Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

Alexis de Tocqueville is most known for the genius of his reflections upon America. Less attention has been given to his involvement in politics. Between 1839 and 1851, Tocqueville served in the legislature of King Louis Philippe’s July Monarchy and those of the short-lived Second Republic. For five months in 1849, he occupied the Quai d’Orsay as France’s foreign minister.

One lesson that Tocqueville learned in these years was the necessity of alliances with people who were not in 100 percent agreement with him, especially if his goal was to inject stability into a politics as unsteady as those of mid-nineteenth-century France. As a legislator and minister, Tocqueville worked with groups ranging from center-left republicans to conservative liberals like himself, as well as monarchists with a practical bent.

There were, however, limits to Tocqueville’s openness to political cooperation. The persistent violence of Jacobins and socialists following the 1848 Revolution, and their hostility to liberal constitutionalism and private property, convinced Tocqueville that the radical left was beyond the political pale. This much is evident from Tocqueville’s outspoken support for the government’s use of the French army to put down the June 1848 Paris insurrection of Jacobins and outright socialists that sought to radicalize the Second Republic. Tocqueville also made his enmity to socialism abundantly clear in a subsequent speech in the Constituent Assembly. Liberty, for Tocqueville, was built upon order—moral, political, and constitutional—not chaos, perpetual upheaval, or efforts to equalize economic conditions.

Yet Tocqueville’s clear-eyed view of the hard left’s destructive impulses did not blind him to the problems of the right. For example, though sympathetic to arguments that a constitutional monarchy might help steady French politics, Tocqueville maintained some political distance from those royalists (including family members) anxious to wind the clock back to a pre-1789 world.

There was, however, a then-newly emergent group on the right towards which Tocqueville adopted a position of polite but unambiguous opposition. If we were to ascribe these individuals a contemporary label, “altright” or even “groyper” would perhaps be the most apt. For like these contemporary far-rightists, such thinkers embraced a highly racialized view of the world. Tocqueville’s response to their arguments is a model worthy of emulation in our time.

From Royalism to Racialism

Arthur de Gobineau is not someone whose name is regularly invoked in contemporary Western political debates. But many of Gobineau’s theories about race foreshadowed some of the twentieth century’s most destructive pathologies, some of which have resurfaced over the past decade.

Born in 1816, Gobineau grew up in a family devoted to the legitimist cause of the Bourbon dynasty. After a childhood marked by parental separation and a descent into poverty, Gobineau tried his hand as a journalist in Paris. Much of his early writing lamented the rise of commercial society as a corrupting force. “Money,” Gobineau lamented, “has become the principle of power and honor … money governs; money salves consciences; money is the criterion for judging the esteem due to men.” Like many “ultras,” Gobineau held the expanding French middle-class in contempt.

Such sentiments were not unusual in hyper-royalist circles. But from the early 1840s onwards, Gobineau’s mind began drifting in distinctly racialist directions. In novels published during this decade, Gobineau made plain his belief that some races—most notably, blond Germanic peoples whom he called “Aryans”—were destined to rule others. He even resurrected mythologies of the French aristocracy as being the descendants of Franks who had conquered the inferior Celts and Gauls back in the fifth century.

This thinking formed the background to Gobineau’s most famous work, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Published in two parts in 1853 and 1855, the book posits that individuals, however talented, were unimportant. For Gobineau, race was everything: it was the driving force of politics, culture, and national destiny. The notion that humans were fundamentally equal qua humans was, Gobineau held, sentimental nonsense.

Tocqueville refused to accord any legitimacy whatsoever to such positions wherever they reared their heads in his time.

Not surprisingly, these ideas translated into deep antagonism to ethnic mixing. Significantly, nineteenth-century America constituted one of Gobineau’s primary targets. The United States, he claimed, was made up of the “human flotsam of all ages.” And Gobineau was not just appalled by any mixing of whites, blacks, and native Americans. He was equally horrified by the mingling of people from different European backgrounds. Any ethnic blending, Gobineau asserted, wherever it occurred, could only produce a fundamentally decadent society.

Politically speaking, Gobineau’s racialist principles led him to favor conspicuously authoritarian governments. Initially, Gobineau dismissed the Second Empire established in France shortly after Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’etat of 1851 as a mere facsimile of true monarchy. By the mid-1850s, however, Gobineau was full of praise for Napoleon III’s regime. It exemplified, to his mind, the centralized authority that rulers needed to control unruly populations. The consequences for liberty were, to Gobineau’s mind, irrelevant.

Unscientific and Immoral

Gobineau’s adulation of Napoleon III put him in an entirely different political camp from Tocqueville. The latter never hid his antipathy to the Second Empire’s authoritarianism or the unconstitutional way the regime had come to power.

This clash of views, however, makes it all the more remarkable that Tocqueville had begun a correspondence with Gobineau years earlier in the early 1840s after reading articles that Gobineau had published in the Revue des Deux Mondes. At one point, Tocqueville even secured for Gobineau a job in the foreign ministry. As the late Sir Larry Siedentop observed in his short book on Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America felt “a tug of sympathy” for Gobineau, having also struggled to establish himself as a writer before the publication of Democracy in America’s first volume in 1835.

But from the very beginning of his acquaintance with Gobineau, Tocqueville made clear his firm disapproval of the younger man’s opinions. That especially concerned the racial determinism that steadily pervaded Gobineau’s writings. In a letter penned before Gobineau’s Essay appeared, Tocqueville wrote:

I have never concealed from you that I have a strong prejudice against what seems to be your leading idea which strikes me as belonging, I confess, to that family of materialist doctrines and to be one of its most dangerous members, since it involves the fatality of constitution applied not only to the individual but to those collections of individuals that are called races.

Tocqueville didn’t deny that there were often profound cultural differences between, say, Italians, Germans, Russians, Persians, Algerians, and Mexicans. But the notion that peoples have unchanging aptitudes and even fixed destinies by virtue of their ethnicity was described by Tocqueville as “unprovable.” For one thing, he noted, such claims ignored the hard-to-deny fact that historical changes have many causes, and that sorting out which ones are more important than others is always challenging. Monocausal explanations for political and social trends, Tocqueville thought, were invariably wrong.

This empirical criticism, however, was accompanied by Tocqueville querying Gobineau’s motivations for advancing his thesis of racial determinism. Point-blank, he asked Gobineau:

What possible interest can there be in persuading miserable people living in barbarism, idleness, or slavery that, by virtue of their race, there is nothing that can be done to improve their condition, change their mœurs, or modify their government? Don’t you see that from your doctrine derives naturally all the evils which permanent inequality gives birth to: pride, violence, scorn for one’s fellows, tyranny, and abjection in all its forms?

The unspoken answer to Tocqueville’s question was that Gobineau’s propositions had little to do with science or the pursuit of truth. Instead, they had everything to do with a desire to rationalize serious injustices and deny freedom to millions of people. For as Tocqueville wrote elsewhere, Gobineau’s racial determinism led to “a very great restriction, if not to a complete abolition of human liberty.”

Against such positions, Tocqueville affirmed a proposition that he regarded as self-evident: that being the essential “unity of the human race.” For Tocqueville, there were no superhumans or subhumans. There were simply humans. That self-evident truth, Tocqueville believed, was foundational to his brand of liberalism as well as natural law and Christian morality. By contrast, Tocqueville insisted, Gobineau’s suppositions about race led to the conclusion that we live in a world in which “there are only victors and vanquished, masters and slaves by fact of birth.” It was no coincidence, Tocqueville stated, that Gobineau’s “doctrines are approved, cited and commented upon … [by] the owners of negroes in favor of eternal servitude.”

A Line in the Political Sand

It is not difficult to see the connections between Gobineau’s beliefs and the type of race science that influenced radical ethno-nationalists from the late nineteenth century onwards. Certainly, other proponents of scientific racism, such as the Anglo-German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain and the American anthropologist and lawyer Madison Grant, contributed to these trends. Gobineau, however, was one of the most willing to spell out race science’s horrendous implications for any society in which the essential equality of humans by virtue of the same human nature is considered a sine qua non for liberal constitutional order.

Few proponents of contemporary alt-right opinion, I suspect, have ever heard of Arthur de Gobineau. But the parallels between their attitudes—whether of the explicitly racial variety, or the type which posits that some people are destined to rule everyone else because of some inherent attributes—and core tenets of Gobineau’s ideology are clear.

In Tocqueville’s correspondence with Gobineau, we also find one observation by Tocqueville that is particularly worth re-stating today. “You know,” Tocqueville informed Gobineau, “that I cannot reconcile myself to your system in any way; and my mind is so fixed on this point that the very reasons you put forward to make it acceptable to me strengthen my opposition.”

In short, there was nothing redeemable about Gobineau’s race theories and their consequences for politics because the more Gobineau articulated them, the more Tocqueville recognized that they were marked by an inner logic that was not only empirically false but morally reprehensible. That made Gobineau’s racialist views something that could only stain any institution or political movement that flirted with them.

In his time, Tocqueville refused to accord any legitimacy whatsoever to such positions wherever they reared their heads. He also declined to let individuals advancing or tolerating such ideas off the intellectual and moral hook. In our time, there should be no hesitation on our part to do the same.

“The battle of the pronouns is a matter of serious political and social concern.” Thus, Judges Amul Thapar and John Nalbandian, near the start of their concurring opinion in Defending Education v. Olentangy Local School District Board of Education, et al., for which the Sixth Circuit issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the plaintiffs in a closely watched en banc decision (10–7) issued on November 6. They are right, and if anyone in 2025 still imagines that pronominal use is not a matter of serious legal concern as well, this case certainly puts that doubt to rest.

At issue in Defending Education is whether Ohio’s fourth-largest school district could discipline students for purposefully using what are sometimes known as “biological pronouns” rather than what are sometimes known as “preferred pronouns” when referring to transgender or nonbinary classmates. The majority, relying heavily on the First Amendment, held that the district could not do this.

There has been no shortage of cases about pronouns, the most famous of which is Meriwether v. Hartop, et al. This pitted the Ohio philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether against his employer, Shawnee State University, which had disciplined him for refusing to use the pronouns “she/her/hers” for a biologically male student known in the court documents as Jane Doe. In 2021, the Sixth Circuit (again) ruled for Meriwether, who received a favorable settlement the following year.

Judge Thapar’s 32-page opinion in Meriwether makes for excellent reading. But I have rarely read a legal document as gripping as Defending Education. In addition to the majority opinion of Judge Eric Murphy and the dissent of Judge Jane Stranch, the 112 pages comprise no fewer than four concurring opinions by five of the nine colleagues who joined Murphy: Judges Alice Batchelder, John Bush, Raymond Kethledge, and (as already noted) Thapar and Nalbandian together. Unsurprisingly, all six opinions—five that come out for the plaintiffs, one for the defendants—cite Meriwether. Also unsurprisingly, sadly, is that the judges voted in blocks: all ten judges appointed by Republican presidents (six by Donald Trump, three by George W. Bush, and one by George H. W. Bush) sided with the plaintiffs, all seven judges appointed by Democratic presidents (four by Joe Biden, two by Bill Clinton, and one by Barack Obama) sided with the defendants.

Both the majority opinion and the dissent in Defending Education rely heavily on the Tinker test, so called after the 1969 Supreme Court case that ruled that the Des Moines, Iowa, public schools had wrongfully suspended three students who wore black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War. To quote the famous pronouncement of Justice Abe Fortas, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

In brief, Judge Murphy suggests that the Olentangy district “has fallen far short of meeting th[e] demanding [Tinker] standard,” having “introduced no evidence that the use of biological pronouns would disrupt school functions of quality as harassment under Ohio law.” By contrast, Judge Stranch—who wrote the majority opinion in the 2024 Sixth Circuit ruling (2–1) that the en banc decision reverses—argues that the district “has met its burden under Tinker to reasonably forecast that the speech requested by Defending Education will,” in the words of the 1969 decision, “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”

Why would anyone believe it appropriate for the government—and private employers, too, for that matter—to attempt to regulate how people use pronouns when the issues these little words raise did not exist a generation ago and are evidently highly contested?

To my mind, Judge Murphy’s opinion has many high points. But what makes the decision truly fascinating—and will substantially affect legal agendas in the years to come—is not the majority opinion as such, or the dissent, but the range of concurrences, all of which worry to greater and lesser degrees about the dependence on Tinker.

Here are two fundamental questions that go well beyond Tinker. First, what is it precisely that makes it wrong—or right—to compel students to refer to biological females as “he,” biological males as “she,” and/or any specific person as “they,” “ze,” or something else altogether? And second, more broadly, how will this latest ruling affect future attempts to compel adults, both in public schools and in every conceivable other environment, to use words that are among our language’s building blocks?

