Haller: The Scientist We Just Can't Do Without.
Never before has his invincible thought been of more urgent practical importance than today.
THE readers of this site might very reasonably ask of me: So what exactly is the big deal, all your arm-flailing hype, about some antique social scientist nobody's ever even heard of? Isn't this just something nobody except for a handful of academics specialized in the history of ideas and sciences could possibly find interesting at all? And at a time when State, economy, and society are crumbling away around us, when it looks like external or even civil war lurks right around the corner, isn't it foolish, downright decadent even, to waste time poring over theory when there are practical matters of existential importance that need our immediate attention?
Haller's political science was by no means intended as an idle ivory-tower exercise, a mere diversion for some grad students and profs nobody cares about trying to score career points publishing in academic journals nobody reads. It was, on the contrary, written with a strictly practical end in view, an especially urgent one: to wit, developing a comprehensive science of State, society, and constitutional law capable of unseating Liberalism and reconstructing the State along more eminently natural, human, and rational lines, according to principles that, while timeless, as old as the Adam, unlike those of Liberalism were never explicitly articulated and organized into a formal and scientific system. This latter omission had the fateful effect of making it that much easier for the Liberals to convincingly claim that the ancient pre-Liberal wisdom was nothing but ignorance, illiteracy, and superstition, and the traditional State based on tried-and-true, albeit more or less inarticulate, principles nothing but an irrational mess of unreason, barbarism, and blind prejudices.
Haller hoped that, by raising the traditional wisdom on governing to the level of a fully-fledged empirical science, drawing explicit principles and precepts from the unselfconscious and taken-for-granted customs and usages that were the stuff of the unwritten constitutions of the older States, and substantiating them with hard facts, this wisdom would be more palatable to modern minds who accept nothing on faith or tradition, demand cogent formal argumentation and above all, evidence, etc. This reconstructed knowledge, in turn, would serve as the basis for a reconstructed (restored) State once the Liberal experiment, along with its administrative State, failed completely, and a post-Liberal age was ushered in. Without this modern scientific reconstruction of common-sense and traditional know-how, Haller feared, by default people would continue to rely on the false Liberal doctrines- with or without them even being aware of doing so- and thus end up doomed to repeat the same failed experiment again and again in a hellish eternal recurrence.
Haller believed that his own days were seeing the dawn of the post-Liberal era, in the wake of the humanitarian disaster-area that was the French Revolution. Haller rightly concluded that any such Liberal experiment would likewise crash and burn before it even got off the ground, due to being premised on notions that are false, contrary to the nature of things, and hence utterly unworkable in practice. But what Haller was unaware of from his vantage-point in Europe was that, in the English-speaking world, the smart set among the Liberals, the likes of Edmund Burke, the "scientific Whigs" (Adam Smith et al.), and the Founding Fathers of the USA were themselves acutely aware of the folly of trying to put uncut Liberalism into full political practice, but not ready to abandon Liberalism for it. On the contrary. But instead of bulldozing natural social relations altogether and at once as their Continental counterparts did, they rather more sensibly superimposed the artificial Liberal political machine upon a tolerated vestige of natural institutions and social relations recognized as indispensable to the functioning of society, by extension, the Liberal State itself: religion and morality, the "patriarchal" family, private law and contracts, property and the common law in which property rights were enshrined, the right to bear arms, local rights of self-government, and in Great Britain, King and aristocracy. As such, these relations and institutions were held to be sacrosanct and off-limits to the predations of centralizing administrative control. State functionaries took this doctrine very seriously, and only cautiously and with extreme reluctance meddled in this so-called "private sphere".
And this hybrid or heterodox Liberalism, unlike its uncut form, turned out to be a smashing success, indeed taking the States that adopted it to Titanic heights of power, prosperity, and internal order that dwarfed anything in human history hitherto. The administrative State was able to have its cake and eat it too inasmuch as, on the one hand, its boundless power allowed for tremendous national forces, above all military, to be mobilized and placed at its disposal; while on the other hand its policy of prudent non-interference in private relations and contracts allowed for explosive economic growth and in turn, a corresponding windfall in tax receipts for the State, as per Adam Smith's "invisible hand". Meanwhile, the morals and manners needed in order to stop huge commercial cities from turning into anarchic hellscapes and protect civic unity against the factionalism and fragmentation that mortally endangers all self-governing Republics found their bulwark and wellspring in the infinity of religious denominations that flourished under official toleration or non-establishment, and at no cost, and enormous savings, to the State. We could continue.
