How Often Did the Founders Think About Rome? | Dr. Khalil Habib

In this episode:

Khalil Habib joins Conservative Conversations in an episode that covers a wide range of great thinkers, including Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Polybius, Livy, Lucretius, Tocqueville, and Edmund Burke
why republics tend to become empires, and how the Founders used the history of the classical world when thinking about the Constitution
how Napoleon fits into the story and meaning of the French Revolution
Texts Mentioned:

Discourses on Livy by Niccolo Machiavelli
Considerations on the Causes of Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline by Montesquieu
The History of Rome by Livy
The Histories by Polybius
On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
The Federalist Papers
Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol” by Edmund Burke

0:00 Intro
2:32 Rome, Machiavelli, Polybius, and Lucretius
9:12 From republic to empire
12:37 Polybius
16:05 The Founders vs the French Revolution
20:04 Feudalism and the French Revolution
27:23 Napoleon
31:08 Russian Revolution vs French Revolution
36:44 Burke on America

How do you restore the effects of feudalism when you could never go back to them no one’s going to take a night in modern days seriously monarchy is at this point is just celebrity it’s it it nobody takes it seriously as a real institution um so what you have now is

Really either some kind of republicanism or democracy or tyranny join the best in the movement it’s conservative conversations with isi educating for Liberty since 1953 welcome back you’re listening to conservative conversation with Marlo slack and Tom suu we’re joined today by one of our favorite professors at isi Dr

Khil khabib who’s an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College where he teaches political philosophy and American political thought Dr khabib has co-edited two books the soul of statesmanship Shakespeare on nature virtue and political wisdom and cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization citizens without states he

Is also and I know this personally a really good guitar player so hi Dr Habib thanks for being on with us well thanks for having me let’s stop now since that intro is going to be all downhill after this so well before we begin the conversation

I’d like to thank you um listener for listening conserve conversations this podcast is a production of the interc Studies Institute and our mission is educating for Liberty so if you’d like to join us in fulfilling this Mission be sure to rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcasts and um

That’ll help us reach more listeners like yourself so before I ask my first question I actually just realized like this is probably the first podcast to be recorded where we have three people of M Middle Eastern descent Heritage so that’s a fun uh a fun realization I just

Had um but uh I wanted to um more interestingly ask about your upcoming book Dr khabib so it’s on Ancient Rome and political philosophy and um you know I know pus is a big part of that a significant part of that and he’s someone who doesn’t get enough um attention in classical political

Philosophy as you were telling us um before before we started this podcast so or before we started this episode recording so if you could tell us a little bit about the book um about pus and what makes them interesting to you as a thinker especially given the

Context uh that you were just explaining to us and perhaps you can frame the conversation surrounding that for for a listener who might not be familiar um the book started off like many of my projects pursuing one question and then as you get down into

The weeds you end up moving on to other questions and then more rabbit holes so the original question was how did montue and macelli understand the rise and fall of Rome’s greatness because any country especially like ours that reaches an age of Empire you have to start getting

Worried about some of the uh the causes that lead to decline and some of the dangers of Empire and so it was really motivated by trying to understand the current ERA in which the United States is functioning I mean as far as I’m concerned it has reached it’s no longer

A small Republic obviously and at this point it’s an Empire and could we learn anything from ancient Rome about the dangers The Perils and the promises of Empire so I started really just examining macelli’s discourses on Livy uh in which he examines the rise and

Fall of Rome and uh and then I wanted to study monu’s book on Rome and compare the two but it became very obvious that as I was doing that that you really needed to understand the ancient uh sources that they were drawing upon and sometimes in many ways actually

Distorting so I went to the most obvious and that was Livy and uh prompted by macelli’s discourses on the first 10 books of Livy but then when I got to Livy it was obvious that he had other sources that were influencing him as well so it just kept kept seeming like I

Was going back further and further back and then I finally arrived at pus so pus is really the beginning of this book and I wanted to examine um what contributions did he make to understanding Rome and then what did liby take from him and as I did that a

Picture emerged that I wasn’t quite expecting it was surprised me and that is that um the ancient sources that examined Rome like liia and pus always emphasized the religious component of Rome to the point where if you’re reading Livy you would almost confuse ancient Rome for a

