...Fukuyama['s]...is the well-worn argument of such theorists as Judith Shklar, John Rawls, and Richard Rorty, and is now repeated in tones of faithful certainty by the liberal congregation. It is liberalism’s original “White Legend,” the story of the benighted times from which true salvation arose in the form of John Locke’s Second Treatise and Letter Concerning Toleration.
The problem is, it’s a simplistic just-so story that is repeated often enough that it now has assumed the status of Liberal Creed. Careful historical examinations of the period in which the lineaments of the modern state first took form instead show that the “wars of religion” were most often the cover that was used by political power seeking to throw off both the constraining conditions of the Church from above and the limiting power of the various aristocratic forms from below. Many battles of the so-called “wars of religion” were not fought over creed and what liberalism came to regard as irrational and private belief, but rather, over questions of political power.
While the story of political modernity can be told in a number of ways, a main telling emphasizes the consolidation of political power in a wholly new form: the modern state. In order to advance the modern form of the the state, strenuous efforts were undertaken to extricate the “secular” from “religious” powers (terms which were repurposed for this project). Among the most compact and persuasive counter-narratives to the Liberal “White Legend” Creed is this powerful essay by William T. Cavanaugh: “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State.” Cavanaugh’s essay is a tour-de-force retelling of the conventional liberal narrative. In a host of details, many gleaned from accounts of prominent historians of the early modern state (such as Richard Dunn and Anthony Giddens), Cavanaugh outlines how this story was constructed to the benefit of incipient liberal actors through both emphasis upon selective incidents and even a wholesale refashioning of the actual motives of the main historical actors. In short, in the effort to forge the modern liberal state - the most powerful political entity ever known in the history of humanity - a story of “limited government” was told that required the cordoning off of “religion” to the private sphere, rebranding what were frequently political battles as religious battles. Not surprisingly, the rise of a Whig polity - the party especially of the modern bourgeoisie and its attendant political class - would require a Whig interpretation of History.
From another, complementary perspective, among the best stories of this same consolidation of political power remains Bertrand de Jouvenel’s classic book On Power (1949). Contrary to liberalism’s claim that it represents a world-historical advance in the idea of “limited government,” Jouvenel shows in his magisterial book that the modern state assiduously disassembled actual existing “federalism” of the pre-modern era through the dissolution of various competing “estates” - whether clerical or nobility. This centralization of power was achieved in significant part through an appeal to the masses, a “people” who were promised liberation from the old aristocracy. Tracing the same story told in an economic vein by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, Jouvenel explores the irony of how liberation from more decentralized political forms ended consolidating and magnifying the centralized power of the modern state at the expense of decentralized political power that constrained the overweening ambition of central political authority. Yet, appropriating and redefining such terms as “liberty,” “limited government,” and “federalism,” the modern state shrouded its ascendant and consolidated power in what we today recognize as the centralized modern liberal state.
The main insights of Jouvenel’s analysis were echoed in a powerful and pressing form by Robert Nisbet in his 1953 classic text, The Quest for Community. Like Jouvenel - but now in the wake of the twin totalitarianisms of the 20th-century - Nisbet concluded that the modern state rested upon the dissolution or effectual redefinition of various memberships and communities that once functioned as the main forms of communal identity - family, church, guild, township, college, and so forth. Once sufficiently dissolved in all but a shell, the allegiance of the dissassociated individuals was instead directed exclusively toward the modern state. Whereas Nisbet attributed the rise of the twin totalitarianisms of fascism and communism to a modern “quest for community,” he predicted that the same dynamics would come to affect liberal democracies as well. The modern state - the political form of the modern nation - was the wedding of liberalism’s individualism and centralization....