It seemed that the sweet spot, the golden mean or happy medium of philosophers the world over, the dialectical resolution of antitheses into an historically final synthesis had been reached; one in which the warnings of a man like Haller seemed obsolete, wrongheaded, and irrelevant, worthy of being remembered, if at all, for having successfully vindicated private law to German and French audiences otherwise too befuddled by misconstrued and over-wrought notions about public law to appreciate its indispensable importance. Having contributed his fair share to reaching this glorious end of History writ large, he could perhaps be thanked for this service and safely laid to rest and forgotten, or alternately, resurrected in passim here and there only to be libeled as a champion of despotism and deleterious and outdated "Medieval" practices. Or could he?
I shall take the liberty of assuming that whoever reads this already knows that almost nothing is left of this attempt at a heterodox Liberal synthesis, and need not be provided with an enumeration of all of the sordid, contemptible, and utterly depraved details of the state of affairs that has taken its place. Far from reconciling two antitheses and merging them into a new and singular unity, analogous to how babby is formed of the DNA of two very different parents, this arrangement was rather more akin to putting two scorpions in the same bottle; one must devour the other. The contradiction between theory and practice, between the official doctrine of the State and the actual social relations it subsumes, by necessity made heterodox Liberalism unsustainable in the long run. Haller had already observed that any effort to try to reconcile Liberal dogma and an actual state of affairs at odds with its precepts is doomed to failure:
"From false theory to practice there is but one path, inevitable and soon to be taken; for men like to see what they believe to be beneficial or true realized, and won't long tolerate an eternal contradiction between their reasoning, however misguided, and the state of the real world. Thus once existing constitutions, as the actual nature and origin of all our social relations, are compared with the received principles, with the supposedly sole legitimate type of human association, by necessity they must all appear unjust"."
This goes double for modern and technologically-oriented people, who have a special generalized penchant for consistency, efficiency and effectivity in the pursuit of desired ends, that is to say, for improvement; who thus have a corresponding weakness for taking goals and principles and running away with them, for taking them to the limit to the exclusion of everything else, in most everything they do. The same urban moderns who, having been told that staying fit is a good thing, obsessively diet and work out according to exacting scientific regimens that dictate every last physical movement and every last calorie, and to the point of developing body dysmorphia, can likewise be counted on to hunt down and root out every last trace of "inequality" with the exact same enthusiasm if they're told that equality is a good thing, and moreover do so without taking any other social end into consideration at all. Hence the infamous phenomenon of "Wokeness".
As though that weren't bad enough, Haller (along with the historic smart set among the Liberals themselves) also reminds us that in any case Republican political organization- the only kind Liberalism recognizes as legitimate- is inherently unstable and as a result, ultimately rather short-lived. All Republics sooner or later undergo a tragic descent into moral turpitude; crass materialism and consumerism at the cost of spiritual values; effeminacy and loss of manly and martial virtues; civic apathy and indifference; frivolity and fecklessness in public decision-making; a proliferation of special interests, aggravated by open-door immigration, that massively conflict with the public good; and finally, class and factional conflict that culminates in the usurpation of power by an oligarchy or dictator. We are incontrovertibly reaching this latter, terminal stage right now.
And so now, at long last, we stand at the end of the Liberal era. The reckless, feckless, and destructive Regimes that have taken the place of the more or less conscientious and responsible Statesmen of yesteryear, unlike the latter, and led on by fanatics, have made it clear in word and deed that they intend to kill the socio-economic goose that lays the State's own golden eggs. In short, what we are looking at is the French Revolution redux: the insane enterprise of implementing the pure and uncut Liberalism, this Fentanyl of States; deleting all natural social relations and institutions, that is to say, intentionally destroying society, while the State tears itself to pieces with partisan conflict. And so we will soon have to ask: what next? What comes after Liberalism? How shall we go about the business of reconstructing the State, and all social relations?