Theocracy um now that’s not to say it’s modeled after Iran or something like that but religion was so Central that you couldn’t understand any battle any any progress or regress in Roman history and Military and political Affairs without recognizing the central role of religion so I was really struck by that

And pivus makes similar comments especially in book six where he’s famous for describing the cycle of regimes so what started off as a book just looking at melli and monu and their emphasis on Roman institutions suddenly this really sharp contrast began to emerge that mon that monus and melli aren’t as

Interested in the religious component they seem to make the institutions do far more heavy lifting and in monu’s case the science and technology and progress of Rome seems to come to the foreground and so suddenly A Tale of Two romes emerged that the ancient Roman Republic was really faded to conquer the

World as an Empire because of its religious the core you would never see that in mavelli or in montc so that was really surprising and so I felt I had to expand the book and so it became a book about basically two ancient thinkers on Rome and two modern think ERS but

There’s one other key feature along the way um I started teaching lucius’s on the nature of things and he was of course discovered or rediscovered uh sometime around the Renaissance and he had a massive influence on monu and melli one of the things I noticed there is that Lucius is also obviously

Interested in Rome but he’s an atheist that’s there’s nothing controversial about that and he’s a materialist there’s nothing controversial about that either what’s interesting about him is he he wants to move Roman politics away from religion and the fear of the Gods and to move it closer to Epicurean philosophy which is

A philosophy of atheism grounded in materialism and once you see him as a turning point in Roman intellectual thought you’ll suddenly see that melli and monu are actually building on lucrecias they’re attempting to found a political science on Epicurean grounds which is really novel because Epicurean and and lucious doesn’t have a iCal

Science to speak of he defines Liberty as a Tranquility of the spirit and he thinks that you can achieve this kind of tranquility and Liberty provided you’re free from religious persecu uh prejudices and that you have a certain kind of philosophic disposition and the way that I see melli and monus

Contributing to this is that you can’t achieve that kind of Tranquility or Liberty without political institutions that stabilize politics and so they build political institutions on Epicurean grounds and so the sorry to give you such a long-winded answer but what started off is just a simple little attempt to understand melli and monu

Spiraled into this long book and uh and that’s basically the main theme you know that um that you hit a point in Roman history where suddenly you know you can’t really go back to the gods as they were understood by the pagans of course and then you have philosophers who were

Interested uh and and and uh embraced in many ways atep the Korean uh foundations I mean monu talks about the nature of things throughout his work he references uh lucretius all over the place and so it’s an interesting interesting investigation so I’m basically done I just have to write the introduction and the

Conclusion that sounds very fascinating there are I mean some many I guess different ways we could take the conversation but I mean something I’m familiar with that you mentioned was the chapter six of pus the this idea of the cycle of regimes and I want to connect

It to what you said about how Rome was destined in a way to become an Empire because that’s not at least in that part um where he’s talking about the cycle of regimes he doesn’t mention I guess the regime in the relation to I guess a a

City state or like a I guess we in the modern Parliament we’d call it a nation state but between that and an Empire which has you know Colonial or imperialist Holdings but there you could there’s almost a cyclical progression throughout history that you could see Athens obviously Rome Britain the

Ottomans the Holy Roman Empire the hapsburgs arguably America today as an Empire um but I was I’m wondering if there’s anything in political philosophy or if pus has something to say on or what pbus has to say on the transformation from a republic to an Empire and to maybe tie

Things into the modern day this argument over what America is is America an Empire as well or where are we in that typology yeah no that’s a great question I mean pus never gets into Rome as an Empire he limits his study to 220 to 146

BC and that’s when Rome is essentially a republic and in that cycle of regime that you’re referring to it’s book six and it’s not simply a cycle of regimes which is what a lot of people take him to to to be doing one of the things that

I explore in my book is the religious role I mean he talks about Customs not just simply institutions and also they didn’t understand institutions in the same way that we do today where you say look there’s clearly the judicial branch or there’s the executive branch uh institution or Constitution literally

Means like I’m looking at Tom’s Constitution which you’re made up what are the parts and you know you can’t sever your arm from your body like you can a separation of power so to speak so part of the institutions that pus focuses on are the religious Customs

