Of the more obvious reasons for skepticism is Walker’s dating of the “European Renaissance” to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and his subsequent claim that it was “partly initiated by the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.”1 The latter claim would mean that the only cause worth mentioning occurred three quarters of the way through the event it initiated. At least part of the problem is that the dating of the Renaissance is truncated. Standard introductions to Renaissance humanism in its entirety begin with the fourteenth century and end with the seventeenth century. Charles G. Nauert’s Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe is one prominent example, and it begins by further complicating Walker’s narrative that the Fall of Constantinople was responsible for renewed interest in Greek by pointing out that

Western Europeans could have recovered Greek language and literature in the thirteenth century as easily as in the fifteenth, but they did not seize the opportunity. The scarce Latin manuscripts that humanists of the early fifteenth century took pride in ‘rediscovering’ were all available during the high-medieval period, but they were not ‘discovered’—that is, few readers knew of their existence. In the case of both classical Latin and Greek, something had changed between the early thirteenth century and the early fifteenth century. This change was a change of mentality, of values, that made the tedious mastery of the classical languages and diffusion of classical texts seem worth the effort.2

Something like a new mentality, but one localized to Florence, is discernable from Walker’s engagement with Marsilio Ficino, but the implication that “stale scholasticism” was its cause is wrong.3 Of the four cities that Walker mentions as centres of scholastic dominance, two were recent additions. “After some earlier appearance at Salerno and Naples,” explains Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Aristotelian philosophy became for the first time firmly established at Bologna and other Italian universities towards the very end of the thirteenth century, that is, at the same time that the first signs of a study of the Latin classics began to announce the coming rise of Italian humanism.”4 Scholasticism did not stale in Italy before the appearance of humanism, and complaints against it were not always from outside scholasticism. The nominalists shared complaints with the humanists, and there were scholastics who were also humanists. The decline of scholasticism did not begin until the late sixteenth century, and neither Ficino nor any other variation on Platonism or hermeticism posed a serious threat to scholasticism, which eventually succumbed by the seventeenth century to the natural philosophies of, among others, Galileo Galilei.

These details are a problem for Walker’s version of events because they show that the decline of scholasticism, which is the only explicit precedent he offers in support of overall cultural decline, did not take place for another two centuries, and without it he offers no sound criterion for judging cultural renewal imminent. There was a new emphasis on professional training in rhetoric that sustained the cultural turn to ancient Roman and, eventually, Greek texts, but, initially,

the men of the Renaissance returned to the pagans because they discovered types in their literature and art which expressed feeling similar to those which they wished to express. Thus it is the feelings first discovered in poetic experience which gave new meaning to classical rhetoric. The discovery of new texts is not innovating but symptomatic; it is not the finding of new texts so much as the fresh reading of them—of Cicero’s De inventione by Brunetto Latini, of Cicero’s letters by Petrarch—that matters; most of the major discoveries of the mature oratorical works of Rome come only later with Poggio’s discoveries in France and Germany and Bishop Landriani’s at Lodi (1416-1420).5

Situating humanism against scholasticism, or any other -ism, can be conceptually useful, but historically misleading, and it was not until the nineteenth century, “under the influence of Hegel, that the modern addiction to reifying ideologies and social trends using nouns formed from -ismos, the Greek suffix indicating nouns of action or process, began to take hold.”6 Walker’s inaccuracies appear the result of relatively recent historical habits, which would explain his frequent reading into Renaissance humanism a number of categories distinct to German Romanticism. The notion of Zeitgeist, however, tells us nothing about the imitatio of Petrarch, who’s historical consciousness was of a reserve of moral possibilities rather than of epochal succession.

In any case, Walker’s broader narrative whereby newfound Platonism broke its Aristotelian chains is long recognized a mistake:

The predominant view of historians was once that the philosophy of Aristotle, after spreading through Latin Christendom in the wake of the great wave of translations from Greek and Arabic begun around 1125, reached its greatest diffusion in the thirteenth century, came to a profound crisis in the fourteenth, and then suffered in the fifteenth under the challenge of Platonism. As a result, Aristotelianism in the Renaissance survived in only a few “conservative” strongholds—such as the universities of Padua, Coimbra, and Cracow—before it was finally swept away by the coming of modern philosophy and science. Thanks to the work of historians like John Herman Randall, Eugenio Garin, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Charles Schmitt, and Charles Lohr, research in the last sixty years has shown that such an image of the development of European thought is so one-sided as to be substantially false. The point here is not to insist on the notable expansion of Aristotelianism in the fourteenth century—for in that century, far from declining, Aristotelian philosophy reinforced its position by consolidating its fundamental role in university instruction, by linking its fate to that of influential philosophical and theological schools, and by obtaining for the first time the explicit support of the papacy. One must go still further and insist that, if the greatest intellectual novelty of the Renaissance was the rediscovery of little-known and forgotten philosophical traditions, Aristotelianism nevertheless remained the predominant one through the end of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century.7

For Kristeller, the mistaken “view that the Renaissance was basically an age of Plato”8 began with historians, who,

like journalists, are apt to concentrate on news and to forget that there is a complex and broad situation which remained unaffected by the events of the moment. They also have for some time been more interested in the origins than in the continuations of intellectual and other developments. More specifically, many historians of thought have been sympathetic to the opponents of Aristotelianism in the Renaissance, whereas most of the defenders of medieval philosophy have limited their efforts to its earlier phases before the end of the thirteenth century, and have sacrificed the late scholastics to the critique of their contemporary and modern adversaries.9

Walker’s emphasis on newness and his fixation on Ficino suggest that the same mistaken view is now making the rounds on Substack. His inaccuracies may be symptomatic of growing pains of adapting to a new media, but they also seem to betray impatience with, if not hostility towards, history, which appears thematic across all three authors.

Discriminating elements of continuity from discontinuity is basic to historical accuracy. Fideler’s “two factors,” which hold the importance of declining literacy and enrollment in humanities programs as indicators for predicting a new renaissance, have little to do with the conditions of education during the emergence of Italian humanism.10 Literacy was rapidly expanding, and this “reflected, and was in part the cause of, a vast growth in Italian vernacular literature from the later thirteenth century.”11 Literacy in Italy flourished late compared to elsewhere in Europe because Italians “found it difficult to cast off the literary monopoly of Latin.”12 When Latin did find a larger audience, “[m]ost urban Italians sought literacy for practical motives. They needed to keep business accounts, have some understanding of legal documents written in Latin by notaries, and on occasion even write business letters.”13 Mass literacy preceded any disgust felt by humanists towards the attenuated “human spirit” and this feeling could find expression and influence only within a system of education with the vulgar resources to provide it a place.14 The situation of early Renaissance humanism resembles more the state of universities with an aptitude for what Fideler disparagingly refers to as “theory,” which departed from the scholasticism of the new critics.15 This would, of course, upset Fideler's picture of a present cultural decline since it would locate a renaissance during what he characterizes as our dark age. The “intellectual frameworks and ‘theory’” he rejects, without argument, would then figure in better as representatives of cultural renewal.16

Yet Fideler’s inaccuracies are not only a problem of continuity and discontinuity but of reference, as facts seem to lose their way in his narrative:

As Walker notes:

Nearly every renaissance has begun under conditions of collapse or shortly after cultural exhaustion and the lack of meaning. And, like the European Renaissance of the fifteenth century, the next one will come from outside of the academy.

This is historically true. The original Renaissance humanists created the studia humanitatis — “humane studies” or the original humanities — outside the university system, which was then dominated by medieval scholasticism.17

The studia humanitatis was neither a creation of the Renaissance nor reinvented in the fifteenth century. The term was “used in the general sense of a liberal or literary education by such ancient Roman authors as Cicero and Gellius, and this use was resumed by the Italian scholars of the late fourteenth century.”18 This may come off as pedantic, but these inaccuracies accumulate and through repetition allow Fideler to blend history into an allegory more agreeable to Walker’s narrative. One original representative of the Renaissance, Ficino, then stands indiscriminately next to another, Petrarch, and despite their living a century apart an apparently joint contribution between them is presented with the semblance of historical legitimacy.

