A Hallerian Take on Freedom of Speech

Towards Clear Notions on a Murky Subject

The recent, raging controversies over censorship and speech rights need no introduction, and no effort will be made to provide one here; I will leave journalists and their ilk to the task of collating digests of the latest outrages, if their talents are up to it, whilst trusting that most anyone who reads this Substack is already more than familiar with the controversies, and doesn’t need me to recapitulate the minutiae of all the transient ephemera of the week. I rather intend to engage myself to the more eminently substantive task of casting some critical light on the idea of “freedom of speech”, asking, and if all goes well plausibly answering, certain questions that come up: What even are speech rights? Are they a real thing, or just another Liberal chimera? If real, what is their nature, and their limits?

For the received Liberal dogma isn’t very helpful here. Notwithstanding all the recent attacks, the notion of a right to freedom of speech continues to occupy an especially hallowed place in the pantheon of Liberal rights; it is guaranteed, or supposed to be guaranteed, at positive law, indeed, in the very written Constitutions of all the Liberal States; even the University, which violates this right every chance it gets, continues to ritually invoke it and otherwise pay it public respects; and everybody claims this right, at least when it concerns him. And yet Liberal doctrine, from the start able to explicate cognate individual rights such as property and self-defense rights in a highly rigorous (if not always quite accurate) way, has been and remains at a loss to tell us just why we each of us are supposed to have the right to weigh in publicly on all topics without exception.

Liberalism, of course, does whatever it can to efface the distinction between natural and acquired rights and derive all individual rights from the abstract and invariant essence of Man, stripping the individual of all real-life particularities and all differences from other individuals- above all by abstracting away the totality of his social being by placing him in an imaginary “state of Nature” entirely devoid of social relations, hence devoid of all social statuses, roles, and distinctions, and of all inequalities in rights that might follow from them. The immutably universal natural or “human” rights supposed to either inhere in or stem from the Platonic essence of the generic and analytically isolated individual are then brought to light, and their implications for real-life social and political relations uncovered by formal derivation.

It would be frivolous to deny that this methodology can yield admirably rigorous results: Hobbes’ exposition of the right of self-preservation, Locke’s theory of property, Blackstone’s important treatment of the right to keep and bear arms, among others. And yet the limitations of such an approach become painfully evident when it comes to speech rights. Indeed, for Hobbes, there can’t even be any serious question of individual speech-rights, since, according to him, each individual must be presumed to have forfeited all rights of private judgment to the State for all time upon entering into the “social contract”. Locke’s celebrated Two Treatises of Government is altogether silent on the matter, and Blackstone gets no further than discovering an individual right to petition the State for redress of specific grievances.

Today we’ve grown accustomed to asserting that speech rights exist simply because the Constitution says they do- something ironically subversive of liberty in that it elevates man-made law to the level of Divine law, as though so much revealed truth that may never be questioned, and hence the State, or the so-called “people”, to the status of a Divine final authority that can make, and by thus by inescapable implication unmake, rights by Sovereign fiat. Alternately, shabby and slipshod attempts are made to ground them in nebulous notions of something called “freedom of conscience”. or “expression”. What these terms are even supposed to mean is never made truly clear, to say nothing of the missing premises that link them to some right to entice others to believe what you believe, to express all your inner thoughts and desires publicly, and so on. In the final analysis, this argument properly belongs to, and in any case facilitates the anti-social behaviour of, two of the most pernicious elements of modern society: revolutionary fanatics who appear to believe they, and they alone, are in possession of some specified or unspecified Divine mandate to indict the rest of the world for all its injustices real or imaginary, and subsequently remake it according to doctrines binding on their consciences; and exhibitionists who get a titillating cheap thrill from spewing blasphemies, obscenities, and bloody horrors at other people, all in the name of a right to “self-expression” and “artistic freedom” they cannot define. Common sense, however, dictates that, seeing as how basic logic teaches that false conclusions necessarily entail false premises, any conception of speech rights that directly and authorizes actions that are inherently wrong must be every bit as much fatally misconstrued as, say, a conception of gun rights that directly and by design authorized murder.

