Karl-Ludwig von Haller's Counter-Revolution in Science.

A brief introduction (Part One).

THERE is so much going on in the political science of Haller, such exhaustive breadth of scope and survey, such punctilious attention to detail at the very same time, such a wealth of insight, such an inexhaustible reservoir of answers to most any conceivable question concerning matters political, from the metaphysical down to the most mundane practical nuts-and-bolts of everyday affairs, that a summary or secondary exposition cannot do possibly it justice. It would take at least a book-length treatise, and not a short one either; and in any case the result would be no more than a sketchy cartoon drawing, in its poverty no substitute for the real thing. The tables of contents reproduced elsewhere on this website prove it already.

     Nonetheless, the original, in the more than two centuries that have passed since its first publication, has yet to be made available in English; an obscure 19th c. Canadian professor apparently had partially translated the Restoration of Political Science and even used it in his lectures, but the project was subsequently suppressed, on grounds of its "illiberalism", in an early anticipation of contemporary academic cancel-culture. I have taken it upon myself to remedy this grave omission from the Anglophone social-science canon, having already, at the time of writing translated the entirety of the first volume; pending its publication, I thought it would it be a good idea to provide some preliminary indication, however impoverished, of its contents, in serial form. Here is the first instalment.

*****    

     The modern Liberal social order has seen better days. Whether or not it will endure for much longer, or ought to, is now a commonplace topic of discussion, while just twenty years ago the question would have seemed as preposterous as asking whether or not the sky would continue to be blue. The Liberal experiment whose origins, in the English-speaking world, now stretch back four centuries may or may not be on its last legs; but everyone finds himself forced to agree that the civic unity it was all supposed to rest upon, the ostensible body of We the People whose members joined together in search of a more perfect union, e pluribus unum, one Nation, indivisible, has cracked into shards. It is indeed becoming painfully evident that this grand solidary body, this national community united as one by the bond of citizenship common to all, never even existed except on paper, a mere juridical fiction of public or Constitutional law. For the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of millions of members of the supposed civic brotherhood have no personal ties to or dealings with one another, don't even know each other, and cannot possibly. Collectively they do not add up to a sociologically substantial and solidary entity in any meaningful way, but comprise a mere aggregation, a vast crowd, a disparate mass of isolated atoms in a non-social state.

     Meanwhile, at what sociologists like to call the "micro-level", everyday life continues to present us with human relationships that are very real, solidary, and sociologically substantial. Like all such relationships, these are based, not on the fictions and abstractions of jurisprudence, but the concrete needs of the concrete individuals within them, and their mutual satisfaction. Hence it is that men and women continue to marry, finding themselves quite unable to satisfy all the needs that marriage supplies on their own. These marriages continue to beget children, who depend on their parents to satisfy their need for food, shelter, and primary socialization, while they in turn, by existing, satisfy their parents' need to nurture offspring who will maintain the continuity of their bloodline for them. In order to acquire the material wherewithal to care for their children and themselves, one or both parents will enter in contracts with other individuals at private law, and mutually exchange something one of them has, and the other one needs- most often, various types of services for money. Finally, above and beyond these person-to-person relationships, a set of individuals with a common need can unite, form a juridical corporation of some type, and pool their resources together in order to satisfy their individual needs collectively; here is a "community" properly so-called.

     These direct, person-to-person relations- the most elementary, most natural, and by far most statistically prevalent form of human relation- by definition have some measure of heterogeneity, asymmetry, or inequality of needs and the means of satisfying them in them; for if the participants were equals in these respects, they would go it alone to the extent of their ability. And this inequality invariably begets an inequality of power and authority in the relationship. Children who are cared for must answer to their parents, who are their rightful governors. The parents, in turn, must answer to the boss, who answers to the board of directors, who in turn answer to the ruling political party, etc.

