk of progress in terms of consumer goods, individual liberties, and power over nature, but have no use for the language of communal health, and certainly no use for the idea of discipline. So, if there is cheap fuel in a mountain, there can be no reason not to decapitate the mountain and scoop it out. The possible damage to nature and to local communities can be addressed later, if one is sentimental enough to think they matter at all. And it would be unthinkable (and spell death for any politician who proposed it) for us to limit our consumption of fuel and slow the brainless behemoth called Progress.

It is this corporate inability of the American people to form an adequate political ideal and to adopt disciplines that might occasionally deny us a convenience or quick fix that frustrates Berry. If he is sometimes guilty of what the late Richard John Neuhaus criticized as “moral smugness,” it is because he is convinced that only through the discipline of the examined life does man rise to the dignity of his nature and the seriousness of his responsibility. So far, few Democrats or Republicans seem to understand, let alone accept the results of his examination; but he has, in true Socratic fashion, begun to corrupt the youth.


Stefan McDaniel is a former assistant editor of First Things.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

While the author’s Christian commitment is clear throughout—Caring for Words grew out of her 2004 Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary—the book is focused on the “horizontal” dimension of language, on its primary role as man’s chief social tool. As she puts it, “caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words.” The state of English therefore concerns everyone—not just poets and English teachers like herself.

McEntrye forthrightly identifies the villains: biased journalists and cynical advertisers, entertainers, and politicians. These usual suspects, she says, are the titans of the word industry who have inundated us with cheap language designed not to tell the truth, but to manipulate, evade, or sell. Public language is thus (to adopt McEntyre’s preferred, ecological metaphor) polluted and depleted by “thoughtless hyperbole, unexamined metaphors, slogans and sound bites, grammatical confusion, ungrounded abstractions, overstatement, and blather” which seep malignantly into ordinary speech and thought.

Polluted and depleted language is obviously an inadequate medium for proper public debate. McEntyre agrees with George Orwell that last use of language leads to foolish thoughts, including foolish thoughts about urgent questions of the common good. When we lose the “subtlety, clarity, and reliability of language, we become more vulnerable to crude exercises of power.”

McEntyre worries that the prevalence of bad English not only deadens our sensitivity to truth and falsehood but also spoils our taste for language as language, thereby denying us a pleasure “akin to the pleasures of music.” She wants us to be sensitive to euphony, layered meaning and double reference, allusion, ambiguity, and association, to relish words that are “not just meaning or reporting or chronicling or marching in syntactic formation, but performing themselves, sounding, echoing….”

Perhaps worse than the loss of music is the loss of subtlety and range, which diminishes experience itself. “As words fall into disuse,” McEntyre says, “the experiences they articulate become less accessible.” She illustrates this point excellently through a meandering reflection on the word felicity. We are less likely to enjoy this very particular kind of sober, rational mature happiness sought by Jane Austen’s heroines if we abandon or flatten a word that identifies it with clarity and distinction. Only felicity can reliably present felicity to the consciousness as an attractive possibility; without it, the incontinent self-indulgence glamorized in popular entertainment becomes our only model of happiness.

But what can we do about these problems? In the spirit of her ecological metaphor, McEntyre suggests twelve enumerated “conservation strategies,” devoting a chapter to each. They all contain important insights and helpful examples, but the essence of the book  is contained in the second and the third: “Tell the Truth” and “Don’t Tolerate Lies.”

As one might expect, McEntyre dutifully rehearses the familiar point that telling the truth can win you enemies, but she is not content to entrance us with the glamour of martyrdom for “speaking truth to power.” She instead emphasizes the difficulty of finding and articulating the truth. McEntyre wants us relentlessly, painfully to practice precision—clarity, exactness, just proportion, attention to the particular—in our writing and conversation. But because we are fallible, and because language cannot capture truth in its fullness, humility must sober our passion. Her description of what Eliot famously called the “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings” will strike a chord in all poor souls who, with different degrees of voluntariness, submit to the agony of writing:

Telling the truth is something like an extreme sport for the very committed. The weather is never predictable and there is always an undertow…We calibrate the differences between what we want words to mean and how they may be heard; we pick them up from the dusty corners where most of the good ones have been consigned to disuse and re-introduce them, hoping to ambush the listener who is contented with cliché. Like Adrienne Rich, who called herself a ‘woman sworn to lucidity,’ we pledge our energies to the work of smithing of words for purposes they have never before had to serve.

