Mark Mitchell’s effort to reclaim traditionalism in the defense of freedom is admirable.
His emphasis aligns him with such estimable writers as Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, and, in our own day, with Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others who have both unsettled conservatives yet revived probing conversations. Though the second half of The Limits of Liberalism, which could be said to be another book in itself, is about freedom, the first half aims to show the epistemic role of tradition—that one comes to know reality through the inherited order, the particular legacy into which all are born. “Our situation today,” writes Mitchell, “is best conceived as a conflict between those who advocate some version of liberal cosmopolitanism (along with its reactionary offspring, identity politics) and those who instead uphold the idea of tradition along with the inherent limits—social, natural, and metaphysical—that such a position entails.”
Professor Mitchell has given himself a formidable assignment—perhaps too formidable. Not only does he faithfully work through the thoughts of three tough thinkers—Oakeshott, MacIntyre, and Polanyi—but he also contrasts their teachings with dominant strains of classical liberalism. In addition, toward the end of his book, he meditates upon Augustine’s Confessions and De Magistro and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, correctives to liberalism in a different key. He concludes that “Liberalism is both incoherent and unstable. The liberal cosmopolitan dream is an illusion.” Like Deneen, he finds his enemy in individualism, which militates against the very freedom it would secure. Without Tocquevillian associations and corporate relationships, liberalism shrinks and isolates the human person. Yet, at the end of the book, the question still persists: is everything wrong due to liberalism?
No doubt Mitchell’s concerns are shared by true lovers of liberty. His worries echo those of the Southern Agrarians in the 1930’s (I’ll Take My Stand), who offered compelling images of and arguments for the small, the known, and the particular versus the large, the mass-minded, and the abstract. Unlike them, however, he writes from outside any distinct tradition himself, at times making tradition as abstract as a principle. Despite the weight Professor Mitchell places on “the particular” as the way to knowledge and right behavior, his assertions remain skeletal, deficient in convincing examples from history or from human experience to embody them. This is a book that is too often deprived of context, one lacking in images laden with “rich and contingent materiality” (the Agrarian John Crowe Ransom’s phrase).
As I see it, the fundamental weakness of the book lies in Mitchell’s point of departure: the claim that one can only know through received opinion, through the ancestors, or through what political philosophers call convention. In his emphasis on how one knows, he neglects the possibility of knowing a thing in itself without cultural mediation. In emphasizing that man is born into a defining prescriptive order, Mitchell sidelines man as the creature who questions and wonders. Professor Mitchell’s work is most detailed in explaining why he appreciates the contributions of Michael Oakeshott, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Polanyi, who, in their respective ways, show that one can know reality through tradition and culture. The claims made, however, downplay the force of human reason to probe the assumptions into which one is born. Their emphasis on one’s native language, for instance, sets boundaries on perception to an inordinate extent. In focusing on how human beings come to know, what is known is compromised.
A second major problem that the book inadequately addresses is the feasibility of individual solutions to a general cultural problem....
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Originally Posted by Rationalist