Fideler’s “historical” habits take after those he cites, including Michael R.J. Bonner, who’s In Defense of Civilization revises the broad strokes of history as an allegorical struggle between civilization and barbarism, “the sort of historiography in which the particular and the minute are dissolved within deep currents and long-term trends.”19 Bonner’s “purpose” (there is no thesis) “is threefold: to explain what makes civilization what it is, to show what we are in danger of losing in the event of collapse, and to point the way toward renewal.”20 We are, according to Bonner, obsessed with novelty, such that the past, and the possibilities it offers, are concealed from us. He advises that “[e]ach generation must seek facts, narrative, and and truth in the past.”21 Bonner wants to renew grand narratives, but does “not believe that the postmodernist era has ended, for the scepticism of grand narratives is alive and well and still justifies some of the most important of contemporary beliefs.”22

Bonner’s representative man of our postmodern era is Jean-François Lyotard, and The Postmodern Condition is his exclusive source for summarizing postmodernity. “The term ‘postmodern’ had been used before [The Postmodern Condition] in reference to art,” he explains, “but Lyotard was first to apply it to Western culture in general.”23 Bonner’s reconstruction of “[t]he basic argument” of the book begins

that the big ideas of the past, particularly the recent past, had led only to disappointment. Progressive movements of any kind—science, religion, the old ideologies, and especially Marxism—had failed to usher in the utopias that they had promised. No one believed in them, and no one could even agree on reality anymore because no one understood it. Here Lyotard’s limited understanding of chaos theory appeared to justify his claims. We could not look to universal theories or narratives to tell us who we are, or what purpose is, because they had led only to failure.24

This reconstruction is not, however, the argument of The Postmodern Condition, and there is every indication that Bonner never read the book. Lyotard’s thesis or “working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.”25 Bonner’s claim that this was the first use of the term “postmodern” in this way was probably lifted from the Wikipedia article, which cites Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity, a book that Bonner never mentions. Anderson’s claim, moreover, is doubtful. It follows an account where

the first philosophical work to adopt the notion was Jean-François Lyotard’s La Condition Postmoderne, which appeared in Paris in 1979. Lyotard had acquired the term directly from Hassan. Three years earlier, he had addressed a conference in Milwaukee on the postmodern in the performing arts orchestrated by Hassan.26

But the term was already used in Legitimation Crisis, where Jürgen Habermas’s notion of postmodernity is the apparent model for Lyotard’s thesis:

The interest behind the examination of crisis tendencies in late- and post-capitalist class societies is in exploring the possibilities of a “post-modern” society—that is, a historically new principle of organization and not a different name for the surprising vigor of an aged capitalism.27

Lyotard cites Legitimation Crisis in the original German and directly responds to its argument at the end of The Postmodern Condition, and one can assume that Anderson’s confusion is a result of competing evidence for the original notion. But Bonner provides no such evidence, which suggests not only that he did not come to the claim alone but that he also did not come to it by way of Anderson. In all probability, Bonner found it on Wikipedia.

Skip this section of nine paragraphs if you do not want to read an attempt to interpret The Postmodern Condition as an extension and modification of humanism. It contributes but is expendable to the larger point of the essay.

For Bonner’s Lyotard, “[i]nstead of grand narratives (or ‘metanarratives’, as Lyotard called them), all we had left were ‘language games’ and a fragmentary jumble of local and personal ‘small narratives’, which were mutually contradictory.28 This is also available from the Wikipedia article, but it does not say much about what Lyotard is doing, which is not entirely removed from a humanist complaining about scholasticism. Humanists employed antilogy, a method for considering “the same events from different points of view; the best antilogy derives from the slightest difference in presenting the givens of a situation, the greatest difference in conclusions.”29 This allowed them to proceed according to the best course of action without neglecting the particular actors. In a postmodern society, however, where actions are at risk of disappearing behind social processes, the best we can hope for is that these processes will factor in the slightest differences, and that the slightest differences will eventually result in the greatest difference. Lyotard’s localized narratives are based on René Thom’s postulate that “[t]he more or less determined character of a process is determined by the local state of the process.”30 For Lyotard, “it is possible—in fact, it is most frequently the case—that these circumstances will prevent the production of stable form.”31 That these differences avoid the best course of action is the point since the best course of action is the social process. For the humanists, “[t]he amoral techniques of rhetoric are used to express the amoral force of circumstance on principle […] The Humanist’s attraction to debate in utramque partem is a positive sign of a generosity and tolerance which rejects the arid disputations of the Scholastics as tautological.”32 Thus Lyotard transforms humanist antilogy into what he calls ‘paralogy,’ an attempt not to change postmodern society by finding consensus among the different sides of an issue but through local dissensus intended to steer social processes by way of linguistic acts.

Bonner’s claim that chaos theory provides Lyotard with his rationale for dissensus is found in the Wikipedia article, with Anderson cited as its source. Anderson is describing the “pragmatics of postmodern science” that Lyotard argues allow us to strategically avoid inappropriate demands of legitimacy.33 Modernity demanded that all knowledge share its standard of legitimacy with science, but crisis eventually struck “scientific knowledge, signs of which have been accumulating since the end of the nineteenth century,” representing “an internal erosion of the legitimacy principle of knowledge.”34 The “distinguishing characteristic” of the Enlightenment, its “emancipation apparatus” that sought to free humanity through its discovery of human laws, “is that it grounds the legitimation of science and truth in the autonomy of interlocutors involved in ethical, social, and political praxis. […] There is nothing to prove that if a statement describing a real situation is true, it follows that a prescriptive statement based upon it (the effect of which will necessarily be a modification of that reality) will be just.”35 According to Lyotard, “that is what the postmodern world is all about. Most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative. It in no way follows that they are reduced to barbarity. What saves them from it is their knowledge that legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction.”36

For Lyotard, legitimacy has over the course of centuries become too dependent on “the denotative game (in which what is relevant is the true-false distinction)” that offers rules of discourse appropriate to science.37 Science, he argues, is ambivalent, on the one hand independent of “the prescriptive game (in which the just/unjust distinction pertains)” and “the technical game (in which the criterion is the efficient/inefficient distinction)” in its pursuit of truth and on the other hand dependent on them to exist within society.38 Over several centuries, the denotative game has overwhelmed the prescriptive game, such that how best to act is lost to the calculation of action. Lyotard complains that “[s]ocial pragmatics does not have the ‘simplicity’ of scientific pragmatics. […] There is no reason to think that it would be possible to determine metaprescriptives common to all these language games or that a revisable consensus like the one in force at a given moment in the scientific community could embrace the totality of metaprescriptions regulating the totality of statements circulating in the social collectivity.”39 This renders traditional ethics meaningless, and Anderson is pointing out that “micro-physics, fractals, discoveries of chaos,”40 encourage Lyotard to see a way out of the demands of scientific legitimacy by imitating “incomplete information, ‘fracta,’ catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes” that he believes characterize the science of postmodernity.41

The everyday philosophical concerns informing The Postmodern Condition are classical in origin, and Aristotle’s identification in the Nicomachean Ethics of prudential action with the good life is as good a starting point as any. For Aristotle, prudence was “a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man.”42 It is distinct from art, “which has an end other than itself,” and were prudence an art it would not be a virtue, “for good action itself is its end.”43 Prudence is a virtue, but one nonetheless closely related to the art of rhetoric, since the highest kinds of virtue “must be those which are most useful to others […] Prudence is that excellence of the understanding which enables men to come to wise decisions about the relation to happiness of the goods and evils that have been previously mentioned.”44 Aristotle’s ethical ideal is the rhetor who relates to others the good and evil of their actions.

Aristotle’s categories of good and evil are not universal but communal, and prudence must be learned through a particular community. Rhetoric is a powerful art for teaching good and evil because, where successful, it performs to the interests of the public, and it is the communal public where the categories of good and evil originate and thereby the source of what is prudent. Epideictic rhetoric, especially, which is the art of praise and blame, becomes an art of preserving the good of the community. During the Renaissance, “epideictic was taken over by that branch of moral philosophy concerned with human actions to be imitated or avoided; the link between the two disciplines was the concept of prudentia, which Sir Thomas Elyot, quoting Cicero, defines as ‘the knowledge of things which ought to be desired and followed, and also of them which ought to be fled from or eschewed.’”45 The basis for studying literature among the humanists became overwhelmingly a matter of praise and blame, such that “[i]n the most comprehensive work of literary criticism in the English Renaissance, The Art of English Poesie, usually attributed to George Puttenham (published 1589; but evidently written much earlier), the genres are again ranked according to their epideictic function.”46 It may well be that the rigid moralism so common in the contemporary humanities has its basis in epideictic.