This reconstruction and this next-level transformation cannot be carried out, and this higher stage of human social evolution not be reached, for as long as the ghosts of the Liberal order continue to dwell in our heads, shaping our political thoughts and discourse, and hence our political acts, without our even being aware of it.
An objection that has been made to me is that few today read Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, and other canonical founding figures of the Liberal tradition, and fewer still go around talking about the state of Nature, the social contract, popular sovereignty, the originary body of the people, and so on in everyday political discourse. But that is only because, when an ideology becomes truly hegemonic, its principles increasingly assume the form of one of Michel Foucault's "epistemes", that is to say, an unconscious system of presuppositions that, while not explicitly stated themselves, determine the form, contents, and limits of what can be stated explicitly and taken seriously by others (cf. the "Overton window"); and in any case, these same premises are baked into the structure and day-to-day workings of all major social institutions, so that nobody has to mention them by name anymore. And this surreptitious Liberal ideology is all the more pernicious for it. It is one thing to refute an explicit argument; another to inspect, examine, and modify all of one's priors. Very, very few people possess the discipline, desire and wherewithal to do this under their own power, or the years and years of self-examination it takes to do it. It is a task perhaps well-suited to some Buddhist monk in the mountains of Tibet; to the harried Western citizen in an existential political crisis, not so much.
Hence it is, just as Haller already intimated, and across the Right-Left spectrum, that those who claim to reject Liberalism infallibly continue to reinvent its wheel, or worse, one of its aberrations or bastard forms. Over here, elite Ivy-League academics who, under the sign of "post-Liberalism", do nothing but rebrand the familiar old Liberal welfare-State. (Their constant invocation of something called "the common good" by itself suffices to prove it). Over there, soi-disant Anarchists who, it turns out, are just fine with government surveillance, Federal law-enforcement agencies, police shootings, mass arrests and incarceration, in short, the terrible apparatus of overwhelmingly irresistible physical violence that is the very font of the Liberal State's power, so long as its use is directed against their political opponents. For their own part, most of these opponents, for all their "based" posturing, are very much regular meat-and-potato Conservatives of the Burkean mould, or populists of an old rural Whig breed. A smaller number believe the Liberal order would work just fine, so long as all citizens were White; in their obliviousness to the glaringly obvious and self-defeating flaw in their reasoning, they strongly resemble the butt of a classic Polish joke. Exactly the same goes for those on the Left who seek to abolish "Whiteness", that is to say, eradicate not just the White race, but the totality of the institutions that race built, while at the same time collecting their paychecks from those same institutions, seemingly without the question of just how they would put food on their tables without those institutions having ever even occurred to them. Finally, a small and especially frivolous minority on the "extremely online" Right want to trade in mainstream Liberalism for one of its failed 20th c. aberrations, namely Fascism or National Socialism, while their equally unserious mirror-images over on the Left likewise seek to revive yet another of its abortions and bastard forms, namely Soviet Communism. The list keeps going like that.
But let's allow for argument's sake that we collectively succeed, unassisted, in rooting every Liberal fiction from our own heads. Now what? Ok then: let's go ahead and reconstruct the State. Very well! But what even is "the State" anyways? What are its possible forms, what are their respective bases of power, what is the nature of the political tie in each one, and under what special circumstances do they emerge? What are their limits of possible modification, the respective rights and duties of rulers and subjects, how long do they last, what must be done in order to optimize their functioning and prolong their lifespan? I dunno, I thought you knew! And so here again everything necessarily defaults to Liberalism, since that is all anyone today knows. We have lived under the Liberal form of State, and that form alone, and spoken its political language, and that language alone, for so long that we cannot, under our own power, even imagine anything else, no matter how we may try. And hence it was that a well-known online political theorist, an avowed "Reactionary" and bitter opponent of Liberalism, could recently propose a reconstruction of Monarchy in terms of a territorial political corporation with a King for its CEO, and in so doing without a trace of self-aware irony re-invent the earliest iteration of the Liberal State once again whilst tinkering around in his garage trying to invent a new ideology. For this latter enterprise is rather like trying to teach oneself Chinese or Dutch without ever having heard or read a word of anything but English. Good luck with that!
