An Urban History of Prosperity’s Menace, and Those Who Sought (and Still Seek) to Tame It

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Regarding Abundance

One of the big topics of conversation among left-leaning and liberal pundits, politicians, and intellectuals so far in 2025 has been “abundance.” The key idea—mostly tied to the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book of that title, but also related to many other claims that have been building for years—is that the United States has forgotten how to build things, and in particular, how to build things for the common good. Making policy changes so as to prioritize the government getting homes built, grids wired, bridges erected, etc., as opposed to prioritizing other, more egalitarian or environmental aims, is the best way to create an electoral constituency for otherwise popular progressive goals, or so the argument goes. 

The data behind the argument is hardly original; libertarians have talked about how America has paralyzed itself through regulations for decades, and socialists have talked about how America’s obsession with profit has resulted in bloated corporations sucking up our inventiveness for just as long. But Klein and Thompson’s Abundance is significant because it uses this data to make an argument that challenges America’s liberal establishment directly (an establishment that both authors are very much a part of). The book itself is open-ended about the direction of that challenge. Is it a call for a return to the New Deal, with the government taking a direct hand in boosting basic industrial and economic projects (but mostly only those)? Or is it a neoliberal apology for big business, who would be happy to lend their productive powers to America’s state capacity in exchange for being released from various democratic restrictions and procedures? (That the Trump administration has gleefully ignored Constitutional process in the name of “getting stuff done” has only complicated the call for, and the costs of, an “abundance” orientation.) 

A Different, Yet Defining Perspective 

Daniel Wortel-London’s superb new book, The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981, appears to have no direct relevance to this debate. But indirectly, Wortel-London (whose politics are clearly leftist, and highly critical of the too-common celebration of capitalist development in American life) presents a way of understanding “abundance” that is, I think, of immense value. Like the very best forms of historical research, The Menace of Prosperity uses a particular place (America’s largest and most influential city, New York) and a particular time (the 1870s to the 1970s, a century during which New York City’s citizens and leaders alike saw, celebrated, and struggled against their city’s transformation from a large urban center to a global financial megapolis) to reveal something general—in this case, something essential to the urban landscapes where 80% of all Americans live. By so doing, Daniel-Wortel also provides readers with something close to a defining perspective on how we should think about economic growth today.

Wortel-London takes his title from a line in Lewis Mumford’s 1938 classic, The Culture of Cities: “From the standpoint of decent metropolitan living one might well speak of the ‘menace of prosperity.’” The specific context of Mumford’s comment was the push in the 1930s by a large number of New York City’s power players for “fiscal stabilization.” Following the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the immense debt being carried by American cities led many urban leaders and bodies (though not, it must be said, anything like a majority of New Yorkers) to embrace a surprising mix of local conservation and progressive reform, some of which echoed the premises of early New Deal programs like the National Resource Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Cities, this argument went, needed to restrict speculation and preserve their locally available economic stock (in terms of land, natural resources, material goods, labor, and productive capacities). As Wortel-London puts it: 

At their most ambitious, these entities promoted a truly radical understanding of municipal well-being: one based not on meeting the whims of the wealthy through debt but on meeting the needs of the city’s working people through its existing resources. Meeting these needs, to be sure, might require deflating the speculative expectations and property values that had accrued in more irrational times. But the reward for this deflation would be abundance: cheaper land would enable more sanitary low-income housing, restrictions on development would enable green spaces, and all this would, in the end, save New York from the instability and social costs that “prosperity” had inflicted upon it (The Menace of Prosperity, p. 121, bold added).

What is being pulled out of this particular moment in Wortel-London’s argument is a different understanding of abundance. Rather than focusing on an abundance of produced goods, focus on an abundance of productive land; rather than building an orientation around increasing supply, build an orientation around the collective use of that which has already been supplied—which for cities means the productive locality upon which one stands. This is not low-tax conservatism, nor is it supply-side progressivism; it is conservation for the sake of democratic empowerment. This is my formulation of Wortel-London’s language, and he may not agree with it, but it shows the value of his research to the abundance conversation—and The Menace of Prosperity has a rich historical tale on its side.

Of course, the insights which history reveal to us will never remain static, and Wortel-London’s careful, sharply detailed unpeeling of NYC’s fiscal evolution demonstrates this well. The particular moment of urban reform which Mumford sought to build upon unfortunately passed, as all moments of reform similarly come and go, some leaving lesser or greater improvements in their wake, but all contributing to the constantly evolving struggle which American cities face. The key point of that struggle is presented at the book’s beginning as the repeated realization by multiple generations of New Yorkers that “the costs of elite-driven growth outweigh its benefits” (p. 2). But why is that a lesson that never sticks?  

The Dilemma of Cities Over Time 

Cities are places of expansion and experimentation. They have been imagined as such in the Western world ever since their emergence as centers of commerce and education in the late Medieval era, promising opportunity and freedom—“Stadtluft macht frei”—to all who relocated there. That such opportunity and freedom were entwined with alienation and poverty was, of course, also understood by many; hence the abiding Jeffersonian preference for an agrarian life. But the specialized material promises of city life—the occupational and social variety, the artistic excellence that even Jefferson admitted to, the tolerance, and the wealth they provide a social space for—have nonetheless continually drawn the masses of humanity into urban environments, meaning that the governance of such cities is always centrally about responding to the demands for growth, and then managing what Wortel-London refers to as their “social costs” (p. 3)—economic stratification, disinvestment in marginalized neighborhoods, community breakdown, and that old Jeffersonian concern, dependency. 