She observes that precision begins with defining terms (a discipline that should be drummed into the American commentariat, by gunpoint if necessary) and helpfully mentions specific terms—liberal, conservative, patriotic, terrorist, Christian—“whose imprecise usage poses a serious threat to peace and safety.”

It is, of course, a worthy therapeutic exercise to identify and analyze vague terms in our own vocabularies, but in urging us not to tolerate lies, McEntyre tells us to demand precision from others, especially when they speak in public. She outlines our civic duty of “clarifying where there is confusion; naming where there is evasion; correcting where there is error; fine-tuning where there is imprecision; satirizing where there is folly; changing the terms when the terms falsify.”

Perhaps conscious of the lurking gremlin-army of spiteful reviewers ready to hoist her with her own petard, McEntyre practices the precision and restraint she preaches. The book has the strident title and the simple Problem-Solution structure common to such programmatic essays in cultural criticism, but it is happily free from shrillness, the genre’s besetting vice. There are a few conventional expressions of scorn for certain cultural institutions (perhaps inevitably—what word besides drivel can describe talk radio?), but one may fairly say, in a wholly complimentary spirit, that McEntyre has no evident gift for polemic.

And after all, McEntyre’s aim is not to criticize but to unite us around a common good. She asks us to “help one another” by forming “reading groups, discussion groups, and Web sites where information can be shared and pondered among folks who trust one another’s purposes….” A healthy culture of the word is the product of intense communal collaboration in disciplined pursuit of the truth.


Stefan McDaniel is a former assistant editor of First Things.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute.

A professor of Jewish Philosophy at Jewish Theological Seminary, Mittleman is before all else a scholar, and one of the most Germanic sort: slow, methodical, and thorough. Like much of his other work, Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory (OUP, 2009) is marked by a mentally taxing but productive tension between nuanced scholarly exegesis of key texts and the positive argument toward which the scholarship is, in principle, ordered.

Mittleman contends that hope, rightly understood, is a universal virtue that democratic societies should embrace and encourage, but also that hope is dangerous when wrongly understood. These fairly straightforward claims are central and controlling, but Mittleman develops them against the background of a scholarly history of the notion of hope in the West. He constructs this story by careful attention to the Bible and the writings of representative Christians, Jews, pagans, and modern secular thinkers.

The pagans were, at best, ambivalent about hope. Hope was good when it provided the energy needed to overcome moderate difficulties in certain situations. But it was not considered a virtue, that is, a durable, praiseworthy disposition (a habit) toward life as a whole. Hope was often viewed negatively, as an unreasonable passion that set its victim up for bitter disappointment. Life already had enough difficulty and bad luck—it would only make things worse to expect too much.

This pagan resignation contrasts sharply with the biblical outlook. As Mittleman shows (most illuminatingly in his reading of Paul and Aquinas), Jews and Christians consider hope a virtue. After all, as they tell the story, an infinitely benevolent and omnipotent God created the world good, providentially guides history and the lives of persons and communities, and has made irrevocable promises to those who trust in him. It is not only reasonable but imperative to manifest trust in God, desire to cooperate in his providential plan, and show proper appreciation of the essential goodness of reality and its possibilities by maintaining hope even in the face of grave difficulty. For Jews and Christians, life is properly pursued with energy, resilience, and daring—if such attitudes generally require ingrained hopefulness, how could such a disposition fail to constitute a virtue?

Mittleman does not hesitate to declare his commitment, as a practicing Jew, to the biblical worldview. He exhorts modern liberal societies to value hope as a virtue, and therefore to craft policies with an eye to protecting and stoking it. This view obviously lends support to the liberal democratic aim of increasing and maintaining a wide range of social, intellectual, and economic opportunities for all citizens. Without possibility there can be yearning, but not hope. But, Mittleman also argues, since hope involves the inclination of the appetite towards a good viewed as possible but at least somewhat difficult to attain, then attempts to create a world that does not require or reward struggle, daring, or initiative (Mittleman is plainly not an admirer of the so-called nanny-state) are misguided. Indeed, it would seem, if Mittleman is right about the value of hope, such policies indirectly insult being as such. They make it difficult to pay existence due homage by passionately responding to its value against the adversities that test and elicit the lover’s ardor.