This leaves what has become the default go-to Liberal case for speech rights: public utility, the “greatest good of the greatest number”- or more precisely, reasons of State. Here the argument rests on all manner of purported or actual advantages to the State that accrue from allowing unimpeded speech: it fosters innovation, creativity, the cultivation of literacy and the exercise of intellectual faculties, and all that good stuff, which in turn increases the competitive strength of the State. This type of argument has been made at least as far back as Milton, in his Areopagitica (1644). But public utility is about as solid and stable as shifting sand as foundational grounds for speech rights. For rights, properly so-called, aren’t even conceivable in a utilitarian frame of reference, in which all questions of right reduce to questions of mere public policy- and the modern State can make and unmake public policy even more easily than it can legislate (that is to say, pretty darn easily). Your speech “rights” are safe and sound for exactly as long as decision-makers are satisfied that they are useful, and thrown straight under the bus the minute those same executive officers deem them useless, or more pertinently, the minute activists and “experts” succeed in convincing them that (your) speech causes “harm”- a term very pointedly and carefully chosen by professional Leftists who know exactly what the vulnerabilities of utilitarianism are and how to exploit them to their own advantage.

Haller, for his part, notwithstanding having suffered the misfortune of being literally run out of town by a revolutionary occupation government for having published a sarcastic article in a local paper, didn’t have much to say about speech rights other than observing that Leftists, then as now, would loudly clamour for freedom of speech for themselves while simultaneously doing everything within their power to deny it to others. But to point this out and leave it at that is to give too-short shrift to the matter, especially in our States of today, politically organized as Republics and peopled for the most part by citizens equal at law, or new arrivals who aspire to citizenship, and in which free speech is much more than a cynical bad-faith stratagem for seizing power. If, God willing, we one day finally manage to expiate the cancer of Liberalism from our societies once and for all and make our countries great again, we are still going to have deal with this issue, and regardless of what form of political organization might come next.

But this gap in his thought isn’t any kind of grievous deficiency. On the contrary. The Restoration of Political Science avowedly wasn’t intended as some kind of God-like encyclopedia of everything worth knowing about anything. Hallerism is a science, hence by definition an open intellectual system that incessantly generates new research problems and opens up new areas of inquiry, as opposed to somehow offering ready-made answers in advance to any question that might conceivably be asked. Like any other empirical science, it provides us with the conceptual tools we need in order to solve problems on our own, instead of doing all the work for us at the outset, something beyond the capacity of any one mortal man. For the purposes of this exercise, these tools consist of the following, Hallerian premises:

-Not all rights can be derived from the Platonic essence of the abstract generic individual considered in isolation from his social relations and the particularities of his being as this or that concrete real-world individual.The pure concept of the individual, whose social being has been altogether abstracted away, just doesn't give us a whole lot to go on when it comes to working out a comprehensive theory of rights. Rational reflection on the pure concept of the individual alone, independently of the particularities of social circumstances and relationships, yields only an elemental boiler-plate of rights such as the right to exist, the corresponding right to do the things necessary to preserve that existence from day to day, the right to enjoy what he has acquired, the right not to be compelled in a matter of private thought or belief, and so on like that. Other rights are acquired rights, rights of particular individuals and not the generic Individual writ large; rights that must be earned or otherwise gained legitimately at some point in the life-course, as opposed to universal rights that accrue to any human being from the moment of conception simply by virtue of human species-membership (“human rights”); as such, they are unequally distributed among men.

-All political rights are acquired rights. Nobody emerges from the womb with them. What really is universal and invariant here is that each and every individual, from future pauper to future King- that is to say, by essence- far from being born with political rights, is born into theoretically-perfect subordination, into absolute abject dependence on the will of others, and in no immediate position to dispose of any thing or any other person. Political rights are rather something that may, or may not, be gained, lost, or modified, and to greater or lesser extents, along the road of life.

