And so it begins
It’s that time again. Time to pick a book I’ve recently read and go through its arguments in depth. The book this time is The Virtue of Nationalism, and the author is Yoram Hazony. As always when I do these reviews, I’ll begin with a series of posts where I outline the views and arguments of the author. For this first portion, my goal is to present and describe the views of the author in a way that is fair, accurate, and charitable. The measure of my success on that front would be if the author of the book I’m reviewing reads my description and would agree that what I’ve written is a fair summary of their views. As a result, the first several posts in my review series are works of explication rather than evaluation. Only after I’ve described the ideas and the arguments of the book will I then turn to evaluating those ideas - what I find persuasive, what I find unconvincing, or what I believe is mistaken.
That said, I can imagine there are a couple of questions people might have at the start of this review. Why review this book? Isn’t nationalism obviously a bad thing? Let’s start with the first.
Why review this book?
One good reason to review this book is the simple fact that the book serves as an intellectual cornerstone for the national conservative movement. Whether you admire or abhor this movement, its influence at the present moment can’t be denied. As a result, it’s all the more important to fully understand what this movement is, what it advocates, and the arguments brought to bear in support of these ideas. This should seem all the more true for those who are opposed to national conservatism - you can’t effectively push back against a movement you don’t understand.
For the purpose of understanding the ideas behind a movement, this book is a good place to start. It’s not bombastic - the author doesn’t write in the manner of someone screaming from a pulpit. If your main exposure to nationalist conservatives has been through online discourse, you’re almost certainly working with a poor understanding of the intellectual background behind national conservatism. This isn’t a problem unique to national conservatism - almost all online discourse of almost every topic mostly consists of people with a poor understanding of the ideas they’re espousing, snidely condescending at everyone else for the sake of online clout.
(What’s that you say? Isn’t me writing this review also a form of online discourse describing an idea? Yes, yes it is. However, I’m at least keeping in mind the way that online discourse drags people to the lowest possible denominator and making an effort to avoid it!)
Isn’t nationalism obviously terrible?
Well, that depends on what one means by “nationalism,” I suppose. People who think of nationalism as an obviously terrible idea also tend to define nationalism as a collection of, well, obviously terrible ideas. That is, ask them what they mean by “nationalism” and they’ll say something like “an ideology that teaches people to believe they are the superior race, that people who live in other countries are intrinsically inferior, is obsessed with racial purity, and glorifies the conquest of so-called ‘lesser’ people.” Well jeez, if that is how you define nationalism, then sure, I agree nationalism is an obviously terrible idea! Case closed! I can’t believe anyone’s still talking about it!
Unless, of course, it’s not that simple, and we’re making things a little too easy on ourselves? Perhaps what’s going on here is that people are insisting that obviously terrible things be built into nationalism by definition and therefore satisfying themselves they’ve successfully demonstrated nationalism is obviously terrible?
Whatever one thinks of the philosophy of Willard Quine, one thing I think he got absolutely right is that interpreting the ideas of others depends on what he called the principle of charity. As he put it, “assertions startlingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of language.” If you think nationalism means something like what I described above, then the assertion that nationalism is a virtue will certainly seem startlingly false on its face. But that very fact should make you suspect that there is a hidden difference of language at play - maybe what Hazony means by “nationalism” is actually a completely different set of ideas, and therefore his argument can’t be simply swept away as obviously false. Of course, you might still conclude it’s wrong - but you can’t know that without understanding what the argument actually is.
Hazony is well aware of this problem - he speaks to it in the beginning of his book. He argues that the meaning of nationalism has been twisted in modern discourse, saying “nationalism was not always understood to be the evil that current public discourse suggests. Until only a few decades ago, a nationalist politics was commonly associated with broad-mindedness and a generous spirit.” But this is no longer the case, Hazony says, and “today we live in the aftermath, in which a simplistic narrative, ceaselessly repeated, asserts that ‘nationalism caused two world wars and the Holocaust.’ And who, in fact, would want to be a nationalist if nationalism means supporting racism and bloodshed on an unimaginable scale?”
So in starting this review, I also have something to ask of you, dear reader. Whatever it is you mean when you speak of “nationalism” - I request you put that definition on the shelf for now. In order to properly evaluate the nationalist argument, one must meet the nationalists where they are. You may think that nationalism means believing X. Hazony, in turn, might argue that nationalism means believing Z. If that turns out to be the case, the appropriate response is not to double down and declare that X is what nationalism really means, and that the Z Hazony describes isn’t real nationalism. If your goal is to increase your understanding, and to engage in productive discourse, here’s an underrated rule of thumb: if someone tells you that you’ve misunderstood or misrepresented their argument, it’s far more likely that you have in fact misunderstood their view, than them having have somehow misinterpreted their own opinion.
So what exactly is nationalism, as understood by the nationalists themselves? We’ll be looking at that over the course of this review series.
The first posts in this series will be looking at how Hazony defines his terms - terms like nation, government, and state, for example, play an important role in his argument. To many people, these all seem like synonyms - isn’t the government just another term for the state? Isn’t a nation just the same thing as a country, or a state? Not for this discussion. When Hazony refers to a nation, he refers to a concept that is distinct from either country, government, or state. Understanding the differences among these terms is crucial for understanding Hazony’s argument.
In order to understand this framework, the next post will be focusing on two main points. First, what are the different orders into which societies are arranged, and how to they relate to each other? Second, what exactly does it mean to be a nation, and what distinguishes this particular form of social order? Stay tuned for the next post to find out!