Despite his enthusiasm, however, Mittleman is careful to nuance his argument, and these nuances provide the most stimulating and helpful elements of his book.

His most important point is that hope, although it necessarily regards the future, does not necessarily involve desire for liberation or even change. The liberationist attitude so characteristic of modernity (which, Mittleman is careful to say, is in some cases justified) is unjust to the good aspects of past and present. A man may take as the object of hope the maintenance or intensification of present goods or the retrieval of lost goods.

Mittleman also warns, channeling Eric Voegelin, against the dangerous modern tendency toward utopianism. Utopian thought assumes that the object of ultimate hope may be achieved in this world, primarily through the saving action of the state. There are many central human yearnings (most notably the transcendent yearnings which are the object of religion) which the state cannot satisfy, but this does not prevent the state from trying, with disastrous results. When the state shows itself incapable of satisfying such hopes, it attempts to trivialize and marginalize them.

Mittleman’s proposed corrective is for associations within civil society, especially religious associations, to insist that the hopes that define them are of vital importance to social health, and that there is no possible state-administered substitute for the social forms and disciplines by which they pursue these hopes.

Although Mittleman does not point this out, there is here a striking connection to ideas developed by Wendell Berry in his seminal 1971 essay “Discipline and Hope.” There Berry seeks the cause of decay in areas of American life as seemingly disparate as political discourse and the art of agriculture. He argues that Americans have learned to seek in mindless partisanship, jingoism, technocracy, and the gospel of free markets the political, cultural, and material flourishing that only hard personal and communal disciplines can provide. Thus, for instance, Americans have fallen into the indiscipline of sound-byte politics because they despair of achieving political health through the proper means of painstaking public deliberation. Because, at least in this case, means are not ultimately separable from ends, despair of political discipline amounts to despair of politics. It amounts, in fact, to the end of politics in the proper sense.

It follows that the key to healing society is not so much the negative task of discarding false hopes as the rekindling of humbler, more demanding, but ultimately more rewarding hopes. That thinkers as different in style and substance as Berry and Mittleman seem to converge on this interesting argument surely counts in its favor.

But putting aside the detailed political implications of this valuation of hope, we must ask a prior question. If, according to Mittleman’s own scholarship, only biblical cultures have sustained the notion that hope is a virtue, why would those who do not accept the biblical story accept Mittleman’s recommendations? Why should we expect a consensus about hope in a secular, pluralist democracy?

Mittleman’s response is to downplay the significance of explicit philosophy. He observes that even dogmatic materialists conduct themselves as though the universe were far more than matter in motion. They love, cherish, strive, and hope. For this reason, he believes, we should begin not with consensus about the correct worldview or religion, but about the undeniable value of certain goods, attitudes, and commitments. This common ground established, we can then begin asking what kinds of stories about the world make the best sense of our attitude toward reality. Mittleman argues that even secular thinkers (his main examples are Ernst Bloch, Immanuel Kant, and Hannah Arendt) cannot give an honest accounting for the central importance of hope in human life without invoking some notion, however sketchy, of the sacred. So at present, it seems, hope is as likely to inspire belief as belief is to inspire hope.

Intentionally or not, in justifying his high view of hope by appealing to universal principles of practical reason that have a mutually reinforcing relation to biblical revelation, Mittleman has made an idiosyncratic approach to a doctrine of natural law. This is unsurprising. In a democratic and pluralistic age, where public reason does not stand under religious authority, no serious discussion about ordering our common life can long avoid questions of natural law. Perhaps Mittleman is too deep in other projects to accept another load, but a scholarly history of natural law would make a worthy supplement to this insightful and engaging book.


Stefan McDaniel is a former assistant editor of First Things.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The blurb hints at the most obvious (and most marketable) answer: perhaps Simon can help us evaluate recent American military engagements in the Middle East. The book is said to offer “an interesting case study of such ethical concerns as just war theory and preemptive war, and is of particular relevance in our modern political climate.”