This by no means is to say that acquired rights are wholly arbitrary, artificial, and man-made constructs, as opposed to truly natural rights. First of all, individual differences in physical strength, intelligence, talents and aptitudes, etc. are no less innate, no less natural than the generic and universal characteristics all individual members of the human species share. Secondly, any one of the multitude of shifting and variform social relations any man enters into and leaves throughout the flux of the life-course, even those that are partially or entirely conventional, no less than their individual incumbents have a fixed and invariant essence or nature of their own, a set of elemental properties that define them for what they are, and absent which they either could not possibly exist as such or at least would become pathologically deformed, distorted, and dysfunctional (cf. the notion of “functional pre-requisites” in modern sociology), and from which various rights of those incumbents can be rationally derived with every bit as much formal rigour as those that can be derived from the nature of the individuals that form and dissolve, enter and leave these relations.

-In light of the second of these two points, one of the reasons political rights are always acquired rights, never enjoyed by all individuals on a universal basis, and cannot be directly read off of the analytically isolated individual is that, by definition, political rights inhere in political relationships, not the essence of Man, and are enjoyed by individuals only in their capacity as incumbents of positions within those relations. Hence, and as the Liberal originals themselves pointed out, there can be no political rights in the mythical state of Nature; hence Liberal individualists who seek out their Rights of Man in abstractions and theoretical fictions find themselves forced in spite of themselves to do the opposite of what they set out to do the minute they move from considering the individual in fictive airtight isolation-chambers to considering his rights in his more purely concrete relational capacity as a member of society and subject of the State.

-The possession and exercise of any political right thus reduces to a question of standing within a political relationship- and this standing, directly or indirectly, but always and by necessity, derives from the personal power of whoever has it (it should go without saying that the exercise of any political right is nothing but the projection of personal power; to speak, as Liberals do, about the political rights of the powerless is manifest absurdity, since any such “right” would be a mere grant or allowance from others who have personal power to project, and hence alone have true political rights). This personal power, of course, does not and cannot emanate from the abstract human essence alone. For power, the ability to make things happen, must be exercised at the level of material existence and not metaphysical essence; it is wholly impotent without substance, absent which it is therefore obviously absurd to even speak of it at all. This concrete substance assumes the form of personal property of some sort; the economic, military, or intellectual capacity and means some have, and others need, and whose proprietors in any case can make use of as they and they alone see fit.

It follows, from the foregoing, that the right to speak, rigorously conceived, is an acquired right, whose possession and exercise cannot possibly be universally enjoyed by all men at all times, but only by those in a position to speak, i.e. with standing, which standing derives from personal power, which in turn derives from personal property; finally, as a projection of personal power, it is a political right, a right of disposal over things and people. Notwithstanding all Liberal vaunting of a universal human right to speak one’s mind freely, supposed to be God-given (even though Scripture has it that God gave us political authority precisely in order to prevent men from saying whatever pleases them), supposed to inhere in human species-being (even though nobody can convincingly demonstrate that each individual human being has a “human right” to speak because he, just like every other human being, is equipped by Nature with a mouth)- every human being learns, the easy way or the hard, that in any social setting from the most trivial and informal to the weightiest and most formal, not just anyone has standing to say to just anything, and that speaking out of turn and/or in a wholly frank and unfiltered manner is likely to result in swift and certain punishment of greater or lesser severity.

The ability to speak is both a prime vehicle for projecting power and a prime metric of its possession. A wholly mute person, capable of communicating with others neither by speech nor by way of other signs, would also be wholly impotent, since wholly unable to make his will manifest, even over what is legitimately his. Mutatis mutandis, in colloquial English “having a say” means having some measure of decision-making power over the disposal of some things or some people. Hence, in any human association, allocation of the right to speak is a highly reliable indicator of the relative power of the members: one can learn who stands where in the hierarchy without knowing anything about the association other than who may speak only when spoken to at one extreme, and who may have the last word in any discussion, convene or dissolve a meeting and set its agenda, interrupt a speaker with questions and instructions or cut off his mic altogether, and so on like that on the other. Playfully telling a peer and equal to shut the **** up would, like all forms of jocular, be a grave insult were it intended in earnest or taken that way, one that may well be answered with physical violence, since the insult entails an unambiguous assertion of superiority over the recipient- and to make a claim of superiority over an equal is to start a dispute that can only resolved by combat, by the offended issuing a challenge to the offender to back up his verbal claim with a substantive demonstration of superior force. (“If you can’t walk the walk, don’t talk the talk”, as an old rhyming formula that was both a proverb and a ritualistic preamble to such fights had it, expressing the nature of things with great elegance and precision).