For the humanist Leonardo Bruni, epideictic was the basis for “recurring types of civic virtue.”47 “Bruni’s historiography is the vehicle of neither particulars nor universals but types” that reflect his “rhetorical realism.”48 These types allow him to praise or blame characters or situations of the past as moral possibilities for the future through “a dimension of personal experience” that “works against radical ethical solipsism, for the sense of historical continuity in choice.”49 Bruni offers a typical course of action, neither universal nor particular to any community, but drawn from the exemplary standard set by historical success. The strategy employed in The Postmodern Condition is one where Lyotard explains that his description of society “makes no claims of being original, or even true. What is required of a working hypothesis is a fine capacity for discrimination. […] Our hypothesis, therefore, should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to the question raised.”50 Bruni and Lyotard are distinct in the important respect that postmodern societies are historically unprecedented. For Bruni, classical literature always provided ready-made types. For Lyotard, “we are in the position of Aristotle’s prudent individual, who makes judgments about the just and the unjust without the least criterion.”51

Neither science, ethics nor history provide us with metaprescriptives for how to act. “For this reason,” Lyotard concludes, “it seems neither possible, nor even prudent, to follow Habermas in orienting our treatment of the problem of legitimation in the direction of a search for universal consensus through what he calls Diskurs, in other words, a dialogue of argumentation.”52 Lyotard proposes that “[t]he ability to judge does not hang upon the observance of criteria. The form that it will take in the last Critique is that of the imagination. An imagination that is constitutive. It is not only an ability to judge; it is a power to invent criteria.”53

Contrary to Lyotard, Habermas argues that reason can emancipate action from the confusions of postmodernity, but we have to first figure out the history informing it. “On the road toward science,” he argues that “social philosophy has lost what politics formally was capable of providing as prudence.”54 He reflects how “[p]olitics was understood to be the doctrine of the good and just life; it was the continuation of ethics.”55 For the Greeks, “politics referred exclusively to praxis,” and “[t]his had nothing to do with techne, the skillful production of artifacts and the expert mastery of objectified tasks. […] For Hobbes, on the other hand, the maxim promulgated by Bacon, of scientia propter potentiam, is self-evident: mankind owes its greatest advances to technology, and above all to the political technique, for the correct establishment of the state.”56 For Aristotle,

[t]he capacity of practical philosophy is […] a prudent understanding of the situation, and on this the tradition of classical politics has continued to base itself by way of the prudentia of Cicero, down to Burke’s “prudence.” Hobbes, on the other hand, wishes to make politics serve the secure knowledge of the essential nature of justice itself, namely of the laws and compacts. This assertion already complies with the ideal of knowledge originating in Hobbes’s time, the ideal of the new science, which implies that we only know an object to the extent that we ourselves can produce it.57

A revolution that began with “Machiavelli on the one side, by Thomas More on the other” that reached maturity in the scientific politics of Hobbes separated “politics from morality” by replacing “instruction in leading a good and just life with making possible a life of well-being within a correctly instituted order.”58 The praxis of politics had replaced ethical theory and its corresponding art of rhetoric with something closer to social science. Yet one can still recover the ancient political art in Lyotard, his denotative, prescriptive and technical games are a postmodern permutation of the genres of judicial, epideictic and deliberative rhetoric.

Unlike Habermas and Lyotard, Bonner simply ignores the changing conditions of praxis. This reflects his histography whereby the historical particulars and minutiae (i.e. actions) disappear behind “big history.”59 The rationale behind The Postmodern Condition and the argument itself are explained away as a unidimensional plot point in Bonner’s impractical narrative. Fideler apparently shares his ignorance, never responsive to, let alone innovating on, the practices and techniques enacted by the humanists whom he heralds as signatories of a new Renaissance. Thus how the Renaissance happened is less important to him than that it happened, and it is thereby reduced to spectacle.

End of section.

James Hankins is another historian informing Fideler’s views who has advocated moral renewal through eschewal of praxis. Hankins has been revising accounts of the Italian humanists for years towards the idea that “humanists of the early Renaissance avoided ideological confrontations over constitutional forms, preferring to direct their reforming energies at improving the virtues of the ruling class. Their reforms were generally about governors, not governments.”60 This recently came to a head with the publication of Virtue Politics, in which

[t]he expression “virtue politics,” as those familiar with modern philosophical ethics will recognize, is meant to recall the term “virtue ethics.” The latter is an approach to moral philosophy, usually said to descend from Aristotle, that has been revived in the modern academy by philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Julia Annas. In contrast to the other two leading approaches to normative ethics in the modern world—deontology and utilitarianism—virtue ethics emphasizes the need to develop, through reflection and practice, excellent patterns of conduct (the virtues) so as to achieve the human good and human flourishing (eudaimonia, or happiness). It thus distinguishes itself from other ethical theories that are more concerned with (1) defining norms of practical action, or duties, based on maxims common to all rational beings, as in Kant; or (2) elaborating rules to be followed by a subject who judges the moral value of actions primarily by their consequences, that is, their capacity to maximize goodness, as in the case of the utilitarians. “Virtue politics,” by analogy with virtue ethics, focuses on improving the character and wisdom of the ruling class with a view to bringing about a happy and flourishing commonwealth. It sees the political legitimacy of the state as tightly linked with the virtue of rulers and especially their practice of justice, defined as a preference for the common good over private goods—their “other-directedness” as a modern might put it.61

According to Hankins, “[t]he humanist conception of the path to virtue—how one acquires virtue—stands in contrast with Aristotle’s. Whereas Aristotle saw the acquisition of virtue as a matter of practice, philosophical reflection, and habit, and aided by good birth, wealth, good upbringing, and good friends, the humanists as a rule see liberal education—full stop—as the path to virtue.”62 Classical literature furnished this education by instilling “noble mores, ingenui mores, and practical wisdom, prudentia—all the qualities needed for excellence in government.”63 The belief was that “[e]ducators who taught the humanities were thus performing a public service. By training the elite in the humanities, noble virtue would radiate down to the populace in general, who would benefit from and imitate the wisdom and moral excellence of their leaders.”64

For Hankins, leaders should be selected meritocratically, and education is not a matter of merely educating those born into privilege. He reflects that “[a] claim to superior wisdom and virtue is not so easily verified as a claim to be the legitimate heir or a magistrate duly elected in accordance with constitutional procedures.”65 Classical literature provided training in rhetoric, and while “[v]irtue was the key; only the charisma of virtue gave a leader the power to change the human heart, to bring order, peace, and willing obedience.”66 Those most eloquent were positioned to make changes from the top-down, and “[i]f some commoner were to show merit and practical wisdom he could always be taken into the ruling group (a practice sociologists call ‘sponsored mobility’). This was in general the practice of Renaissance republics too: deliberation was confined to the well informed, whereas the people in their councils were only allowed to vote up or down on legislation formulated by their betters.”67

As to who decides merit, the Italian humanists discovered that they were ideally situated. Yet something like cult of expertise is being suggested by Hankins, and it is not difficult to confirm this from the humanists themselves. Desiderius Erasmus advised that “it is not enough just to hand out the sort of maxims which warn” the prince “off evil things and summon him to the good. No, they must be fixed in his mind, pressed in, and rammed home.”68 One gets a sense that the humanists aspired towards governing when for Giovanni Botero it seemed "necessary that the king never bring to the council anything for deliberation that was not first vetted in a council of conscience to which outstanding doctors of theology and cannon law belongs.”69 That something as personal as conscience should defer to expert educators suggests that princedom in either case is an empty title for humanist governors.

Hankins’s ‘meritocracy’ avoids the more provocative ‘aristocracy,’ from the Greek arete, or virtue, but this is more or less what he believes the liberal society ought to be today. He agrees

with Pareto that all government is oligarchical in the sense that all government implies the rule of a few over many. I think this was true even of Athens in its most democratic period in the late fifteenth century BC. The important questions are whether the political elites are opened or closed to merit (as the humanists advocated), and whether they are constituted by decent people of good character who accept a duty of care towards the poor and the powerless. Modern democracies are nothing like ancient ones and in practice resemble oligarchies; and they are yearly becoming less liberal. In modern Western societies small groups of the wealthy and powerful dominate government, the economy, and the wider culture (while talking incessantly of equality). It is still possible and, in my view, highly desirable to have a democratic check on ruling elites, but I believe, with the humanists, that, as things stand now, the best way to improve our governments is to improve our governors. The advantage of humanist virtue politics is that it is potentially compatible with modern pluralistic societies where citizens profess many faiths, including scientism and secular humanism, but also share common political institutions. For those institutions to function well, we need our societies to share at least a few common principles of practical reason—what Justus Lipsius called civil wisdom—as well as common models of what constitutes civilitas in Suetonius’ sense (Augustus 51-56), that is, the correct comportment of citizens. These standards are most likely to be widely accepted when derived from common traditions and from teaching common classical texts (not necessarily those of Greco-Roman antiquity).70

How merit would persuade an audience of ears conditioned by the GOPAC tapes is never explained, and some of his proposed solutions to social problems are poorly considered. He recalls that

while prosperity was a good thing, a mark of good government (as illustrated in the famous fresco in Siena’s Palazzo Communale), the humanists despised a life devoted to competitive money-making, driven by avarice. If there was to be competition among elites it should be generosa aemulatio, a noble rivalry in the best things, rivalry in human excellence or virtue. That too is a teaching of virtue politics that could profitably be revived today. Our democracy needs the right kind of competitiveness as much or even more than it needs equality. 71

Hankins’s belief that the problems of capitalism are resolvable through some version of trickle-down virtue is difficult to reconcile with the quality of his work as an historian.

