The expanding circles of social order
At the end of my previous post, I described how Yoram Hazony’s argument for nationalism depended crucially on understanding what he means by the term nation, and what distinguishes a nation from other forms of social order. The nation is a very high-level form of social arrangement, so to understand it, we must start at the bottom and work our way up. Taking this step is also where Hazony beings to distinguish his political philosophy from liberal theories. Liberal theories of political philosophy, Hazony says, root their analysis in the individual, and of individual consent:
Similarly, there is a story that instructors in politics, law, and philosophy tell their students about how states are born. They tell them that while living in a state of perfect freedom and equality, each individual consents, together with countless others, to form a government and to submit to its dictates.
The political theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes are held up as archetypes of this kind of thought. While Locke and Hobbes described life in this pre-state society differently, with Locke’s vision more idyllic and Hobbes’s view more dire, both described societies consisting of free individuals who, through their consent, create a new form of social order in the state. Hazony rejects this framing on historical grounds - there never was, in actual human history, any such state of nature where individuals operated freely, and then consented to unite into some form of government:
The enduring weakness of political philosophy descended from Hobbes and Locke is due to this one great falsehood: It pretends that political life is governed largely or exclusively on the basis of the calculations of consenting individuals as to what will enhance their safety and protect and increase their property.
Hazony rejects this whole approach. For him, the starting point isn’t the individual. It is the family:
Small institutions like the family or the squad, consisting of individuals bound together by mutual loyalties developed over long years of shared hardship and triumph, are the bedrock of all political order.
The basis for this claim is not one of normative philosophical principle, but instead an empirically observed historical reality. For all of human history, people have been born into this world not as autonomous and free individuals, but as members of a family. Being born into a family isn’t coming into existence in a “free and equal state of nature” - far from it. Families are structured and hierarchical. They are held together not through the freely chosen consent of individual members, but out of bonds of mutual loyalty, an inheritance of shared history, and obligations generated from that inheritance.
Family bonds have other noteworthy characteristics. Hazony speaks often of mutual loyalty. Mutual loyalty is something stronger than, say, a mere mutually shared interest. Humans do not see each other as entirely separate individuals, useful to engage with for the sake of welfare enhancing transactions. Instead, we see certain other people - their lives and their well-being - as intrinsically bound up with our own identity as well. A man does not look at his children as simply individuals distinct from and unconnected to himself. Instead, he sees his children as extensions of his own self, and his identity and well-being are inextricably intertwined with theirs. This is what creates genuine loyalty:
When an individual includes a certain other within the purview of his or her self, we call this attachment loyalty. When two individuals have each taken the other under the protection of their extended selves, the bond that is established is one of mutual loyalty, which allows these two individuals to regard themselves as a single entity.
Family bonds are held together by this mutual loyalty. Members of the family don’t see themselves as entirely separate from each other - they have a sense of shared identity and well-being, such that the triumphs or hardships of one family member are felt by the others.
This is not to say family life is entirely harmonious. Within a family, there can be conflict, or rivalry. But this conflict is bounded and contained by the strong family bonds and mutual loyalty between family members. And importantly, if there is an external threat to one member of the family, it is felt by the entire family and treated as a threat on them all. Collectives like families can have internal strife to some degree, but such strife is discarded when faced with some outside threat:
These experiences, in which another individual is recognized as a part of one’s self in adversity and in triumph, establish a strong distinction between an inside and an outside: an inside, comprising the two individuals, each of whom regards the other as part of a single identity; and an outside, from which a challenge arises against them, and in the face of which they experience a joint suffering and a joint success.
If I had to give a stylized example of this thinking, here’s how I would describe it. Simply imagine two brothers within a family who have a sibling rivalry. They compete with each other for favor or for status, they frequently bicker and may sometimes fight. Yet, if one brother is threatened by some outside rival, the other brother immediately discards the internal sibling rivalry and comes to the defense of his threatened brother. And in doing so, he may very well say “My brother and I may have our differences - but, if you’re messing with him, that means you’re messing with me too!”
We could try to explain this as some kind of welfare enhancing rational calculation based on the benefits provided by a mutual defense arrangement. But doing so would be indulging in a woefully deficient understanding of human nature. Indeed, people often strenuously uphold these “arrangements” when doing costs them more than they could hope to gain:
But human individuals are also capable of regarding the aims and interests of a collective or institution of which they are members as their own, and of acting upon these aims and interests even where such action will be detrimental to their lives and property. Indeed, political events are frequently determined by the actions of individuals whose motives are of just this kind.