Another speech-act likely to cause grave offense, and possibly be answered with personal violence or, among the modern bourgeois, a police call, would be to enter somebody else’s landed property and offer unsolicited and authoritative opinions about how he should conduct his business. In this example we see the inextricable connection between standing to speak, personal power, and property rights. “Just who the **** do you think are”, the offended proprietor will instantly and indignantly reply, before demanding that the interloper leave the premises, ejecting him physically, or summoning security or the cops to do so for him. For the meddlesome blowhard, having no ownership share in the property, has no personal power over it, hence no standing to have any say concerning its disposal; and the legitimate proprietor quite reasonably takes it that the blowhard, by fact of holding forth with opinions he didn’t ask for, means to usurp his rightful property- something nobody likes, no matter how many Marxist platitudes they may otherwise profess when it comes the property of others.

Right off the bat we can see that speech rights, understood in terms of the right to criticize political authority and hold forth on any matter of State policy, are of very limited applicability to Monarchy, in which a single man is owner and proprietor of the landed territory of the State. Here, as a rule subjects have no more of a legitimate right to pontificate on what the King should and shouldn’t do than I do to tell my neighbour how to raise his kids or balance his checkbooks whilst a guest at his home. Certainly the subjects may legitimately raise issues concerning the various particular agreements and arrangements with the King upon which their consent to political subjection (not to be confused with popular sovereignty or any so-called “social contract”) is predicated (in exactly the same way that, in the case of my neighbour, I may legitimately raise issues with respect to such specific contractual obligations as we may have towards one another, to the extent that his business, his proprietary rights and mine intertwine, and no further). But the notion that any man has the right to freely weigh in on any and all matters of State- something that, under the old Monarchies, even the high nobility, each of them Sovereigns in their own right at law and moreover collectively supposed to comprise the King’s advisory board (curia Regis) were often reluctant to do, for fear of appearing to meddle in the King’s rightful personal business- presumes that the State is politically organized as a Republic, and that the legitimate critics of public policy aren’t just anybody, but citizens of that Republic. Now we furthermore, and on the basis of the premises outlined above, have to define just what a Republic and just what a citizen is.

A Republic, or what today is given the nebulous and imprecise name, “democracy”, isn’t something that’s too terribly hard to define once we have armed ourselves with Haller’s invincible weapons of science and cut through the fog of Liberal obfuscation and mystification. A Republic is a type of perpetual corporation, not essentially different from the multiplicity of corporations we all deal with or belong to in private life- that is to say, an organization created by a membership that seeks to accomplish together what they cannot individually, pooling together some of the personal power of each individual member into a common stock so they can project power collectively and thus accomplish the goal for which the corporation was created, whatever it may be. If and when a corporation, under some circumstance or other, whether by design or by accident, finds itself politically independent, i.e. its own final authority with no higher authority on Earth above it, then it ascends to the status of a fully-fledged Sovereign power, of the sort known as a “Republic”. (Yes, it’s that simple).

A Republic, unlike a King, has no power or means of its own; its power is the aggregate of the individual contribution of each full member or citizen in the form of tax monies to finance it, and the direct personal provision of its defense by each and every individual citizen, all of whom must stand ready to expose their life on the Republic's behalf in time of war.

It follows from the latter obligation (and not because of the inherent equality of all members of the species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens) that all citizens of a Republic stand equal within it and are rightfully entitled to the same share of power in its affairs. In a Republic, unlike a commercial corporation, there can be no inequity of power between minority and majority shareholders, since each citizen stakes his very life in the Republic- and there is no greater contribution that can possibly entitle some members to a greater share of power than other members than this ultimate unsurpassable sacrifice. Any attempt to rank-order citizens who all freely assume this ultimate obligation into superior and inferior classes unequal in rights is therefore an irrational and monstrous deformation of the nature of a Republic and a grave injustice to the citizens deemed inferior. (It also follows that any non-citizen who has borne arms for the Republic ought to be admitted to citizenship and all the attending rights, and in fact typically is).

