New Issue: Political Mythologies

Our new spring issue is now live on HedgehogReview.com! Subscribers will have full access to the issue including essays and reviews from familiar favorites and new contributors such as Alan Jacobs, Phil Christman, Tae-Yeoun Keum, Witold Rybczynski, Lily Meyer, Ed Simon, and others.

From the new spring issue: Liberal democracy is on the defense. It suffers not only from widespread disenchantment with its accomplishments—and a widening gap between what it seems to promise and what it delivers. But today liberalism also suffers from a growing, rivalrous enchantment with the authoritarian personalities of powerful and dangerous leaders like Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Jair Bolsonaro, or Vladimir Putin. In "The Return of the King," Philip S. Gorski, professor of sociology and religious studies at Yale University, argues that the roots of these modern movements can be traced back to pre-modern forms of sacred and political authority.

"With the insights of [these historical contexts], we are able to see the peculiar features of this authoritarianism as quite real modern-day reincarnations—or possibly recrudescences—of the ancient tradition of divine kingship. Moreover, they help us understand the cultural precondition for the return of this tradition: namely, the rise of neoimmanentist worldviews, which hold that the world is imbued with the mystery and power of the sacred, and the concomitant decline of transcendent worldviews, which hold the sacred to be wholly other and beyond. In our postliberal era, the disenchanting principles of modern liberalism—including trust in science, reason, and objective fact—have themselves been disenchanted."

Editor Jay Tolson on the new spring issue: "According to the grand narrative of Western progress, the history of the modern world was to be one of gradual demystification, disenchantment, and demythologization—all thanks to the steady advance of reason and science. We know how that worked out, and not only because the dream of reason produced more than its share of myth-spawned monsters, from the 'super race' of Nazism to the End of History promised in the various instances of truly existing socialism. But if the world today appears to be awash in unreason—think QAnon and its many cognates—large credit should go to reason itself: to the myth of Reason as the sole and sufficient guide to the True and the Good.

"For all its contributions to humankind's material betterment, the rationalist program fell short even on own progressive-utilitarian terms, repeatedly failing to deliver the greatest material good for the greatest number. Perhaps its greater failure, though, was its reduction of the Good to such a low common denominator, a reduction that has arguably contributed to a host of contemporary ills, from the collapse of communities to alienation and anomie. That humans need meaning at least as much as their daily bread is a truth that compelled many of the great thinkers of the last century, from Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt to Leszek Kolakowski, to take up the study of myth and myth-making to explore their role in human understanding as irreplaceable expressions of the human drive to find meaning and values in our individual and collective lives. They found that reason itself needed myth if there was to be real human progress and not just the bootless repetition of various utopian schemes for progress. 'Myth,' as Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleague and co-author Max Horkheimer argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 'is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.'"

Read more here.