Hankins’s forays into cultural criticism are no better. He appeals on behalf of the public good that “[p]olitical virtue requires that institutions of society and government be led by people who are able to make them function well—like the soul in the body, as Erasmus put it. This means recognizing what the ergon and the telos of the institution is: the way it should function (ergon) to best achieve its end or good (telos).”72 He laments “that our institutions are led by people who simply don’t care, or don’t appear to care, about the primary function and purpose of the institutions they lead. They have other teloi to pursue, other virtues to signal.”73 Hankins descries the experience at his university, Harvard, where “more or less every week the faculty receive an email blast from some self-important administrator, usually written in bureaucratic langue de bois, warning of some moral danger to the community.”74 The result of “[a]ll of this incontinent sermonizing” are the ‘scholar activists.”’ that apparently include “the declining quality of” many of his colleagues.75 Missing from the article is an account of Hankins’s understanding of the university. There is no self-criticism, no critical eye directed inwards and towards what his ergon and telos would look like in practice, or why his colleagues, and the faculty at other universities would approve of it. He appeals instead to the public for support on the basis of shared frustration.

In his review of Virtue Politics, Hannan Yoran singles out Hankins’s criticism that “[i]n recent historical scholarship it has become customary to present humanism as a movement principally concerned with language and style; engaged in the recovery and elaboration of ancient literary genres, methods, and textual practices; and preoccupied with antiquarian and philological questions. This interpretation in my view represents a confusion of ends with means, and reflects the priorities and sympathies of modern scholars more than it does the fundamental values and goals of the humanist movement.”76 Yoran asks “[w]hy not look at humanists both as promotors of virtue politics and as professional rhetoricians?”77 Hankins did so in the the past, but this distinction is now absent. One possibility is that Hankins may want to withhold the practices of his profession, and assure that those outside its walls that professors are competent to work them out to the advantage of a virtuous society. This would explain why his image of the university is unified, both individually and through their representation in Harvard.

I have dwelled on Bonner and Hankins because they seem to represent a turn among educated elites towards a history that resists criticism by those they believe socially inferior. Bonner received his doctorate from Oxford and Hankins from Columbia. Bonner is a former policy advisor for the Ontario Government now employed by the Aristotle foundation for Public Policy and Hankins is slated as visiting professor for the 2026-2027 school year for The Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, an institution established as part of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s efforts to undermine the woke agenda of universities. What they show is friendliness among elite universities towards political power beholden to donors. Bonner is the inferior historian, and if his historiography is any indication then he appears not to care much for history. Hankins does, but he either believes that donor interests cannot be stopped and that the best course of action is to mitigate the damages they inflict or he believes that he and others like him can genuinely ennoble them, and thereby all of us. In either case, as Erin Maglaque points out regarding his endorsement of charter schools, “[i]t won’t surprise anyone to know that the Christian nationalists and neoliberal free marketeers whose interests have coalesced in the cause of classical charter schools don’t actually care about Petrarch.”78

Fideler’s reverence for Petrarch as an icon of renewal avoids almost entirely the difficulty posed by material conditions. After briefly acknowledging that “programs are slashed for supposedly financial reasons” he cites as a counterpoint “Jennifer Frey’s honors program at the University of Tulsa.”79 What Walker admits tepidly as “insights” of critical theory would offer a fuller explanation of the problem, but one that would also pose a challenge to Fideler’s allegory of the spirit. Unlike Hankins, Fideler’s advocacy is not the result of deep insight into Renaissance culture. It resembles Spenglerianism, but in the register of American Transcendentalism, a closeted materialism preoccupied with the impurities of “demographic changes and a shrinking student population” while resolute that a symbolic solution be found.80 Consequently, Theodor Adorno’s criticism of Spengler is relevant to Fideler in that “[e]verything that cannot be reduced to a symbol of human nature, which, despite all his fatalism, Spengler endows with sovereignty, survives only in vague references to cosmic interconnections. […] By reducing history to the essence of the soul, Spengler gives it the appearance of a self-contained entity, yet one which for that very reason is actually deterministic.”81

The predictions of Walker and Fideler do not belong to the Renaissance. They belong to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These two write in the fashion of the manifesto rather than of anything composed by Petrarch or Ficino. Their arrangement of facts is pastiche united by a charge to “make it new.”

They claim that the Renaissance had to overcome the domination of scholasticism, as ours must overcome the domination of theory. That neither apparently know anything about either scholasticism or theory and therefore possess no idea how to resist domination by either is irrelevant because both believe that the true movement of history is on terms external to its facts, arranged into a language that they are peculiarly qualified to read (although they are happy to initiate others who support them financially). Yet if scholasticism is of no lasting importance to the Renaissance nor theory to us then what provides them with their awareness of a coming new Renaissance as opposed to more modest and regular developments in culture, or further domination by theory? The answer can only be that they believe themselves witnesses to events from a standpoint outside history. I gets the sense, as with popular cultural critics like Jordan Peterson, of observing a perverse spiritual journey, of something that should be private made public.

Apart from Fideler and Walker, LaMonica has proposed an alchemical model for predicting renaissances down to the decade. Her account of the Northern Renaissance, for example, retraces it as a visual arts movement embodied by Albrecht Dürer, whose contribution, as with Walker’s Ficino and Fideler’s Petrarch, is sui generis, although why he receives laurels while his contemporary Erasmus, who’s influence in education, theology, philology, and letters, and mastery over not only the printed page but the printing house, is displaced through reference to advocacy of “inner reform” suggests overreliance on the perspective of Art Historians. The idea, as far as I can tell, is that Dürer infused various arts such as printing with elements of Italian visual culture until a new visual rhetoric defined the North. “In this way,” she explains, “the Northern Renaissance becomes a hinge between medieval Europe and the birth of modern seeing.”82

But what about ways of seeing continued through to the Northern Renaissance that are not specific to Dürer or the visual arts? According to Ronald G. Witt,

[m]edieval grammarians and rhetoricians read the same ancient manuals of rhetoric and exploited the same ancient arsenal of colores rhetorici, as the humanists did. Medieval writers, however, often employed rhetorical colors to an extreme degree, whereas the early humanists, controlling their use of colores, more nearly approached ancient practice. They revived the simile, which had been neglected by medieval poets, and, by the 1360s, following the Ad Herrenium, they introduced ekphrasis (description) in their orations.83

Ekphrasis made its way North independent of the visual arts. Murray Krieger compares the non-mimetic uses of ekphrases from Jacopo Mazzoni to Philip Sidney and notes that “the image placed before our eyes by the words of the poet cannot be the same as the image placed there by the visual artist, just as the intelligible cannot be the same as the sensible.”84 Ekphrasis inspired Elizabethan culture through its appropriation by grammar schools, as “a gift to one’s masters or peers. Verbal paintings invite an audience to shuttle between aesthetic admiration and interpretive labor, a state of suspended attention a schoolboy could surely turn to his social advantage.”85

LaMonica is closer to the mark than Walker or Fideler in acknowledging cascading sociohistorical changes across Europe leading to the Northern Renaissance. Walker’s promise of a “more just and democratic society” through cultural renewal straightforwardly ignores the fundamentally unequal conditions of cultural participation in the past. Isotta Nogarola, for example, a brilliant student of Renaissance Italy, was a woman, and so, contrary to the prevailing humanist propaganda “that studies are an end in themselves,” she

failed to ‘achieve’, in spite of having access to humanist studies, as did others who failed to notice the tight inter-connectedness between the status of the bonae artes as a training and the political establishment and its institutions (other women, and those of inappropriate rank). Ad omne genus hominum, ‘for every type of person’, has to be read out as ‘for every appropriately well-placed male individual’. ‘Opportunity’, that is, is a good deal more than having ability, and access to a desirable programmed of study. It is also being a good social and political fit for society’s assumptions about the purpose of ‘cultivation’ as a qualifying requirement of power.

If humanism has been of its nature tightly ‘civic’, then as a woman Isotta Nogarola would never have had the support of the community of distinguished humanist scholars and teachers in her pursuit of humanist studies. But equally, if humanism had really set as its highest goal the pursuit of learning for its own sake, she would not have disappeared so decisively from secular scholarly view in the mature years of her life—years in which she continued to excel at those studies. She could continue an excellent student of humanism in private, but she could not be publicly supported as ‘virtuous’ in doing so.