Simon makes several points that are of definite relevance to the moral evaluation of any invasion. All these points, it should be noted, seem to count against supporters of America’s recent military actions.  For instance, Simon critiques the then-popular argument that Italy had the right, even the duty, to bring a higher civilization to Ethiopia. He grants that much about Ethiopia is deplorable, but points out that “it is always easy to move people by describing…what is most unhappy about a country, without saying anything about the favorable sides of the situation” (which, it goes without saying, are jeopardized by war); that there are low odds that a conquering nation can effect deep and lasting changes among a people “strongly ensconced in the double citadel of its mountains and age-old customs;” that efforts at pacification and reform will be “necessarily burdensome” to the natives, involving violence—perhaps on a larger scale than before.

There is an even more striking passage, which may titillate some of those who opposed the war in Iraq on moral or religious grounds: “The question which then confronted the Christian conscience was this: Would the teaching of the Catholic Church on the war be taken seriously? . . . A dishonest conscience is never embarrassed. . . Greedy merchants will always have plenty of good reasons that their profits conform perfectly within the laws of just price. . . Likewise, why bother to openly declare that one rejects the teaching of the Church on the conditions of a just war . . .? It is much cleverer to profit by the obscurities which inevitably accompany the application of a necessarily abstract doctrine. Using the cover of darkness as a means of protection is a deceptive method familiar to all marauders, pickpockets, and assassins.”

Still, as gratifying a pastime as proof-texting is, it would be perverse to enlist Simon as a partisan in such a complex contemporary debate. The man who wrote that “true morality demands, when confronted with every new situation, a new effort at analysis, adapted to all the particularities of the situation” would surely be the first to suggest a large number of relevant disanalogies between Mussolini’s Italy and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia on the one hand and the contemporary United States and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on the other. The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought deserves to be read, but not as a work of prophesy or as a hornbook that saves us the trouble of wrestling with unique facts. We should read it with attention because it provides an inspiring and challenging model of citizenship.

A gifted philosopher, Simon was obviously comfortable with abstractions and rigid formal systems. But The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought reveals a man who also energetically absorbed and synthesized the concrete, multifarious, ever-changing facts of politics and history, generating subtle and incisive analyses.

In part, this habit seems to have been characteristic of his generation. According to James McAdam’s forward, most educated Parisians of the interwar period sought to “combine the hard facts of politics with the highest human ideals.” Consequently, “thorough immersion in the political and social questions of the day was a way of life.” Although no society can hope to mass produce men of Simon’s stature (and it was France’s tragedy that men like him would prove too rare in subsequent years), his moral and intellectual grandeur is a credit to the literary and political culture that nurtured him—a culture that stands as a grim judgment on our own, sadly decayed public discourse.

But Simon was remarkable, even among his contemporaries, for his focus on political deliberation as a moral, not merely intellectual activity that demands exacting self-criticism from the individual citizen. It is crucial to recognize that The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought is not a just another salvo in an ongoing public dispute. Simon certainly has a settled and undisguised view of the Italian invasion (he thinks it clearly unjust), but his object in writing his book is not to defend that opinion. Instead, he seeks what he terms the “rectifying of French consciences.”

He proceeds by surveying the public writings of French intellectuals during the Ethiopian crisis and subjects them all to searching analysis. He attempts to lay bare errors of logic and judgment on all sides of the debate. These errors, he argues, are born of partisan passion undisciplined by firm adherence to truth. He writes, “Anything that might come to trouble our lucidity of judgment would give another chance to the most immense evils that threaten us. Silence then for the party spirit, silence for nationalist passion, for anti-Fascist passion; silence for hatred, even hatred that takes as its object indisputable criminals. All political agility will be powerless if it is not ruled by a clear-seeing and honest interior attitude.” In short, Simon thinks that the sickness afflicting French (and, more broadly, European) politics is fundamentally spiritual, and he offers this book as a spiritual exercise. His attitude represents that supremely admirable political stance that is usually mistaken for glib “beyondism.”