The history of American cities following the Civil War, as the American economy came to prioritize large-scale manufacturing and trade over agriculture and small-scale artisanship, became a history of capitalizing upon land—the land that city-dwellers were moving to occupy, the land that entrepreneurs wanted to place factories upon, the land that investors realized would increase in value. This search for capital was driven by both voters and speculators—and since cities were Constitutionally-defined non-sovereign entities, subject to state and the national governments, that capital could mostly be obtained in only a few ways. Slowly, through taxation, which has never been a popular revenue stream; more quickly, through debt-financing, the easiest and most fiscally devastating stream that cities have relied upon; or most directly of all, through transfers from other jurisdictions and governments, which is the stream they have the least amount of control over. (The additional possibility of cities running, on behalf of their citizens, profit-making public utilities to generate funds has been, as Wortel-London details, sadly reduced as a viable option.) The latter two methods qualify as “elite-driven”—and redirecting these methods of raising capital towards actual democratic, broad-based uses, as opposed to following elite development preferences, was (and is) something rarely accomplished.

The Menace of Prosperity’s hundred-year survey of the “fiscal imagination” of NYC’s (and, across America, other urban) leaders is essentially a remarkable recitation of attempts at this kind of redirection. The pattern is similar: the costs of elite-driven growth are recognized, are responded to with reforms, and those reforms, successful or (more commonly) not, eventually become embedded in the continuing evolution of the city, such that they develop their own constituencies and become a new basis for demands of, again, elite-driven relief. That may sound like a hopeless cycle, but it isn’t presented as such. With each response to every fiscal crisis in New York City’s history, Wortel-London shows us individuals thinking creatively to craft solutions that will improve the life of the city—though he also shows us how the “sunk costs” of previous efforts to tame elite-driven growth and make the productive possibilities of urban spaces more available to all city inhabitants add up over time.

In the 1880s and 1890s we see Henry George and his “fiscal republican” followers fight to institute some version of a land-value tax, one that would “by taxing land at 100 percent of its value….force landlords to either lower land prices in the hope of attracting productive enterprises to their property and making some kind of profit, or to sell their land to those who would….[thus] liberat[ing] urban real estate markets from the distortions of the speculator…[and] making it easier to establish businesses and freeing cities to reach their economic potential” (p. 36). The failure of the Georgist campaign was a great loss—one unfortunately tied to its unwillingness to consider cooperative alternatives, with its hyper-focus upon real estate development undermining its own constituency “once opponents of fiscal republicanism provided alternative policies for acquiring property ownership and achieving local growth” (p. 51).

Forty years later, the once-Georgist homeowners and local producers in New York’s outer boroughs, who had learned to organize—in good local democratic fashion—on behalf of the debt-financed integration of the city’s periphery with the downtown through subways, bridges, and more, were now the key opponents to the aforementioned “fiscal stabilizers.” In the view of reformers, the public sector—which “was not as committed to pursuing speculative profit”—was crucial to the development of an “economically self-sustaining” housing market which could cool the fluctuations of New Deal-era urban economies (pp. 115-116). In one of his more insightful arguments (in a book filled with them), Wortel-London details how elements of the New Deal’s conservation orientation were compromised by its sincere attempt to include “local governments and civic bodies,” with the result that “rather than seek out new solutions,” many in the Roosevelt administration “attempted to supplement older approaches with new financing, standing ready to pick up the municipal slack for assisting realty along the same lines local governments had.” The result—“federal support for suburban homeownership”—predictably “worked against efforts to restrict peripheral growth” (pp. 134, 136). Public housing couldn’t compete with such subsidized expansion. 

By the 1970s, as movements in support of civil rights, women’s rights, and the environment reached their peak, suggestions in response New York City’s latest crisis over growth were perhaps more radical than they had been in nearly a century. While the city’s liberal establishment embraced the post-WWII logic of corporate growth and redistributive taxation, others, inspired by visionaries like Paul Goodman and Jane Jacobs, started to push for rebuilding the city’s economy through decentralization, a move towards empowering neighborhoods and communal associations through “close-grained tax allowances” and the loosening of centralized zoning rules, without reliance upon “cataclysmic money” from the national government (p. 177). For the first time in the city’s history, non-Caucasians had a major presence in these arguments, as many Black activists came to see the “lack of local economic control” as a central concern (Wortel-London reports that as of 1960, “four-fifths of Harlem’s commercial and residential properties were owned by non-locals” and “four-fifths of the Harlem workforce was employed outside the community”—p. 183). But the immense momentum enjoyed by New York elites—both governmental and corporate—who bet on making the city a center of the globalized economy gave them resources to finance Jacobsian-style reforms in the city’s built environment, all while ignoring the fiscal imagination of these cooperative radicals: 