A political theory designed to understand human beings as they are in reality, and not to tell us stories about the adventures of some fantastic creature invented by philosophers, cannot avoid this capacity of the human individual to recognize the aims of the collective as his own. Astonishing and yet as common as the air we breathe, this ability is with us every day and every hour. It is basic to our empirical nature, and there can be no convincing account of how strong human institutions are built unless this capacity is at its center.
Hence, we start at the center with human families. But families are only the inner circle of human institutions, Hazony says, and “It is out of such small units that larger-scale political institutions of every kind are built.” What are these larger scale institutions? The next level up from the family is the clan. A clan is an alliance of families, themselves held together by mutual loyalty and a shared history of common cause and common defense:
It is possible, for example, to bring together heads of families in an association of mutual loyalty to one another, in this way tying together the members of the various families in a clan. And indeed, all over the world, and in all ages, clans have been established to provide for collective defense, to establish procedures for justice between them, and to pursue common service to their gods.
Children born into families will have direct, shared experiences with their siblings, but may have no such shared experiences with others in a clan. Nonetheless, they inherit loyalty to the clan by means of their loyalty to their parents, themselves raised with loyalty to the clan:
But his parents, who have direct bonds of mutual loyalty to the other heads of families, experience the suffering and triumphs of the clan as if these were happening to themselves, and they give expression to these things. And so the child, who experiences the suffering and triumphs of his parents as if they were happening to him, is able to feel the suffering and the triumphs of the clan as his own as well.
Just like within families, there is an inside and outside dynamic within clans. Within a clan, particular families may have rivalries or struggle against each other for influence or prestige. Yet, in the face of an outside challenge, these internal rivalries give way to the mutual loyalty of the clan:
And because of this extension, he will be willing to set aside even bitter disputes with other members of his clan when a threat from the outside is experienced as a challenge to all.
From an inner circle of the family to an extended circle of the clan, the next outer ring is the tribe. Just as a clan is an alliance among families, a tribe is an alliance among clans. And, as before, there is an inside and outside dynamic at play here. Within the tribe, there can be rivalry and competition among clans. But when challenges arise from outside the tribe, the clans are called together by their bonds of mutual loyalty to rally in common cause.
And thus, we reach the final layer of how Hazony interprets society - that of the nation. As before, a nation is made up an alliance of tribes, brought together by a history of mutual defense and mutual loyalty, and sharing a common history, language, and cultural inheritance.
In modern society, Hazony says, the concept of the clan would be best used to “refer to local institutions and organizations” while the notion of the tribe would “refer to larger-scale collectives that are strong enough to vie for national influence.” He doesn’t use the more generic “community” to describe human collectives because it lacks the layering that is central to his argument. Thus, “For the sake of simplicity, I have adopted a four-tier hierarchy: family, clan, tribe, and nation.”
What a nation is - and what a nation is not
Throughout Hazony’s description of each of the above tiers, he often speaks of shared history. That is, a clan is made out of an alliance of families with a shared history of mutual defense and so forth, and tribes from clans with a similar shared history. This is another important part of understanding Hazony’s argument. Families are fundamental to humans. But clans, tribes, and nations are things that develop organically, over time. They develop in light of shared histories, cultural heritages, and experiences. For example, when talking about a nation, Hazony says
By a nation, I mean a number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies—characteristics that permit tribes so united to understand themselves as a community distinct from other such communities that are their neighbors.
Tribes that lack this shared heritage and history can’t simply be thrown together and genuinely create a nation. Nor does a mere geographical proximity create a nation - while this proximity may be a necessary condition for a nation to emerge, it is not sufficient. As Hazony puts it in a remark in the endnotes:
A bounded land or territory is typically a part of this national heritage. But notice that a bounded land receives its identity from the nation that lives on it, and not the nation from the land, as is often claimed.
Put another way, it is the people on the land that create a nation, and not the land that makes a nation out of people. So, at this point, it may also be clarifying to describe not merely what a nation is on this understanding, but also what a nation is not.
A nation is not the same thing as the state. Nation and state are distinct from each other:
These definitions mean, in the first place, that a nation is a form of community, a human collective recognizing itself as distinct from other human collectives. Such a community can exist independently of the state, and does not have to include every individual living within the state.
To disentangle the idea of nation and state, it would be helpful to look at some concrete examples. Consider, in the first case, the ancient Greeks, prior to the rise of the Roman Empire. While there were city states among the Greek civilization, there was no Greek national state. Nonetheless, the Greek people themselves would still have constituted a nation, on Hazony’s understanding, even in the absence of a Greek national state. In more modern times, one could point to the Kurds. While the Kurds lack a state of their own, we can still sensibly speak of a Kurdish nation that nonetheless exists.