It will thus take an external intervention to disrupt the vicious cycle that leads from Liberalism to Liberalism in an ideological circle perfectly closed and inescapable to those caught up in it, to halt this enormous hamster-wheel on which we run in place so that we can finally step off it and really move forward. Providence, ever-beneficent, ever-merciful, has however thoughtfully seen fit to allow Haller to do the arduous leg-work for us here, with his singular personal gifts, his rare erudition, and the lifetime he spent doing this work, and long before any of our grandparents were born. In this respect, and as paradoxical as it may seem, Haller, in the final analysis was not a man of his times, but the man of ours. His counter-revolution in science, although originally carried out in a time long past, is only right now coming into its own proper time; his scientific intervention in ideology is thus both timely (the work, as we have seen, could not serve the purpose it was originally destined for until now), and, since it was produced ahead of its proper time, gives this intervention the aforementioned external character it absolutely needs (for Haller actually grew up and held public office in one of the truly non-Liberal States that still existed right up until the time he wrote, at which time moreover it was still possible, albeit already rare, to have truly non-Liberal thoughts).
This scientific intervention, this spanner in the Liberal ideological works, is a triple-intervention, to wit:
-An initial, negative intervention: Here the whole structure of modern Liberal ideology (the "pseudo-philosophical system") is laid bare, with all of its assumptions made explicit, and one by one decisively refuted as the nonsense they are, with special attention paid to the fictions this ideology makes use of in order to cause us to perceive the reality of things as the opposite of what it manifestly is, and enable Liberalism to hide the true nature of social and political relations in plain sight, by creating blind spots in our perception that prevent even the most intelligent and thoughtful among us from seeing what is right in front us. Haller emphasizes that only way out of the maze of the pseudo-theory is to reject it categorically, along with every single one of its premises, which are fundamentally flawed, scientifically unsalvageable and worthless, and moreover once accepted must invariably sooner or later lead minds to the logical conclusion of those principles in a French-style revolution.
The purely negative work of peeling the scales from our eyes and restoring our sight having been accomplished, two positive interventions remain:
-Systematic elaboration, for the first and only time in history, of a truly rigorous and comprehensive general scientific theory of the State; a genuine political science, which like any modern empirical science constructs, on the basis of first principles, a research object, defines its variable states and its possible and necessary transformations, and from there draws corollaries which serve as hypotheses to be tested by comparing them to the facts, and validated if they correspond to those facts.
-On the basis of this purely scientific knowledge, the practice-oriented elaboration of :
a) an equally rigorous theory of justice which makes clear the respective natural rights and duties of subjects and rulers in each possible type of State, and is intended to serve as the foundation for a reality-based system of constitutional law replacing the false and unworkable Liberal pseudo-system based solely on legal fictions and empty abstractions. It should be noted that this theory of natural right is no deontology a la Immanuel Kant, concerned only with oughts as opposed to what actually is. The natural laws of right uncovered by Haller's method are effective forces in actual social life as we find it, descriptive and not just prescriptive; they are, in fact, causal natural laws in the same sense as those studied by other sciences (albeit less irresistibly deterministic in their workings) and likewise validated by their agreement with the empirical facts.
b) a purely practical theory of Statecraft, the art of enhancing, conserving and prolonging the life of States, covering most every question of domestic and foreign policy that can be addressed by way of general principles.
Having been sprung from the prison-house of ideology, and armed with Haller's invincible science, we will actually be in a position to figure out where we go from here once we have buried Liberal democracy. That part is strictly on us. Haller is no Karl Marx figure; he does not affect to furnish us with a one-size-fits-all blueprint for some kind of Utopia that awaits us at the end of History. Our future is open; it is not deterministically given in an origin that unfolds according to a fixed and irresistible dialectic; humanity has learned the hard way where that sort of thinking leads. What Haller did was to provide us with the cognitive wherewithal to work out the details for ourselves, to figure out what is possible in the yet-unclear circumstances that await us, and how to do what it will take to actually achieve it in a legitimate and sustainable manner, instead of indulging ourselves with pipe-dreams of Utopia that can't be realized in practice and in any case shouldn't be.