Each citizen, then, has an equal share in the Sovereignty of the State; and N.B. this share isn't a grant from the State, but value added by the citizen to the State from a personal stock that he possesses independently of the State- since the Sovereign power of the State is nothing more than the sum total of each citizen's contribution in the form of his goods and his military manpower, neither of which are bestowed by the State, but must be independently possessed and then voluntarily offered up as a condition of citizenship and the very existence of the State.

It thus befalls the State to recognize each citizen's share in its Sovereignty, and refrain from doing anything that would hinder his ability to possess it, since it would be irrationally self-defeating to the point of suicidal for the State to do so. The citizen therefore has a right to own property and enter into lucrative private contracts; to have a home and family of his own, as his inviolate personal domain; and to keep and bear arms for the defense of himself and the State. These rights secure the conditions of the acquisition and reproduction of the personal power and means the citizen must bring to the Republican table as a condition of having a seat there.

That having been accomplished, it befalls the State to enact legal instruments enabling each citizen to actually exercise his share of Sovereign power within the State, i.e. participate politically. These instruments positively specify, at law, the right of the citizen to hold public office; to personally participate in the appointment of those officers of the State chosen by election; and to speak freely on any matter of political or other public significance.

It would be manifestly absurd, we have seen already, to speak of a citizen having a say in public decision-making without also having the ability to speak. And in a Republic, the political speech of the citizen isn't mere input, but the exercise of his piece of the Sovereign power, as such entailing Sovereign immunity to speak as he sees fit- since, if the citizen's speech is an exercise of Sovereign power, then by definition the citizen is final authority over the contents of his speech, which stands above any higher scrutiny or correction. For the citizen doesn't speak his truth to the Sovereign power of the State, but speaks it as the power of the State, as a constituent part of the State on equal standing with the other constituent parts. (Hence the English-language phrase, "to speak one's piece").

It goes without saying that, in any formal decision-making process, somebody or something must have the last word; and direct democracy is so cumbersome, actually or practically impossible, that most Republics, like most other corporations, appoint officers and invest them with power to act on behalf of the public thing, administer the common goods and affairs of the membership, make laws and regulations, and things like that. Not just any citizen can barge in and say what he wants when he wants in formal proceedings presided over by these officers. But outside of these formal proceedings of State, nobody can have the last word in the discussions the citizens have amongst themselves, and no actor public or private can take it upon himself to decide acceptable topics of public debate or positions on any question (the internal discussions of purely private clubs and societies excepted).

In particular, no faction, even if it carries the majority vote and does so by legal means, can prohibit expression of the political positions of other factions, or the expression by any citizen of any position on any public subject. For if one faction of citizens were to unilaterally fix the terms of permissible debate in favour of their own party-political position and interests, they would abrogate the Sovereign prerogative of every citizen not of their faction while retaining it for themselves. They would be free to speak their piece as they saw fit, the rest not. In other words, the censorious faction would have subjected the rest to itself. They would no longer be equal in power, and their relationship thus mutated from one between peers and fellow citizens into one between superiors and subordinates.

It would be meaningless to speak of the rest as having any political rights when all they could do with their say in government is voice support for the positions approved by one faction, or perhaps debate on the topics and in the terms deemed permissible by it. The censorious faction would thus have effectively installed itself as a ruling class, and the Republic degenerated into an oligarchy: a polity that no longer a Republic, but isn’t a Monarchy either, lacking the full set of attributes that define either form of government, but rather combines incommensurable elements of both political forms in an irrational and monstrous congeries in which the rulers can neither be properly called citizens nor Princes, and the ruled neither be called citizens nor subjects. The former would act like Kings, disposing of the public goods of the public thing as though their own personal property when it isn’t. The latter would continue to be the civic equals of their superiors in other respects, and thus still subject to civic obligations, but without the rights- something absurd, perverse, and a grave injustice on its face. They would still be adding their fair share of Sovereign power to the common stock that is the stuff of the State- but, having been made unable to exercise it, would therefore see that share alienated from them by the elite in a blatantly exploitative way.

