On Superman, Sentimentality, and Citizenship (or, What Gunn's Superman Knows About America that J.D. Vance Apparently Can't Comprehend)

Daniel McCarthy expanded upon his New York Post editorial, the one I responded to previously, in the pages of his journal, Modern Age. His expansion—“Superman After Liberalism”—isn’t a rebuttal to my response, but he tagged me nonetheless, so I’m going to take the opportunity to respond once more…particularly since the way McCarthy is pursuing his case against James Gunn’s Superman provides me with an important contract to Vice President J.D. Vance, who recently, on the occasion of receiving an award from the Claremont Institute, gave a speech on citizenship which was about as antithetical to the deeply American moral sentiments of Superman as I can imagine.

McCarthy’s argument against Gunn’s vision of the Superman character isn’t changed by his expansion, but he does elaborate on his thesis in some interesting ways. He’s not wrong that “the problem of reconciling the exceptional with the egalitarian” has been a subtheme to telling super-heroes stories ever since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster essentially evented the genre (and if McCarthy had either the pop culture knowledge or inclination, he could have made the obvious point that recent comic, cinematic, and television incarnations of Superman—from Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie to Henry Cavill in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel to many, many others—have all taken different positions on how to address this narrative problem). Nor is he wrong—though he is, I think, incomplete—in suggesting that Siegel and Shuster’s original solution, and the one that supposedly served the character so well for decades, was to write Superman as motivated by a New Deal-era confidence in liberalism as a form of patriotism, the result of his, through his adopted parents, “assimilation into Kansas and America as the land of the free.” I don’t see how anyone remotely online—to say nothing of comic books fan over the past 85 years who have (likely unlike McCarthy) actually consumed Superman media—could be unaware of this aspect of Superman’s history, especially given how relevant it is to debates that McCarthy (and Vance) are deeply involved in today.

McCarthy sees the Superman of the James Gunn film as having abandoned this confidence, as American liberalism has also abandoned it (or maybe, depending on how much and what sort of postliberalism McCarthy embraces, it was fated to turn away from it, in favor of identity politics and government-managed pity). Instead, he sees the Superman played by David Corenswet as unexceptional, bland, and weak (McCarthy makes much of how Superman’s unwillingness to kill makes him reliant upon other heroes capable doing the necessary “dirty work”). And while he allows that there probably could have been, even within his framework, a way of telling the Superman story that asked the “right questions,” this one absolutely isn’t it; in Superman, he sees only a left-liberal film that is so frightened that “fascism has already taken over this country” that its titular character lacks “a place of his own,” leaving him to articulate only lame liberal sentiments with no moral strength of their own.

I’ve already talked about how wrong this argument is. The lame liberal sentiments that McCarthy sees in Superman’s wonderful final words to Lex Luthor—

I’m as human as anyone. I love, I get scared, I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human! And that’s my greatest strength.

—could, I suppose, be understood as validating a kind of moral individualism and even fatalism. That they lack much by way of realpolitik thinking, and thus arguably open the door to a hypocritical Machiavellianism, showing a face of kindness and sympathy to the crowd while justifying self-interested actions behind your back, is also perhaps true. (Superman didn’t seem too worried about the fate of his clone, for example.) But of course, it’s not like the downsides—the exclusionary classism, racism, sexism, and more—so frequently present in more rigorously particular moral systems are difficult to identify either.

More importantly, to fail to understand the moral strength—and, on an admittedly somewhat attenuated level, what I think can only be understood as an aspect of self-sacrificing Christian love—that is just as possible to be found within this kind of compassion-driven ethical universalism is a major mistake. It’s one that has been made by haters of Rousseau and every attempt within the context of modernity to follow the path toward moral legitimacy—a civil religion based on rights and consent and small-d democratic efforts to build communities of action and legislation—which he suggested for centuries now. I have no idea if James Gunn or David Corenswet have ever heard of Moral Therapeutic Deism, and I definitely reject the idea that what viewers of Superman saw on the screen is just another version of some self-centered, MTD, make-it-up-yourself-morality. But denying that there is any moral substance, any heroism, to someone who puts forward, first and foremost, kindness and concern and sentimentality and good deeds, absent any explicit patriotic attachment or sectarian confession or nationalist vision, is simply a complete misreading of the moral thinking at work in this long, centuries old, deeply important liberal Christian tradition. It’s a complete misreading of the religious sensibility that, as a resident of Kansas, I still see plenty of evidence of all around me, obtaining in communities and families that are interconnected and wired and far less self-sufficient that many who prattle on about “heartland values” insist on making them out to be, but which issue in friendliness and service and charity nonetheless. And finally, frankly, it is a complete misreading of American republicanism as well.

