What we've been up to

From the new issue: Parenting in a liberal, democratic society might seem like an exercise in hypocrisy. Our social and political creed says that each individual is free to pursue happiness however she sees fit. No one is allowed to control another person, and hierarchies are verboten—at least in principle. But in the relationship between a parent and a child, it's hard to avoid something like a hierarchy. Parenting is many things, but it's usually at least a relationship in which an adult uses disproportionate resources and power to control another, dependent person.

But some progressive-minded parents do their best to dispense with such power disparities. They don't discipline; they affirm. They don't direct; they protect and cultivate. Rita Koganzon, assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia, points out in her essay, "You're Not the Boss of Me," that this parenting trend tries to maintain a congruence between our public and private lives.

But Koganzin doubts that our personal relationships should always be as egalitarian and individualistic as our democratic society. In fact, the success of liberal democracy is sometimes threatened when our private lives are turned inside out.

Two well-known liberal theorists believed that there's a democratic virtue in maintaining incongruence between the public and the private:

"Is a childhood of rehearsing equality and liberty in the protected spaces of the family and school really the means to liberal liberty and equality in adulthood? Is congruence good for liberalism? Before Rawls and even Tocqueville, some liberals said no. The question of the family and education arises immediately at the birth of liberalism, with philosophers such as John Locke (Some Thoughts concerning Education, 1693) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Émile, 1762) devoting entire works to it. And what is immediately striking from the perspective of congruence is that both unambiguously rejected it."

Also from the new issue: There's a certain account of modern society that goes something like this. Once upon a time, primitive peoples believed in myths about gods, goddesses, and supernatural events. Pre-modern folk told and re-told these fantastic tales because such stories made sense of their world and they were useful for binding people together for common action. But eventually, at least by the time of the Enlightenment, we grew up and no longer needed these myths. We exchanged obsolete and now embarrassing traditions for science and public reason.

This extremely popular account of modernity, of course, is deeply flawed in a number of important ways. As Isaac Ariail Reed, professor of sociology at UVA and senior fellow at the Institute, points out in his review of Tae-Yeoun Keum's new book Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought, modern political thinking is rife with myth. In fact, Reed argues in "Myths Have Their Reasons…," political myth-making is a form of reasoning that we can't escape.

"A possibility emerges: that the vaunted reflexivity of modernization is not the sudden appearance of rationality on the stage of history nor the acid skepticism of a virtuosic and miserable disenchantment, but rather the intensification of a 'self-conscious approach to myth' that is to be found in Plato, and thus, also, in Nietzsche….what Keum describes as the 'distinctively self-conscious, and even playful, use of the literary medium of myth' has not been dispensed with in late modernity—because it is only through such play on myth in literature that work on myth can change culture, and thus change politics."

Want to read more from the new issue?

Carl Elliott reviews Quality of Life: A Post-Pandemic Philosophy of Medicine by Robin Downie.

"The Critic's Critic: George Steiner and the art of hopeful failure" by Richard Hughes Gibson.

Charles Mathewes writes about Augustine of Hippo and the modern predicament.

"Authenticity in Fashion" by Richard Thompson Ford.

B.D. McClay writes about self-care.

"Anything But True Love: Vladimir Nabokov's Anti-Erotic Masterpiece" by Talbot Brewer.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy on the unmanageable growth of awareness days.

"My Identity Problem" by Alan Shapiro.

Jonathan Malesic writes about Substack journalism.

"Chasing Phillis Wheatley" by Tara A. Bynum.

Brad East reviews Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Blood- and God-Talk by Eugene F. Rogers.

"The Fake Book of Negroes" by Gerald Early.

Malloy Owen reviews History Has Begun by Bruno Maçães.

"How to Be Yourself: The Studied Art of the College Application Essay" by Joseph E. Davis.

Charlie Riggs on COVID-19 masks and the politics of sincerity and authenticity.

We are making available essays from our new issue each week. Be sure to keep reading and subscribe!

Recommended Reading

From the archives: The crisis of liberal modernity has been accelerated by a "vertigo in political culture" in recent decades. So argues Isaac Ariail Reed in an essay for the Fall 2019 issue, "The King's Two Bodies and the Crisis of Liberal Modernity." What we hold in common—what shared visions we have about public goods and the common life—shrink in comparison to the mounting issues that separate us and over which we are willing to bitterly, even violently, fight. It's tempting to think that the sources of this disintegration are of recent vintage, but Reed believes they have long been characteristic of the dynamics of modernity.

The German medieval historian and political theorist Ernst Kantorowicz—though not very well-known—might help make sense of these dynamics. Reed writes:

"What I propose…is something of a leap of interpretation, even of faith: that this medieval historian provides us with a framework with which to illuminate aspects of political modernity that are left in the background, or even denied, in theories of differentiation and disenchantment (and their Marxist variants). And it is precisely these illuminations that we need to better diagnose our current crisis."

From further afield:

The New Atlantis has a symposium on the American model of governance in a moment of crisis.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins reviews new books on Cold War liberalism at The Baffler.

At Commonweal, John Rodden considers the legacy of Christopher Hitchens.

At National Review, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey weighs in on an ongoing debate in the history of capitalism.

Hedgehog Review Live

Bishop, theologian, philosopher, Augustine of Hippo has left a lasting imprint on Western thought. Among his other intellectual achievements, Augustine wrestled with many challenges that strikingly resemble those of our own time. Join us via Zoom on January 12, for the Hedgehog Review Noon Discussion moderated by editor Jay Tolson as IASC senior fellow and professor of religious studies Charles Mathewes discusses some of the points from his current essay in The Hedgehog Review, "Another City: Augustine Before the Modern." Historian and IASC fellow Jonathan Teubner will provide a short response.

Register to attend the event.