Owen Barfield on Imagination

“Our sophistication, like Odin’s, has cost us an eye; and now it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors, which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from perception.  Thus, the ‘before-unapprehended’ relationship of which Shelley spoke, are in a sense ‘forgotten’ relationships.  For though they were never yet apprehended, they were at one time seen.  And imagination can see them again.” (Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (1928): 72-73)

Wonderful Drawing of T.S. Eliot, 1955

From Time and Tide, April 23, 1955, pg. 523

The Fascist TSA

Today's news that the TSA illegally and unconstitutionally detained a U.S. Senator is disturbing beyond imagination.  We are, clearly, following the path of ancient (and modern) Rome.

My Defense--for what it's worth--of Friedrich Hayek

Over at TIC.

by Brad Birzer

When Friedrich Hayek announced his personal political philosophy as an “unrepentant Old Whig” in his magnum opus Constitution of Liberty, he was reaching deep into the well of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, even if he had originally spoken these words against his friend, Russell Kirk, in their famous Mont Pelerin debate of 1957.[1] 

While the Old Whigs founded themselves rather spontaneously as a coherent movement during the 1680s in England, they drew their inheritance and patrimony from the great republican and Stoic thinkers of the Occident. As with other liberally-educated persons of his generation, Hayek frequently referenced the great thinkers of the ancient world, especially Aristotle and Cicero, in his own works, and, of course, he also cited a number of other thinkers who helped develop the Whig and republican movements during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke. And, finally, he discussed intellectuals following the events of 1688, including Commonwealth men such John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. Hayek rightfully viewed himself in a line of succession with these profound social critics and philosophers.[2]

Though Hayek openly rejected the label “conservative,” he did, for example, find and identify with many of the same heroes of the past as did self-professed conservatives such as Kirk and R.A. Nisbet. Indeed, with the very important exceptions of Locke, Mill, and Acton, the primary influences on all three men were nearly identical. That Hayek came from Central Europe and Kirk and Nisbet from America probably helps explain, in many ways, the desire on Hayek’s part to avoid the label “conservatism.” Its American (and English) manifestation was quite different from the continental variety. Hayek, of course, knew its twentieth-century English and American types, but he had seen much in Europe that almost certainly shaped his distaste for the term, “conservative.”

Regardless, I think it’s critically important for those of us who identify with imaginative conservatism to give Hayek his due as a thinker and a man. While Hayek has much to tell us about many things (he was, after all, accomplished in philosophy, economics, law, and psychology), I’ll offer just two of his most important ideas: the necessity of voluntary community and the fatal conceit.

Economies and Communities 

Importantly, Hayek argued that while “each man knows his interests best,” one’s gifts should be used in community, where reason is “tested and corrected by others.”[3] Daniel Rush Finn has done an excellent job of contrasting Hayek’s and John Paul II’s economics in his 1999 article, “The Economic Personalism of John Paul II: Neither Right nor Left,” so I won’t try to rehash that or make the attempt to claim that Hayek’s understanding is fully commensurate with Catholic social teaching.[4] Though nominally Roman Catholic, Hayek's understanding of the individual is clearly not the same as the Catholic understanding of the human person, but it's worth mentioning here that John Paul II held Hayek in great respect.  John Paul consulted Hayek on some issues in 1980; but that’s another story.

Hayek’s views on community and the role of the individual within community, however, are very western, if not completely Catholic. This is a very long passage from Hayek, but I think it’s worth quoting all of it, especially as Hayek did such an excellent job of distinguishing true individualism from false:

This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, which all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working in human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may be recognizable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational. I need not say much on the first point. That true individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group, that it believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations, and that indeed its case rests largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration need not be stressed further. There can be no greater contrast to this than the false individualism which wants to dissolve all these smaller groups into atoms which have no cohesion other than the coercive rules imposed by the state, and which tries to make all social ties prescriptive, instead of using the state mainly as a protection of the individual against the arrogation of coercive powers by the small groups. Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society as these smaller groupings of men are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of the rules of social intercourse; and the readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process which nobody may understand is also an indispensible condition if it is to be possible to dispense with compulsion. That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background, is of course, a commonplace. But the reverse of this, while less familiar, is probably not less true: that coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and traditions have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.[5]

Hayek’s view, after all, agrees with Aristotle’s (and St. Paul’s and Marcus Aurelius’) belief that “man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis.” That is, man must employ his particular gifts within community to make and render them meaningful.[6] Hayek was anti-utopian regarding this, however. Man is a “very irrational and fallible being,” Hayek wrote, “whose individual errors are correct only in the course of the social process, and which aims at making the best of a very imperfect material.”[7] The market process, and, consequently, the social process helps attenuate the problems of man’s inherent flaws, but it does not erase them or make somehow good. The system of private property rewards virtue and punishes vice, at least to a great extent, as well as allows entrepreneurs to try and fail and try again. As an additional advantage, private property also brings a considerable amount of harmony to a community. In this, Hayek sounds as much like Adam Smith as he does Burke.  As the great Anglo-Irish statesman had argued, commerce reconciled “conflicting interests without giving one group power to make their views and interests always prevail over those of others.”[8] But, it was more to Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith that Hayek turned, arguing that commerce and virtue were not incompatible. Certainly, Mandeville and Smith each recognized that man is fallible. One can neither reshape nor redesign the human person. 

Buckley on the cover of Time, 1967

Buckley on Kirk's PROGRAM FOR CONSERVATIVES

Mr. Russell Kirk wrote, several years before the first edition of this book appeared, a superb collection of essays called A Program for Conservatives, which continues in my judgment to be normative in the literature of imperative conservatism.


But it is not a book the Platform Committee of the Republican Party is likely to consult when the time comes to describe its program in election year.  And if it were, Mr. Kirk's book would probably not qualify as a true program for conservatives, the word 'program' having been used by Mr. Kirk as a conscious act of disdain for the social engineers who tend to believe that our problems dissipate as they are reduced to politically actionable programs, the kind of thing one wins or loses elections by proposing.


--William F. Buckley, "New Preface," in Up From Liberalism (1959; New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968), xxi.

My favorite Tweeters!

On Twitter, I follow, with great appreciation and profit (and deep thought and, at times, equally deep laughter): @louiseallain (Louise is my “best twitter friend”); @winstonelliott3; @jroii; @thejulieview; @csmorrissey; @carloberg; @joshuamercer; @stevemartintogo; @tpcarney; @bodyofbreen; @mcelhearn; @jsnell; @cagrimmett; @thekingdude; @ubookman; @mattswain; @david_m_wagner; @mattstevensloop