At their most ambitious, groups holding to this [cooperative, localist] vision claimed that New York’s existing development strategies—recreating the city in the image of its most powerful and profitable enterprises—was both unjust and uneconomic. And at their most radical, they argued that the economic health of neighborhoods could only take place through outright community ownership. Nonetheless, most of these “fiscal communitarians” lacked the agonistic edge that earlier fiscal reform movements held. While White brownstoners were eager to preserve some of the city’s existing housing stock, they had little inclination to displace the white-collar enterprises where many of them worked. And many in the city’s Black neighborhoods were less interested in empowering their communities than in empowering their own enterprises within those communities. Ultimately, New York’s liberal policy-makers were able to meet these demands while further accelerating the city’s white-collar development…. Oblivious to the costs of private growth and unwilling to imagine alternatives, New York’s liberal establishment would keep their faith in the city’s white-collar economy (p. 192).  

An Abundance of Urban Alternatives, If We Can See Them 

 In the end, Wortel-London believes the history of New York City’s repeated reforms of, and frequent failures in redirecting the consequences of, elite-driven growth, teach that “we cannot frame the fiscal dilemmas of local governments in simple terms of economic development versus economic decline” (p. 225). The assumptions of NYC’s elites—that subsidies can provide fiscal solvency, that wealth generation can pay for welfare—unfortunately continue to obtain throughout American cities, despite concerted efforts to show the long-term financial costs and liabilities of expanding infrastructure, and the equally devastating social costs of centering city life around the cult of business development. Growth, very simply, should not be entirely about expansions of supply or increases of goods. Partly because those expansions and increases depend too often upon the exclusionary capitalization of spatial resources that urban communities nominally offer to everyone who relocates to them, and partly because such capitalization invariably cannibalizes itself, requiring the process of seeking elite investment and debt-financing to continue unabated, perpetuating the crises which The Menace of Prosperity expertly details. 

But Wortel-London doesn’t leave his readers without hope. On the contrary, in the book’s final pages he affirms that we can build upon the history of America’s cities, as so many reformers have done before. It’s been more than 40 years since the end of The Menace of Prosperity’s story, and fiscal struggles remain; why not turn again to considering how it is that “locally oriented firms with alternative ownership structures…can provide more public revenue, with less public costs, than seemingly ‘wealthier’ firms,” and that “lodging the ownership and operation of economic enterprises within [a city’s] most marginalized communities….[will] provide these communities with much needed resources while expanding their political autonomy,” thereby working to democratize the finance structure under which all of us who live in cities depend (pp. 225, 227)? 

In a recent essay, Wortel-London looked at the likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, as the latest potential participant in this ongoing struggle. Many may dismiss him the moment they hear him self-identify as a “democratic socialist”—but for city-dwellers who want (as they should) to take the lessons that The Menace of Prosperity laid out seriously, Mamdani’s talk about municipally owned grocery stores, rent freezes for qualifying tenants, and loan forgiveness for small businesses, ought to provide some food for thought. Financing these programs is the problem, as always—and yet those with urban faith might look to cooperatives, land trusts, public banking, and other innovations (all of which have drawn upon the same lessons this book reveals) as routes to explore. 

The faith that something cooperative, something Jeffersonian, can be built into the operation of urban liberalism may seem a faint hope. But for close to 1000 years, people have come to urban centers looking for opportunities, carrying with them new ideas, hoping for the freedom to build upon them. The wealth of America’s cities are immense; the most important lesson of Wortel-London’s magisterial history is that, if tens of thousands of city residents over the years have seen, in their time and in their particular context, a means to tie that wealth less to elite use and more to abundant employment, why shouldn’t we join those who are continuing to seek to realize, in today's context, this vision once more?

Thoughts on MacIntyre

Via Alan Jacobs, I’ve learned that Alasdair MacIntyre passed away on Thursday, at the age of 96. Unlike other philosophers, theologians, and political theorists I’ve written memorials to on my blog over the years, MacIntyre’s work—which engaged deeply with issues of ethics, Aristoteliansim, and rationality—never had a major impact on my own. Still, I don’t see how any English-speaking student of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped by After Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981; I was, like everyone else, and in that sense I owe him as much a debt as any other thinker I linked to above.

For a long time, my understanding of that debt was inextricable from the liberal-communitarian debates which academic philosophers and political theorists (including folks like me who were trained to become such, and for whom even if it didn’t quite work out that way, still can’t get that debate off my mind) who are today in their 50s were inundated with in graduate school. MacIntyre always denied being a communitarian, though he was lumped in with them anyway, and I think not inappropriately so. Beyond all the sturm und drang which attend any kind of intellectual argument over the drawing of disciplinary and ideological lines, there remains the simple fact that MacIntyre self-professed “revolutionary Aristotelianism” ultimately pointed to the local community, to the centrality of tradition, and to the continuity of stories and language—in other words, to things and phenomena very much beyond the ambit of the sovereign, rights-bearing individual—as the starting point to any of kind rationally defensible moral philosophy, to say nothing of any kind of actual civic health. By making the—I still think highly persuasive—argument that liberal individualism leaves us with what he called a mere “emotivism” as a basis for understanding, interpreting, and judging our own and others’ actions, he absolutely add significantly to a broad set of communitarian ideas which are still valid today.