What we are stressing is that the independence of liberal arts education from establishment values is an illusion. The individual humanist is defined in terms of his relation to the power structure, and he is praised or blamed, promoted or ignored, to just the extent that he fulfils or fails to fulfil those terms. It is, that is, a condition of the prestige of humanism in the fifteenth century, as Lauro Martines stresses, that ‘the humanists, whether professionals or noblemen born, were ready to serve [the ruling] class. The most apolitical of them could be drawn into the public fray’. The fortunes of a gifted woman embarked on the humanist training show vividly how a programme with no explicit employment goals nevertheless presupposes those goals, and how the enterprise of pursuing secular humanist studies can be regarded as morally laudable (a ‘virtuous’ undertaking) only where achieving that goal is socially acceptable.86

Walker and Fideler both pay tribute to our own exclusive models of achievement. Walker, for example, is always careful to specify that he holds not only a doctorate but one from Harvard, and although Fideler ingratiates himself to Walker by parroting the latter’s credentialed claim to credibility he leaves unnamed the source of his own doctorate from a less prestigious university, often associating it by proxy with time he spent studying at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, and despite any pretense of modesty or calls for more egalitarian and inclusive education, both affirm the insubstantial but uncompromising exclusivity of university prestige that distinguishes those with the dignitas to publish on subjects like humanism from those without that dignity, the haves from the credentialess have-nots.

My suspicion is that the esoteric element in their writing serves a hidden purpose: any skepticism or disagreement that might arise towards or between the predictions of LaMonica, Fideler and Walker can be dismissed as an exoteric confusion. In practice, however, this enforces onto each of the predictions enough imprecision that skepticism or disagreement can be ignored, and it is difficult to see how they can be both predictive and imprecise at the same time (and predictive to a degree that all competing predictive models are put to shame).

In 1903, William James delivered a commencement speech at Harvard in which he distinguished between prestige “and something deeper and more rational” that departed from its “club sense”.87 According to James,

[t]he old notion that book learning can be a panacea for the vices of society lies pretty well shattered to-day. I say this in spite of certain utterances of the President of the University to the teachers last year. That sanguine-hearted man seemed then to think that if the schools would only do their duty better, social vice might cease. But vice will never cease. Every level of culture breeds its own peculiar brand of it as surely as one soil breeds sugar-cane, and another soil breeds cranberries. If we were asked that disagreeable question, “What are the bosom-vices of the level of culture which our land and day have reached?” we should be forced, I think, to give the still more disagreeable answer that they are swindling and adroitness, and the indulgence of swindling and adroitness, and cant, and sympathy with cant—natural fruits of that extraordinary idealization of “success” in the mere outward sense of “getting there,” and getting there on as big a scale as we can, which characterizes our present generation.88

James’s speech is laudatory, or else he might have also lingered on the more pessimistic implication that virtue is more difficult to sustain than vice, and continued with it to conclude that every institution eventually dies from vicious overabundance. Walker and Fideler do not represent the dying light of the university, but its coming death, which the university is now too weak to remedy. James recalls that “[t]he true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the soul of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons.”89 These sons will remain mostly solitary. It is their less solitary siblings who invoke truth on behalf of others that endanger the human spirit.

Revised 23 December 2025

I commented that Endeavour’s example of a traditional hero, Achilles, is not officially a representative of “the Greeks” insofar as The Iliad is concerned, and that the “liberal civic values” the author complains are causing the disappearance of heroic imagery have less to do with postwar distortions of the politics of “shared ancestry” than with changes occurring centuries ago to how heroic narratives were taught.3

These were offhand but, I believe, within the parameters of the argument, pressing criticisms, and anyone who takes time to look into the evidence Endeavour claims in support of the argument will discover more against it than for it. Although unsound, however, there remains something to take seriously about the argument, which is that Endeavour’s use of terms like “metanarrative” and interpretation of “undertones of Jewish angst” from comic books appropriates techniques originating with, and still mostly specific to, humanities departments to legitimize race hatred.4

A relevant complaint began Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay on “David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer.” Nietzsche discovered that German culture was in decline owing to a belief among its self-appointed cultural spokesmen that Germany’s military victory over France was the result of its superior culture. He responded that

[o]ur culture played no part even in our success in arms. Stern discipline, natural bravery and endurance, superior generalship, unity and obedience in the ranks, in short, elements that have nothing to do with culture, procured for us the victory over opponents in whom the most important of these elements were lacking[.]5

The problem, for Nietzsche, was that these spokesmen had appropriated the language and practices of German culture to carry out interests that had nothing to do with either the culture or the military.

Nietzsche defined culture as “above all, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people.”6 He was not writing in terms of division, but of unity, which is appropriate to culture because culture does not, of its own accord, divide between, or exclude, anyone. What culture does exclude is non-cultural elements, such as a military victory, which, to become culture, must first undergo transformation through cultural practices, the techniques specific to an art. Nietzsche finished his definition by explaining that

[m]uch knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it, and if needs be can get along very well with the opposite of culture, barbarism, which is a lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles.7

Barbarism results from a neglect of cultural practices, the attempt to directly identify non-cultural elements with culture without the appropriate use of technique.

Nietzsche’s definition of culture allowed him to expose the cultural spokesmen as uncultured cynics, and to measure the ill effect that they were having on culture. They were cynics because they preferred the transactional elements of humanity, elements that persist only as facts of our species. The subordination of culture to military victory

is in the highest degree destructive: not because it is a delusion—for there exist very salutary and productive errors—but because it is capable of turning our victory into a defeat: into the defeat, if not the extirpation, of the German spirit for the benefit of the ‘German Reich’.8

The First World War realized this defeat, satisfied Nietzsche’s prediction by forcing a German culture predicated on military victory into contradiction with the defeated German people, and readied these people for the promise of cultural renewal through a militarized Third Reich.

But cultural decline was already apparent to some much earlier than the First World War. By 1873, Nietzsche felt confident enough in his appraisal of it to publish his description of the displacement of German culture by the cultural spokesmen, which acknowledged

[t]he enormous incongruity between this complacent, indeed exultant belief and an in fact notorious cultural deficiency [which] seems to be apparent only to the select few. For all those whose views coincide with public opinion have covered their eyes and stopped their ears—the incongruity must not be admitted to exist. How is this possible? What force is so powerful as to dictate such a ‘must not’? What species of man must have come to dominate in Germany that such strong and simple feelings can be prohibited and expression of them obstructed? I shall call this power, this species of man, by its name—it is the cultural philistine.9

It is a further incongruity that many of Nietzsche’s outspoken disciples are among those who “covered their eyes and stopped their ears” to what was said and done, but Nietzsche’s legacy is no exception to the rule of cultural philistinism, and the cultural philistines’ celebration of him is further proof that barbarism is compatible with knowledge, even knowledge of barbarism.

Nietzsche was thinking about a similar incongruity when he reported on how

a circle of philistines was celebrating the memory of a true and genuine non-philistine, and one moreover who in the strictest sense of the word perished by the philistines: the memory of the glorious Hölderlin.10

The cultural philistines

[t]hus had a right on this occasion to speak of tragic souls which perish through contact with ‘reality’—the word reality here understood in this sense, already alluded to, of philistine rationality.11

By “philistine rationality”, Nietzsche had in mind the levelling cynicism of the cultural philistines who exchanged a free, flourishing culture for one that emptied the human being of everything that might elevate it above the life cycle of our species.

The title of the essay refers to the distorted reflection of Strauss that Nietzsche found, while reading Strauss, in himself as both a thinker and a writer. In the essay, Nietzsche is critical of Strauss for choosing to express himself in the confessional style, the proper use of which was understood by Nietzsche and he criticized Strauss for impropriety:

David Strauss makes a twofold confession regarding philistine culture: confession by word and confession by deed—the word of the confessor and the deed of the writer. His book entitled The Old Faith and the New is, with regard to its content and with regard to its quality as a book and the production of a writer, an uninterrupted confession; and that he should permit himself to make public confession as to his beliefs at all already constitutes a confession.—It may be that everyone over forty has the right to compile an autobiography, for even the humblest of us may have experienced and seen from closer quarters things which the thinker may find worth noticing. But to depose a confession of one’s beliefs must be considered incomparably more presumptuous, since it presupposes that the writer accords value, not merely to what he has experienced or discovered or seen during his life, but even to what he has believed.12

The confession offers the reader no direct point of reference, no shared factual basis for Strauss’s beliefs. Instead, Strauss depended on abstractions, language that generalized in too imprecise a manner to lay claim to any actual experience. Nietzsche diagnosed the meaninglessness in Strauss’s words as the detachment of language from experience, as Strauss unable to connect the two in a way communicable to the reader.

While attempting to wrestle with Nietzsche, Endeavour describes Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an argument against the “ease, comfort, and convenience” of sedentary and lonely lifestyles, food delivery and dating apps.13 Contrary to this description, however, the philistine rationality of the last man is foremost an assault on the spirit rather than on “physical health,” and Endeavour’s reduction of the problem to laziness—too lazy to exercise or go out with friends and see family, to cook for himself or to hit on women in person—is an example of, rather than a solution to, the dispirited, and all too healthy, industriousness characteristic of the last man.14 A slow, thoughtful explication of Thus Spoke Zarathustra might have clued Endeavour in as to the importance of Zarathustra’s choice to live in solitude (as did Nietzsche), and apart from the civic values that Endeavour proclaims in his post on Nietzsche and decries in his post on heroes.