These questions, which nearly everyone would have regarded with incomprehension only two decades ago, have become seemingly unavoidable. As I point out in a survey of recent books about pronouns for young children, eighteen of the one hundred most-used “word forms” in American English are personal pronouns or pronominal adjectives, ten of them third-person forms. It is true that Judge Stranch wrote her “entire dissent … without using gendered third person pronouns to refer to individuals.” (In 2022, the conservative judge Barbara Lagoa of the Eleventh Circuit tried something similar in another case involving someone who is transgender.) But this is a language game that requires extraordinary attention to pull off and, furthermore, almost always results in something that sounds peculiar in places. As the majority opinion puts it,

in ordinary conversations (especially conversations between young students), it would be all but “impossible” to train oneself not to use pronouns when referring to others. … Students do not use this speech to belittle others; they use it because there is no practical alternative short of expressing a viewpoint with which they might fundamentally disagree.

Now, it is understandable that reasonable people will sometimes disagree about the applicability of the Tinker test to a specific matter. And in the case of Defending Education, although I believe the decision to be correct, I am sympathetic to the firmly worded assessment of Judge Batchelder, in her concurrence, that, pace the focus of the majority opinion, “Tinker has no role in a viewpoint-discrimination or compelled-speech analysis.” Be that as it may, what is much harder to understand is why would anyone believe it appropriate for the government—and private employers, too, for that matter—to attempt to regulate how people use pronouns when the issues these little words raise all but did not exist a generation ago and are evidently highly contested?

There are, of course, plenty of other highly contested and legally challenging things that were not widespread until a generation ago: the Internet, for example. But there is a vast gulf between a technological innovation and the basic linguistic expression, throughout the history of English, of what most people under most circumstances—very much including young children at school—have considered an immutable fact about biology.

And so, it will become increasingly interesting to watch how judges grapple with pronouns in the context of First Amendment rights. Will they continue to hold, with the majority opinion in Defending Education, that requiring a person to use or not use certain pronouns violates the Free Speech Clause? Will they affirm the importance of not engaging in viewpoint discrimination, an idea stressed here most powerfully in the concurrences of Judge Batchelder and Judges Thapar and Nalbandian? And when pronominal edicts conflict with sincerely held religious beliefs, what role will the Free Exercise Clause play? (It was part of the decision in Meriwether and could have played a larger role in Defending Education, which arose out of an email from a parent of a “devoutly Christian child”: see the amicus brief filed by a coalition of Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim groups.)

Or will it prove necessary to invoke historic common law, as Judge Kethledge does in his concurrence? “Not at all convinced that contemporary free-speech doctrine affords us a clear basis to decide cases like this one by the application of legal rules,” Judge Kethledge concludes that Olentangy students almost certainly “retain their right, under the historic common law, to use the pronouns they honestly think they should use.”

Then there is the lengthy concurrence of Judge Bush, written with verve in quite a different spirit. As a linguist who has written a great deal about pronouns, including about pronouns and the law, I am especially interested in what Judge Bush has to say about language, beginning with his opening paragraph, which I quote in full:

This case is about a government attempt to alter traditional grammar. If the issue seems odd, that’s because it is. Unlike languages in many countries, American English develops through custom, not law. True, we have “rules” of grammar. But they are rules only because we follow them until they change through voluntary, widespread decisions of individuals and groups. This change occurs through persuasion, not government mandate.

The first thing to say about this is that Judge Bush gets something wrong: no language develops through law rather than custom. He goes on to report that “governments around the world use the force of law to regulate language,” citing governmental committees and academies in China, France, Canada, and Belgium, and writes that “English is the notable exception. Governments in English-speaking countries have traditionally done nothing, nada, zilch, to regulate English common usage.” But official language-enforcing units like the Académie Française invariably exist as defensive, and generally futile, mechanisms against change—often inexorable change that isn’t so much voluntary as unconscious—rather than as anticipatorily offensive authorities.

Still, Judge Bush is only a bit hyperbolic when he calls the “tactics” of “the newly emergent pronoun regulators … a power play entirely without precedent in American history.” (The level of hyperbole depends, I think, on whether one views the semantic expansion of a word like “he” to include biological women to be a deep matter of grammar or simply a lexical change, albeit an especially consequential one, not unlike what the 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia arguably did to the meaning of “sex.”) He is right, I believe, that “if schools may prohibit common, historically acceptable pronoun usage by simply relabeling it ‘bullying,’ then they may prohibit virtually any speech.” And more generally, a “government simply cannot regulate grammar—full stop.”

The most moving line in the decision is Judge Kethledge’s “final point,” which he calls “hortatory rather than legal” and which Judge Stranch picks up with “full agreement” in her dissent: just because one has the legal right to say something doesn’t mean that one ought to do so. “Perhaps,” Judge Kethledge suggests, students “can … forbear from making an example of the eighth grader sitting next to them—if not as a matter of law, then of grace.” No one should be forced to refer to a boy who thinks he’s a girl as “she,” but if it does not deeply offend one’s sensibilities to do this—I recognize that this is a big “if”—then I, for one, counsel good will and, to take one of my favorite words, Judge Kethledge’s grace. And if indeed the “decline of trans and queer identity among young Americans” that Eric Kaufmann and others have observed continues, then maybe the battles of the pronouns, which came about so quickly, will cease sooner than their current prominence might suggest.

In the ancien régime, people were famously divided into three classes: those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. That world was dissolved in a bubbling brew of revolution and Enlightenment ideals, which may be for the best, because I can’t say that serfdom particularly appeals to me. But sometimes it’s helpful to look back and consider which aspects of older societies are worth recovering. Here’s one thing I admire about the ancien régime: its elites cultivated courage and toughness in their children. 

There was a practical element to this, to be sure. Young aristocrats needed to be prepared for military command, because who else would lead the army in the event of an invasion? But it was important whether or not Huns or Janissaries were rampaging through the towns. Elites always enjoy more than their share of comforts and privileges, which can make people soft and entitled. What happens to societies whose leaders are soft and entitled? 

Pre-modern elites understood themselves as the warrior class, entrusted with the protection and safety of society as a whole. That ethos, and the training it demanded, gave them at least some measure of protection against the “soft” vices: cowardice, dishonesty, petty cruelty. It laid a foundation for noblesse oblige, not just military service as such. Powerful people are at their worst when they feel free to throw their weight around, bullying and manipulating weaker parties. Warrior training helps to rein in that tendency. 

It’s a thing of the past, unfortunately. Today, our elites work while the middle class fights. This subversion of the old system reflects both military and economic changes, along with a broader shift that prioritizes cognitive excellence over most others. Privileged young men today are likelier to find themselves leading a seminar or strategy session than a platoon. What do we lose, though, when we stop asking our most privileged classes to cultivate courage? 

It’s an important question. And it leads us, naturally, to the subject of football.

Little Platoons

Football is America’s most martial sport. It brings together brute force, high strategy, and meticulous coordination, blending the grit of military trenches with the grace and precision of a ballet. It’s not hard to explain why Americans love it so much, as they have for over a century. Both professional and college football have, since the 1960s, captured larger audiences than any other sport, while high school football is and remains our most popular boys’ sport by wide margins. Much has been written over the last 15 years about declining participation, but those numbers are rising again. Football is unambiguously America’s favorite sport.

Nevertheless, there have been some real demographic changes to the world of football. American boys still play it, but the privileged mostly do not. Participation has fallen significantly among the sons of the wealthy and educated, the same demographics that have largely given up on military service. Football culture still holds strong in some regions, especially in the South, but in general, the affluent and educated are steering their sons away from it, while the poor and middle-class continue to play. At one time, we positively expected to see the town’s Fortunate Son (handsome, intelligent, and privileged) lining up under center for the snap. Today he’s likelier to swim, play tennis, or run cross country, carrying a trombone or STEM-themed textbooks through the halls instead of a playbook. Elite brains are too precious to risk on the gridiron.

Football is not the only possible “school of toughness,” but it could be the only one still robustly in business in cities and towns across America. Some days, I honestly think it is. 

It’s an awkward cultural shift. Football is still beloved in this country, but periodically a harrowing injury (such as Damar Hamlin’s dramatic on-field collapse in 2023) inspires a fresh bout of soul-searching as the affluent agonize over the ethical implications of enjoying a sport they won’t let their own kids play. It’s inevitable, perhaps, that we would end up here as our most elite classes increasingly experience football as televised entertainment, not a part of community life. To the spectators at a high school game, those boys are representing the community, our sons and a little platoon of warriors. It’s part of the cultural and moral fabric of America. But if the NFL is mainly spectacle, just a slightly-tamer version of the gladiatorial contest, then it does seem wrong to enjoy it, and perhaps exploitative to allow the less fortunate to play it for our amusement.

Football probably isn’t going anywhere, but it’s hard to be quite sure. Our elites have shown an unfortunate willingness to impose their views on the entire nation, regardless of what anyone else thinks. But if football is canceled, how do we save American boys from becoming spineless wimps? At this hour of the day, it’s hard to see what could possibly replace the gridiron as a civilizational mainstay, the American agoge, our most vaunted cultural tutorial in the value of discipline, teamwork, strategy, self-sacrifice, and sheer physical courage. It is inconceivable that our thinking classes could design something equally good, let alone persuade their fellow Americans to like it. 

Fields of Eton

I don’t mean to be too hard on America’s elites. The truth is, I understand completely why so many steer their sons away from playing football. It can be brutal. The risks are real, even if sometimes exaggerated by hyperbolic haters. And if (like me) you come from a family of degree-toting poindexters, football quite possibly is not the activity where your kids seem likeliest to excel. We’ve left the ancien régime well behind us. Silver souls are uncommon in the egghead classes. 

A sober “safety check” is beyond the scope of this particular article, but from a concussion standpoint, it’s worth noting that high school football is not much more dangerous than girls’ soccer, a sport almost no one wants to cancel. Nevertheless, football feels far more wrong, perhaps especially to mothers. I myself have experienced this, even as someone who loved football for many years before my own sons began playing. Logging hours in a local bar or friend’s living room, sipping a drink while you armchair-quarterback your college team, does not prepare you for the first experience of seeing your own son thrown to the turf by someone much bigger than he is. 

It might feel different for a person who grew up immersed in “Friday Night Lights” culture. I can’t say for sure. I do know that there’s a very big difference between rooting for distant celebrities and watching the same activity involving kids you know. Through those first few games, your entire brain seems to be screaming in protest. What are we, barbarians? How can this be fine? If it’s your son making the tackle, the emotions may be more complicated. Part of you is proud. Another part is in shock. Who is that guy? 

The rational mind can make sense of these visceral responses. Of course it is discomfiting to see kids you’ve known for years, classified in your mind as “vulnerable beings who need my protection,” playing tackle football. In cultural-civilizational terms, this game is a true anachronism, genuinely shocking in its raw physicality. In what other socially approved context do modern people act like this? We’ve spent years teaching our kids that it’s wrong to push and shove, and really wrong to throw people to the ground, and suddenly they’re being actively instructed in how to do those things. It’s jarring. No matter what you think on a rational level, a mother can feel a lot of mixed emotions when a coach says, “proud of his progress, we’re going to start him next week!” or “I think we might try him at running back!” Wonderful. He’ll be thrilled. And I will now go fill that Xanax prescription.

For those earliest games, I confess that I found myself occasionally glancing over at the coaches, processing a certain cognitive dissonance as I considered how responsible and decent-seeming they seemed when filing into Mass on Sunday. And yet, these men had deliberately taught all these nice kids to behave in such a way. I emphasize once again that I already loved football at this point! I understood what the boys were doing; I had just become accustomed to thinking of football players in the same class as stunt men or rescue swimmers. It’s impressive, but Don’t Try This At Home. 

So I’m familiar with all those uncomfortable feelings. Were they exposing a problem with football though, or with me and the culture that produced me? In a culture (or sub-culture) that has forgotten the value of toughness, football may just feel wrong to a certain sort of person. But that’s revealing our characteristic defect, not the sport’s.

In conversations on this subject, skeptical parents have often suggested to me that the goods I associate with football (discipline, teamwork, physical toughness, self-sacrifice, and courage) are indeed important, but that it would simply be better to instill them in another (safer?) way. That sounds reasonable. But how do we do it? Obviously football is not the only possible “school of toughness,” but it could be the only one still robustly in business in cities and towns across America. Some days, I honestly think it is. 

What other things do boys do today that draw together those same goods? It’s particularly hard to think of other activities (apart perhaps from other gritty team sports, such as hockey) that combine the “toughness” component with “self-sacrifice and teamwork.” Individual sports or outdoor wilderness challenges might involve real exertion and perseverance, but they tend to be heavily managed experiences in which kids jump through hoops their elders have set for them, usually in pursuit of a personal prize or credential. There’s an unscripted, “touching grass” element to football that those activities simply lack, along with high levels of cooperation and mutual trust. Even looking at other team sports, which surely have their own excellences, I know none quite like football in which boys literally count on one another to “have each other’s backs.” Everyone appreciates prudent modifications, such as safety caps, that help to mitigate the risks. Past a certain point, though, it just isn’t possible to make safety an absolute priority while also instilling courage, sacrifice, and grit.