On the other side of things, you can have a state in the absence of a nation. Hazony particularly cites the creation of the Syrian and Iraqi states, drawn into existence by fiat by European nations as part of their own misadventures in building and managing empires. These places, Hazony says, were “brought into being as non-national states.” Why were these states non-national? Consider the case of Iraq:
Thus, for example, the state of Iraq attained its independence from imperial Britain in 1932 as a consequence of boundaries drawn in negotiation with France. There had never in history been an “Iraqi” nation prior to this, but the British, ignoring national and religious boundaries, nonetheless asserted that such a nation could be created by forcing together Kurdish, Assyrian, Sunni Arab, and Shia Arab tribes, among others—peoples sharing neither language nor religion, nor a prior history of united action. They were called a nation and given a written constitution, a flag, and the right to send ambassadors the world over, as well as various other symbols of a national state…However, there was no truth in any of this. In reality, Sunni Arabs were the dominant tribal group, holding the state together through the ruthless oppression of the much larger population of Shiite Arabs. The large Kurdish population never accepted Arab rule.
In the case of Syria, too, it was imagined that a nation would be created simply by declaring the existence of a new state:
A similar fate has befallen Syria, which was established as an independent state by the French in 1946. There had never in history been a “Syrian” nation prior to this, the name itself having been invented by the Greeks to describe this geographic region. Yet contrary to the evident facts, the Alawite, Druze, Kurd, Assyrian Christian, and Sunni Arab tribes in this arbitrarily drawn territory were declared a nation.
Recall that Hazony says a nation is “a number of tribes with a common language or religion, and a past history of acting as a body for the common defense and other large-scale enterprises.” These conditions did not exist within the political borders created for Syria or Iraq. These states were created without reference to an underlying nation. And in the absence of a nation and the shared history and heritage they entail, the tribes within those states were not united through the mutual loyalty nations require. So, each of these countries descended into opposing tribes struggling to dominate all the other tribes within their borders, and once power was seized, the dominant tribe ruthlessly oppressed all other tribes within the country.
A nation, then, is not made by political borders. There is a relationship between the two, but it goes in the other direction. The existence of a nation is what informs where borders should be drawn, but you can’t draw borders to create nations.
Additionally, it’s worth pointing out that a nation is not a racial or ethnic monolith, nor is it static with regards to the tribes considered members of a nation. Hazony traces this point all the way back to the ancient Israeli writings about nations:
It is important to notice that the Israelites’ conception of the nation has nothing to do with biology, or what we call race. For biblical nations, everything depends on a shared understanding of history, language, and religion that is passed from parents to children, but which outsiders can join as well. Thus the book of Exodus teaches that there were many Egyptians who attached themselves to the Hebrew slaves in fleeing Egypt, and that they received the Ten Commandments (more accurately translated as the “Ten Precepts”) at Sinai with the rest of Israel. Similarly, Moses invites the Midianite sheikh Jethro to join the Jewish people. And Ruth the Moabite becomes part of Israel when she is ready to tell Naomi “your people is my people and your God is my God,” her son being the forefather of King David himself.
And this means nations can integrate not only new individuals, but entire clans or tribes:
This constant regeneration of shattered bonds of mutual loyalty means that families can and do adopt individual members that were not born among them, and that clans adopt entire families that were not born among them. In the same way, nations adopt not only foreign individuals and families, but entire tribes that were once foreigners but are not considered foreigners any longer.
Also important is noticing that a nation is not unbounded. Because the life and health of a nation is based on a shared history and heritage, nations don’t, and can’t, extend across the earth. Each nation is shaped and defined according to its own unique history, heritage, and geography. The failure to recognize this is something for which Hazony takes Locke to task:
In [John Locke’s] Second Treatise, there is no in-principle limit to the size of state or the number of people whose property it can propose to protect, and the state is in fact eerily without boundaries or borders of any kind. According to the law of nature, Locke writes, “mankind are one community.” The existence of political boundaries among men is, as far as he is concerned, nothing but a product of human “corruption and viciousness.”
To Hazony, it’s critically important that nations be limited by boundaries, and that nations do not seek to impose themselves across those boundaries on the peoples of other nations. The conditions that make it possible for nation to exist are organic conditions that emerge in ways that are specific to circumstances of time and place. They are fundamentally local phenomenon, not interchangeable and transferable universals. Where those conditions are met, nations exist, and the boundaries separating those nations are crucial for maintaining peace and stability both within and between different nations.
All of this discussion about what a nation is, and what a nation is not, only sets the stage for the next part of this discussion. We know what a nation is, but how is it that nations form, and helps them endure through time? That will be reviewed in the next post.