So now let’s turn to Vice President Vance’s partly thoughtful, but mostly pedantic speech, one that Superman would never be pretentious enough to give. In talking about citizenship, Vance starts by making a serious, complicated point:

Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we're doing [in the Trump administration] is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It's hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.

That social bonds and civic strength develop organically over time through the routines of ordinary life is an undeniable communitarian truth; the whole notion of “social capital” is built upon that understanding. And hence, it’s not unreasonable to see the challenges of ethnic, religious, racial, cultural, and (I think especially) linguistic diversity as genuine ones, ones which immigration restrictions might be an at least partial solution to. There is good research in support of this—but also evenmoregood research that challenges it, making the argument that the obstacles posed by diversity are actually, when one controls for technological distractions and economic barriers which prevent people from interacting as humans (anthropologically social creatures that we are) normally would, quite small, and in any case that such obstacles, absent political polarization, actually fall quite fast.* Robert Putnam, the scholar who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded in a later study that the difficulty Vance highlights is a short-term one, one that—in immigrant societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.”

Presumably, Vance—or at least his speech-writers—are smart enough to know all this. Which means that in holding to this argument, he unintentionally (or, who knows—maybe intentionally!) reveals that his hope through serving in the Trump administration isn’t to fine-tune immigration policy, but rather to change America  away from being an immigrant society at all. And his case for this is plainly ideological—or even, I think, theologico-political, and not in a good way. In the most notorious passage in his speech, he claims:

If you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself. If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

Some of the reasoning here is obviously puerile. (“Must we admit all of them tomorrow?” So, you’re assuming that “hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence”—perhaps in part because their own French or Japanese or Canadian or British or Italian or Australian or Norwegian political cultures have long socialized them to accept similar principles of government by consent and natural rights—actually would all want to come to the United States in the first place?) And some of it worryingly strange. (As John Ganz pointed out, the Anti-Defamation League is hardly a “woke” entity these days, but somehow Vance nonetheless thinks it important to insist to castigate them, suggesting that he really does think that anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and others so-inclined should be given a pass, presumably because they had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.) But the parts of it which bother me the most are, I think, anti-republican in the most malicious way.

The republicanism of Thomas Jefferson has been endlessly analyzed, and no doubt will long continue to be. But broadly speaking, Jefferson’s republicanism was a fascinating—some would say incoherent—mixture of the aristocratic and the democratic, a mixture of Enlightenment confidence, agrarian sentiment, and noblesse oblige. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is not a crystalline distillation of all those ideas, but it does hit all the main points of it, especially as its ideas were later amplified and refined through centuries of American experience and practice. Jefferson’s vision was one of rational human beings exercising their natural right to collectively achieve independence, not solely or even primarily in order to remain virtuous farmers, or to instantiate through the power of a new social contract their own preferred res publica, but simply in order for their personal and communal development, as productive citizens, to be free from the interfering interests of powerful others in their civic spaces. Whatever the inconsistencies one might find in this theoretical framework, it is a substantive one, reflective not of unstated assumptions about some natural necessity regarding borders and identity, but rather of the explicitly stated assumption that a God-and-nature-given sensibility will show the rightness of a free people being able to work out their independence as part of civil order they choose for themselves, absent any distant hierarchy (whether spatially or temporally).

No one actually familiar with the philosophical and historical arguments here can deny that notions of sovereignty—of the right of a people to collectively define and govern their communities, including the borders thereof—were an important component of these republican visions that shaped America’s political culture. But Vance would have us believe that sovereignty needs to be the central concern of anyone concerned about citizenship and freedom:

What does it mean to be an American in 2025? For one, I think it has to mean sovereignty. More precisely, American citizenship must mean belonging to a nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern world that's hellbent on dissolving borders and differences in national character.