It means something to put your very body on the line for someone else. Soldiers know this. Moms know this. Don’t we want our boys to learn it too? 

Those Who Fight

We couldn’t invent football today. It comes from a time when gentlemen still liked to hunt and shoot together, and considered it normal to see their sons in military uniform. The first football matches were played by the well-to-do young gentlemen of Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia, and Yale, who would beat each other up on the gridiron before joining together for a “handsome dinner,” a posh multi-course meal. They were elites! These were America’s Best and Brightest (and richest)! But in those days, elites still remembered the Duke of Wellington and his “fields of Eton.” 

We can’t recover that era, but we can make good use of the traditions we’ve inherited. We can expose our sons to football, and permit them to play, if they dare.

To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that all boys must play high school football to have a successful life. Not everyone can, and some who try won’t succeed, which is fine. Failure can be instructive too, and I personally think it might be quite beneficial for more of our high-level influencers to have memories of being benched or cut because other boys were bigger, stronger, or tougher than they were. Must nerds always be vengeful? Considering how warmly the modern world has smiled upon us, it might behoove us to be a bit more magnanimous, cultivating less-natural-to-us excellences as we can and appreciating others’ where we cannot. 

Concussions can be scary, but how do we balance that against another kind of hazard: the soft tyranny of low expectations that seems to be swallowing our boys like quicksand?

On a more practical level, I should acknowledge that while I am a football mom, I have not encouraged every son to play at every opportunity. I definitely want my sons to live in a cultural environment where the relevant goods are valued. I want them to know that I see them, not just those guys on TV, as the sort of people who can be expected to step in and make their blocks when occasion demands. But prudence is required, as in all areas of life. Where real goods conflict, football won’t always win.

What’s important is that its real value is appreciated, even or especially for boys who might not immediately be drawn to contact sports. Anecdotally, I have found that youth football coaches overwhelmingly know the tune here; they recognize that they are making men on the gridiron, not just players. Their job involves much more than just drills and playbooks, and they’re very aware of this. It’s foolish indeed to undervalue that kind of mentorship for our sons, especially in a time when American boys seem to be struggling mightily with what we might call “vices of weakness.” 

And they are struggling. Young men today are lazy, undisciplined, antisocial. They’re incredibly safe by historical standards, and yet they remain anxious and risk-averse, sometimes to the point of pathology. In the dark hallways of the manosphere, it’s clear that young men have an overpowering sense that manhood has been stolen from them, and they’re bitter about it, though they can’t explain with any clarity what has been lost. Surrounded to a historically unprecedented degree by choice and opportunity, they struggle to find the motivation to do even the things that have been considered normal for almost all men everywhere: work, get married, have children. Even sex is a “maybe” for men today.

Against that backdrop, football’s more unsettling characteristics (the ones that make moms wince) start looking more and more like a feature and not a bug. Concussions can be scary, but how do we balance that against another kind of hazard: the soft tyranny of low expectations that seems to be swallowing our boys like quicksand?

Perhaps it’s time to take at least a few pages from the ancien régime, where elites were trained to fight. In football, America’s most martial sport, they still can. Game on.

It is always difficult to describe a man in full, but even more so when that man isn’t too interested in himself. Such is the case with the great Catholic journalist G. K. Chesterton, whose extensive body of work, comprising 80 books and thousands of articles, made him a giant in the realms of religion and politics in the early twentieth century. Sadly, he was also a man of deep depression. Catholic theology considers despair a sin, as a form of pride and egotism. And his life was filled with many tempting tragedies, enough that his poetic works include subtle snippets like “The strangest whim has seized me. After all / I think I will not hang myself today.”

Despite this temperament, Chesterton was also a defiantly joyful person. In a very Roman Catholic sense, he simply chose not to fall into despair. He refused to let the pride of self-hatred consume him. Unfortunately, this made him a poor author of his own life, as he simply wasn’t interested in it. 

His famous 1936 autobiography is infamous in this regard, as any reader will notice it’s hardly about Chesterton. As the notable Chesterton scholar Ethan Nicole explains in his excellent Chesterton’s Gateway, “Chesterton didn’t like talking about himself, so he spends most of the book talking about other people, which is sweet of him, but that’s not what you came to a Chesterton biography for.” 

Many great biographies have thankfully already been written about Chesterton. Maisie Ward’s comprehensive biography is considered the most definitive, while recent ones by Joseph Pierce and Ian Ker have also been highly praised. However, the gaping hole of a proper autobiography leaves regrettable gaps in his history. There is more to be said about this man, and happily, Dale Ahlquist, president of the Chesterton Society, has stepped into this gap with his newest book, I Also Had My Hour: An Alternative Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton. 

To write another man’s autobiography is a brave and dangerous thing. Only an adoring devotee would dare to attempt it, and Ahlquist is that man. As one of the world’s leading experts and defenders of Chesterton, the book is the culmination of decades of research into the great apologist’s life. 

The truth is, Chesterton did talk about himself, with details and personal anecdotes sprinkled across his vast corpus of writings. The body text of I Also Had My Hour takes advantage of this fact, using those snippets to create an unusual sort of collage. Ahlquist builds the narrative of his life by systemizing these quotes into a cohesive explanation of the major events of Chesterton’s life, unpacking many of the most notable things to happen to him, such as the Marconi scandal and his conversion to Catholicism. The book includes some familiar quotes, but also draws heavily on rarer Chesterton texts that sparsely see the light of day. 

This methodology does create cause for concern, particularly with Chesterton. He’s already famous as an author for the preponderance of lofty out-of-context quotes floating around the Internet, many of which make no sense without proper context. There’s a danger in crafting an entire book entirely out of them; the editor brings his own biases into the text through clever inclusions and exclusions. How many writers would hesitate to allow any future biographer to do the same?

Ahlquist is certainly right to admit upfront that the book is “cobbled” together. The first chapter alone contains 367 cited snippets from Chesterton’s writing in the Illustrated London News, GK Weekly, The Daily Herald, The New Witness, and the various prefaces to several largely forgotten books, highlighting quotes that many Chesterton devotees likely have never read. 

In execution, it reads almost more like a medieval florilegium than a proper biography, similar to C. S. Lewis’s book of George MacDonald quotes. The ambition to string them together into a coherent narrative is mostly successful, but results in a text with abrupt tone and momentum changes. Chesterton might be ranting against corruption in one paragraph, while the next contains calm reminiscences. 

Like Chesterton’s own biographies on St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas, he attempts to tell the story of who Chesterton was rather than what happened to him, capturing the man rather than listing his life in a chronology.

The best thing the book has going for it is Chesterton’s whirling prose. Dale’s ability to drag a line of thought through digressions on Victorian politics, Anglican theology, and beer resembles Chesterton’s circuitous style. Chesterton’s ability to turn a rant about an umbrella into a remarkable metaphysics lecture is fully on display. Even if a sentence seems tangential, it’s still lovely to read because he wrote it. 

The narrative that unfolds through these snippets is a deeply interior one, showing the emergence of Chesterton’s inner world amid the changes of Victorian England, with the cheer and justice of Old England degrading into industrialism, Darwinism, and socialism. Chesterton sees the whimsy and imaginative literature of his youth being replaced by less uplifting stuff, until he feels like the last man reading fairy tales in a crowd of humorless radicals. The paradoxical orthodoxy he advocated for his entire adult life amounts to a rejection of the “mode of the age,” the chaotic sophistry and fashionable ideology of modern Britain. He craved a solid foundation from which to fight corruption and temptation in its myriad forms. He found it in the Catholic Church. 

Ahlquist borrows heavily from Chesterton’s views on biography to craft a narrative that is less a traditional biography than an unpacking of the meaning of the events of his life. An event as simple as his move from London to Beaconsfield becomes a lengthy rant on the snobbishness of a generation of English writers seeking rural simplicity. His brother’s work as an editor becomes a digression on Irish liberation. Like Chesterton’s own biographies on St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas, he attempts to tell the story of who Chesterton was rather than what happened to him, capturing the man rather than listing his life in a chronology.

This is largely what Ahlquist delivers, offering readers profound commentary on the core issues and controversies of his life, delving deep into his conversion away from Anglicanism, addressing allegations of anti-Semitism against him, engaging his critics, and unpacking the major events of his life. He succeeds (mostly) in systemizing Chesterton’s incredibly unsystematic thought process into something comprehensive. These collections are invaluable in laying out hundreds of scattered thoughts across his entire body of literature, but there is little narrative thread connecting these chapters. 

The book that emerges reflects an uneven final product. Not only are more than half the book’s pages littered with exhausting citations and digressive footnotes, but the chapters themselves have little order or structure. Chapter lengths are random, large portions of his life are omitted, and his character faults are glossed over. 

The book’s rawness is reflective of what must’ve been an exhaustive creative process. It would have taken decades for anybody to find and collect all of these quotes into a coherent work. The seams are often clearer than they should be, and some quotes are repeated several times, but altogether it is nothing less than a remarkable work. 

I Also Had My Hour is a sincerely awkward book, in the best sense of the word. It is trying to systematize ideas that cannot truly be systematized, but readers can enjoy the way Ahlquist’s adoration for his mentor paints Chesterton’s life in a glowing sheen. It’s the fuel that makes a collection such as this possible, enabling him to casually collect three decades of research into a single condensed volume. If it has any flaw, it is simply that Alquist adores Chesterton too much. The book gives Chesterton the glow of a Saint, and downplays all of his potential faults to mere eccentricities. But as Dale argues, many have tried and failed to make the case that Chesterton is overrated. 

As it stands, the book is a benevolent Frankenstein monster; an act of hagiographical graffiti. It seems likely Chesterton would appreciate the beauty of that.

A few weeks ago, Ilan Wurman wrote a thoughtful essay for Law & Liberty that jousted with the ideas behind Caleb Nelson’s much-discussed break with the unitary executive theory (UET). The UET takes many forms, but it often embraces two conclusions about presidential power: that the Constitution vests in the president (1) an inherent power to remove principal officers and (2) an inherent power to direct principal officers’ exercise of delegated authorities. Nelson made waves by following a growing anti-UET literature and arguing that an originalist analysis premised on original public meaning fails to establish either a presidential removal power or a presidential direction power. Wurman’s essay cautioned against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He acknowledged that a presidential direction power of the kind envisioned by unitarians lacks sufficient support, but argues that a presidential removal power stands on firmer ground.

My intervention here is meant to problematize Wurman’s analysis. I think Wurman is right to abandon a presidential direction power. Scholars such as Christine Chabot, Julian Mortenson, and Jed Shugerman have done too much damage to the UET’s pedigree to conclude otherwise. Wurman’s narrower defense of a presidential removal power might turn on a thicker set of evidentiary debates that are submerged in his essay. Having assembled some evidence of an original public meaning that contradicts the anti-unitarian literature, Wurman’s case may ultimately turn on how to parse conflicting evidence and which side ultimately carries what burden. These arguments, though probably decisive, are too complicated for a short essay.

Rather than straining this medium by hashing out those complicated evidentiary debates, I will try to merely problematize Wurman’s work by examining his sub rosa debate with famed constitutional thinker Edward Corwin.

Old Ground: The Taftian and Corwinite Camps

The ongoing conflict over the UET tracks a century-long debate between Chief Justice William Howard Taft and legal scholar Edward S. Corwin. Taft gave the UET one of its earliest articulations in the 1926 case, Myers v. United States. The case did not implicate the modern UET. It raised narrower questions arising from a 1876 statute that required the president to obtain the Senate’s approval before removing postmasters. Taft nonetheless crafted a vision of a unitarian presidency in extravagant dicta. Taft’s unitarian vision, with important caveats, pointed towards powers of removal and direction that turned on implied readings of the Article II Vesting, Take Care, and Appointments Clauses. Modern unitarianism has adopted more sophisticated arguments that generally hue to the outlines of a Taftian reading of these triangulated clauses.

For most of the twentieth century, the Taftian reading was eclipsed by an alternative offered up by Edward Corwin. In his own time, Corwin was maybe the most important public-facing interpreter of the Constitution in the American academy. His reputation was largely cemented through his epic takedown of Taft’s work in Myers, which remains one of the most stinging and effective critiques of any opinion ever produced by the Supreme Court. Corwin’s reading gave Congress ultimate control over the administrative state. His argument flowed from Congress’s power to create administrative offices under the Article I Necessary and Proper Clause. This reading formed the basis for a powerful rebuke of Myers’s reasoning in the academy and on Capitol Hill. Progressives, apoplectic over Taft’s unitarian vision, arranged for Corwin’s argument to be disseminated across the Nation through mass pamphleting.