     For the most part, nobody finds all that much to object to in these everyday relations of authority and subordination, which everybody sooner or later finds themselves in. We grumble, and gripe, but go along with it anyways, recognizing that if we don't, our needs won't be met, and moreover that, as long as our superiors are in fact meeting our needs, we owe them all due deference, that basic decency demands one not bite the hand that feeds. And while abuse of authority, as a rule, isn't long-tolerated, men and women alike find, not just abuse or excess, but deficiency of the authority exercised over them to be intolerable, too. An ordinary man who appears weak and indecisive has trouble attracting and keeping a woman; a President perceived to be weak and indecisive by the voting public serves only one term of office; and the same goes for every level in between. Finally, when we ourselves are in a legitimate position to give the orders in any capacity, we expect them to be obeyed. If they aren't, we are likely to become quite upset, taking great personal offense at the insubordination, and moreover to take recourse to all means at our disposal against it; for failure to swiftly vindicate our authority against a challenge to it will likely lower our standing in the eyes of others considerably, perhaps even earn us a punishment.

     This universal lived experience of authority and obedience in everyday life, in which it figures merely as one of its natural and inevitable features among many others, no more remarkable or controversial than eating or working, makes for the most striking contrast with the abstractions of political discourse in our Liberal societies. For these abstractions turn the immediate experience of human being-in-the-world on its head.

    Experience teaches us to take the inherent inequality between human beings, and the inequalities of power and authority that result from them, for granted a part of the natural warp and woof of life; political abstractions incessantly and obsessively "problematize" them, portraying them as the great bane of human existence, a most urgent social problem. Experience teaches us that different, that is to say, unequal, people need each other, and that this need impels them into mutual relationships and society. It teaches that personal dependence, while not always the most favourable position to be in, isn't necessarily the worst either (e.g. it is a sociological truism that a personal relation of dependence on a superior always raises and never lowers the overall social status of the dependent), and that in any case everybody depends on somebody at some point in the life-course, just as somebody else, in turn, sooner or later depends on him; while political theory insists that such dependence is the very worst thing that can befall a human being, and that every possible measure should be taken to make them all absolutely independent of one another. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the founders of the Liberal feast, baldly had it: "each citizen is to be made perfectly independent of all the others, and overwhelmingly dependent upon the public power...since only the power of the State makes its members free". Experience, in its immediate contact with the natural order it participates in, teaches us that the inequality which produces this dependence is a natural fact, that different people simply have different strengths and talents to offer; but from the aloof distance of ivory-tower abstraction, inequality of any sort appears entirely man-made, the work of injustice, of vast "systems of oppression" imposed upon the human race, whose members were all born equal, and must be made equal again.

     Experience observes that, in the real world, authority, like a gun, is as good or bad as the man who wields it, and that most who have some don't abuse it, and ought to be punished if they do. Theory, working from blind precept, in advance of all observation posits the abuse or exceptional case of authority as the normal case, the one that, no matter how rare, lays bare its true essence. It accordingly reasons that all men are rapists, because some of them are; that some Whites have oppressed and abused Blacks, and "racism" therefore the congenital inheritance of every White person; and above all, that since some fathers neglect or abuse their families, it follows that the relation between father and family- the most elementary, selfless, and benevolent of all human relationships- must be the Ur-form and wellspring of every other form of oppression and injustice ("patriarchy"). Regarding it as self-evident that all personal authority is abusive, the only practical question is exactly how; hence an infinity of new forms of abuse ("micro-aggressions") are discovered with each passing day in the most innocuous forms of ordinary social interaction between superiors and subordinates, or even equals, and whether or not the participants themselves think they are oppressing and being oppressed ("systemic bias"). Everyday common sense sees the source of legitimate decision-making power as residing in property, drawing the obvious distinction between an employee and a business partner. Ideological orthodoxy insists that all decisions must, or at least ought to be, made by a majority vote in which the sole qualification for voting is human species-membership ("human rights"), irrespective of share, interest, or membership; hence e.g. the demand for a "workplace democracy" which proceeds as though the workers own the company when they don't, and the actual shareholders the employees of their employees.

