The Modern Nation and Liberalism

So I’m going to resist the cruel temptation to comment on David Letterman (hasn’t been funny for more than a decade) or say more on whether Beck and Limbaugh are worth defending. Instead, I’m sharing with you a bit of an article I’m writing on Scruton’s and Manent’s defense of the nation as the indispensable political form for democratic self-government in our time:

There’s a sense in which modern liberalism did promote a return, against the universalism of Christian liberalism (or personalism), to the the polis or nation as a political form. Christianity certainly detached people from political loyalties for membership in the “city of God” composed of all the faithful. One result of that detachment was wars of religion, wars over competing views of what it means to be included in the community of the faithful. The modern nation—or a return to territorial loyalty—emerged in opposition to the displaced or apolitical loyalty of creedal monotheism. Wars of religion came to an end with the return of the primacy of political or national loyalty. And the nation—or not some universal, creedal, apolitical city—again became the European’s truest home. Europe was once again divided into a large number of political or clearly territorial places.

But after the truthful liberation of the person to be a whole by Christianity—or not merely a part of nature or a political community—political loyalty in the comprehensive, classical sense couldn’t be completely restored. In Scuton’s England, the subordination of the universal, Christian church to the political requirements of a particular nation seemed to occur most seamlessly and otherwise successfully. But England is also the place in which modern, secular liberalism emerged against the pretensions of both the nation and the church.