Nelson’s splashy piece on the UET places him firmly in this Corwinite tradition. He places considerable emphasis on a natural reading of Article I, which empowers Congress “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution,” not only Congress’s own powers but also “all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” Nelson’s position boils down to the view that the emphasized portion of text above includes executive powers vested by Article II in the president. Because the Constitution assigns Congress latitude over “all other powers vested … in the Government,” a Corwinite reading of Article I gives Congress latitude to shape the term of removal even if Article II’s grant of executive power implied a baseline power of presidential removal. A removal power, to the extent one is implied in Article II, is merely one of many “Powers” belonging to “the Government of the United States” to which the Necessary and Proper Clause refers.

The debate between the Taftian unitarians and the Corwinites shows that an original public meaning analysis cannot hang on any single clause of Articles I or II in isolation. The debate turns on how these Articles interact. Nelson finds that the evidence in the unitarian literature fails to overcome a straightforward reading of the Necessary and Proper Clause, which seems to envision broad congressional control over the design of the administrative state regardless of the meaning of any portion of Article II. The Founding Era evidence is just too underdetermined to support a unitarian remaking of American government. And at least with respect to a presidential direction power, Wurman agrees with Nelson.

Problematizing Wurman’s Move

Wurman’s attempts to save a presidential removal power seem insufficient to me once we tee up the Taftian-Corwinite debate. If the question is whether there’s sufficient original public meaning to overcome the Necessary and Proper Clause’s reference to “all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States”—i.e., does the original public meaning of Article II create an unregulable presidential removal power that is immune to a plain reading of Article I—much of the evidence Wurman points to is ambiguous at best. James Wilson’s argument that “there can be no good Executive without a responsible appointment of officers to execute,” does not, without more, resolve the core question in this analysis. I think Wurman realizes this. I read that portion of his essay as merely establishing the importance of a presidential appointment power to the Founding generation’s understanding of executive power.

Wurman’s central move in his essay remains, by my lights, unpersuasive in light of Congress’s long-accepted power to regulate the president’s appointments.

Wurman’s project is classic Taft; he wants to build up the importance of the express power of presidential appointment and argue that a presidential removal power is “incident[al]” to that clear grant of executive power. On this score, Wurman points to the private writings of Founders such as Thomas Jefferson, who thought that executive power inherently encompassed both appointment and removal. A hardcore originalist might ignore these private writings because the ratified text expressly embraced appointment but not removal. These are the kinds of debates that led Nelson to conclude that the Founding Era materials on which Wurman relies are just inconclusive.

The most interesting part of Wurman’s essay is his turn to the interaction between Article II and the Necessary and Proper Clause. This is, by my lights, the section that really matters. Nelson saw no sufficient evidence to establish that an implied power of presidential removal was somehow immune from the plain thrust of the Necessary and Proper Clause. Here, Wurman argues that just because Congress has tremendous latitude to, among other things, create administrative offices does not mean that Congress has the lesser power to insulate administrators from presidential removal.

Wurman’s argument makes intuitive sense. The grant of a greater power does not necessarily imply the grant of a lesser one. As Wurman writes, “just because Congress can establish … federal crimes … does not give Congress a ‘lesser’ power to limit the reasons why the president can pardon individuals convicted of those crimes.”

The problem here is that unbroken precedents have depended on implied congressional powers that directly affect the president’s appointment power. And as far as I can tell, these precedents have not been targeted in a sustained way for overruling by the unitarians. They are so consistent that they are part of settled law, beyond doubt. And they tend to show that nothing about the all-important power of presidential appointment was immune from an extravagant reading of the Necessary and Proper Clause.

Just after the Founding, in the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress required the president to select an attorney general “learned in the law.” Over the next two centuries, Congress filled the statute books with a baroque collection of qualifications that regulate the president’s appointment power. These qualifications range from regulating the prior experiences, age, gender, and party affiliations of potential appointees. Writing in the Reconstruction Era, Attorney General Amos T. Akerman concluded that Congress’s power to regulate the president’s pool of potential appointees faced very few limitations. Congress could not, for example, dictate a single appointee and thereby functionally rob the president of his or her appointment power.

In newly unsealed primary sources from Congress’s own internal constitutional deliberations, lawmakers drew on this largely unimpeded reading of the Appointments and the Necessary and Proper Clauses to devise a modern state defined by administrative depth. In a few places, Congress required the president to select nominees from a short list devised by other officials or entities. For example, when the president appoints judges to the courts of the District of Columbia, he or she must select appointees from a pre-screened list put together by the District of Columbia Judicial Nomination Commission. This move to insulate the rule of law from unbridled presidential will depends entirely on Congress’s powers under the Necessary and Proper Clause. Presidents from both parties, far removed from the Founding, have objected to Congress’s powers to regulate appointments, but many of them have nonetheless helped Congress enact statutes that limit unfettered presidential appointment power.

This unbroken practice from the Founding to the present shows the limits of Wurman’s argument. The Constitution does not expressly supply Congress with the power to regulate the president’s all-important power over appointments. And yet, Congress has repeatedly hemmed in the president’s choice of appointees through a broad reading of the Necessary and Proper Clause. Wurman’s citation of Congress’s power over federal crimes aside, sometimes the delegation of the greater power really does imply the lesser. Generations of Americans have concluded decisively that Congress’s power to create offices implies the power to craft qualifications and to regulate the president’s pool of appointees.

What is the potential difference between removal restrictions, qualifications, and short lists? Wurman notes cryptically that “qualifications for office [and] bipartisanship requirements … can help the president carry law into execution.” But this is a subjective distinction that carries too much of Wurman’s own political morality into his analysis. Removal restrictions, like qualifications, can help the president enforce the law by creating zones of administrative power that embody other virtues besides direct and hierarchical political control. If Congress requires the Federal Reserve to be managed by PhD economists, would a unitarian scholar bat an eye? Wurman would, I expect, say that this qualification helps enforce the law. But one view of the Fed’s removal provisions is that they insulate expert economists from unbridled presidential control, creating the conditions for the same kinds of good law execution that Wurman thinks is compatible with qualifications.

I came to this debate without a dog in the fight. I deeply respect both Nelson and Wurman, and I was open to the idea that the Constitution might require a limited removal power. But like Nelson, I find the evidence underwhelming. Wurman’s central move in his essay remains, by my lights, unpersuasive in light of Congress’s long-accepted power to regulate the president’s appointments. I look forward to more evidence and debates. But this contest requires a search for original public meaning that is strong enough to establish an unregulable removal power. That evidence must show that the Founding generation understood themselves to be placing a removal power above Congress’s broad authority to mold the administrative state to its liking. So far, however, the search has come up short.

Robert Jackson was a key figure in mid-twentieth-century American liberalism. He rose rapidly up the cursus honorum of the New Deal. In the period between 1934 and 1941, Roosevelt appointed him Assistant General Counsel to the IRS, then Assistant Attorney General for the IRS. He then worked for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division before becoming Solicitor General, Attorney General, and finally Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, serving from 1941 to 1954. Jackson was the last Supreme Court Justice who never attended college, nor had a law degree (he spent one year in law school and otherwise “read law,” learning the trade as Lincoln had). He took a leave of absence to be the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trial. A zealous liberal in his political career, he became something of a conservative on the Court. He is usually classed as among the best prose stylists in Court history (with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). Yet he has had only one biography until now—Eugene C. Gerhart’s America’s Advocate (1958), though John Q. Barrett has made a career collecting and posting material on Jackson. Something enigmatic about Jackson keeps him peripheral.

Now at least he has a heavy-hitting biographer in G. Edward White, whose Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment was just released this October. White is professor of law at the University of Virginia and the foremost judicial biographer of our day, as the author of the classic American Judicial Tradition, a serial biographical overview of two centuries of American jurisprudence. He has also written biographies of John Marshall, Earl Warren (for whom he clerked), and Alger Hiss, as well as the very fine Creating the National Pastime, a history of baseball from 1903 to 1953. But White concedes that “I have been struck by how difficult it is to encapsulate [Jackson] other than in contradictions.” This is probably because White is too much a biographer and not enough of a historian, getting sucked into the psychological and personal, and not analyzing political and constitutional ideas.

The childhood, early-life, and pre-career background is usually the worst chapter in any biography. White’s is probably the strongest part of his book, even though he sometimes falls into the trap of giving too much detail, becoming quotidian and dull. (For instance, we do not need the details of his sister Mary’s experience at Smith College, including her C-minus in Zoology.) Jackson grew up an old-stock Protestant agrarian on the border of Pennsylvania and New York—the US-6 route, still one of the least densely-populated parts of the country east of the Mississippi. He ended up in Jamestown, New York (also home of Lucille Ball). His people were Jeffersonian democrats, with a small-town ethos of individualism as well as familism and community. Jackson came to believe that the twentieth century destroyed this idyllic world, but he seems never to have considered that the progressive and New Deal policies that he did so much to promote may have contributed to this destruction. 

When we get to Jackson’s public and political career, White tends to downplay his legal and constitutional controversies. His criminal and civil suits regarding Andrew Mellon’s taxes, for example, are often seen as harassing and vindictive. Early in World War II, Jackson provided Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a legal fig-leaf to cover the apparently illegal “destroyers-for-bases” deal, in which America gave Britain some older-model Naval destroyers in exchange for a rent-free lease on several naval and air bases in several territories in the Atlantic. It was a serious stretch of executive authority; Princeton’s Edward S. Corwin, perhaps the greatest authority on the Constitution in the twentieth century, called the deal “an endorsement of unrestrained autocracy in the field of our foreign relations … no such dangerous opinion was ever before penned by an Attorney General.” Roosevelt himself told Jackson that he needed him to draw the political flak. White mostly skirts this thorny episode. 

Jackson’s unhappy career on the Court resulted from his inability to fuse or completely separate the roles of advocate and judge.

White also minimizes the legal problems of Jackson’s Nuremberg prosecutions. Though he does quote Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone’s description of Nuremberg as “a high-grade lynching,” White doesn’t even mention the travesty of the participation of the Soviet Union, whose crimes against humanity were on a par with the Nazis’. It is hard to take seriously Jackson’s claim that the trials vindicated an “international rule of law.”

Jackson was also a key supporter of Roosevelt’s scheme to “pack” the Court in 1937. His 1941 book, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy, argued (at the president’s prompting) that Roosevelt’s plan exposed the Court as a political institution, and succeeded in inducing the Court to change its doctrine and accept the New Deal, ostensibly the “switch in time that saved nine.” As Jackson put it, the fence-sitting conservative Justices (presumably Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Associate Justice Owen Roberts) “subdued the rebellion against their constitutional dogma by joining it.” White disputes this at great length. White is an “internalist,” meaning he believes that the Court changed for legal and not political reasons, rooted in earlier developments in constitutional doctrine. Historians, political scientists, and law professors have been arguing over this for years. White is both a history PhD and a JD, but he should have done more to present the evidence from the “externalist” side. Like Jackson, he is on this issue more advocate than judge.

Jackson was at his best as an advocate and was happiest in his role as solicitor general and Nuremberg prosecutor. Outside of those offices, he often evinced Hamlet-like indecisiveness. Though he was one of Roosevelt’s favorites (and that esteem was more than reciprocated), the president ultimately dropped him from his short list of possible successors in 1940 because he wasn’t partisan enough. (In the end, nobody was, so Roosevelt anointed himself for a third term.) Instead, Jackson was put on the Court in 1941. His was the last of the seven seats that Roosevelt filled. Jackson himself said, “If you’re going to pack the Court, you’ve really got to pack it.” When he signed Jackson’s commission, the president boasted, “It may not be proper to announce it, but today the Court is full.”

Jackson’s unhappy career on the Court resulted from his inability to fuse or completely separate the roles of advocate and judge. Though brought up in the world of progressive “Legal Realism,” which conflated law and politics, he retained some sense of the classical belief that law could be separated from politics—the “natural law” belief that law was discovered, not made, which White has called the “oracular” view of judging. White notes that before he was on the Court, Jackson was “not a committed ideological partisan in the same manner as many who served with him in the Roosevelt administration … but he was a team player.” He was as political as Roosevelt needed him to be, ardently denouncing New Deal opponents as plutocrats and fascists. But he knew that the Court was different, and many of his Roosevelt-appointed fellow Justices did not.

Part of the reason for Jackson’s unhappiness on the Court came from the relative insignificance of the judicial office in wartime. Jackson joined the Court on the eve of Pearl Harbor. White pithily points out that on “the Monday after Pearl Harbor, the Court heard two cases raising the question of whether members of country clubs owed taxes on their green fees.” He asked Roosevelt if he could be of more use off the Court. Justice James Byrnes resigned in 1942 to become the director of Economic Stabilization and then of the Office of War Mobilization; he was commonly known as the “Assistant President.” But Roosevelt kept Jackson on the bench.