     Finally, on the face of it, these ideological principles all right-thinking people are required to accept and profess as self-evidently true, in theory and practice demand the abolition of human society, and its reconstitution as a mass of perfectly equal and perfectly independent- that is to say, perfectly isolate- atoms who may or may not periodically meet for hookups or to vote in various democratic elections. But, most curiously, theory indignantly objects that it is precisely the most intimate, solidary, and direct of all human relationships, i.e. the ones based on an inequality of personal power (man and wife, parents and children, mentor and student, captain and troops, lord and vassals, etc.) that in fact comprise the great barrier to the realization of society, even though they hitherto were thought to comprise its very stuff; for society, theory teaches, is the state that obtains when all are perfectly equal and perfectly independent of one another. Personal power based on personal ability and willingness to feed, protect, and instruct others incapable of altogether fending for themselves is depicted as an anti-social force, a force for anarchy or tyranny in radical opposition to society- notwithstanding the many social relationships it is factually seen to give rise to spontaneously (which, the theory purports to prove, aren't social at all, but so much "oppression"). All social strife and discord, all social alienation, is explicable in terms of the persistence of personal power; and the perfection of society will only come about when private property, inequality of wealth and talent, and other material sources of this power are abolished for good. Then all humanity will finally, obeying the inexorable and irresistible dialectic of History, unite in one big family- even though this human family will recognize neither parents, children, nor any other social distinctions at all, and its members, perfectly self-sufficient, will have no need of each another.  

     How could this strange bifurcation between the concrete and the abstract; common sense and accredited dogma; practice and theory; sentiment and intellect; things as they are, and the words that purport to describe how they are; hypothesis and empirical evidence; and the eyes that see and the hand that writes, have ever come about? What is the likely result of grounding the very constitution of the State and the entirety of public law in assumptions about the nature of Man, law and the State that are not only false on their face, but frankly fictive, not even pretending to correspond to any actual reality; and what, by extension, the likely final fruit of the political and social practices these principles necessarily engender? Can we ever hope for a political science that will vindicate human nature, by extension, what every human being knows to be true, instead of one that denies human nature exists at all, whose "scientific" hypotheses falsify facts instead of the other way around, and which arrogantly relegates all human wisdom, practice, and lived experience to the dumpster of ignorance, error, and prejudice? In politics itself, a corresponding doctrine or worldview that will teach that good government is all about conforming to the nature of men and things, not negating it- the latter an enterprise doomed to failure at best, and disaster at worst? That it isn't the natural and spontaneous relationships that have formed between human beings from the dawn of time that are to be feared as despotic, but rather the artificial and planned dystopias dreamed up by our social engineers and technocrats, whose imaginary model societies are to be built upon the grave of the real thing?

     The foregoing, then, is a very brief thumbnail sketch of the problem-area that Karl Ludwig von Haller addresses, the questions he seeks to answer, the problems he attempts to solve, and the tasks he sets out to accomplish. Haller seeks to achieve these objectives by opposing the false and empty Liberal tradition of political science (by extension, its later offshoots and aberrations such as Marxism, Fascism, or "critical race theory"), not by means of an irrationalist Romantic flight from formal science in favour of pure intuition, but on the very terrain of science itself , with what we might call a counter-science, a social science truly worthy of the name; a genuine scientific revolution- although he himself calls it a "counter-revolution", since it aims to both vindicate the ancestral wisdom rejected by Liberal theory, and restore the natural order Liberal political practice strives to denature and destroy. Like all scientific revolutions, Haller's scientific (counter) revolution in social and political science identifies fundamental and irremediable flaws in the paradigm or conceptual framework of the existing science it displaces (Kuhn 1962); it identifies loose ends the existing paradigm cannot tie up, contradictions it cannot escape, problems it cannot solve, facts it cannot explain, and limits it cannot go beyond. Hence the old paradigm is deemed unsalvageable and rejected altogether in favour of a new one based on new and altogether incommensurable first principles.

     Very briefly, the Liberal paradigm is premised on the idea of natural equality of rights among all men, understood specifically in terms of political rights; all men, by simple virtue of their standing as members of the species, Homo Sapiens, have the same right to participate, on equal terms, in any decision-making or rule-making process wherever they happen to be (even though this has never been the case anywhere). Legislative and executive power reside can never legitimately be exercised personally, but must rest exclusively in the hands of a collective governing body held, at Constitutional law, to have been created ex nihilio by the governed (even if it avowedly wasn't) and which belongs to something called "the people", which is supposed to be a unitary body formed between every inhabitant of any given country (even if its ostensible members have no dealings with one another whatsoever and don't even know each other). Each individual member, by fact of residence on the national territory, is presumed to have forfeited his personal power- above all, the right to use force in the prosecution of justice on behalf of himself or others- in the fictive act of civic association ("social contract") supposed to have created the collective governing body or State, which monopolizes the legitimate use of force and the administration of justice under the pretext that so-called "private" individuals are by too irremediably depraved and incompetent to be able to exercise it for themselves. By means of this imaginary social contract, the so-called "state of nature", a primordial pre-social condition of anarchy and total warfare (which never existed, and whose own original proponents admitted to be fictive in any case) was put to an end, and human society created for the very first time by the State.      