The geopolitical situation has been almost totally transformed since 1935, but Simon’s exhortation to rectify consciences is as urgent as ever. There is much to be said in favor of the structural cynicism (the justly celebrated “checks and balances”) that is such a notable characteristic of the American system, but such provisions can only temper the effects of widespread vice and dishonesty—and only some of the time. To prevent the corruption of public thought that leads to corrupt acts, citizens must recognize political debate as a thoroughly moral enterprise. They must see it as a mutual discernment of a good, just life in common, and they must understand that this exploration that is spiritually taxing, requiring the painful subjection of passion and personal interest to truth and justice.

It is difficult to see how such a high conception of politics, with its attendant corporate and personal disciplines, can arise or long endure, unless most citizens view truth and justice as sacred. In Simon’s case, his intense focus on rectification of conscience was inseparable from his belief that the author of all reality, searcher and judge of hearts, shared his priorities. Simon therefore stands not merely as a model of citizenship in the abstract but also as proof that societies need—or, at least, can gain much from—religiously informed public philosophies.


Stefan McDaniel is an assistant editor of First Things.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Second, and more provocatively, freedom to trade goods and services is a defeasible but still important human right. Gregg adduces two main arguments in support of this: Francisco de Vitoria’s argument that the right of peoples to trade is part of a more general right to freedom of association and Hugo Grotius’ argument that the universal destination of the earth’s goods (and, it would seem, services) requires international markets. Such markets are the only reliable means to “spread the wealth around” to all the peoples of the world. Viewed from this point of view, protecting free trade is (as Gregg quotes Edmund Burke as saying) a matter of justice, not merely utility.

Gregg’s article is full of compelling good sense; I wish to offer supplementary thoughts rather than a refutation.

The least controversial part of Gregg’s argument is the (broadly speaking) utilitarian one: free trade makes us all richer. After Adam Smith, this is intuitive and seems to be amply borne out by history. But one should also consider the risk of creating a dangerous interdependence. As modern society and economy have developed, there has been a striking decline in self-sufficiency at every level of social organization. Nations, regions, cities, towns, and neighborhoods depend, for the most part, far more critically on externally provided goods and services for basic functioning than they did two hundred years ago. If the British blockaded Manhattan today, they would win in half a week without firing a shot.

This should be worrying for at least two reasons. The first is fairly straightforward: things can go suddenly and catastrophically wrong in any system, and the vaster, more complex, and more decentralized the system, the harder it is to control the damage. This is because it is harder to understand the chain of cause and effect and because it is harder for any authority to be effective in coordinating necessary remedial actions. It seems wise for communities of all sizes to insulate themselves partially from the effects of failures in larger markets, even at the price of gaining fewer benefits from participation in those markets. Maintaining such circumscribed but porous economies decreases but does not eliminate competition. Furthermore, it tends to nurture the local pride that can inspire good and creative work. We could therefore expect continuing innovation and growth in productivity within each economy, even if at a reduced rate. And such partial insulation is not merely self-interested, because, after all, one semiautonomous economic community can often provide assistance from a position of strength when another experiences internal failure. Loving your neighbor is rarely the same thing as chaining yourself to him.

The second reason hinges on a controversial judgment about the requirements for healthy polity. It is a judgment that may be risible or even unintelligible to those with very different political imaginations from mine, but it is important to propose it. Public authorities and legislators should promote integral human development. That is to say, development involving all the many, complex aspects of existence that make for a full human life. Deciding to seek integral human development does not lead automatically to any specific policies but (what is more radical still) changes the very language and patterns of reasoning followed in discussing policy options. If decision-makers chose to be explicitly responsive to all the various values in play when organizing the lives of their communities, political discourse would change almost beyond recognition.

Now, when it comes to making decisions about economics, a crucial value is generally overlooked: human beings are happiest when they belong to several concentric or overlapping communities, each with a distinctive way of life (enduring, usually, across many generations) and each enjoying a degree of organic wholeness; that is, the sense of being a demarcated ‘little world’ adequate (at least potentially) to provide the elements of a good, distinctly human life. Economies are deeply intertwined with concrete ways of life, and are crucial to establishing organic wholeness—they are not merely patterns of production to be judged only by their productivity and efficiency. Communities without somewhat circumscribed, partly independent economies of their own tend to have increasingly abstract and finally unreal existences.