There, he was shocked to see how overtly the Roosevelt appointees were willing to politicize constitutional law. He sided with Felix Frankfurter, an icon and teacher of progressive lawyers who became quite restrained and often conservative on the bench. They clashed with the four justices that Frankfurter called “the Axis”—Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, and Wiley Rutledge. (White’s American Judicial Tradition chapter on Douglas was titled “the anti-judge.”) These conflicts became bitter and personal, often dramatized as front-page news. In what became known as the “Jackson-Black Feud,” Jackson was particularly aghast that Black did not recuse himself in a case argued by his former law partner and believed that Black manipulated decisions to benefit his own favored interest groups. He also believed that Black and Douglas had conspired to deny him the chief justiceship, threatening to resign if President Truman appointed Jackson. (Though, typically, Jackson also denied that he really wanted the job.) He sent a long telegram from Nuremberg denouncing Black, which ended up in the newspapers. “Only once in the history of the Supreme Court has one of its members publicly accused another of unethical behavior and manipulating the decision-making process for personal ends,” one historian wrote. Today’s “Barrett-Jackson Feud” looks like a clawless cat fight in comparison. Truman told his wife, “It sure was a lucky thing I didn’t make Jackson Chief Justice. He has surely gone haywire.” Truman regarded Roosevelt’s judicial selections as “somewhat disgraceful.”

Antonin Scalia described himself as a “faint-hearted originalist.” Jackson could be called a faint-hearted realist.

Perhaps the best illustration of Jackson’s judicial agonizing is in the desegregation cases (Brown v. Board of Education) in 1954. This was a genuinely hard case, for Jackson wanted to do the right thing but struggled to find adequate legal grounds. He prepared a concurring opinion, but in the end went along with the unanimous opinion written by Earl Warren. “Our problem is how to make a judicial decision out of a political conclusion,” he wrote. He could go along with a political decision, but wanted the Court to be candid about what it was doing. He pondered a decision in which the Court condemned segregation as wrong but not unconstitutional, leaving it to Congress to act, presumably under the interstate commerce power. (Jackson had long ago given Congress carte blanche, saying that “in order to be unconstitutional … the relation between interstate commerce and the regulated activity would have to be so absurd that it would be laughed out of Congress.”) He finally worked out a decision along “living Constitution” lines, stressing the great progress that black Americans had made since Reconstruction. They were no longer so inferior a race as to justify segregation. But he set his draft opinion aside and joined Warren’s unanimous decision.

As White notes, Jackson grew up in the era of Legal Realism, which viewed law as an instrument of power, with no distinction between law and politics. But he did not go as far as “the Axis.” Jackson fell between the stools of classical, nineteenth-century jurisprudence (often called “formalism”) and modern realism. White often describes Jackson’s judicial approach as “pragmatic,” and notes that he particularly admired William James, author of the famous essay “Pragmatism.” Pragmatism, James explained, defined the true as “whatever works.” When this approach enters the legal realm, it is easy to see how it could degenerate into “If it feels just, rule it.” This was what the realist Benjamin Cardozo called gefühlsjurisprudenz, “a jurisprudence of sentiment or feeling.” It surfaced among the Axis (especially in Frank Murphy), but the deaths of Murphy and Rutledge in 1949 delayed its full manifestation until the Warren Court, which began just when Jackson left the stage.

Antonin Scalia described himself as a “faint-hearted originalist.” Jackson could be called a faint-hearted realist. Though he was taken aback at the full-throated realism of Hugo Black or William O. Douglas, he had no alternative to fall back on, since his generation had been disconnected from the political theory and jurisprudence of the American Founders. He was unable to find a way back to the natural law tradition, as did some prominent legal progressives like Roscoe Pound, Robert M. Hutchins, and even Jerome Frank. This unsure grounding may account for his difficulty in moving from the job of advocate to that of judge. He was aware of the problem. “Something does happen to a man when he puts on a judicial robe,” he told a biographer, “and I think it ought to. The change is very great and requires a psychological change within a man to get into an attitude of deciding other people’s controversies, instead of waging them. It really calls for quite a changed attitude. Some never make it—I am not sure I have.”

White wrote about Jackson over forty years ago in The American Judicial Tradition. The chapter was titled “The Dilemmas of Robert Jackson.” Jackson seems as enigmatic now as he did then. This is perhaps because White is more biographer than critical historian. Like many biographers, he has been captured by his subject. Jackson’s first biographer, Eugene Gerhart, was similarly captured. White’s focus on the personal and psychological (was Jackson having an affair with his secretary and, if so, why?) could have been profitably replaced by more attention to other historians’ evaluations of his prominent and controversial public acts.

It would be hard to write on twentieth-century American political and constitutional history without Jackson playing a role and making several appearances. But he remains poor material for a stand-alone biography.

John McGinnis’s lead essay for this month’s Forum, “Nondelegation Without Chaos,” is a fine piece of work. But it doesn’t seem to address the essential problem with our imbalanced government: the inability of Congress to comply with the current—though widely ignored—1928 Supreme Court standard that the laws contain an “intelligible principle” that the courts can understand and apply. Instead, McGinnis has suggested a sensible but different procedure in which “the Court would require that Congress make policy choices.”

The trouble is that this new procedure looks pretty much like the old procedure. The difference is that now Congress would be required to “make policy choices” instead of following the current requirement that Congress supply an “intelligible principle” when it makes a law—an idea that the courts have more often praised than invoked.

The intelligible principle idea was introduced to guide the courts in whether or how to apply a particular law. The gentle suggestion was, essentially, to “tell us what this law was intended to do so we may apply it appropriately, but not further afield than what you (Congress) intended.” But even this simple rule has been ignored by Congress—as well as the Court—in later cases.

I have a hard time believing that a Congress that can’t state an “intelligible principle” for the legislation it is adopting would be able to make “policy choices,” which would seem to be an even higher standard.

In other words, the problem is not that the Courts have failed to make clear what they want Congress to do; it’s that Congress can’t—or hasn’t in the past been able to—state what it’s trying to achieve by a particular law, and thus how far the law extends in controlling the public’s activities.

The effect, then, is that the president, or any agency authorized to enforce the law, has greater freedom in enforcing the law than Congress likely intended. This is more than simply giving an agency or the president more power; it is an obvious separation of powers problem. Because Congress has not clarified the scope of the law, the president or the enforcement agency is able to “enforce” beyond what Congress intended.

When the Court has shown itself unwilling to strike down laws that violate the separation of powers standard, it has fallen into the “strict in theory, fatal in fact” fallacy, where the intelligible principle rule is a reasonable standard in theory, but ignored in fact. Indeed, it is hard to find a post-1928 case where the Court actually invoked the absence of an intelligible principle in invalidating a law. Schechter Poultry and Panama Refining, two cases which are often cited as based on the intelligible principle idea, both struck down laws because they were seen as straightforward unconstitutional delegations of legislative power by Congress lacking any standard at all—nothing as simple as lacking an intelligible principle. One case in which the test was actually invoked since 1928 occurred in 2001, in Whitman v. American Trucking Associations, where Justice Scalia found that a single word, “requisite,” was able to satisfy the intelligible principle test.

Rather than changing the “intelligible principle” idea—which is simple, straightforward, and at least has the value of Supreme Court acceptance in the past—the Court should actually enforce it.

If history is any guide, Congress will continue to fail this test until something is done to penalize it for failing. The problem would not be solved by making the standards tougher to meet, unless the Court actually commits to enforcing them.

The danger here, and it is a serious one, is that Congress will continue adopting broadly framed or unframed legislation, which will enable the government to prosecute people it disfavors. If the law-abiding public will not be able to understand where the fences actually are, law enforcement officials will have excessive discretion in charging violations of the law. The government will become even more powerful and dangerous, and the public more vulnerable.

The problem, then, is not whether the intelligible principle non-delegation requirement is framed, but whether Congress will be able to apply it, and that remains doubtful.

Under McGinnis’s proposed standard, Congress will be required to make “policy choices.” It would help to have some examples of what a policy choice is, but it sounds a lot more specific than an “intelligible principle” and thus even more difficult for Congress to apply.

Thus, it would be sensible to assume that Congress will not be able to do any better in complying with the “policy choices” idea than with the intelligible principle.

Since we have a system of separated powers to preserve our liberties, it’s essential that the formal separation between the legislature and the executive remain in place. The greatest threat to the separation of powers today is the failure of Congress to be more specific in the legislation it develops. Broadly worded or unspecific laws will unwittingly provide even more power to the executive branch than it has already acquired.

Thus, if the McGinnis proposal is to address the failure of Congress to make more specific laws, it’s a fine idea, but it may only enhance the problem that already exists—the inability of Congress to abide by existing restrictions on the scope of the legislation it enacts.

Accordingly, if the Supreme Court is really interested in toughening the nondelegation rule—as it should be—the answer is with the Court itself. It must make clear to Congress that it will not enforce legislation that is not specific enough to meet any test, whether it’s the existing test of an intelligible principle or the McGinnis test of chosen policies.

Years ago, we had a serious problem with the Chevron doctrine. That was an informal rule applied by the courts, which allowed administrative agencies to make rules and regulations if they could point to existing legislation that might be relevant to the question—not specifically intended to address the problem that an agency wanted to control, but somewhere within the general ballpark. This system was finally overturned by the Supreme Court in Loper Bright Industries v. Raimondo in 2024.

The problem today with excessive delegation is much the same, and can be addressed in the same way. Rather than changing the “intelligible principle” idea—which is simple, straightforward, and at least has the value of Supreme Court acceptance in the past—the Court should actually enforce it, and invalidate laws that fail to include an intelligible principle.

If the Court simply did that, it could solve a substantial part of the nondelegation problem today.

The debate about Islam’s compatibility with Western freedoms often seems to have reached an impasse. Everyone knows that most Muslims are not violent extremists or actively working to undermine liberty. Everyone also knows that Muslims are more likely than other communities to support (at least in principle) the coercive imposition of religious norms. Thus, we play the game of essence and accidents: is this or that anti-liberal tendency of a particular Muslim community the result of Islam’s deep essence or of more culturally contingent accidents?

I doubt such questions will ever be settled. Not because I think there is no right answer or that Islam doesn’t have an essence—as a Muslim, I am committed to thinking that there is, and it does—but because in a pluralistic society, we should not expect agreement on the essence of any religion. The various schools and sects of Islam disagree as to which beliefs follow from the tradition’s core theological and scriptural commitments; non-Muslims also disagree sharply as to how best to characterise those commitments.

This is not to deny that any progress can be made through examining Islamic theological commitments. Mustafa Akyol, for instance, draws on what Daniel Philpott calls “seeds of liberty” in the Islamic intellectual tradition to identify dynamics by which doctrine might develop in a more liberal direction. But the debate rarely takes full notice of the fact that its outcome will depend as much on how we interpret liberty as it does on how we interpret Islam. Liberalism is not a monolith, after all: where some versions hold that denying the reality of any of the fourteen or so genders that supposedly exist is tantamount to blasphemy, others think that liberty requires strong, traditional nuclear families to inculcate self-discipline among the populace.

Much academic theorising on the topic takes for granted the interpretation of liberalism defended in John Rawls’s 1993 Political Liberalism, which holds that the state must abstain from taking sides on controversial religious and philosophical questions. Because disagreement on such matters is inevitable, argued Rawls, politics should concern itself only with the “primary goods”—health, wealth, education, and personal freedom—supposedly desired by citizens of all faiths or none. Yet Muslims, like many conservative Christians and Jews, often suspect secularist versions of liberalism like Rawls’s of being rationalisations for the empty, materialist lifestyles they (sometimes rightly) perceive many non-Muslims in the West to be living. A whole industry of English-speaking Muslim influencers has sprung up, exposing what they take to be the metaphysical falsehoods underpinning state neutrality and secular progressivism.

But what if Rawls was wrong: what if a liberal state doesn’t have to be rigorously neutral about religion? I want to suggest that a better version of liberalism, with a far greater tendency to converge with important strands of the Islamic tradition of political thought, has been staring us in the face for seventy years. This version of liberalism is what American conservatives call fusionism. 

Fusionism—the fusion of religious traditionalism and classical liberalism—rejects neutrality. It holds that the state can and should favor and foster the religious life of its citizens, but that it must do so through non-coercive means. Why non-coercive? Because fusionism recognises that true religious worship is destroyed by coercion. A man who recites Hail Marys or performs Muslim prostrations at gunpoint isn’t praying for a bad reason: he isn’t praying at all. The natural law theorist Robert P. George describes this insight as resting on the “reflexivity” of the good of religion. Religious worship is, for George, essentially the free inner orientation of the soul towards God: no one else, as a matter of conceptual necessity, can coercively induce a person to enter this state. Thus, genuine worship does not exist if individuals perform the outward markers of religion out of fear, because the inner harmony of the soul with its creator is destroyed by the threat of force.