Of course, today it is the postliberals who are most interested in claiming the communitarian MacIntyre for themselves. As bizarre that MacIntyre himself apparently found the prospect that his writings had somehow inspired people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others to embrace the goal of a retreat from and an overturning of the current liberal order, MacIntyre’s contempt for the conservative acceptance of capitalist inequality (when asked in 1996 what he still retained from his pre-Aristotelian Marxist phase, MacIntyre simply stated “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post”) probably isn’t enough to prevent that appropriation. Fred Dallmayr—who, as I’ve written, understood what it means to move beyond liberalism much better than most of those who parade that label—noted in a chapter from his book Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World that MacIntyre’s thinking, which he called “stellar,” nonetheless evinces a certain “metaphysical realism” and “functionalism,” thereby undermining ways of thinking about our situation which call for a more immanent, more attendant, more patient approach. MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelianism absolutely does not call for a revolutionary communitarian imposition, but it’s possible the way in which he formulated those ideas opened up an interpretation of them that he firmly disagreed with.*

But it would be wrong to make any set of reflections of MacIntyre’s immense philosophical achievements to rest entirely upon the political contestation over his prioritization of community. Far better, I think, would be to say something about how MacIntyre defined the communities of tradition, locality, and story in question. Because that can take us in an interesting direction.

In a book of MacIntyre’s that doesn’t appear to me to get much critical praise, but which was very important to me once upon a time (maybe even more so than After Virtue), he explored a fundamental, philosophical challenge to communitarian ideas, though he didn’t use that language to set up the problem. Essentially: if you’re not going to employ universalist concepts whose rationality are available to all individuals equally, and rather are going to insist upon the priority of concepts that have some communal, historical, or cultural particularity, then how can you avoid relativism? In short (and as the title of the book in questions asked): if you’re going to tie the possibility of rational, moral judgment to particular communities, then Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? should we employ? MacIntyre’s answer to these questions is dense and rewarding, and pretty much impossible to briefly summarize. But the first step is recognizing how forthright he is in accepting the puzzle. There is no attempt to sideline what it means accept that Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment, cannot be made logically universal:

But since practical reasoning, as Aristotle understands it, involves the capacity to bring the relevant premises concerning good and virtues to bear on particular situations and since this capacity is inseparable from, is indeed a part of, the virtues, including justice, it is also the case that one cannot be practically rational without being just. And for reasons which are in essentials the same as those which entailed the conclusion that one cannot be just apart from membership in some particular polis, one cannot be practically rational apart from membership in some particular polis. That one’s rationality should be not merely supported by but partly constituted by one’s membership in and integration into a social institution of some particular type is a contention very much at odds with characteristically modern views of rationality (p. 123).

Philosophical liberals will, of course, tear their hair out at that conclusion, but the rigor with which he makes this argument has stood the test of time: we are not self-constructing, but rather socially constituted beings, and thus mostly think, and judge, by and through those institutions and histories and forms which characterized our constitution. Okay—but does that mean all of them? Obviously not; some communal phenomena and constructions are far more relevant to questions of justice and rationality than others. For MacIntyre, the primary one—obviously so, given the importance he attaches to stories—is language, and the structural forms by which language is conveyed. On his reading of history, the boundaries of any shared, spoken, written language are what give us linguistic communities, which in turn provide our social communities. He never quotes Herder or Gadamer in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?, but he’s plainly working in the same vein as them: trying to articulate, in Aristotelian terms, a philosophical hermeneutics, a way of understanding the constituting power of language over time and through the social bonds and interactions which define us.

The complaint about linguistic communities is, of course, obvious: languages change! They change through translation, through interpretation, through just the generational process by which stories that revealed to one set of listeners one set of references upon which they could reason, end up revealing to another, later, set of listeners an entirely different set of references, because of geographic or technological or cultural change. MacIntyre acknowledges this, insisting the every tradition is open--by definition, as a spoken, written, particular thing—to evolution: “[T]he time and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through the language-in-use which gives expression to [their tradition] may encounter another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use, and may discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history, and their own language-in-use, it [nonetheless] provides a standpoint from which, once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second language, the limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within their own tradition” (pp. 387-388).

That’s a long sentence, and appropriately so, because he’s talking about a long process. (Whether his own articulation of Aristotelianism supported it or not, his work on thinking through the real world process of phronesis absolutely had a patient, immanent character to it.) MacIntyre is telling us that in encountering differences, and as we learn about them and even embrace them, there will always be a constant need to maintain our own received traditions, stories, and language—not to defend them from some kind of pollution, but because it is through working through their interaction with one another that we can see clearly what one story can teach which another story cannot.

It's worth saying in conclusion that, dense as MacIntyre’s work often was, he could be viciously funny (at least in an academic sense). One of my favorite passages from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? has stayed with me for decades, because it’s such a thorough dumping on those who talk blithely about “the Western tradition” or “the Christian tradition” as something to be defended. Building upon his own careful philosophical consideration of linguistic communities and historical traditions, he takes the time castigate the type of teaching every one of us who has ever had to take on a survey course usually fall into, faulting both modernity, but also a flawed conservatism that doesn’t understand what it’s about:

The type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges [guilty!], in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else as is possible if one is to reach Satre by the end of the semester. If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a reintroduction to the culture of past traditions, but is a tour through what is in effect a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reaching of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as “the Judeo-Christian tradition” and sometimes “Western values.” The writing of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives, such as William J. Bennett, turn out in fact to be one more stage in modernity’s cultural deformation of our relationship to the past (pp. 385-386).