The Declaration is by no means a culturally placeless document; among the particulars that Jefferson levied against King George were claims that his actions were stirring up the continent’s native inhabitants to war and allowing the Catholic French to establish a dangerous foothold in Canada. Jefferson was not so idealistic as to ignore all concerns about security and identity. But the power of the document—and really, the power of this kind of liberal republicanism in general—is the way it connects with sentiments of liberty whose natural rightness were, in Jefferson’s view, becoming undeniable with the transformations which moved Western civilization away from the ancient and medieval worlds, and towards a more rights-based one. Jefferson’s embrace of the Enlightenment is hardly defensible in every particular, especially when it comes to race and religion. But the fact that America’s political culture became entwined with Jefferson’s hopes—his belief that, as he put it in one of the final letters he ever wrote, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God”—is inseparable from what this country has meant to the history of the world. To reduce that all to obsessions over sovereignty (and apparently not so much, in Vance’s mind, popular and democratic sovereignty, which is a crucial aspect of self-governance, but rather martial sovereignty, since he seems especially worked up about the fact that “so many young people…say that they would not die for their own country…[or] put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for our common nation”) is a serious conceptual loss.

Fortunately, the history of America is filled with people who have understood this country’s civic self-conception more accurately than Vice President Vance does. President Abraham Lincoln, for one, who in perhaps his greatest and most influential speech, emphasized that the carnage of the Civil War, and the kind of community those who waged it were motivated by, was one characterized by a simple, singular “proposition”: “that all men are created equal.” But also, how about the political theorist, and refugee from the Holocaust, and naturalized U.S. citizen, Hannah Arendt? There’s isn’t a smidgen of flakey idealism to be found in her writing—and yet, her whole understanding of her adopted country began with her appreciation of the power of the demos to build civic spaces and secure liberty through revolutionary action, action which is not dependent upon some kind of prior security, but upon a spontaneity available to all. There is, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader, devout (however flawed) Christian, and democratic socialist, whose commitment to all three of those collections of moral principles formed the pillars of the “beloved community” that he believed all free people ought to and someday would be able partake of, with Jefferson’s words in the Declaration guiding him towards his refusal “to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” And what about Zohran Mamdani, the likely future Mayor of New York City? On July 4^th, he posted his sentiments: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.” And Vance—kind of like McCarthy, come to think of it—found that bland statement of liberal patriotism simply horrifying. “There is no gratitude in those words, Vance ranted. “He dares on our 249th anniversary to congratulate [America] by paying homage to its incompleteness and to its, as he calls it, contradictions?....Who the hell does he think that he is?”

Well, for one thing, he appear to think—if only in terms of structure, not substance—pretty much the exact same way Vance himself thinks, if he were only honest or self-reflective enough to notice it, since our Vice President actually ends his own speech saying “we must get to work”—which I think must mean that even he agrees that the work of American citizenship is, well, “unfinished.” But that’s just more puerile rhetoric from angry man, or at least a man who knows his position in the Trump administration and the plaudits he receives from the MAGA base depends upon his performative anger.

A better answer, of course, is that Mamdani, like all good Americans this summer, may not think he’s Superman, but he’s surely been inspired by Malik Ali, the falafel vendor who believes in Superman, jumps into a crater to help him up during his first tangle with the Hammer of Barovia/Ultraman, and then is pointlessly murdered by Lex Luthor while the latter tries to get Superman to tell him the location of his home. Because Superman does have a home, a place—a place of homely, maybe even “bland” liberal republican and Christian virtues, all that not particularly sovereign stuff about doing good and feeling compassion and treating everyone equally and trying again and again, despite all his and our limitations and mistakes. It’s the sort of place that teaches a person to, when offered a falafel by a vendor after saving someone from being hit by a taxi, accept it gratefully.

Did the Kents introduce Superman to falafels while he was growing up? Probably not—probably he came to like them because he’s just another struggling modern person, appreciating the good food and other good works human beings can achieve. There is a substance to this very American, very liberal, very “bland” struggle. It’s a substance I’m happy to admit is in some ways parasitic upon, and therefore must necessarily connect to, all sorts of deeper traditions and values and visions; there’s a reason why I call myself a communitarian and a civic republican and a Christian, after all. But to allow the fact that the Christianity and republicanism and community attachments of modern Americans (like, I think, James Gunn’s Superman) tend to be rather liberal to become a reason to reject their sources entirely is the worst sort of cutting off your nose to spit in your own face. Of course, when you’re talking about a political movement that’s all about reacting against the America that actually exists, not to reform or improve or correct it but rather to just reject its reality, then maybe that kind of cutting and spitting is what passes for respectable thought. It wins awards from the Claremont Institute, apparently.

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.