Muslims in the West are clearly seeking a theological rationale for a principled reconciliation with the commitment to pluralism and religious liberty.

Many fusionists generalise this argument against religious coercion to apply to any kind of coercive promotion of virtue. For Frank Meyer, whose 1962 In Defense of Freedom summed up fusionism for America’s postwar conservative movement, no self-regarding acts of moral goodness—abstention from excessive intoxication, sexual chastity, the interior cultivation of love and charity towards one’s neighbour—can be produced by force. Just as performing religious rites out of fear is not genuine worship, abstaining from hedonistic or self-disintegrating behaviour out of fear is not genuine temperance. The point applies, for Meyer, to all the virtues. This does not mean fusionism has no interest in the effect of vice on public order, or that it denies the claim that a moral citizenry is an important precondition for a free republic. But it holds that correcting private vices through force is a self-defeating enterprise.

Thus, the journalist E. J. Dionne sums up fusionism as “utilizing libertarian means … to traditionalist ends.” The goal is to produce virtuous and pious individuals; the means is to free up and facilitate individuals, families, and religious congregations to pursue virtue as best they can. Kevin Vallier, probably the most sophisticated contemporary fusionist, argues that fusionism rests on a claim about the “liberty-virtue relationship.” According to fusionists, this relationship is symbiotic. Indeed, for Meyer, freedom is a necessary precondition for virtue to exist at all. Fusionism has been the dominant position of the mainstream American right since Meyer popularised the idea. And far from being a “dead consensus,” Vallier has shown that fusionism is a living paradigm, stimulating the development of important new insights into issues like the dynamics of collective action problems and the “moral ecology” by which social norms influence ethical choices.

What does all this have to do with Islam? Perhaps surprisingly, the fusionist argument about liberty and virtue turns out to be essentially identical to one of the best Muslim theological arguments for religious freedom. The Sudanese-born scholar of Islamic jurisprudence and human rights law, Abdullahi An-Na’im, who now works in the US, argues in his 2009 book Islam and the Secular State that the government must abstain from imposing sharia rulings through civil law. He rests his case not on the Rawlsian claim that Islam (like all religions) should be privatized, but on the argument that effectively promoting Islam in fact requires the protection of personal liberty, including the liberty of Muslims to sin, where doing so does not undermine public order. An-Na’im argues that for Muslims to follow sharia rulings only out of fear of state coercion is to degrade their souls. The subject who complies with this jurisprudence only out of fear of state compulsion is an automaton, a puppet of the ruling authority, not a virtuous Muslim citizen.

For An-Na’im, the goal is not to sideline or marginalise sharia, but to make it a lived reality in individuals’ lives rather than an imposition of the dead hand of the state. Respecting religious and personal freedom ensures that Muslims “are able to live by their own belief in Islam as a matter of religious obligation, not as the outcome of coercion by the state.” The so-called “Islamic state” promoted by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood (to say nothing of more extreme varieties like those of Al-Qaeda or ISIS) is, for An-Na’im, a recipe only for religious hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, or nifaq in Arabic, is, An-Na’im notes, “categorically and repeatedly condemned by the Qur’an” as one of the greatest and most wicked of sins. Liberty helps free Muslims from this snare. Libertarian means, traditionalist (Islamic) ends.

This is not the place to assess An-Na’im’s argument on its theological merits, and this is no part of my intention. But the significance of his intervention cannot be denied. Illustratively, Gözde Hussain’s recent academic treatment of Islam and liberalism identifies An-Na’im’s strategy as one of the most promising routes from the Islamic intellectual tradition to liberal pluralism. His approach, for Hussain, maintains a commitment to theological doctrines seen by most Muslims as central while yielding conclusions congenial to a principled affirmation of liberty.

Perhaps the answer isn’t a better secularism but a better conception of liberty.

Hussain thinks An-Na’im will get Muslims to Rawls. I think he will get us to Frank Meyer. If the reason is not already apparent, consider the fact that An-Nai’m’s fear of nifaq is essentially the same as Meyer’s worry about inauthentic virtue and George’s concern about religious hypocrisy. Indeed, their language is strikingly similar. An-Na’im argues that religious practice “must be completely voluntary according to personal pious intention … which is necessarily invalidated by coercive enforcement.” Compare this to George’s claim that “communion with God … cannot, in the nature of the thing, be established by coercion”, which can “only damage the possibility of an authentic religious faith”. Here, the “reformist” Muslim and the Christian theorist of natural law are singing from the same hymn sheet.

An-Na’im has unwittingly planted the seeds of a Muslim fusionism. Like fusionism, his Islamic liberalism rejects state neutrality about religion, whether in its Rawlsian form or in any other. Like fusionism, his liberalism rests on a claim about the liberty-virtue relationship. And also like fusionism, it proposes libertarian means to traditionalist and religious ends.

Though An-Na’im does not provide a detailed schema for religion-state relations, he clearly rejects the idea “that the state can or should be completely neutral”, seemingly allowing for measures that favor faith as long as they also respect personal freedom. Fusionism, whether Muslim or otherwise, does not supply a neat and comprehensive blueprint for how the state should interact with religious organisations. Rather, it establishes broad parameters within which societies may legitimately vary, depending on local circumstances and prudential judgement. On the one hand, fusionism rejects the claim that the state has no legitimate interest in promoting religious virtue; on the other, it rejects any attempt to secure this interest through coercive measures. The compulsory church attendance endorsed by some “Christian nationalists,” along with laws against apostasy from Islam or intrusive Saudi-style “morality police,” are all ruled out.

Yet the government might fund religious organisations or symbolically endorse them without violating the fusionist stricture against religious coercion. Europe’s mild and tolerant established churches, and the non-denominational prayers of pre-1960s American public schools, both fit comfortably within fusionist parameters (though whether it would be prudent for the US Supreme Court to overturn its post-war application of the Establishment Clause to the states is an entirely different question, to which fusionism, as such, deliberately supplies no definite answer). Muslim countries embracing fusionism would enjoy a similar “margin of appreciation” with respect to public morality. While not banning the private consumption of alcohol, Muslim fusionists could legitimately seek to limit the public advertisement of intoxicants.

Obviously, there are challenges for Muslim fusionism to resolve. As Akyol argues, the acceptance among theologically committed Muslims of liberalism of any kind will probably depend on the adoption of some kind of teleological conception of sharia, such that medieval rulings on issues like apostasy can be revisited if they no longer serve the purposes for which they were intended.

But in the meantime, at the level of practical politics, Muslims need fusionism. Many Muslims in the West are clearly seeking a theological rationale for a principled reconciliation with the commitment to pluralism and religious liberty of the societies in which they live (and which are in many cases now the only ones they have ever known). Secular and progressive versions of liberalism manifestly, and understandably, lack appeal. Fusionism, however, allows religiously conservative Muslims to have it both ways: the state has a legitimate interest in religion and should not be neutral about the nature of human flourishing, but it can express this interest in ways compatible with the kind of religious and personal freedoms to which the modern West is committed.

Western Muslims need fusionism—and the West, too, needs Muslim fusionism. Almost all the anxieties about Islam’s “compatibility” with Western societies ultimately boil down to the theologico-political problem of liberty. If Muslims can commit themselves in principle to the equal liberty of all citizens with respect to religious practice, conversion, and proselytisation, and to respecting personal freedom even when used for vicious ends, no one with sense will object to their holding traditional beliefs about family and sexuality that are shared with members of the other Abrahamic faiths. My fear is that without this principled reconciliation, Muslim life in the West will remain a pragmatic modus vivendi—and Muslims will continue to be suspected, sometimes justly, of being “resident aliens” whose real loyalty is to something or somewhere else. Where large, settled Muslim populations exist, fusionism offers the best hope of convincing them that a free mosque in a free state is not a compromise but a feature of the best regime.

Finally, Muslim nations also need fusionism. Many of these countries are, as Philpott has illustrated, stuck in a sterile stand-off between authoritarian “Islamists” and the partisans of a Jacobin brand of secularism that sees deep religious commitment as at best suspicious and at worst a threat to the state’s existence. But perhaps the answer isn’t a better secularism but a better conception of liberty. The answers Muslims are seeking might just be found by engaging with the fusionist synthesis of liberty and virtue.

This article is loosely adapted from a talk delivered at a private event hosted by the Philopatridian Society at Chapman University in September 2025.  

Americans frequently disagree over how to respond to crime, and partisan agendas sometimes lead to imprudent policy decisions, whether seen in progressive prosecutors’ refusal to charge certain offenses or in the dispatching of the military to American cities. Yet beyond the headlines, the New Right’s growing concern about the fate of the family provides a fresh opportunity for left and right to find common ground on preventing crime, particularly juvenile delinquency. The right has an opportunity to bolster families and help young men to thrive, while staying true to the fusionist alliance between traditional conservatives and libertarians.

For Republicans looking for new ways to be pro-family, now is the perfect moment to embrace data-driven strategies for crime control. Everyone wants safe cities, but they are especially important as hospitable places for raising families. At the same time, programs to prevent juvenile delinquency can help keep families together and prepare young men in particular to be good husbands and fathers to their own children. European-style pro-natal policies (such as child allowances and lengthy state-supported parental leaves) are designed to help raise birth rates, but they are expensive and thus far have shown disappointing results, both in Eastern Europe and Western Europe. In the realm of family policy, better crime control is the lowest of low-hanging fruit. 

While research on what policies work to encourage fertility remains valuable, we know that prudent investments in preventing delinquency could result in fewer kids being lost to a life of crime. It could mean more productive workers to support an aging population and lower long-term incarceration costs. Most importantly, a fresh effort to reduce crime could turn depressed parts of American cities into places where families can thrive, while also helping to heal rifts between different factions of the conservative coalition. Cradle-to-grave welfare programs offend limited government conservatives, but everyone agrees that the state properly has a role in maintaining law and order. 

Re-envisioning Family Policy

When Hillary Clinton wrote “It Takes a Village” in the 1990s, conservatives and libertarians alike widely condemned it as a manifesto for intrusive government overreach. Today, the landscape has transformed. Momentum is building on the right for a more robust family policy that gives government a larger role in encouraging childbearing and supporting parents. 

This convergence reflects a deeper political realignment reshaping American politics. The Republican Party’s demographic coalition has transformed dramatically, now representing more voters without college degrees and significantly more lower-income voters. Critically, data shows that voters with children are more likely to identify as Republicans.

Perhaps not coincidentally, polling reveals that Republican voters now view government programs supporting child-rearing more favorably than in the past. This year, conservative states Alabama, Iowa, and Mississippi passed legislation granting paid family leave to state workers, a policy once considered firmly progressive. It may not be surprising to see California enacting legislation requiring that primary caregiver status be considered in sentencing offenders, but when Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana pass similar laws, that represents more of a shift.

These trends intersect with two growing philosophical imperatives on the right: promoting natalism to reverse declining birth rates and addressing the crisis of disconnected boys and young men. Together, these concerns could galvanize conservative support for policies that invest public resources upstream in breaking cycles of delinquency, thereby reducing the need for costly incarceration downstream. Policies like summer jobs and after-school programs for at-risk youth have long enjoyed significant bipartisan support, but they are more identified with the left.

That’s for good reason. Some progressive politicians have rarely met a government program they didn’t like, regardless of whether they have seen evidence of its effectiveness. For example, in 2023, progressive Colorado lawmakers shut down the state’s Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice, sacrificing a valuable source of data and evidence on which rehabilitation programs are working, on the altar of indulging their concerns about its inclusion of prosecutors and purported lack of racial diversity.

Center-right policymakers are more likely to demand such evidence, but appeals to them for funding prevention must contend with powerful arguments for fiscal restraint, especially at the federal level, given exploding and unsustainable debts and deficits. Recent Department of Justice cuts to crime prevention programs suggest implementation will likely occur at state and local levels, aligning with conservative federalism principles.

Some evidence suggests a growing subset of more dangerous young offenders who are typically among the least socialized young males.

Investments must be based on rigorous research that establishes a cause-and-effect relationship between the program and outcomes, such as lower rates of delinquency. This is not just a substantive imperative, but a political one. While some New Right figures like Oren Cass have broadly deviated from small-government orthodoxy, most on the center-right still prefer to reconcile family support with traditional concerns about excessive government, as seen in the National Conservativism Statement of Principles.

This tension recalls the core fusionist alliance of the 1980s, which united social conservatives and libertarians through policies of lower taxes and limited government. This approach sought to keep a lid on taxes so that more households could get by with a single earner, allowing one parent, typically the mother, to stay home during children’s formative years through reduced financial pressure.

The fraying of Reagan-era fusionism coincides notably with the erosion of the single-earner household. Whereas 49 percent of mothers with young children stayed home in 1973, just a third do so today, suggesting that dual incomes are a necessity for an increasing share of families.