It’s not surprising that a man who could write a passage like that was the kind of professor who insisted on referring to his students as “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and once handed out a “B minus minus” as a grade. Thinkers like this leave a profound legacy, and even if MacIntyre’s is, I fear, fated to be misappropriated, his own arguments make it clear that, so long as we speak our language and tell our stories, there are always practical possibilities for some St. Benedict, like MacIntyre himself, to come along a remind us of the immense gifts of connection and continuity we possess. Requiescat in pace, sir.

*Update, 5/27/2025: Noah Millman’s tribute to MacIntyre is really superb, and in talking about his piece with our mutual friend Damon Linker, Damon made an observation which clarifies what I was gesturing at in this paragraph very well: “In the end, though, I’m not a MacIntyre admirer. I get my Aristotle from Strauss. And the problem Noah notes early on in his piece — of MacIntyre projecting Aristotelian theory onto the lived reality of the ancient and medieval worlds — is a big problem and the ultimate source of the influence he had on the ‘postliberal’ right. This influence made MacIntyre uncomfortable, but it was his own fault for eliding crucial distinctions in a way that made it sound like he was describing a lost world of moral wholeness and meaning that was banished by the Enlightenment, etc. That’s garden-variety reactionary romanticism, and it’s unfortunate MacIntyre gave it fuel.”

Thoughts on Dallmayr and a Different Post-Liberalism

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic. Also, a blog note: it's been over 10 years since I last used this space to think at length about a philosopher or theorist or theologian that helped shape my thinking, and a lot has changed in that time, to say nothing about how much has changed in the 20+ years since I started blogging at a stage of my life that was much nearer to the heady intellectual life of graduate school. Still, old internet traditions never entirely die. Anyway, if you're interested in how I used to present these kinds of reflections, follow the links to see my comments upon the passing of Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty, Richard Neuhaus, and Jean Elshtain, great and important thinkers, all.]

Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate has put “postliberalism” back in the news, assuming it had ever left. Vance’s embrace of postliberalism and the Trumpist cause of “national conservatism” will no doubt continue to get a great deal of play over the next three months (and, assuming he and Trump succeed in November--either electorally or through the legal challenges and/or mob actions that may well arise in case they appear to have lost—beyond). But I’m not particularly interested in whatever postliberal policies or plans Vance might be able to use his position as Vice President of the United States to promote; he himself has said that he sees his role as that of being a “corrective,” “explicitly anti-elitist, explicitly anti-regime” voice in America’s possible postliberal future, not as someone tasked with trying to “concoct” what that voice actually, specifically has to say.

That’s not because I don’t think he could articulate something interesting. He’s an obviously intelligent man, and even if his conversion from the complicated, Trump-suspicious, sort-of-libertarianism of Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 to his ferocious commitment to Trump-as-defender-of-the-American-homeland today was a mixture of political opportunism and genuine conviction, that’s hardly a reason not to recognize the value of his observations. No, the main reason I’m not too enthused by the prospect of hearing much about Vance’s own postliberal potentiality is simply that I think that what he says is bound to be tied up with the wrong sort of postliberalism.

It would be easy to say that this is just because I disagree with the political particulars towards which his postliberalism points, and that’s certainly true, insofar as it goes. The elites that Vance sees his voice as opposing are, from what I can tell, mostly progressive university professors and Silicon Valley moguls (at least those not associated with Peter Thiel); the regime that he presents himself as challenging is made up of, very likely, mostly just race-conscious bureaucrats and lawyers in the Department of Education and the FBI. I actually do have significant gripes with much of the above, believe it or not--but no, as a democratic socialist and liberal Christian, I don’t see them as constituting that regime of elites which any person, like myself, who values local community most needs to worry about. The postliberal concerns relevant to my way of understanding of the world are rooted in philosophical arguments, rather than partisan ones.

Earlier this summer the political theorist Fred Dallmayr, a scholar I greatly respect, passed away. I think it’s a small tragedy that Vance never had the opportunity, when choosing which currents of philosophical critique to be swept along by, to learn from Fred’s version of postliberalism--because he definitely had one. It wasn’t a conservative version, to be sure. Rather, it was a version that--even it if brought him to some arguably similar civic or communitarian or populist or social democratic conclusions as those we can see defenders of liberalism worrying about--started from very different philosophical premises that are common among other American postliberal thinkers.

