Reflections on the Revolution in America
By Pavlos Leonidas Papadopoulos, First Things.
Book Review: The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy by Glenn Ellmers.
The year 2020 revealed two dominant impulses in the American-led world order. First, the yearning to transcend politics in favor of scientific administration, embodied in the widespread eclipse of self-government by public health experts to manage our response to COVID-19. Second, a fascination with a racial-cultic substrate that lies below the ordinary plane of politics, embodied in the ritual destruction of “whiteness” and veneration of “Blackness” after the death of George Floyd.
Glenn Ellmers is not in the business of prediction, and his new book The Narrow Passage does not opine on the stability (or fragility) of our regime. Instead, he analyzes its contradictions as a scholar of political philosophy and as a disciple of Leo Strauss—and especially of Strauss’s student Harry Jaffa. A reader expecting the clichéd conservative formula—“We must reinvigorate the principles of Western civilization (namely, the liberal values of America two or three decades ago) to halt the left’s extremism and correct the impoverished philistinism of the Right”—will be disappointed. Though Ellmers is opposed, without qualification, to the political agenda and anti-philosophical currents of left ideology, he is surprisingly sympathetic to their psychological roots. His book is an inquiry into the human condition that occasioned the culture war.
Following Strauss, Ellmers understands Western civilization, and perhaps humanity itself, as animated by the tension between “the philosopher” (for whom the unexamined life is not worth living) and “the city” (which requires the authority of unexamined opinions). Every political order sees itself as “the holy city,” animated by a divine commandment to make no covenant with and show no mercy to alien nations, but instead to destroy their altars, cut down their groves, and burn their graven images. But “the philosopher” questions all opinions, including those that his “holy city” accepts as true and unquestionable. The deepest roots of our present discontent are found, not in 1968, or 1789, or 1776, or “the Enlightenment,” or medieval nominalism, but in the human soul itself.
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