What makes the situation with Endeavour all the more curious is that the language and practices of humanities departments were so easily appropriated to legitimize race hatred—curious, at least, until one attends closely to what is entailed by that language and those practices. For Endeavour, despite overstating the hypocrisy of modern heroic narratives, is nevertheless correct that there is, by and large, hypocrisy among our own cultural spokespeople.

Consider The Origins of Totalitarianism, wherein Hannah Arendt attempted to come to terms with the consequences of cultural decline predicted by Nietzsche. In the “Preface to Part One: Antisemitism”, Arendt reflected that

[t]he history of antisemitism, like the history of Jew-hatred, is part and parcel of the long and intricate story of Jewish-Gentile relations under the conditions of Jewish dispersion. Interest in this history was practically non-existent prior to the middle of the nineteenth century when it coincided with the rise of antisemitism and its furious reaction to emancipated and assimilated Jewry—obviously the worst possible constellation for establishing reliable historical records. Since then, it has been the common fallacy of the Jewish and non-Jewish historiography—though mostly for opposite reasons—to isolate the hostile elements in Christian and Jewish sources and to stress the series of catastrophes, expulsions, and massacres that have punctuated Jewish history just as armed and unarmed conflicts, war, famine, and pestilence have punctuated the history of Europe. Needless to add, it was Jewish historiography, with its strong polemical and apologetical bias, that undertook to trace the record for Jew-hatred in Christian history, while it was left to the antisemites to trace an intellectually not too dissimilar record from the ancient Jewish authorities.15

Arendt’s argument is that this historiographical fixation on Gentile hostility, with its eventual iteration as transhistorical hostility, was later appropriated by antisemitic propagandists:

what is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystalized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon: they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence.16

The mistaken claim that the history of Jewish-Gentile relations was determined by an insurmountable hostility became a pretext by which antisemites could further the claim of a genetic basis for Jew-hatred. Arendt was not criticizing Jewish apologists for that hatred, but she did criticize their rationale, and it was her critical attitude towards the naturalization of hatred that, I contend, should be brought to bear on humanities departments and their enthusiasm for “historicizing” hate.

Since the 1990s, David Bromwich has been an eminently ruthless but penetrating critic of similar trends within liberal culture, which he has referred to as “culturalism,” “liberal culturalism”, “cultural identity”, and “identity politics.”17 In 1995, he published an article in Dissent in which he attempted to “offer some notes and questions about a line of political apologetics that if pursued far would lead to the euthanasia of liberal society.” This line of political apologetics was culturalism, which he defined as

the thesis that there is a universal human need to belong to a culture—to belong, that is, to a self-conscious group with a known history, a group that by preserving and transmitting its customs, memories, and common practices confers the primary pigment of individual identity on the persons it comprehends.18

Liberal theorists, Bromwich argued, had trafficked the thesis of culturalism as a means of underselling the ironies of liberalism, ironies that these theorists believed overwhelmingly exposed the incongruity between the ideals and reality of liberal societies. Bromwich characterized the activity of these liberal theorists as a “shedding of irony […] a gesture that they hope will be taken seriously.”19 Implicit in this characterization is an accusation that to be taken seriously is to speak on behalf of others, to maintain the irony that comes with increasing others’ rights by cynically impressing on them the importance of uniformity within a group.

The best suited to maintain culture on these terms, and thereby vent the ironies of liberal society, were the cultural spokespeople of the university, and Bromwich extended many examples of culturalism to university practice in a book he published several years prior to the Dissent article. In Politics by Other Means, Bromwich described the aftermath of an invitation to respond to Henry Rosovsky, the dean of faculty at Harvard University, who

appeared to deny that criticism of education could be anything but a pose, unless it offered a point by point administrable solution to the need for adjudication among constituencies. Having described his reaction in this way, however, I am brought up short. For the author of The University: An Owner’s Manuel did not say, or imply, that he was opposed to criticism. Rather, he was opposed to intellectual criticism: the kind of analysis that appeals too severely from habits to principles, and does not take into account the diversity of interest a great institution has to represent. Nor did he say that one ought to refuse to listen to the critics. One ought to be tolerant and hear what they had to say, only take every word with a strong dose of irony. But, to judge by his reactions on this occasion, there is another kind of criticism Rosovsky is prepared to attend to more warmly. This is the directive a society offers to its educators simply by being a society—an apparent tautology which I will explain as well as I can.20

Bromwich’s explanation is quite long, but he begins it by describing how

the proposals that come from a society being what it is are not, exactly, arguments. They are instead a given and deducible outcome, a machine, as it were, operated by the brute fact of demographics.21

In slightly different terms than Bromwich’s own, he explains that Rosovsky imagined liberal societies as demographic machines, and universities were to act as blueprints of, and operators to, these machines. If liberal societies were to achieve optimal demographic efficiency, then this was to occur first in the universities, among parallel demographics to that of society. Bromwich was disturbed by Rosovsky’s vision of the university, and reflected that

[i]t is, in truth, more than a license for conformity, it is a four-year sentence to conformity. For there is not one of us who could not, if the will were there, be identified and exhaustively understood as the member of some group.22

Momentarily, I will turn to Urvashi Chakravarty’s Fictions of Consent, born from the legacy of culturalism. First, however, I want to turn to Bromwich’s warning with which he concluded his article in Dissent:

I began by saying that liberal culturalism is a lie, a gesture of shrugging off irony adopted late by persons who think habitually as ironists. I have to recur to the same note more somberly. The theorists of cultural identity are hatching dragons. The nest belongs to a kind of creature that they have never imagined, but there they sit and brood, with care and concern, thinking what comes will possibly look a good deal like themselves. The fire may scorch us in the years to come.23

A generation later, Chakravarty published Fictions of Consent, an examination of

the ways in which early modern English iterations of service and servitude laid the conceptual and rhetorical groundwork for such pervasive and lasting narrative and ideological strategies around slavery.24

As Arendt made the case that Jewish historiography provided a pretext for later antisemitic ideology, and I suggest that humanities departments are providing a pretext for the far right, Chakravarty goes on to argue that the discourses of service and servitude in early modern England established a pretext for slavery. But while Arendt (and I, hopefully) avoided implying that a pretext is a cause, Chakravarty repeatedly attempts to establish a casual relationship; and, moreover, where Arendt drew out the motives of the apologists, which were separate from those of the antisemites, Chakravarty moves to render indistinguishable the motives behind service and servitude from those behind slavery. The result is that slavery becomes virtually indistinguishable from service and servitude, and the real differences—the kind that one comes to know through experience—disappear behind a concern for slavery as pretext.

Chakravarty believes that

[s]lavery and bondage were of course not only commonplace in the early modern world; they constituted it. And early modern English audiences [of theatre] and readers would almost certainly have encountered discussions of slavery outside England’s borders. They may have read the daring tales of kidnap, bondage, and escape that characterized captivity narratives, or responded to the petitions for the redemption of captured English travelers and sailors taken prisoner in Algiers or Barbary; they had perhaps witnessed processions of redeemed captives and enjoyed representations of slaves (ancient and early modern) on the Renaissance stage, even as they remembered the notorious cases of schoolboys, such as Thomas Clifton, who were kidnapped and impressed into playing companies; most unsettlingly, they may have known of the sixteenth-century slaving voyages of Francis Drake and John Hawkins, among others, and perhaps would eventually subscribe to the joint stock companies which, later in the seventeenth century, invited “Native Subjects” to become “sharers” in order to finance the procurement of “Negroes” to “furnish his Majesties American Plantations.” But English readers and audiences did not only confront slavery in the form of returned English captives or migrant servants; they also performed, ventriloquized, and vivified both classical and contemporary slaves as memories, specters, alternates, and intimates in the slave plays that English schoolboys read and enacted as part of their grammar school education. These plays—principally comedies by Terence and Plautus—were as ubiquitous as they were significant for their depictions of wily slaves, faithful freedmen, and errant sons learning to become citizens of Rome. But they also staged the kinds of slaves, and the forms of bondage, that would come to inform not only the characters and plots of early modern plays, but the ways in which concepts of slavery and manumission were conceived, fictionalized, and disseminated.25

And from these conjectures and examples, Chakravarty contends

that the schoolroom, rather than the sea or the shore or the slave market, was the primary contact zone for slavery. Slavery was not a foreign phenomenon but intimately familiar, seeded in the spaces which were both quotidian and quintessentially English, for slavery, crucially, lay at the heart of the humanist curriculum.26

Through a mixture of moralistic may-haves and superficial erudition, in addition to a desire probably shared by most of her readers to locate the classroom at the centre of human history, Chakravarty has done her best to present slavery as the inevitable result of English culture.