For example, the postliberal vision of Patrick Deneen—a close friend of Vance's and an oft-cited (by both friends and foes) influence on his thinking—involved (as I’ve argued) a questioning and ultimately a complete dismissing of the egalitarian foundations of pluralistic democracy. Deneen’s attitude towards the liberal elites who supposedly shape so much of America’s political culture and discourse is just as contemptuous as Vance’s, but he would see them replaced with a new set of elites, ones that would, as the theorist Adam Smith put it, “instantiate the values that ‘the people’ already hold” by protecting them from “any of its members who want to ‘impose rights’ in ways that vitiate those values,” by means of a revived ancient constitutionalism wherein the virtuous few would conserve, on behalf of “the many,” the cultural stability they purportedly long for. Dallmayr’s postliberalism, by contrast, is far more friendly to democratic egalitarianism. Which probably means that a conservative like Vance—whose concern with concentrated corporate power is enough to lead him to co-sponsor legislation in the Senate with progressives like Elizabeth Warren, but not enough for him to support directly egalitarian policies like Medicare for All—wouldn’t have been inclined to give it much attention, if he’d been aware of it. That’s his loss.

A brief aside here about Fred, who died at age 95, and was simply a tremendous scholar by any measure, even if--and I don't think he would have denied this in the least--his scholarship in his later decades tended more towards cultural breadth than philosophical depth. Born in 1928, he was an adolescent during WWII (his older brother died in 1943 on the Russian front), and he wrote in his autobiography On the Boundary: A Life Remembered that he “cannot exaggerate the importance of these war years,” his experiences of fear, confusion, deprivation, and oppression, for both his “persistent opposition to war and violence,” as well as, perhaps perversely, his “trust in the better side of humanity” (p. 10). Trained in law and comparative politics, he later became an expert in continental philosophy, eventually finding a permanent home at the University of Notre Dame in 1978. In the 1980s and 1990s, several fortuitous circumstances enabled him to begin a deep study of the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and other Indian classics and philosophers, and soon he was a pioneering figure in what came to be (usually) called “comparative political theory,” short-hand for the effort (one shared by multiple other academic disciplines in the 1990s) to rethink longstanding political arguments in light of contributions which could be drawn from thinkers and writings outside of the Western canon.

Fred was the person I most wanted to study with when I decided academia was my calling, and I still sometimes wonder, 30 years on, what might have become of me if I’d gone to graduate school at Notre Dame and had Fred as my dissertation advisor. We first corresponded—by typewritten, snail-mail letters--when I was still an MA student with Eric Hyer at Brigham Young University, trying to bring together my interests in political philosophy and my fascination with the assumptions at work in East Asian political cultures, assumptions that had first captivated me turning my two years as a missionary in South Korea. My shot for a place at Notre Dame missed, but Fred remained a cheerleader for me; as the years passed, he happily referred to himself my "doktorvatervater" as I wrote my dissertation under his former student Stephen Schneck at Catholic University of America; opened the door to my first academic publication through an issue of The Review of Politics he guest-edited; was always generous with his time and advice (and letters of recommendation!) as I made my way into the academic job market; took me out to lunch at conferences and made me a part of multiple early comparative political theory programs and organizing meetings; and introduced me to scholars that were (and still are, today) decades beyond me in both age and accomplishment. He was to me, as I'm sure he was to many hundreds of others, a friend, and his death this past June, though we had not interacted in more than a decade, gave me a sorrowful pause.

And now, in the context of the political news of the day, a reflective one. Because in looking back through Dallmayr’s oeuvre—much of which may seem irrelevant to contemporary debates in political theory or practice, instead dealing with such matters as phenomenology, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and more—I see a direct challenge to Vance, Deneen, and others who want to replace liberalism with something better. Because Fred did too, and his approach has, on my reading, a coherence and an open-mindedness that needs to be learned from.

As should be clear from my reference to Deneen’s appeal to ancient constitutionalism above, for writers like himself—as well as Edward Feser, Adrian Vermule, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari, C.C. Pecknold, and more—the problems of liberalism are overwhelmingly rooted in what are seen as the enduring truths (both normative and explicitly anthropological, and thus, for these Catholic thinkers, incarnational) of “classical and Christian premodernity” (Deneen, Why Liberalisms Failed, p. 23). Philosophical liberalism, according to their arguments, was always doomed to fail as the grounding for a social order, no matter what freedom it allowed for human beings to build communities and cultivate virtue independent of the supervisory order of the Great Chain of Being (as instantiated through the traditions or teachings of family, church, and state). This is because liberal freedom was conceived as a privileging of individual voluntary action against nature’s mastery, and thus, lacking any kind of guiding framework to reify humanity’s own social character, invariably becomes self-interested and atomizing, relativizing the very idea of virtue and undermining whatever communities might incidentally be built.

These are complaints which parallel those that can be found in a dozen different communitarian critiques of liberalism—socialist, Jeffersonian, civic republican, syndicalist, Laschian, communalist, Confucian, and more—but the explicitly Aristotelian orientation of American postliberal thinkers is notable. Their particular critique of liberalism’s assumptions is, for the most part, one I am mostly in sympathy with (and I think Fred was too). But their's is also not, insofar as I can tell, an immanent critique, one that works from within our own modern subjectivity, instead presenting itself as a reactionary call to upset the modern apple cart. (Deneen implicitly acknowledges this dependence upon outside critiques by allowing that his preferred premodern philosophy “relied extensively on the fortunate appearance of inspiring founding figures and statesmen who could uphold…self-reinforcing virtuous cycles”—WLF, p. 24). So thorough is their apparent conviction that an abrupt re-orientation towards premodern assumptions about human sociality is the best alternative to the breakdowns of the day that their recognition of the complete absence—for technological, socio-economic, and historical reasons—of the sort of demos which they believe would readily embrace the reconstruction of the rule by a virtuous elite doesn’t give them much pause. Instead, it simply means that, as Deneen put it, that “Machiavellian means [must be employed] to achieve Aristotelian ends” (Regime Change, p. 185)—a phrase which perhaps puts a different spin on Vance’s past statements (likely currently being quietly walked back or scrubbed) that Trump, upon his election, should simply reconstitute the entire administrative state and employ it directly for his own ideological ends. Burning down bad institutions so as to build good ones has a long history, after all.

