Re: "In the immediate aftermath, sometimes called “the Peace of Westphalia,” things seemed fairly good. But now, almost half a millennium later, it’s clear that Caesar cannot always be trusted to be tolerant and decent. He likes power. And the Church, even declawed, remains a formidable opponent, brimming with influence and moral authority. Across the globe, Christians have endured terrible persecution at the hands of militant secularists over the past few centuries. For all their failings, it turns out that those greedy and corrupt Medieval clerics may have played a meaningful role in preventing politicians from devolving into totalitarian tyrants."
So yes, sort of... But I'm not sure I followed what is Deneen versus what is you.
I wouldn't say that the peace of Westphalia was a good arrangement. That was the heyday both of royal absolutism and of the Atlantic slave trade, and that's no accident. Bad things happened because the Church was weakened and it was less able to fight them.
And then the royal absolutisms started crashing down, and the slave trade ended, and that had a lot to do with Christianity at work. You kind of jumped over that.
Liberalism was definitely not born in the Peace of Westphalia. It would be closer to the truth to say that it was a reaction against the Peace of Westphalia. *Cuius regio, eius religio* is, more than any other single thing, what liberalism from Locke on down was born to destroy.
I did obviously blur over a great deal. This is certainly very complex.
Westphalia though was actually not where the “cuius regio” was developed. That was at Augsburg. Westphalia confirmed it and made more steps towards accommodation of religious minorities, also adding Calvinists to the list of faiths that should potentially be tolerated. Of course you’re also right that the Peace of Westphalia wasn’t a paradise either but compared to the devastating wars that came before it? Eh. The world is ever troubled, and I’m not trying to trivialize the evils of the slave trade etc, but I think you could say, “it achieved many of its goals, and they were genuinely important goals.”
Locke is clearly a liberal, but in my quick-gloss telling what he was really doing can be best understood as “trying to come up with more adequate solutions to the tyranny of Caesar, a problem that became acute once God (or his Earthy representatives, say) was placed on the back burner.” So in that sense the Westphalia period was indeed proto-liberal. We’ve kicked out of the traditional God-and-Caesar dialectic and put in a stopgap, but the clear inadequacies of the stopgap motivate a less-obviously-flawed framework… liberalism.
But Lockean liberalism has problems too. As later centuries have revealed.
I mean, as for calling the Westphalia era proto-liberal, maybe... But you could call ancient democratic Athens proto-liberal, or the Roman Republic, or the High Middle Ages. There's a case to be made for each. The Magna Carta, the birth of parliament-- that was high medieval. The right of remonstrance for bureaucrats and Confucian China is proto-liberal in a way. Liberalism is the highest and best form of political organization that the human race has achieved, and every past era that is inside my admirable adumbrates it in some respect. No doubt there's some of that in the Westphalian order too.
But I think it's a more important truth that Westphalia established the order that liberalism reacted against and overthrew, and in crucial ways overthrew it in favor of a new order that was more medieval. Medieval France had a feudal aristocracy with considerable Independence. It was in the Westphalian that that was particularly eviscerated, in favor of the royal absolutism of the Sun King. The Stuart monarchy aspired to absolutist rule, eviscerating the Parliament which was a medieval heritage. The weakening of the churches in the wars of religion and the Peace of Westphalia cleared the way for royal absolutism. Westphalia may have been proto-liberal in some ways, but in the most crucial ways it was quintessentially anti-liberal, and it was the order which the great liberal revolutions of modern times rebelled against.
What this is bringing out is that you are far more enthusiastic about Lockean liberalism than me. I would not agree that liberalism is “the highest and best form of political organization.” I think the flatness of Locke’s view of human nature, the voluntarism (all of which was of a piece with other harmonious intellectual currents) factored into a formalism that later gave rise to the naked public square, Rawls, the anti-traditional currents of modern government.
I guess I’m staking out a ground somewhere between the postliberal (“this is an inevitable development of liberalism, and indeed its real essence”) and the sunny view that hostility to tradition is incidental or even contrary to “true” liberalism.
I’m fine with other people defending other views, but you can see how to me the hamstringing of the Church is kind of the crucial turning point. There were reasons for it! Something had to be done about the Wars of Religion! But Lockean liberalism isn’t actually an *adequate* substitute for the Church, as a check on the ambitions of Caesar. Liberalism of some sort is clearly necessary; there’s no other game in town. I don’t really see us sitting on a “highest and best” political pinnacle though.