     Haller's (counter) revolutionary scientific paradigm is predicated on radically incommensurable principles. Human society is a natural order, not the artificial by-product of State power; it has no historical date of origin, but exists wherever human beings are found. It wasn't created by any kind of collective deliberation followed by a social contract that forms a singular national body, but is rather a network of person-to-person relations or individual contractual agreements that form spontaneously between human beings in order to satisfy the various needs of life. The political functions of legislation, the provision of security and defense, and the execution of justice are self-sufficiently exercised within these private relationships, without anybody ever having to create an artificial public monopoly power in order to do so. In this respect, the State too is a natural phenomenon; it has always existed, and was never created as such; and rightly understood, contra Liberalism, it isn't a purely "public" entity that towers above society or the field of "private" social relations, but is itself a private social relation, the network of private contractual agreements that obtains between a politically Sovereign actor (which can be an individual, or an association of individuals), and various individuals and associations who depend on it, and on an individual basis submit to its authority in exchange for various types of advantages they receive by doing so.

     Hence the central distinction Liberalism draws between State and society, "public" and "private", is at best analytical, and even in the Liberal order itself isn't water-tight and can't be. (One need only consider the so-called phenomenon of "corruption", in which public officials exchange public resources at their disposal with various private actors in return for payouts or political support). Indeed, the only difference between a State and any so-called "private" social relation is that a State is politically independent, answering to no higher authority above it, whereas Liberalism mystifies the State as something absolutely different from ordinary social relations, an emanation of some cosmic principle of pure reason or something else that towers above mere mundane social relations from a place of transcendence, when it is in fact but one human social network among others, just that much more powerful. State and society, then, are consubstantial, each the stuff of the other; political power and authority organically inhere in the very nature of social relationships, as opposed to comprising their artificial exterior or limit.    

     Power, for Haller, consists, not in some metaphysical natural right speculatively supposed to accrue with species-membership, but the factual possession of the material wherewithal and means of either helping people or, as the case may be, hurting them. In other words, political rights are not natural rights, but acquired rights, which neither are, nor possibly can be, acquired by everybody on an egalitarian basis. By no means is this to say that Haller recognizes no natural rights; he is, in fact, an especially fierce proponent of the idea; the point is rather that power and authority don't derive from the abstract and invariant attributes of Man in general, but the concrete talents and aptitudes of particular men, which are highly variable, and by no means distributed equally. Some men just have more talents, aptitudes, drive, etc. than others; if they put these natural advantages to use, they end up with the personal property from which power spontaneously flows, and alone flows (power, according to Haller, can no more be decoupled from private property than "the shadow can be separated from the body"). These men thus establish themselves as superiors, as the lords and masters of other, less powerful men in fact and right.

     Since the power of superiors is indelibly bound up with their rightful personal or private property, it follows that, while power certainly can be exercised collectively, should its possessors choose to, contra Liberalism it need not be; it may with perfect legitimacy be exercised personally, in the capacity of e.g. an individual patriarch, lord, or, at the highest level, sovereign prince. Finally, it follows that where, for Liberalism, power may only be legitimately exercised by an impersonal governing body that supposedly holds it only in trust on behalf of the so-called people, and only in order to secure something called the "public good"- i.e. what we infamously know as the administrative State-  for Haller, the rightful owners of power legitimately make use of it for their own personal good first and foremost, just as they otherwise do with the private property and wealth from which political power flows.

     In short, Haller audaciously counters the political theory based on the egalitarian principle that men must always rule collectively as a democratic community of natural equals, with one based on the aristocratic principle that the stronger always rule the weaker, by virtue of their superior forces.

(to be cont'd)

*****

Bibliography.

Haller, Karl-Ludwig. Restoration of Political Science, or Theory of the Natural Social State against the Fiction of the Artificial Civil State, Volume One: Exposition, History, and Critique of False Academic Systems. General Principles of the Natural or Divine Order, against these Systems. Lyon and Paris: Lusand, 1844. Trans. mine.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract or Principles of Public Law. Geneva: 1762, trans. mine.