Indeed, having already stripped the members of the opposition of their rights and equal standing, the superior faction would act with much greater justice if it were to altogether strip members of the opposition of their citizenship and release them from their obligations, too, instead of fraudulently continuing to call them citizens for purposes of exploiting them like so many serfs. If this elite wants to be sole supreme master of the State, it can't with any justice have its oligarchic cake and eat it too; its members must between them and them alone find the means to pay the State's bills and provide for its defense (perhaps by taking on the former citizens as mercenary soldiers, at a rate of remuneration presumably rather higher than that of the citizen volunteer).

The political right to freedom of speech is not the same as the right to "freedom of expression" whereby the individual claims an inherent right to speak and behave how he pleases- especially when it transgresses basic social norms of conduct, upsets and offends his fellows, and generally disrupts the social peace, all in the ostensible interest of “self-expression”, of satisfying his artistic needs or whatnot at the expense of the needs of others. The civil right to freedom of speech, by contrast, is the right of a citizen in good standing to draw attention to defects and errors in legislation and policy; to propose and advocate for such laws, policies, and courses of action he thinks likely to advance the public interest, strengthen the State, and accomplish the purpose for which the members created it; and to generally speak as he sees fit on all political subjects. It does not encompass speech that is non-political, and in any case inherently wrong, e.g. obscenity and pornography; disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly; criminal harassment and threats; libels; blasphemous mockery and pointed insults to the Divine (reasoned philosophical-theological disputation strictly excepted); and sedition. Since it is not an inherent right of the individual qua individual, it does not extend to non-citizen residents who have no share in the public thing, and whose weighing in on its internal business would comprise intrusive meddling the citizens aren't obliged to tolerate. Nor does it extend to those under civil disability (i.e. serving a penal sentence), or to minor children who aren't legally independent and thus by definition aren't yet eligible for the full rights of citizenship, since they cannot assume its obligations.

Nor can it rationally be said to extend to speech agitating for the destruction of the State, either by insurrection, or by modification of its laws and Constitution in such a way that would turn the Republic away from the purposes for which it was created, cause it to mutate into something other than a Republic, or abrogate the fundamental rights of citizens as declared in the Constitution. I have said that the citizen may speak as he sees fit under the Sovereign immunity that accompanies the Sovereign power he adds to and exercises in the State. Is this limiting case, then, not itself an abrogation of his rights as possessor of a piece of the State's Sovereignty?

It isn't that simple. The Republic is a strictly voluntary association. No Republic can force anybody to become and remain a citizen. For it follows from the very fact that the value the citizen adds to the State originates outside the State in the personal power and means of the citizen, which belong to nobody but him, that if he decides the Republic in which he participates isn't a good fit for him anymore, he can always renounce his citizenship and go add his value to some other Republic, subject himself to a King or even become one himself, or give over his goods, power, and body in entirety to a Communist collective. It doesn't matter- as long as he does it somewhere else. And if he won't leave voluntarily, the others may want to consider simply kicking him out. His personal rights won't be violated or abrogated at all- he'll just have to find some place else to exercise them. And if nobody is obliged to be a member of the State, mutatis mutandis nobody has the right to membership in it- least of all those who subvert and undermine it from within, and so by the fact have already renounced their citizenship and become enemies of the State, though they continue to claim rights within it.

Every voluntary association has the inherent right to expel members for grievous misconduct. And those members of the State who wish to preserve the Republic and their own rights have the right to strip malcontents and revolutionaries of their citizenship and send them packing when failure to do so would necessitate extending to the malcontents the right to subvert and ultimately destroy the public thing the loyal citizens sacrifice for, and usurp their power, goods, and rights, all with civil rights the malcontents weaponize against the rights of others, and the very State that legally extends those rights to them. It is no more reasonable to expect the State and its loyal members to do so than it is to expect the pawnbroker to knowingly sell the robber the pistol with which he will be robbed.

N.B. the loyalists have the right to preserve the State even if they are a minority in it. The natural right of the individual person to exist finds a cognate in the right of a Republic to exist as long as some of its members want it to (it can only be dissolved unanimously), and they may act on its behalf to defend it in the same way that the individual, having an inherent right to exist, may defend himself against criminal attack.