Re: "In the immediate aftermath, sometimes called “the Peace of Westphalia,” things seemed fairly good. But now, almost half a millennium later, it’s clear that Caesar cannot always be trusted to be tolerant and decent. He likes power. And the Church, even declawed, remains a formidable opponent, brimming with influence and moral authority. Across the globe, Christians have endured terrible persecution at the hands of militant secularists over the past few centuries. For all their failings, it turns out that those greedy and corrupt Medieval clerics may have played a meaningful role in preventing politicians from devolving into totalitarian tyrants."
So yes, sort of... But I'm not sure I followed what is Deneen versus what is you.
I wouldn't say that the peace of Westphalia was a good arrangement. That was the heyday both of royal absolutism and of the Atlantic slave trade, and that's no accident. Bad things happened because the Church was weakened and it was less able to fight them.
And then the royal absolutisms started crashing down, and the slave trade ended, and that had a lot to do with Christianity at work. You kind of jumped over that.
Liberalism was definitely not born in the Peace of Westphalia. It would be closer to the truth to say that it was a reaction against the Peace of Westphalia. *Cuius regio, eius religio* is, more than any other single thing, what liberalism from Locke on down was born to destroy.
I did obviously blur over a great deal. This is certainly very complex.
Westphalia though was actually not where the “cuius regio” was developed. That was at Augsburg. Westphalia confirmed it and made more steps towards accommodation of religious minorities, also adding Calvinists to the list of faiths that should potentially be tolerated. Of course you’re also right that the Peace of Westphalia wasn’t a paradise either but compared to the devastating wars that came before it? Eh. The world is ever troubled, and I’m not trying to trivialize the evils of the slave trade etc, but I think you could say, “it achieved many of its goals, and they were genuinely important goals.”
Locke is clearly a liberal, but in my quick-gloss telling what he was really doing can be best understood as “trying to come up with more adequate solutions to the tyranny of Caesar, a problem that became acute once God (or his Earthy representatives, say) was placed on the back burner.” So in that sense the Westphalia period was indeed proto-liberal. We’ve kicked out of the traditional God-and-Caesar dialectic and put in a stopgap, but the clear inadequacies of the stopgap motivate a less-obviously-flawed framework… liberalism.
But Lockean liberalism has problems too. As later centuries have revealed.
I mean, as for calling the Westphalia era proto-liberal, maybe... But you could call ancient democratic Athens proto-liberal, or the Roman Republic, or the High Middle Ages. There's a case to be made for each. The Magna Carta, the birth of parliament-- that was high medieval. The right of remonstrance for bureaucrats and Confucian China is proto-liberal in a way. Liberalism is the highest and best form of political organization that the human race has achieved, and every past era that is inside my admirable adumbrates it in some respect. No doubt there's some of that in the Westphalian order too.
But I think it's a more important truth that Westphalia established the order that liberalism reacted against and overthrew, and in crucial ways overthrew it in favor of a new order that was more medieval. Medieval France had a feudal aristocracy with considerable Independence. It was in the Westphalian that that was particularly eviscerated, in favor of the royal absolutism of the Sun King. The Stuart monarchy aspired to absolutist rule, eviscerating the Parliament which was a medieval heritage. The weakening of the churches in the wars of religion and the Peace of Westphalia cleared the way for royal absolutism. Westphalia may have been proto-liberal in some ways, but in the most crucial ways it was quintessentially anti-liberal, and it was the order which the great liberal revolutions of modern times rebelled against.
What this is bringing out is that you are far more enthusiastic about Lockean liberalism than me. I would not agree that liberalism is “the highest and best form of political organization.” I think the flatness of Locke’s view of human nature, the voluntarism (all of which was of a piece with other harmonious intellectual currents) factored into a formalism that later gave rise to the naked public square, Rawls, the anti-traditional currents of modern government.
I guess I’m staking out a ground somewhere between the postliberal (“this is an inevitable development of liberalism, and indeed its real essence”) and the sunny view that hostility to tradition is incidental or even contrary to “true” liberalism.
I’m fine with other people defending other views, but you can see how to me the hamstringing of the Church is kind of the crucial turning point. There were reasons for it! Something had to be done about the Wars of Religion! But Lockean liberalism isn’t actually an *adequate* substitute for the Church, as a check on the ambitions of Caesar. Liberalism of some sort is clearly necessary; there’s no other game in town. I don’t really see us sitting on a “highest and best” political pinnacle though.