For good measure, she adds race to the mix,

[a]s the coarticulation of service and servitude [which] was increasingly limned by the logics of family, race, and blood, [and] it anticipated the racial and rhetorical strategies of Atlantic slavery—and simultaneously secured its futures. 27

This sleight of hand from anticipation to future security—from possibility to necessity—is possible only through its absolving of any underlying agency. Chakravarty reflects that

[i]t is now a commonplace to remark that early modern England was a service society, that every man and woman understood his or hear position in a social and political economy that was organized by the strictures, possibilities, and discourses of service. Yet an equally powerful early modern rhetoric insisted that this widespread—and effectively compulsory—service be understood not as coerced but rather as willing, volitional, consensual; as, paradoxically, “free.”28

The contradiction in “free service” becomes for Chakravarty the principle evidence that consent to power is a fiction barely concealing an impulse to enslave. But why, one might ask, would the English not simply have coined “free slavery” and acted on that?

And more disturbingly, one cannot even begin to talk about justice where consent is absent. It is true that, for example, justice can metaphorically “take place” within the justice system, as judges deliver decisions based on law, but the essence of justice—that which allows the justice system to continue existing—is something that can only be meaningfully discussed when we take into account consent. If service, servitude, and slavery are void of consent, then they cannot be unjust, and this appears to take most of the wind out of Chakravarty’s historical narrative.

There is a scene in Thomas More’s Utopia, a book supposedly about the most just state, where More’s characterization of himself and his friend, Peter Giles, are offering employment advice to Raphael Hythloday, who recently disembarked at Antwerp after a five-year excursion to Utopia. They explain to Raphael that his knowledge would be of service at court. But Raphael rebuffs their advice, indignant that they would have him “enslave” himself “to any king”, to which Peter responds that he does not

‘mean that you should be in servitude to any king, only to his service.’

‘The difference is only a matter of one syllable’, said Raphael.29

As Utopia unfolds, it becomes apparent that Raphael’s intended response about the syllable is literal rather than joking. At one level, Utopia is, as the reader knows, a fiction, a bricolage of ancient literary texts from Raphael’s early education, and Raphael, who appears to struggle with distinguishing text from reality, equates ‘service’ with ‘servitude’ because, as Chakravarty recognizes, it is never clear on a textual basis where one ends and the other begins.

The effect of Raphael’s equation is important for understanding his classification of Utopian slaves, which, while less privileged than citizens, are less distinct than is implied by the word ‘slave.’ The third class are

hard-working penniless drudges from other nations who voluntarily choose slavery in Utopia […] Such people are treated with respect, almost as kindly as citizens, except that they are assigned a little extra work, on the score that their used to it.30

The idea that citizenship and slavery are nearly indistinguishable in an influential early modern English representation of ideal statehood may seem to support Chakravarty’s argument, but the catch is that Utopians are detached from the political consequences of everything important to being human—creativity, freedom, justice, etc.—and the state of Utopia more resembles an attempt at the most efficient organization of bodies than a representation of a political ideal. As well as being a writer, More was a politician, and, as his self-characterization recognizes on the final page, the details of Raphael’s account “were really absurd.”31

More left it to the reader to figure out the absurdities, but Fictions of Consent can be of no assistance because it refigures irony as paradox. Utopia depends for its irony on our capacity to distinguish text from reality, a capacity that Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, warned was of moral and political importance through his retelling of the myth of the Theban king Thamus responding to Theuth’s invention of writing:

You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.32

Socrates goes on to advise Phaedrus

[t]hat if Lysias or anybody else ever did or ever does write—privately or for the public, in the course of proposing some law—a political document which he believes to embody clear knowledge of lasting importance, then this writer deserves reproach, whether anyone says so or not. For to be unaware of the difference between a dream-image and the reality of what is just and unjust, good and bad, must truly be grounds for reproach even if the crowd praises it with one voice.33

One might suspect that, in line with Socrates’s warning, Chakravarty has provoked disapproval among scholars, but, in fact, the book has been widely praised, winning a number of prestigious awards and receiving positive reviews in prestigious journals. Evidently, the academic community, which, by all appearances, takes its deduced role as cultural administrator very seriously, understands this to be a serious scholarly book, a genuine contribution to the maintenance of our liberal society. Should it surprise anyone that Endeavour is able to appeal to readers in arguing that liberal culture is a front for race hatred?

Arendt rejected the historical narrative of “race-thinking,” a racially-prescribed constraint on thinking distinct from racism, as a dominant ideology among Europeans with “its roots deep in the eighteenth century […] emerg[ing] simultaneously in all Western countries during the nineteenth century.”34 She argued that

[u]ntil the fateful days of the ‘scramble for Africa,’ race-thinking had been one of the many free opinions which, within the general framework of liberalism, argued and fought each other to win the consent of public opinion. Only a few of them became full-fledged ideologies, that is, systems based upon a single opinion that proved strong enough to attract and persuade a majority of people and broad enough to lead them through the various experiences and situations of an average modern life. For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.35

Arendt singled out race-thinking and class-thinking as having become “obligatory patterns of thought,” that

free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either of these views.36

Contrary to Endeavour, Arendt described how

an old misconception of racism as a kind of exaggerated nationalism is still given currency. Valuable works of students, especially in France, who have proved that racism is not only a quite different phenomenon but tends to destroy the body politic of the nation, are generally overlooked. Witnessing the gigantic competition between race-thinking and class-thinking for dominion over the minds of modern men, some have been inclined to see in the one the expression of national and in the other the expression of international trends, to believe the one to be the mental preparation for national wars and the other to be the ideology for civil wars.37

Race-thinking was, for Arendt,

a source of convenient arguments for varying political conflicts, but it never possessed any kind of monopoly over the political life of the respective nations; it sharped and exploited existing conflicting interests or existing political problems, but it never created new conflicts or produced new categories of political thinking. […] It is highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth century, if the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the new era of imperialism had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences. Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world.

Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help to racism. The very existence of an opinion which could boast of a certain tradition served to hide the destructive forces of the new doctrine which, without this appearance of national respectability or the seeming sanction of tradition, might have disclosed its utter incompatibility with all Western political and moral standards of the past, even before it was allowed to destroy the comity of European nations.38

Bromwich’s solution to culturalism was to reengage with irony, but I would add that our reengagement should confine itself to our shared public life. As liberalism implies, there is nothing arbitrary about privacy, and to believe there is, and to locate hope for the future in public opinion, as do Chakravarty and Endeavour, is to pray before the altar of the status quo. Socrates encouraged others to seek dignity in themselves rather than from their city, and, when unjustly condemned, he found within himself a deeper justice, and was able to die on his own terms.

Updated 4 September 2025.

Mainstream American news has it that what is at stake is disregard for the law. As I write this, the Associated Press lists five top stories, all of them addressing the relationship between the U.S. President and the law. I have no doubt that I share with most readers of AP a total lack of formal legal training, but I do question that if Trump can simply ignore the legally defined limits to his power whether what is at stake is answerable from a legal perspective.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt describes how the law became a means for the Nazis to distract the conscience of the German people. Even someone like Adolf Eichmann, who beyond any reasonable doubt was a willing participant in the final solution, was perfectly honest in describing himself as a law-abiding citizen. The problem, for Arendt, was that Eichmann never questioned whether the law was morally sound.

Trump’s frequent appeals to the immorality of the American legal system suggests that his base possesses a conscience, and does not believe that their moral considerations have adequate legal representation. On the other hand, the outrage from Americans outside that base towards Trump’s legal transgressions suggests that there is at least some legal representation of moral considerations. But if the question is about inadequate representation, why does the news continue to express moral problems in legal terms?

The beginning of an answer is found in Plato’s Euthyphro, wherein while Socrates is on his way to court he runs into Euthyphro, a prophet, and they begin discussing the nature of piousness in relation to their respective court cases. The dialogue is remembered today for posing a dilemma, which asks whether something is pious because it is loved by the gods or the gods love it because it is pious, but the dialogue as a whole provokes much needed commentary on current political developments and is worth reading closely.

Piousness was serious business in ancient Athens. Occasionally, it was a matter of life and death. Such was it with Socrates, for whom blasphemy was one of two charges resulting in his death. Over the course of Socrates’s life, piousness became more serious as Athenian citizens attempted to come to terms with a series of traumatic experiences that accompanied the Peloponnesian War. Here is how Thucydides, Socrates’s contemporary, an Athenian general and historian, summarizes these experiences:

Never before had so many cities been captured and then devastated, whether by foreign armies or by the Hellenic powers themselves (some of these cities, after capture, were resettled with new inhabitants); never had there been so many exiles; never such loss of life—both in the actual warfare and in internal revolutions. Old stories of past prodigies, which had not found much confirmation in recent experience, now became credible. Wide areas, for instance, were affected by violent earthquakes; there were more frequent eclipses of the sun than had ever been recorded before; in various parts of the country there were extensive droughts followed by famine; and there was the plague which did more harm and destroyed more life than almost any other single factor. All these calamities fell together upon the Hellenes after the outbreak of the war.1

The description is of violent and inscrutable nature, both environmental and human, let loose on the world, and with it the overtaking of reason by superstition. Superstition as a response to inscrutable nature encourages religious posturing, and while Socrates was no atheist—he believed in and respected the gods—he knew that to take the gods seriously depended on our taking reason seriously.