Dallmayr’s approach never involved any burning. In a series of books he wrote towards the end of his life (particularly Democracy to Come: Politics as Relational Praxis, Post-Liberalism: Recovering a Shared World, and Truth and Politics: Towards a Post-Secular Community), Dallmayr’s complaints with modern liberalism, while echoing many of the concerns that can be found in the postliberal literature, were profoundly immanent—that is, his philosophical framing of the problem which faces humankind was always underscored by a sense of historical unfolding, of hermeneutic interpretation, of “letting be” (the title which my advisor Stephen Schneck gave to a festschrift he edited for his former teacher). Anyone familiar with contemporary philosophy can probably discern the Heideggerian echoes in that title, and that discernment would be correct. Dallmayr was a serious scholar of Martin Heidegger, particularly Heidegger’s work post-Kehre, after his intellectually important “turn” towards the poetic in in the 1940s, 1950s, and beyond, as opposed to his pre-Kehre work, including the monumental Being and Time. Dallmayr described his approach to Heidegger’s writings in On the Boundary as “slow and difficult…as an emigrant from Germany I did not know how to surmount the barrier erected by some of Heidegger’s actions and pronouncements in 1933 and the early period of the Nazi regime” (OB, p. 43). But once he began to seriously read the philosopher’s work, he found in Heidegger a way to formulate his theoretical discontent with the modern prioritization of the rational, individualistic, acting subject. (Dallmayr’s deep attachment to and his highly constructive uses of Heidegger’s formulations are not, in my opinion, compromised by recent further revelations on Heidegger’s Nazi past, particularly the translation of his notorious Black Notebooks, but to be fair it’s true Dallmayr never published any comments on these developments, even though they preceded his death by a decade. I talk about my own idiosyncratic—and, perhaps not coincidentally, Dallmayr-compatible—approach to Hediegger’s challenging ideas here; for his part, Deneen presents Heidegger as the inspiration for postmodern theories that “placed primacy on the liberation of the will,” which I think is a reductive reading at best—WLF, p. 120.)

Crucial to these formulations was Dallmayr’s appreciation of the way Heidegger worked out his understanding of the relationship between language and our awareness of and experience of the receptivity and solicitude which characterizes the fact of our being-in-the-world (Dasein). Such phenomenological and existential expressions may seem the furthest thing from political, but for Dallmayr the implications of these philosophical observations—understanding ourselves in terms of a world that gives, that positions us as entities who stand out and receive (linguistically, culturally, historically) that which opens itself up to us—were profoundly important for thinking about democracy, justice, peace, and religious faith. For Dallmayr, moving beyond liberalism meant, most centrally, an “individual decentering,” which he saw as even more radical than the practical judgment which Aristotle made central to the cultivation of political virtue. Drawing upon Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dallmayr argued that “the crux of Aristotelian ethics” actually lies in “the careful mediation between…[our] finite existence and the infinite horizon of ethical goodness” which informs our world (Post-Liberalism, pp. xii, 64).

If this sounds like some postmodern version of Christian notions of grace or immanence, Dallmayr would not deny it—though he would also be quick to point to parallel versions which could be (re)constructed out of Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist concepts as well. His intention in doing so would not be to promulgate some kind of weak and relativistic civil religion—Dallmayr regularly made clear his deep attachment to a pious though philosophically non-doctrinaire Christianity, taking holy men like Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, or Pope Francis himself as his spiritual guides, and he carried that attachment into his active, church-attending faith life. Rather, his aim was that to insist that any human sociality, any enduring community with languages and traditions and texts that can be reflected upon, has within it evidence of humanity’s engagement with, and responses to, the ethical conditions—or, in Heidegger’s terms, the sense of “care” (Sorge)--which characterize our phenomenological existence in the world. In a reflection that relies heavily on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (a massive work that itself reflects at important points a deeply Heideggerian sensibility about language and moral evaluation), Dallmayr makes both a religious and an explicitly political point about what it means to understand worldly engagement in terms of hopeful reception, as opposed to a constant fear of the breakdown of virtue (to say nothing of a paranoia over the violation of rights):

The basis of [all] these religions is rather found in Deuteronomy 6:4-6 in the famous “Shema Israel.” What does shema here mean? It is an invocation to the listeners to open their ears, not to harden their hearts, or to become “buffered selves.” What are they to hear? Only this: that the Lord God is one and that “you should love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” and that this please should dwell “upon your heart”…

What this and similar biblical passages suggest is a slow maturation or seasoning, a willing turn of people toward social justice and truth without doctrinal inculcation or creedal manifestoes. Such a process does not lend itself to political platforms or ideological proclamations, and certainly cannot rely on coercion or make common cause with “top-down” interruption or disruption. In our time, this process can no longer be restricted to one locality, one society, or one nation but must extend to humanity seen as a global community of interactive and ethically engaged people. In this manner, the contours of a “post-secular” cosmopolis come into view…neither a super state nor a military-industrial complex but only the emblem of a hope or promise sustaining ordinary human lives: the promise of the “city of peace” (Truth and Politics, pp. 16, 21).