Consider a household in which even mundane tasks are routinely “outsourced”—older siblings never babysit, parents never clean house or mow the lawn, no family members entertain each other on instruments or cook for each other. Although this household may be efficient and may greatly increase the Keynesian multiplier, making everyone richer, it is impoverished qua household. It will be diminished as a group of persons sharing a common good achieved in part by joint management of community resources. This is why there may be good reason to pay one’s own child to mow the lawn, even if someone else does it better and more cheaply.

There must obviously be due proportion in all things. Regions are not families, and still less are nations. The lesser degree of community will make economic relations within them less personal, less organic—and properly so. Still, even these levels of community may sometimes be given proportionate support by partly protecting their economies. Gregg points out that it is much harder to grow grapes in Scotland than in Italy. From this he concludes that it makes little economic sense for Scots to buy their own wine when they can buy Italian wine and redirect their energies. But let us say that that there were rewarding challenges and special, fascinating knowledge involved in making Scottish soil yield decent grapes; let us say that an admirable, humanly fulfilling way of life had grown up around this endeavor. An individual who esteemed the art of growing Scottish grapes and felt fondness for the famous grape-growing villages that dot the landscape, to one of which (let us say) all four of his grandparents belonged, and who thought of it as a great national institution that showed the rugged creativity of the Scottish people would not be stupid or wicked if he supported this comparatively disadvantaged industry by purchasing its produce at a higher price. If enough Scots felt this way, they might decide, after public deliberation, to collectively “pay more” for Scottish wine by subsidizing it. The ability to entertain seriously such contra-market choices is an important sign that an organic community has not devolved into a mere administrative department.

Look at the matter from a slightly different angle: Economic relationships, even when they include prices (as they often must), are most human when the law of supply and demand is not the only factor, when there is some degree of personal interest, knowledge, and concern between buyer and seller. The more open the economy, the less buyers and sellers are likely to know or care about each other in any given transaction. There will be more alienating bureaucracy and anonymity. Some such relationships seem unavoidable under modern conditions, and are, in any case, arguably worthwhile because of the benefits they provide. But surely economic life (which, lest we forget, is a large part of “Life” writ large) should not be dominated by such relationships. (It is worth noting in this connection that international trade is itself at its most comprehensively rewarding as a fully human activity when foreign goods are bought not merely because they are cheaper, but because they are associated with, and are the organic product, so to speak, of a locale and way of life that interests the buyer.)

Turning briefly to Gregg’s arguments that free trade is a right, I must agree with his points but suggest further considerations along the lines of what I have just been saying. Like de Vitoria, I think that free trade is part of free association, which is a real but defeasible right. Like Grotius, I think that international markets are vital in giving everyone a greater share in the world’s bounty. The question is, what are the full range of values that could, in theory, defeat (or at least limit) the prima facie right to free association, or defeat (or at least limit) the prima facie imperative to share the world’s bounty?

It is obvious to most people that limiting the freedom of association of prisoners is justifiable when public safety requires it. But, more interestingly, there is also general support for the limitations Amish communities place on their members’ freedom of association for the sake of communal integrity. Is it possible that a somewhat similar rationale could justify somewhat similar policies on the national level?

Because of the terrifying tendency of the modern state to abuse its coercive power, and because it is unhealthy and dangerous to compare nations too closely to religious communities, it is certainly hard to think of a case in which very strict state control of, say, travel or information would have any sane man’s support, whatever the reasons tendered for these restrictions. But creating another North Korea is not legislators’ only alternative to laissez-faire.

It may well be reasonable, for instance, to ban importation of certain foreign items, or of such items in certain quantities, or at least to put heavy duties on them, in order to prevent or limit the justly undesired social changes associated with them. After all, not everything for sale is worth having. It seems still more reasonable to use economic regulations to limit the social dislocation caused by the large movements of peoples associated with globalization. This can be done without coercion by measures such as impeding the free functioning of international labor markets through heavy duties on imported and exported labor.

My purpose here is not to support or oppose any nation’s international trade policies, and it is certainly not to propose any of my own. It is rather to insist that complex communal goods should never be ignored, even when other goods should obviously take precedence. It is crucial to do so, because by the very fact of attending to them we reinforce a properly nuanced conception of human flourishing—and therefore of the true nature of politics.

Stefan McDaniel is an assistant editor at First Things. Samuel Gregg’s response to this article will appear on Friday.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.