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For the founders of liberal theory it is not autonomy but peace that occupies the philosophical focal point. Locke, for example, knows nothing of autonomy. Rather, in his conception, civil order remedies the manifold “inconveniences” of the state of nature which ever tip it in the direction of the state of war. For Kant, autonomy is indeed the sine qua non of moral worth, but its pursuit is not the business of the state. So little is politics the soil on which autonomy is sown and moral goodness harvested that, proclaims Kant in one of the most striking passages in the entire literature of liberalism, “As hard as it may sound, the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess understanding).” His proposed solution is a civil order in which individuals enjoy maximum external freedom consistent with a like freedom for all others. This structure is designed to ensure only that people — and devils — don’t bump into each other too hard or too often, but it is on that modest foundation that all the excellences of social existence are grounded.


For centuries Jews were the stateless people and suffered at the hands of Europeans who were deeply rooted in their own nations. The early Zionists, from Hess to Herzl, drew a very simple lesson from this experience: that Jews could not live safely or decently until they had their own state. Those who claim today that the state of Israel is the brainchild of nineteenth-century European thought are not wrong; this is hardly a secret. But the point is often made with sinister intent, as if to suggest that Israel and the Zionist enterprise more generally represent some kind of political atavism that enlightened Europeans should spurn. Once upon a time, the Jews were mocked for not having a nation-state. Now they are criticized for having one. And not just any nation-state, but one whose founding is still fresh in living memory. All political foundings, without exception, are morally ambiguous enterprises, and Israel has not escaped these ambiguities. Two kinds of fools and bigots refuse to see this: those who deny or explain away the Palestinian suffering caused by Israel’s founding, and those who treat that suffering as the unprecedented consequence of a uniquely sinister ideology. The moral balance-sheet of Israel’s founding, which is still being composed, must be compared to those of other nations at their conception, not to the behavior of other nations after their existence was secured. And it is no secret that Israel must still defend itself against nations and peoples who have not reconciled themselves to its existence — an old, but now forgotten, European practice. Many Western European intellectuals, including those whose toleration and even affection for Jews cannot be questioned, find all this incomprehensible. The reason is not anti-Semitism nor even anti-Zionism in the usual sense. It is that Israel is, and is proud to be, a nation-state — the nation-state of the Jews. And that is profoundly embarrassing to post-national Europe.


Just as he could never accept that a decent system of ethics would be more likely to arise in a school for mentally handicapped children than among any intellectual élite, no matter how attuned to the Transcendental, he could never accept that peace is not a principle, merely a desirable state of affairs.

 
Unlike the Marxist, the classical liberal regards men as “basically imperfect and resigns himself to a system where the good will be the result of countless actions and never the object of a conscious choice. In the last resort, he subscribes to the pessimism which sees politics as the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men contribute to the good of the State.” Aron readily acknowledged that this prosaic model lacks the grandeur of utopia. “Doubtless the free play of initiative, competition between buyers and sellers, would be unthinkable if human nature had not been sullied by the Fall. The individual would give of his best in the interests of others without hope of recompense, without concern for his own interests.” But that “if” issues an unredeemable promise. Aron’s twofold task was to remind us, first, that there is no human nature unsullied by the Fall and, second, to suggest, as does orthodox Christianity, that what prophets of the absolute decry as a disaster was in fact a “fortunate fall,” a condition of our humanity.

 
There is, in effect, only one fashion. It changes every season out of financial necessity, but only marginally. This one fashion is that of the early teen, and it is embraced from babyhood to senility. People want to become children precisely because of their glorification of childhood as the only virtuous state. In a world in which there are, increasingly, no borders, frontiers, walls or restrictions, people will be driven to construct their own. They find themselves belonging nowhere, and so they invent forms of belonging.

 
Eighteenth-century aristocrats by the palaceful were appalled when professional writers first appeared. Writing in exchange for money, they thought, would be the ruin of letters. John Ruskin, King of Victorian Sputterers, couldn’t stand Rembrandt because the Dutch master’s paintings lacked “dignity”: All those paintings of self-satisfied, bulbous-nosed burghers made Ruskin gag.


A rural bourgeois was an oxymoron, while a “noble bourgeois” was not. Only during the Revolution, when political radicals denounced the “bourgeoisie” as a new and dangerous aristocracy of wealth, did the word start to acquire its modern meaning of middle class, and even then it did not gain general acceptance until the early nineteenth century. It is in Balzac’s Human Comedy, with its unforgettably grasping and narrow-visioned bourgeois anti-heroes, that the French “bourgeoisie” came into its own. Yet even then, crucially, the word “bourgeois” functioned mostly as a term of abuse: the bourgeois was always someone else. Nor did any other, less opprobrious term, like “middle class,” fill the gap. It was not that the French people commonly identified as “bourgeois” claimed to belong to some other social class. They did not define themselves in terms of social class at all.

 
It is the function of “social justice” to blame somebody else, to blame the system, to blame those who (mythically) “control” it. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his magisterial history of communism, the fundamental paradigm of Communist ideology is guaranteed to have wide appeal: you suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others; these oppressors must be destroyed. We need to hold someone accountable, Hayek notes, even when we recognize that such a protest is absurd.


We laugh here — or at least give a snort — because we know that giants and enchanters do not exist. Yet it is hard to overestimate the radical reorientation of consciousness when humanity at large — starting in Western Europe during the Renaissance — began divesting itself of belief in supernatural causes. Cervantes allegorizes just such a process. Don Quixote is, as it were, the last man to believe in magic — the last man in his world to feel himself surrounded (and often buffeted) by invisible beings. He’s like a paranoid schizophrenic, thinking that everything that happens to him is the work of unseen sorcerers plotting against him — and his mental isolation is immense, despite Sancho’s ambivalent support for some of his fantasies. For much of the fiction he comes off as a senile man-child: fey, withered, dissociated, lost in his archaic, estranging dreams.

 
Like Dionysius, this kind of intellectual is passionate about the life of the mind, but unlike the philosopher he cannot master that passion; he dives headlong into political discussion, writing books, giving speeches, offering advice in a frenzy of activity that barely masks his incompetence and irresponsibility. Such men consider themselves to be independent minds, when the truth is that they are a herd driven by their inner demons and thirsty for the approval of a fickle public. Those who listen to such men, usually the young, may feel the stir of passion within; this feeling does them credit, for properly channeled it might bring honor to them and justice to their cities. But they are in need of an education in intellectual self-control if they are to turn that passion exclusively to good use. Socrates understands this. These intellectuals, though, lack his humility and pedagogic care; their reputations depend on exciting passions, not channeling them. Socrates suggests that such intellectuals play an important role in driving democracies toward tyranny by whipping the minds of the young into a frenzy, until some of them, perhaps the most brilliant and courageous, take the step from thought to action and try to realize their tyrannical ambitions in politics. Then, gratified to see their own ideas take effect, these intellectuals become the tyrant’s servile flatterers, composing “hymns to tyranny” once he is in power.

 
Like Don Quixote, Jay Gatsby moved from the romantic love of a woman to the romantic conviction that the hard realities of this world can be made to yield to a steadfast heart and a vaulting spirit, to one’s “Platonic conception of himself.” That neither Dulcinea nor Daisy is a suitable object for this erotic desire doesn’t count decisively against Don Quixote or Gatsby. No woman of flesh and bone could be worthy of such idealization, and both men turn out to be more in love with love than with their beloved. “In any case, it was just personal,” says Gatsby when he tries to take in the knowledge that Daisy never loved him the way he loved her.