Yet even while continuing to advocate for traditional family structures, personal responsibility, and low taxes, center-right policymakers must confront the reality that not every child will receive sufficient moral and tangible support at home to avoid falling through the cracks. Only by acknowledging a limited role for government in this domain can these policymakers address the crises of fertility and masculinity while also bridging free-market and social conservative factions.

By focusing on the narrow mission of preventing delinquency as opposed to the Holy Grail of ending poverty, center-right policymakers can channel limited public resources to interventions that produce sustained changes in attitudes and behavior, like cognitive behavioral therapy, coupled with mentoring in the case of a particularly successful Chicago program. Center-right policymakers can also act to prevent delinquency and crime through targeted investments in environmental strategies like improving street lighting and remediating abandoned buildings that make blighted areas more conducive to child rearing. Taken together, the fertility and masculinity crises can provide the impetus for a distinctly center-right approach to prevention programs that heeds this lesson and is also more targeted, research-anchored, and incremental. The result is a refreshed version of fusionist family policy, meeting the current world where it is at, rather than simply pining for the one of Ozzie and Harriet.

The Rise of Natalism

Natalism—actively promoting childbearing—has become a vocal movement on the right, creating a demand for a broader family policy that goes beyond traditional concerns such as eliminating abortion. It is championed by figures like Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance. 

A new survey found that children aren’t among top life goals for many young women. While the US is in better shape than other developed nations, our population is forecasted to decline to just 226 million by 2100 with no net immigration, and the nation’s worker-to-retiree ratio is projected to drop from 2.9 to 1 today to 2.0 by the 2060s.

Demonstrating a growing political will to address this challenge, the “Big, Beautiful Bill” included boosted child tax credits and newborn investment accounts championed by Senator Ted Cruz. These “baby bonds” mirror a proposal from liberal Democrats Cory Booker and Ayanna Pressley, proving there is bipartisan interest in the issue.

The declining birth rate threatens economic vitality and national security while creating new impetus for crime prevention. Given the growing imbalance between elderly and working-age populations, losing youth to crime proves particularly counterproductive, reducing future workforce participation while burdening remaining workers with incarceration costs. 

This natalist impulse could boost proven programs like Nurse Family Partnership, where nurses visit vulnerable first-time mothers from pregnancy through the child’s second birthday. One study found the program reduced child arrests by 59 percent by age 15, demonstrating exceptional ROI. Texas’s 2007 $241 million justice reinvestment initiative that averted billions on projected prison costs included not just short-term interventions like drug courts and mental health treatment, but also Nurse Family Partnership funding as a long-term crime and incarceration reduction strategy. This wasn’t a liberal project but a conservative-led initiative, suggesting such approaches align with fiscally conservative, data-driven governance. Similarly, after-school and summer jobs programs for at-risk youth have likewise shown some success in reducing delinquency.

The Right and Young Males in Crisis

Alongside natalism, concern on the New Right is growing about boys and young men falling behind academically, economically, and socially. Amplified in podcasting circles, this concern gains empirical support from centrist figures like Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway, validating longstanding conservative worries about the devaluation of traits that traditionally have been seen as masculine, like bravery and chivalry. Just as with natalism, it is fuel for conservative interest in broad family policy and creates some overlap with concerns associated with progressives.

For decades, children’s groups that tend to lean left have focused on “disconnected youth“—mostly male teenagers who are neither working nor in school. This cohort is more likely to be arrested and incarcerated. They are also more likely to be in the child welfare system, including foster care. 

Factors identified by experts—lack of male teachers, inadequate vocational programs, and the increasing number of young women more interested in their careers than marriage—may not directly cause crime, but they foster disengagement and despondency that are often precursors to delinquency. This often intertwines with rising mental illness and substance use among young males.

While overall juvenile crime rates have not increased, potentially because young people are engrossed in digital worlds, there is troubling evidence that certain serious offenses like homicides and carjackings have risen. This suggests a growing subset of more dangerous young offenders who are typically among the least socialized young males.

Fortunately, some targeted interventions can help steer kids from going down this path. Programs like Chicago’s Choose to Change, combining mentoring with cognitive behavioral therapy, show promise. A rigorous 2025 study found 23 percent fewer violent crime arrests among participants.

Given the strong connection between disconnection and justice system involvement, conservatives may find new reasons to support adult education and career training for those who dropped out of high school, championing apprenticeship models like Indiana’s initiative.

Rigorous Research and Incrementalist Approaches

What is needed at this juncture is a targeted, data-driven incrementalism that respects fiscal constraints and social complexity and aligns fiscal incentives with desired outcomes in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

In the research, the gold standard remains repeated randomized controlled trials. But as economist Jennifer Doleac notes, replicating initial findings is often bumpy. Programs may work in one context but not another, with fidelity often lost to staff turnover or local conditions. While cognitive behavioral therapy can reduce delinquency and recidivism in some settings, effectiveness depends heavily on implementation quality and whether the environment is conducive to rehabilitation. For example, a program behind bars may be delivered with fidelity to its design, but if the facility is often locked down, or if overcrowding makes facilities scarce, outcomes will almost certainly suffer.

The cost of prevention, diversion and probation programs is largely borne by local governments, but if local prosecutors put an offender in prison, the state picks up the entire bill.

Research is essential not just because it sheds light on what interventions are effective for at-risk young people or offenders of a specific profile, but also because it identifies failures. Programs like DARE and Scared Straight were largely abandoned after rigorous studies showed counterproductive results. Overall, intensive interventions for the highest-risk individuals, like the Chicago CRED program, typically prove more effective and efficient than light-touch approaches for broader populations.

Basing policy and expenditures on research, which by its nature involves trial and error, dovetails with the inherently conservative notion of incrementalism. Occasionally, new interventions arise, like text reminders for court hearings that have a negligible cost and are backed by a plethora of rigorous studies. But most proposed interventions come with a significant price tag and more limited, context-specific research. That’s a reason for favoring careful scaling over sweeping, untested transformations. 

Oklahoma provides a compelling case study, as Governor Kevin Stitt has partnered with Arnold Ventures to expand programs for at-risk youth that have been independently demonstrated to be effective through randomized controlled trials. For Oklahoma, the benefit includes not just matching funds, but an ongoing evaluation component through which additional programs worthy of scaling will be identified over the coming four years. 

Center-right policymakers should also prioritize targeted programs for the highest-risk young people, aiming to prevent and change delinquent behavior, over broad anti-poverty initiatives. While poverty plays an inconsistent role in property crime, its significance varies depending on the context, and other factors such as criminal thinking patterns and family and neighborhood dynamics are more highly and consistently correlated with delinquency, especially violent offending. This counsels in favor of interventions that change attitudes and behavior, as opposed to the progressive tendency to pursue income redistribution as a panacea for crime and other social ills. 

Nonetheless, investing in delinquency prevention may still raise center-right skepticism, especially if it appears to expand state bureaucracy and government debt. Yet the reality is that the costs of both crime and incarceration are enormous. A seminal 2007 analysis found lifetime societal costs for high-risk youth reaching $4.2 to $7.2 million, a figure now inflated by rising correctional costs. 

One way to bridge the gap is through attacking perverse fiscal incentives. In child welfare and the justice system, authorities often have real incentives to use the costliest intervention, typically residential placement or confinement. Just as steering kids away from delinquency can avert decades of costs in crime and incarceration, supporting parents in prudent ways can avert more costly removal of a child and placement in congregate living or foster care. In 2018, the bipartisan federal Families First Act revamped federal funding to ensure that states, instead of being paid based on how many removals occur, could use the same funds for prevention. Most states have now enacted legislation to implement this approach, and the number of kids in facilities and foster care fell 23 percent from a peak in 2018 to 2024. 

Nevertheless, this wrong pocket problem persists in many states within the criminal justice system. The cost of prevention, diversion, and probation programs is largely borne by local governments, but if local prosecutors put an offender in prison, the state picks up the entire bill. A handful of states have sought to better align incentives and outcomes through funding schemes like Reclaim Ohio and Redeploy Illinois by which counties can use some of the funds that the state would have otherwise spent incarcerating children on other interventions. The broader lesson, though, is that return on investment is the ultimate barometer. There’s nothing conservative about keeping government on the sidelines until the most expensive intervention becomes necessary. After all, no homeowner would wait for their roof to cave in before repairing it.

Conclusion

Conservatives should continue to look for ways to reduce the size of government and the fiscal burden of the justice system, especially incarceration. However, there are reasons to make stronger efforts to keep young people from following the wrong path.

Fortunately, limited government conservatives can still agree with national conservatives that our shared future as a country depends on the success of families in nurturing a new generation of Americans. Similarly, crime violates both individual rights and a community’s sense of safety and well-being. Preventing crime is clearly a core government responsibility.

Limited government conservatives can embrace data-driven responses to delinquency, which focus as much on attitudes and behavior as on poverty, and lean on causal research and not a general willingness to treat all children as the property of “the village.” That kind of thinking can reconcile the free-market right’s small-government commitment with the New Right’s focus on natalism and masculinity.

Despite many real disagreements, a new center-right vision for preventing delinquency and crime can bridge the libertarian and conservative divide. No one is opposed to a safer, more prosperous, and more family-friendly America. 

In one of his most famous passages, Michael Oakeshott used a metaphor of a ship to make the point that politics cannot bring salvation. Instead, he argued in “Political Education,” the task is the ongoing effort to navigate the perilous sea, keeping the vessel of political life afloat:

In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.

Examining modern Western politics, with its rationalist and ideological ethos, one might ask—by Oakeshott’s metaphor—whether to don life jackets and rush to the rescue boats. The task of keeping the ship afloat without a fixed destination has been taken up by new navigators, who often ignore the practical knowledge of seamanship in their quest to escape the boundless sea. Their imagined harbours vary, yet all share a desire for salvation from life’s adventure, with its successes and failures. The difficulty is that these journeys are fraught with danger and the realisation that the harbour is unreachable. Political activity has thus become the politics of shipwreck: drifting endlessly toward an unattainable goal and often failing to secure the imagined salvation.

Oakeshott and other thinkers have traced modern politics’ journey from a boundless ocean to a shipwreck. Yet none has more precisely accounted for this shipwrecked politics in the Anglophone world than Shirley Letwin. An American-born intellectual who made Britain her home, Letwin became a central figure in the LSE Right—a circle of London School of Economics academics in the Oakeshottian tradition—and a key contributor to the broader New Right that helped propel Margaret Thatcher to power. So prominent was she that Milton Friedman, writing in the National Review on her death, called it “a severe loss to the cause of human freedom.”

Letwin’s contributions are many, especially on the idea of law. One of lasting significance is The Pursuit of Certainty—an Oakeshottian work tracing how our answer to the central question of Anglophone political thought—“what sort of activity politics is”—has shifted. Anglophone politics moved from a moderate, sceptical, realistic, and limited activity—like sailing the boundless ocean—to the conviction of new navigators that “politics was no longer one of several human activities and at that not a very noble one; it encompassed all of human life.”

Originally published in 1965 and later republished by Liberty Fund, The Pursuit of Certainty remains one of the most penetrating studies of how modern politics forsook moderation in favour of the rationalist quest for certainty. The book stands as a major work of intellectual history, examining David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Beatrice Webb through a sequence of interconnected essays. It develops Letwin’s doctoral thesis, written under the influence of Friedrich Hayek and the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, which explored the transformation of British liberalism from its classical form into a modern variant increasingly aligned with socialism. Whereas the thesis possessed a clear structure and defined purpose, the book might leave readers unsure why these particular thinkers were chosen or what unifies the work, were it not for Letwin’s own clarification in the introduction.

Letwin explains that these thinkers reveal “how the conception of politics changed in England,” since “each represents a distinctive way of looking at politics, which has become intertwined with others and obscured in political practice, and yet remains a vital part of the political tradition in England.” This interpretive choice gives the book its coherence, even though the transitions between thinkers sometimes feel more thematic than narrative. While her interpretations—especially her moderate reading of Hume—possess clear intellectual-historical value, the key concern here is what the work reveals about the evolution of modern politics. All four thinkers contributed to this transformation, yet its nature and consequences are most clearly discerned when contrasted with the moderate politics exemplified by David Hume, to whom we now turn.

Moderate Politics

For Letwin, Hume exemplifies the moderate man: a figure shaped by admiration for balance, civility, and irony, and a rejection of puritan zeal. He embodied scepticism, convinced that human life cannot bear grand systems or theological certainties. This temperament led Hume to repudiate the classical rationalist tradition—which sought to base politics on reason—and to reject any political or moral system claiming certainty over human affairs. As Letwin notes, Hume “was critical of moralists who tried to reduce [politics] to a single principle” and of “man’s ability to make all his notions coherent and consistent, or to perceive a permanent truth.”