And in both the case of criminal attack on the person and revolutionist attack on the State, every other principle recedes before the imperative to self-preservation, which may be pursued by any means necessary. The loyalists are under no obligation to extend the revolutionists rights in accordance with Republican principles, so that the revolutionists can one day strip the loyalists of rights and bring down the Republic in accordance with revolutionist principles. The revolutionists, as aggressors, have no claim that could trump the right of the loyalists to defend themselves and the State, even if they are the majority- not least of all because there is absolutely nothing stopping them from abandoning the State, pooling their means and acquiring some territory of their own somewhere else in the world, and building Utopia there as they see fit to. (N.B. by no means does this apply to those who, in the wake of a usurpation that sees them reduced to second-class citizens, refuse to discharge civic obligations, disregard the laws that degrade them and suppress the exercise of their rights, or take direct action against the usurpers- for this resistance is not revolutionary, but on the contrary seeks to defend and preserve, or restore, the wholesome integrity of the State against the corruption, mutilation, and destruction of the State usurpation necessarily entails).

There is perhaps more that could be said on the matter, but the foregoing exposition, rough-and-ready, but I think, plausible and more or less rigorous, should suffice to provide a indication of what an application of Hallerian principles to a pressing contemporary issue might look like, and go to show that Haller’s political science is much more than a tool to assist historians and social scientists in understanding State forms of the past that no longer exist anywhere. The Liberal State as we know it, after all is a type of Republic, sharing the same core of essential features and much the same social relations between the citizen, the State, and other citizens as the traditional Republic; it too is a Sovereign corporation financed and defended exclusively by its citizens, all of whom are equal at law and hence have the same legitimate rights, expectations and obligations, and so forth. One possible way to effectuate the revolution in political consciousness needed to end the long night of Liberalism once and for all is to do just what the Liberal originals themselves did: re-analyse powers, rights, and obligations in existing political relations by situating them on altogether different premises than those hitherto accepted, but without immediately seeking to change those relations.

The Liberals didn’t start demanding the abolition of Monarchy right off the bat, but rather first took to explicating the relation between King and subject in Liberal terms, such that the King was construed not as an independent territorial lord, but rather the hereditary chief executive officer of a Sovereign political corporation created by the a people, in a word, a Republic- one whose President, for the time being, wore a crown and not a bourgeois business-suit, but a Republic nonetheless. The King’s head, then, was cut off in theory long before it was cut off in practice; people first had to become accustomed to thinking of the Kingdom as a Republic (often, without even realizing that they were doing it) before they could countenance removing him from his Throne the way any executive official can be removed from office, to name just one thing. By the same token, re-analyzing Liberal rights by rationally deriving them from non-Liberal (Hallerian) premises may pave the way, if not towards turning existing Republics into Monarchies once again, then at least turning them into non-Liberal Republics.

In this endeavour, we have exactly the same competitive advantage over Liberalism that the latter had over vague conceptions of the Divine right of Kings and such: the ability to generate clear and distinct answers, rigorously derived from first principles in a fully-fledged scientific system, to pressing questions of law and politics that could not be answered as readily or with as much as formal rigour by the existing paradigm.

We have seen that Liberal methodology, since it derive rights from an abstract and generic human essence stripped of all particularities of concrete social being, considered as so many irrelevant accidentals, is logically inadequate to the task of specifying rights that inhere only in the relationships they enter into, and thus becomes progressively less and less adequate to living social reality to the extent that a society develops and its internal relations proliferate and become more and more diverse and variegated. As the abstractions of Liberalism become more and more inadequate to the complexity of social reality, Liberals become more and more vulnerable to being asked questions they cannot answer, and can no longer simply refuse to by referring the matter to the inscrutable will of God or the Founding Fathers, or even by accusing their interrogators of “racism” or somesuch. Their inability to answer hard questions is not lost on the public, which is accordingly rendered that much more amenable to being seduced by those who can answer them, and answer with seeming effortlessness. That could be us, if we wanted it.