Dallmayr’s belief was that the reflective, interpretive, and linguistic engagements of human beings--when properly, democratically understood--will reveal paths beyond what he calls the “minimalism” of modern liberal philosophy, without “top-down” (and thus invariably culture-specific) “doctrinal inculcation or creedal manifestoes.” This kind of hope, admittedly, probably holds little appeal for those who crave specific policy recommendations. But then, Dallmayr never saw himself as engaged in the kind of “epic theory” which animates conservative postliberalism, the conviction that, since liberalism has failed, a project of classic and Christian “recovery and reinvention” (RC, p. xiii) must be directly undertaken, without much patience for what might immanently emerge from those local democratic projects which continue all round us. Dallmayr imagines a respectful, peaceful attendance upon what those communities will do; again, the ideal of politically “letting be.” That is not a call to quietism or inaction, but rather a resistance to those whose first response to the actions and decisions of fellow members of their polity is reactionary. He prefers what he calls an “apophatic” democracy, a deliberative democracy that is “receptively generous,” open to “new possibilities, new paradigms and horizons of thought,” recognizing that human deliberation “always occurs in a…linguistic framework which is historically and culturally sedimented,” and which takes seriously “the humanizing Gandhian principles of ahisma [non-violence] and satyagraha [the peaceful pursuit of truth], but also Montesquieu’s stress on the needed spirit of democracy: the “love of equality” (Democracy to Come, pp. 40-41). He further adds:

Here the radical quality of the democratic love for equality comes into view: that equality can no longer be a purely domestic concern, but has to be the “spirit” governing relations among all peoples and societies in the world. This means that democracy has to be nurtured by different societies and cultures from within, with their own resources. These resources and likely to be philosophical, religious, cultural, pedagogical, and many other kinds. What is important is that these recourses or traditions are rethought and re-energized from within in a democratic spirit (DC, p. 151).

Again, to try to be fair, one might ask if Dallmayr anywhere at least acknowledges that the resources for collective social nurturing he calls for—the patient, receptive engagement with one’s one tradition, similar to what Charles Taylor called “strong evaluation”—might be absent, or at least face institutional or structural opposition that would stand in the way of communities extending themselves and their own truths into emergent understandings? In a word, yes—which is why he sees some kind of “socialist democracy” (or, as he wrote in connection with the theologian Paul Tillich, “a moderate democratic religious socialism”) as that participatory, egalitarian, socio-economic and political arrangement which could move us closest to the “democracy to come” that constitutes his central political aspiration. Guided by his own experience in postwar Germany, as well as the thinking of scholars and activists like John Dewey, Alex Honneth, and Martin Luther King, Jr., he insists that the socialism necessary for the proper, non-individualistic, egalitarian empowering of human communities cannot be statist, and indeed must shun all “central determinism.” (PL, pp. 82, 86-87, 95). The point is, as always, to attend to the kind of receptivity and local experimentation which judicially-minded liberal rights-mongering has long tended to distrust. But Dallmayr trusted that taking democracy seriously would enable postliberal formulations of virtue, equality, and community to emerge; considering the language of Vance at least, one wonders if American postliberals, as much as they genuinely want to rebuild communitarian trust, have any trust at all that the demos will actually do it the way they’re convinced the demos actually wants or needs it to be done.

The postliberal ideological formulation, like conservatism itself, has a different range of valences in the British and broader European context. Speaking from that context, the theorist Adrian Pabst, long associated with John Milbank’s “radical orthodoxy” movement (which itself aims to demonstrate the affinity between postmodern and phenomenological treatments of language, society, and economy with the Christian tradition), sees the postliberal movement of the moment as taking three distinct forms: national conservatism, Catholic integralism, and communitarian pluralism. Perhaps that fits Dallmayr's always somewhat European perspective, though he himself was far too cosmopolitan in his outlook, far too convinced that the respectful treatment of (and the socio-economic support for) of diverse democratic expressions would allow for human beings everywhere to engage in an ongoing articulation of both human and godly truths, to be content with the communitarian label and its necessary implications of particularlity. Yet no one who reads the breadth of his work could deny that his most fervent intellectual convictions were those that revolved around a peaceful and pluralistic attendance to that which looking beyond secular modernity's cheap universalism, and looking instead towards the communal and democratic formulations that can challenge and inform and make more civic the liberal capitalist presumptions of the West, might reveal. That sort of patience would never manifest in a political platform one could run for political office on, of course. But as a student of politics who learned a good deal from Fred, and who now expects to hear about postliberalism pretty much daily between now and November, I can only wish.

Requiescat in pace, Herr Doktor Dallmayr. I hope you’ve finally been able meet Gustav Mahler in person at last.