Hume’s moderate disposition and scepticism yield not a political doctrine but a disposition—one “that considers visions of another, better world, or indeed any desire to impose some ideal pattern of life or government on all men, irrelevant to politics.” For Hume, politics is a matter of prudential judgement, shaped by circumstance and guided by moderation, scepticism, and recognition of limits. It is not a politics of zeal, enthusiasm, or heroism, nor one treating “political disputes as a struggle between good and evil,” which he linked to civil war and fanaticism. Instead, a political disposition “looked for a moderation of disagreement, not for its disappearance. A balance between evils was the best one could hope for.” Humean politics trusted in government as an office, with the rule of law and decency safeguarding against arbitrary power, rather than in crusades for perfection.

Letwin aptly summarises Hume’s politics as

an art not a science. It is the art of choosing the least evil. It is guided by a sense for what civilization at its best can produce, and depends on a capacity for making fine discriminations, for seeing differences of degree where the vulgar only roughly distinguish kinds, for recognizing the connotations of things without losing sight of their true proportions. It requires sureness about rules and great delicacy in applying them. It is above all an activity of judging.

Reading Hume as an exemplar of moderate politics is not novel, though it remains contested. Letwin’s treatment, however, is one of the book’s most accomplished achievements: she rescues Hume from caricature as a detached philosopher and restores him as a thinker engaged with political conduct within the conservative tradition. Her contribution is especially notable in identifying Hume—not Edmund Burke, often called the father of modern conservatism—as the foremost representative of British moderation, scepticism, and prudential politics. This reflects the development of her own thought. In an earlier essay, “Rationalism, Principles, and Politics,” she criticised Oakeshott on Burkean grounds for privileging only prudential principles. In The Pursuit of Certainty, she adopts a more Oakeshottian stance, applying it even in critique of Burke. She may have been influenced by Oakeshott’s review of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, where he noted that “it would perhaps have been more fortunate if the modern conservative had paid more attention to Hume and less to Burke.”

Letwin sees John Stuart Mill as the intellectual successor who abandoned Bentham’s modesty.

Letwin acknowledges affinities between Hume and Burke and credits the latter with greater influence on modern conservative politics, yet she maintains that their approaches diverge in key ways. The first difference, she argues, lies in style. As she notes, “Burke … spoke not to the House of Commons at all, but to humanity, to eternity, to God. His orations … came close to furnishing politics with a sacred text.” This casts Burke as a grand romantic rather than a moderate. Yet this reading is debatable. Burke’s rhetorical elevation can be seen less as metaphysical than strategic—a way of mobilising political imagination against abstract theorising rather than sacralising politics. While intellectually stimulating, Letwin’s critique risks underestimating the practical dimension of Burke’s statesmanship and the rhetorical demands of his context.

The second difference that Letwin identifies rests on firmer ground, namely the substance underpinning Burke’s and Hume’s respective views of political activity. As she argues:

Hume’s politics is built on convenience, Burke’s on truth. It is only natural then that whereas the emotions Hume considered appropriate to political institutions were loyalty, obedience, respect, or scepticism, Burke saw in political institutions objects of love and veneration.

For Letwin, Hume saw politics not as a sacred mission but as a secular, limited activity—an art of managing passions, habits, and institutions to secure stability and decency. By contrast, Burke viewed politics in quasi-religious terms: “Society becomes the Temple of God, and the state, along with the Church, is its guardian,” thereby, as Letwin notes, infusing “a cosmic spirit into politics.” By sacralising politics, Burke transformed “political questions into moral crusades … what Hume called fanaticism and feared above all in politics.”

The spirit of Burke’s sacred politics can be explained not only as a matter of rhetorical expression but also as a reflection of his belief in a higher, divine moral law. Indeed, Burke grounded his political thought in the virtue of prudence, which he famously described as “the god of this lower world.” For this reason, Letwin observes that Burke “contributed very little to the development of a new view of political activity.” Yet, she also acknowledges that Burke’s sacred politics enabled him to grasp more effectively the revolutionary rationalism that animated the French Revolution and to appreciate the moral and patriotic resources necessary for confronting it. In this sense, Letwin recognises that Burke’s outlook, was ultimately more attuned to the temper of his age than Hume’s sceptical restraint might have been.

Letwin’s analysis arguably reflects her own preference for the sceptical tradition of British conservatism over the religious or metaphysically grounded one. She highlights the question of war as the clearest point of contrast between Hume’s and Burke’s political outlooks. Whereas Hume regarded war as “always the greatest evil, and to be avoided by every workable negotiation and compromise,” Burke viewed it as the ultimate means of securing justice in the world. For Letwin, this contrast illustrates that Hume’s politics might have accommodated the existence of a revolutionary France through diplomacy, while Burke’s sacred politics could not. In retrospect, had Hume lived to witness the French Revolution, he might well have supported a war against revolutionary France—though not on Burke’s moral or providential grounds, but rather for reasons of security and balance of power.

Nevertheless, in drawing this distinction between Hume and Burke, Letwin issues a warning about the dangers of transforming politics into a sacred activity. In this respect, she may be echoing Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics, which cautions against political theologies that seek to recreate the City of God on earth through political means. It may well be that, to avoid such pitfalls, Letwin’s Oakeshottian conclusion gains force—namely, that modern conservatives would do better to emulate Hume’s moderation rather than Burke’s sacralised politics. Particularly in a highly secularised world, a conservatism grounded in scepticism and prudence is likely to prove more coherent and appealing than one premised on metaphysical or sacred commitments.

Scientific Politics

Letwin’s critique of Burke was not that he lacked anti-utopianism or moderation, but that he turned political activity into a sacred sphere. By contrast, for Jeremy Bentham, politics was scientific rather than sacred. This science aimed for certainty in law, which Bentham saw as the antidote to the chaotic and irrational accumulation of common law precedents. His scientific politics rested on the principle of utility—the greatest happiness of the greatest number—providing a universal, impersonal standard for legislation. Bentham’s solutions, Letwin notes, “were not those of a moralist or a philosopher, but of an engineer or inventor,” seeking a perfectly codified legal system in which law is predictable and unambiguous. Only then, he believed, could liberty be secured.

Bentham departed from Hume by treating politics not as prudence or custom, but as a realm where “reason alone, in the narrowest sense of logical analysis, was relevant.” His aim, Letwin notes, was “to eliminate altogether the need to depend on judgement; he wished to replace practical wisdom with a technique.” Despite the ambition of his vision, Bentham rejected revolutionary upheaval, remaining a modest utopian who believed human affairs could be fully regulated through law and calculation. Yet this modest utopianism—reducing politics to logic and system—paved the way for his intellectual successors to abandon such restraint.

Letwin sees John Stuart Mill as the intellectual successor who abandoned Bentham’s modesty. She examines Mill’s upbringing and early adherence to Benthamite ideas of certainty, systematic reasoning, law, and reform—up to the point that this creed triggered a mental crisis. This, Letwin argues, is crucial: Mill rejects Benthamite certainty, recognising that rational calculation alone cannot yield a complete moral vision. A new creed was needed, one not merely logical but capable of offering “a complete view of man and the universe, not a partial, hesitant sketch of a corner.”

Mill’s new creed was a faith in the certainty of progress, viewing human history as gradual improvement guided by reason, liberty, and culture. This belief led him to a form of elitist radical politics, where only educated guidance could realise such progress. The certainty of progress required a new approach to politics, found in the emerging science of society—sociology. Unlike Bentham’s project, sociology offered a scientific foundation for politics, providing a practical tool for reform that united scientific reasoning with political action. Mill argued that those who should govern were “scientists who understood the laws governing human character and how to apply them under various circumstances. Their counsel would not be merely superior opinion; it would carry more than the weight of experience and wisdom.”

Much of today’s Right has likewise forsaken moderate and sceptical politics for a mode Hume would have called “a form of revolutionary enthusiasm.”

For Letwin, Mill was not a friend of liberty, despite On Liberty and Representative Government, even though he valued individuality for human flourishing—a point she agreed with. Mill’s liberty was not merely absence of restraint, but the condition for developing an “ideal individual.” This could be achieved only by those capable of self-government, who were also tasked with guiding society toward that ideal. Where society could not govern itself, a superior class of scientists could direct it, even despotically. Letwin notes that for Mill, “despotism is therefore a mode of government as legitimate as any other.”

Strikingly, Letwin’s critique in The Pursuit of Certainty echoes Maurice Cowling’s Mill and Liberalism (1963), which portrays Mill not as a liberal saint but a moral absolutist. The parallels emerge when Letwin writes of Mill’s argument in On Liberty:

enables the liberal to feel assured of his tolerance, and at the same time to feel it is right, even obligatory, to impose his own views on the less fortunate mass of people in want of uplifting. He provided a justification for withholding personal liberty from any claimant unable to demonstrate that he was pursuing the “right” ideal and was possessed of sufficient will power to pursue it steadily and energetically.

With Mill, Letwin identifies a new liberal intellectual committed to liberty, progress, and reason—yet whose politics often undermined the very values it claimed to uphold. Mill’s confidence in a science of politics was part of a wider movement seeking certainty in science rather than philosophy or religion. For Letwin, Mill is significant as a transitional figure: moving from Benthamite rationalism to a more ambitious scientific politics, ultimately aiming at the abolition of politics itself.

The End of Politics

The final thinker Letwin examines is the socialist Beatrice Webb. Given the least sustained treatment, Webb is shown as the embodiment of the pursuit of certainty in politics—the belief that social problems could be solved through methodical, scientific investigation. At the core of Webb’s vision was the conviction that expert knowledge, rather than tradition or sentiment, should govern society. Her approach was, above all, “a plan for replacing politics with science, politicians with scientific experts. It designed a government in which the uninformed public, and its haphazardly trained representatives, were made to recognize and submit to the knowledge of social scientists.” Webb’s politics thus constituted a managerial utopia, guided by experts, informed by sociology and economics, and directed toward the collective good of future generations—representing the culmination of the pursuit of certainty: politics as the earthly analogue of salvation.

Yet the pursuit of certainty as a route to salvation leads to the logical culmination of this evolution in the understanding of politics: the end of politics itself. In a managerial utopia that seeks to encompass all human conduct, the political enterprise becomes a ship bound for perfection, and any disagreement about the journey is construed as a threat—an obstruction to reaching the fixed, ideal destination.

Letwin observes the implications of Webb’s vision for the end of politics:

For once society is regarded as an organism, it is understood to have a unitary good and all the old political controversies become obsolete. The problem of reconciling conflicting desires of individuals, or of compromising between conflicting views of national ends, disappears. There remains only one end, the health of the social organism, and what every man should have can easily be determined by his function in the social machine … since politics would comprehend everything. Anyone who attempted to exclude government from some activities, or in any way to separate politics from the rest of life, would be advocating a return to anarchy and preventing human beings from realizing their highest potentialities.

Shipwrecked Politics

The book concludes with Beatrice Webb, yet without a closing chapter or postscript to encapsulate the consequences of the evolution Letwin traces through the four thinkers. This omission recalls the work’s central weakness—its lack of a clear structure or sustained narrative—only partially remedied by the introduction. To assist both the reader and Letwin in bringing the argument to closure, one might suggest that the British political tradition, as she presents it, has moved from Hume’s moderate politics to one animated by faith in reason, expertise, and social control, epitomised by Beatrice Webb. The book thus stands not merely as a diagnosis but as a warning of our current predicament: that the loss of sceptical restraint in steering the ship of politics, and the attempt to direct it towards a predetermined ideal, has led—or will lead—to shipwreck, when the pursuit of perfection founders upon the illusion that politics can be governed by infallible design.

Its dual status as both diagnosis and warning about the abandonment of Humean moderation amply justifies The Pursuit of Certainty’s place as a classic of liberty. Yet its value reaches further, offering a lesson for the modern Right facing a similar predicament. The difficulty, Letwin’s book suggests, is that much of today’s Right has likewise forsaken moderate and sceptical politics for a mode Hume would have called “a form of revolutionary enthusiasm.” Instead of navigating the ship of state upon the boundless ocean with prudence and restraint, the modern Right seeks to steer it into the harbour of salvation—an effort destined for shipwreck. The enduring challenge, then, is that modern conservatism has yet to heed Oakeshott’s warning: one cannot defeat rationalism by imagining a more acceptable form of it.

The book’s greatest limitation is that it provides no practical guide for addressing our current predicament. Humean conservatism, to which Letwin adheres, offers “no political principle or doctrine,” but rather “a disposition” shaping conservative politics. It is concerned with steering the ship steadily by preserving what is familiar, not directing it toward an imagined conservative salvation. In an age of fervent and overzealous right-wing politics, such modesty is unlikely to appeal widely. Yet The Pursuit of Certainty offers an implicit reminder to conservatives and friends of liberty alike: in times of ideological excess, a less enthusiastic politics may be exactly what is needed.