Athenian citizens sought the wisdom of pious men to make sense of their experiences, and to learn how best to live with them. Unfortunately, they were also willing to pay considerably amounts of money for it. Naturally, this attracted professional wise men. Socrates, who was among those suffering the calamities of the Peloponnesian War, also sought wisdom, but recognized these wise men as purveyors of fraud. He also recognized that false wisdom was further degrading citizens’ ability to work through their experiences. As a means of correction, he developed the elenchus, a method by which our natural capacity for reason could be used to expose inconsistencies in speech.

Socrates’s innovation was a response to the spiritual crisis of Athens. In Euthyphro, we encounter Socrates on his way to court because Meletus, a “young and unknown” Athenian citizen, has decided to make a name for himself by indicting Socrates for falsely invoking the gods, the same indictment that will shortly contribute to Socrates’s death.2 He explains it to Euthyphro, as follows:

SOCRATES: Strange things, to hear him tell it, for he says that I am a maker of gods, and on the ground that I create new gods while not believing in the old gods, he has indicted me for their sake, as he puts it.

EUTHYPHRO: I understand, Socrates. This is because you say that the divine sign keeps coming to you. So he has written this indictment against you as one who makes innovations in religious matters, and he comes to court to slander you, knowing that such things are easily misrepresented to the crowd. The same is true in my case. Whenever I speak of divine matters in the assembly and foretell the future, they laugh me down as if I were crazy and yet I have foretold nothing that did not happen. Nevertheless, they envy all of us who do this. One need not worry about them, but meet them head-on.

SOCRATES: My dear Euthyphro, to be laughed at does not matter perhaps, for the Athenians do not mind anyone they think clever, as long as he does not teach his own wisdom, but if they think that he makes others to be like himself they get angry, whether through envy, as you say, or for some other reason.

EUTHYPHRO: I have certainly no desire to test their feelings towards me in this matter.

SOCRATES: Perhaps you seem to make yourself but rarely available, and not be willing to teach your own wisdom, but I’m afraid that my liking for people makes them think that I pour out to anybody anything I have to say, not only without charging a fee but even glad to reward anyone who is willing to listen. If then they were intending to laugh at me, as you say they laugh at you, there would be nothing unpleasant in their spending their time in court laughing and jesting, but if they are going to be serious, the outcome is not clear except to you prophets.3

What is remarkable about this passage is its description of the cynicism pervasive within Athenian society. Meletus is probably as much a victim of this cynicism as he is an enabler of it. He misrepresents Socrates as someone attempting to invoke the gods as a means of benefitting himself through proximity with them, but, confusedly, would also laugh at Socrates for not receiving fees and thus not standing to benefit directly from the invocation. Cynicism, however, is so much the norm that, as Socrates also points out, any wisdom originating from within the speaker already elicits suspicion on delivery, and this he will directly challenge through his teaching that wisdom begins and ends with oneself.

When Socrates runs into Euthyphro, the latter has been prosecuting his father for murder. As the dialogue unfolds, we discover that Euthyphro’s father had accidentally killed a servant, who had himself murdered a slave. Therefore, the series of events begins with a murder that leads to another murder, until, what is worst of all, a son is prosecuting his father. Coupled with Meletus’s cynical indictment of his elder, Socrates, Plato’s depiction of Athens is of a city in an advanced state of moral decay.

Euthyphro’s express purpose is to rid Athens of the “pollution” that will accompany the first two murders.4 He believes that getting rid of this pollution depends on piousness, on following the will of the gods, which he, as a prophet, possesses special knowledge of and, through the law, intends to coerce others, including his father, into conformity with that knowledge, thereby cleansing the city. Socrates asks him to explain piousness, pointing out that for his plan to work he will need to explain himself to a jury. Euthyphro responds that to be

pious is to do what I am doing now, to prosecute the wrongdoer, be it about murder or temple robbery or anything else, whether the wrongdoer is your father or our mother or anyone else; not to prosecute is impious. And observe, Socrates, that I can cite powerful evidence that the law is so. I have already said to others that such actions are right, not to favor the ungodly, whoever they are. These people themselves believe that Zeus is the best and most just of the gods, yet they agree that he bound his father because he unjustly swallowed his sons, and that he in turn castrated his father for similar reasons. But they are angry with me because I am prosecuting my father for his wrongdoing. They contradict themselves in what they say about the gods and about me.5

There is no reason to believe that Euthyphro is inaccurate in his description of others contradicting themselves, but the implication that this constitutes “powerful evidence”—in fact, the only evidence he provides—that he has knowledge of piousness is unfounded, and his definition appears to say nothing more than that what he does is pious. When Socrates calls him out on this, he offers a second definition:

what is dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious.6

And from this will Socrates introduce the famous Euthyphro’s dilemma. The problem is that it is not clear whether the gods love what is pious because it is pious or what is pious is pious because it is loved by the gods.

After some back and forth, it becomes obvious that Euthyphro cannot resolve the dilemma, and he turns his attention to the circularity of the argument:

I have no way of telling you what I have in mind, for whatever proposition we put forward goes around and refuses to stay put where we establish it.7

However, Socrates rejects the circularity as anything other than Euthyphro’s confusion. Euthyphro does not take this well, and accuses Socrates of forcing the argument into circularity:

I am not the one who makes them go round and not remain in the same place; it is you who are the Daedalus; for as far as I am concerned they would remain as they were.8

Socrates rejects the accusation on the grounds that the argument Euthyphro employs is informed by knowledge to which only Euthyphro has access. Socrates’s method merely exposes inconsistencies in the articulation of that knowledge, and he cannot fix these inconsistencies into Euthyphro’s mind. Were Socrates to attempt to speak on Euthyphro’s behalf, he would inevitably fall into contradictions of his own making.

Socrates’s point is that only Euthyphro can know why he is prosecuting his father. Any attempt by Euthyphro to equate his doing with the will of the gods only implicates his aversion to the reason behind the prosecution. In truth, there is no genuine dilemma because knowledge of piousness is only found within the one who questions it. Unfortunately, Euthyphro misses the point, becomes frustrated, and excuses himself from the discussion, resulting in an aporia.

Within an aporia resides the self, and no knowledge can be articulated without also including oneself as part of that articulation. Ironically, Euthyphro was probably closest to an accurate definition of piousness when he equated it with what he did, but because he wanted a law by which to generalize his definition of piousness to other Athenian citizens the law became for him an instrument of ignorance rather than knowledge. Reduced to inarticulate religious posturing through Socrates’s elenchus, Euthyphro was forced to choose between genuine philosophical inquiry that begins and ends with self-knowledge or continuing his self-deception.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt repeatedly notes Eichmann’s difficulty speaking, and his tendency to rely on clichés rather than generate sentences of his own. She attributed his poor handle on speech to his thoughtlessness, his refusal to connect language to anything but his career as a Nazi officer. To have deliberated his position beyond the choices made available to him by his superiors would have endangered his career.

What Arendt calls “the banality of evil” refers not the dispossession of Eichmann’s capacity for thinking through a career in the Nazi bureaucracy but the constraints on thinking that he imposed on himself to get on well with his employers.9 In response to one instance where Eichmann chose to act contrary to his orders with “considerable trouble” to himself by diverting a transport of twenty thousand Jews and five thousand Gypsies from certain death, she describes how

we are perhaps in a position to answer Judge Landau’s question—the question uppermost in the minds of nearly everyone who followed the trial—of whether the accused had a conscience: yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around.10

For Eichmann, “the other way around” was the lawful way, the way by which he avoided trouble that almost by necessity of Nazi law would have followed from the moral consideration of himself.

Like Euthyphro, the law became for Eichmann an instrument of ignorance, a means to self-deception. Like Athens, Germany had undergone successive traumatic experiences before Hitler took power, and in their attempt to come to terms with these experiences German citizens were inclined to substitute lawfulness for redemption. The legal jargon of American news suggests that we may be repeating the mistakes of the past.

I contend that there is a transformation of moral considerations into legal terms which belies our concealment of morality beneath a language of obedience. Euthyphro’s mistake was to think that Athens might find its redemption through the law, but attempting to redeem others through coercion gets things backwards. In an essay that Arendt wrote after she published Eichmann in Jerusalem to defend herself from the confusions of both her accusers and defenders, she concluded that we would be better off ridding ourselves of any notion of being morally coerced and instead ask why we were willing participants.11 This is the philosophically correct answer because it begins and ends with self-knowledge, and, it seems to me, the only meaningfully moral answer. If history is any indication, however, violent and inscrutable nature will not long be contained.