The Formation of Nations
In the last post, I reviewed Yoram Hazony’s analysis of the different layers of social order - family, clan, tribe, and nation. If by chance you haven’t read that post, please do so before reading this one - the definitions established in that post are important for understanding the ideas contained in this one.
So, given what Hazony means by the idea of the nation, there is still some exploring to do regarding the formation of nations. What brings nations into being, how do nations become national states, and what holds them together?
We saw in the previous post that for Hazony, the family is the fundamental unit of social order. We are all born into this social order. And family comes with obligations - not generated from consent, but by the very nature of family itself:
Most of us suppose that brothers and sisters born to the same parents have a special responsibility to help one another in a time of need that takes precedence over other obligations. In the same way, we would suppose that grandparents have obligations toward their grandchildren, and that grandchildren have obligations toward their grandparents. But none of these family relationships are the result of consent: One does not choose one’s brothers or one’s grandchildren. And so these obligations must derive from other sources.
Here again we see Hazony rooting his ideas in stark contrast to how he sees liberal theories of political order. In liberal political theories, free and equal individuals must refrain from actively aggressing against or harming others, but they carry no affirmative obligations towards others. Obligations only arise when they originate in the consent of the free individual:
Every theory involves a reduction or simplification of its material, of course. But a well-framed theory will capture the most consequential features of the domain being studied, while a poorly framed one will let crucial elements slip away unnoticed. And so it is with the Second Treatise, which offers a rationalist view of human political life that has abstracted away every bond that ties human beings to one another other than consent. In speaking of “consent,” Locke means that the individual becomes a member of a human collective only because he has agreed to it, and has obligations toward such collectives only if he has accepted them.
Hazony’s objection to this approach is not theoretical. It is empirical, because it fails to describe how human collectives have been formed and maintained in actual history. Starting with family, and moving up to tribes and clans, we are each born into an existing collective founded on mutual loyalty and a shared inheritance. And it is the fact of being born into this existing relationship and that generates our obligations to it, and also the obligations of the collective to each of its individual members. Obligations of this sort are inherited, not chosen through free consent:
However, [Locke’s theory] is painfully lacking as a description of the empirical political world, in which mutual loyalties bind human beings into families, tribes, and nations, and each of us receives a certain religious and cultural inheritance as a consequence of being born into such collectives. It ignores the responsibilities that are intrinsic to both inherited and adopted membership in collectives of this kind, establishing demands on individuals that do not arise as a result of consent and do not disappear if consent is withheld. And it is oblivious to the effects of a common adversity, which brings inevitable challenges and hardships to families, tribes, and nations, reinforcing the responsibilities to the collective and turning them into the most acutely felt, and often immovable, features of the moral and political landscape. No intelligent account of politics, or of political obligation, can be devised that does not give great weight to these factors.
By abstracting away these factors, and by denying that there are positive obligations and responsibilities placed on the individual “that do not arise from consent and do not disappear if consent is withheld,” these political theories create “a far-reaching depreciation of the most basic bonds that hold society together.” A world where each individual “is under no obligations other than those to which he has consented” becomes a world where the “institutions that result from and impart bonds of loyalty and common purpose” will ultimately “appear to have no reason to exist.”
In reality, the way nations are formed bears no resemblance to the descriptions given in Locke’s writings. Locke, and those who follow in his footsteps, have skipped a very important step in considering these questions. Locke’s writing falls into a subject Hazony calls “the philosophy of government, which seeks to determine the best form of government.” Of course this is an important and worthy question. But there is a more fundamental issue that needs to be examined first, one Hazony calls “the philosophy of political order, which seeks to understand the causes of political order, and on the basis of this understanding, to determine what are the different forms of political order available to us and which of them is best.” What we learn from studying the philosophy of political order sets the boundaries within which we can consider the questions of a philosophy of government.
This is what Locke and similar theories lack, according to Hazony. They assume away the questions political order, which history shows is rooted in the order of families, tribes, and clans, and instead considers questions of government considering only the detached individual bounded by nothing other than their own consent.
By moving back a step from the philosophy of government to the philosophy of political order, we can then ask the key question:
Is the state formed when independent individuals consent to living under government, or through the unification of previously existing cohesive communities?
Hazony comes down squarely on the latter. It is a unification of an already existing order of tribes, itself the result of a preexisting order of clans and families, that creates the nation and through it, the national state. Nowhere in history has there ever been a nation or a state that was created as a result of individual consent. States are born from either violent conquest, or by the willing unification of an established order of tribes:
[Hobbes and Locke] assert that the agency for establishing the state is the consent of each individual, and that the motive for this consent is a calculation that the establishment of the state will best protect his life and property. In reality, however, there is no such consent and no such calculation. In the case of conquest, the consent of the common individual is utterly irrelevant. And even when a free state is formed through the unification of a nation’s tribes, this takes place because bonds of mutual loyalty have been established among the heads of these tribes with the aim of establishing peace among them and securing their joint independence and way of life in the face of foreign menace. The common individual is not asked to consent to national unification and independence, which is decided upon in counsels to which he has little access, and as a rule he will adopt a posture of loyalty to the national state out of loyalty to his tribe, even if he regards the decisions of its leaders to have been questionable. It is thus the interests and aspirations of the tribe and the nation, as these are understood by the tribal leadership, that are decisive in the birth of a free state.
Here, one might consider the American founding. As covered in the previous post, Hazony described “clans” in modern society as “local institutions and organizations” while “tribes” are “larger-scale collectives that are strong enough to vie for national influence.” We can consider, then, the thirteen colonies of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and so forth, to have been the tribes, and within those colonies, local communities and organizations made up the level of clans. At the time of the American founding, there was a real question about whether or how to bring these tribes together to stand against the British. Many asked questions like “What do we, the people of Delaware, really have to do with the people of Georgia?” People saw themselves as loyal to their clans and their tribes, but there was not yet a fully established sense of a shared national identity. The Continental Congress was, in effect, a collaboration among the leaders of tribes to ally themselves together in common cause against a common enemy, and to bind these tribes together as a new nation.
Here we can clearly see how the Lockean description fails to make contact with reality. None of the discussions and negotiations leading from the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation to the ratification of the Constitution occurred because each free individual in the colonies consented to the process or to the outcome. But the leaders of these disparate tribes agreed among themselves to bring themselves into a unity as a new nation, and the individuals of this new nation extended their loyalty to the nation through their existing loyalty to their tribes, clans, and families. These extended loyalties are what hold nations together. And without the mutual loyalties of family, clan, and tribe, nations cannot hold themselves together.
Given this understanding of what the nation is, and how nations are formed, we can finally turn to the question of what it means to be a nationalist. In the next post, I’ll explore what Hazony means when he speaks of nationalism, and how it stands in contrast to alternate forms of political order.