That encouraged and promoted um a love of virtue and a love of piety and uh what makes Livy interesting is Livy is the one who traces Rome to its Imperial uh stage and it is Livy who essentially says that Rome was faded they almost had a Divine mandate to

Conquer and to become an Empire and uh mackelli picks up on that and thinks that to your specific question is there a political theorist who thinks about you know whether or not Empire is inevitable from a republic it’s mackelli melli essentially argues that Empire is absolutely inevitable but not because of

Divine mandates as you can imagine he’s going to give you a secular or naturalistic or material explanation as to why that’s necessary and in the discourses on Livy uh what he does is he first examines um human nature and once he uces that it is acquisitive by Nature that there is no

Teologicas or in Aristotle Aristotle and pus recognize that human beings are acquisitive but their theological end is moral virtue and that is to to to moderate man’s Des desires and to subordinate them to reason and uh but with melli there is no teic Universe it’s just man’s infinite and insatiable

Desire to acquire well if that’s true then the only regime that would suit human nature would be an acquisition a regime that acquires there’s only one that can do that successfully and that is a republic there are dangers when a monarchy does it Mak belli points out oligarchies are have a trouble doing

That there was something about Rome that enabled it to acquire and to grow the other side of the inevitability of the growth of a republic to an Empire according to melli is National Security part of the problem is if you remain small you’re always going to be subject

To the whs of your neighbors or any belligerent enemy and so the other the other aspect of of Rome’s necessary growth and from Mel’s perspective any good Republic is bound to grow into an Empire is the inevitable necessity to expand the influence of your security as

Much as possible so that you can secure uh your territory that’s why people like monu are interested in questions about a confederated republic how do you maintain some degree of republicanism in a in a understanding of politics that requires extensive growth um and that’s and that’s where melli and monu um are

On the same page what about America in what sense uh I guess we were founded as a republic it sounds like pus I know monu is very important to the founders well as the Federalists say I mean the antifederalists thought that there was a possibility to maintain something like an ancient Republic and

One of the insights that the Federalists have and I think the correct is that ancient republics were so small that you couldn’t find an original colony small enough to even resemble an ancient Republic so that is over that train has left the station as far as the the

Federalists are concerned even in the first Federalist paper there’s a whole question of whether or not we’re going to become the most interesting Empire in the world um they were they took uh Roman names on uh the size and already of what they wanted to ratify in terms of territory was already significantly

Larger than anything resembling an ancient Republic and the Federalists tell us that they have discovered a new political science that they’re doing something entirely new that there’s a danger in fact of founding on an ancient Republic that and by ancient Republic they mean something like what the Anti-Federalist claim to be putting

Forward something small something that direct democracy something that was largely homogeneous um the problem is that they tell you especially in for for example Federalist 9 that anytime you look at ancient republics they’re always at War they’re perpetually moving from Civil War to tyranny you know you need a

Napoleon to come in and clamp down and and then this was just the problem of ancient republics they learned that from tiities they learned that from melli they learned that from their study of history so the only way you can actually uh have modern politics in an age where

You have Empire you’ve got the English you’ve got the Spanish you’ve got Maritime Powers abroad and in your backyard is to Simply adopt a policy where you are large enough you have a confederated republic that can influence its its own immediate sphere and space and protect itself from any kind of

Foreign or domestic trouble um to put into the context of the uh I guess the a regime change that our listeners are probably very familiar with um and one that our students recently became probably very familiar with by participating in a seminar isi actually LED with um professor khabib in

Um Austin on the American French Revolution so students got to read Burke and toille um and in the toille assignment you assigned uh the Anan regime and the French Revolution um and Tom was saying that and also my colleague Jane who was at the seminar um they were particularly struck by tok’s

Argument that the death of the ncn regime was almost inevitable um because the death of filis and the proliferation of trade radically transformed uh transformed the Moors of the states of pre-revolutionary France so they also mentioned that the students were also very struck by your assessment um and I

I would love to talk more about and perhaps get your sense of as especially as the right rethinks what it means to have a Humane economy um it it seems like their free trade although it has um you know improved vastly improved across across the world living standards um there’s also you

Know the right has stood for deregulation creating jobs and wealth and all these these different um historically the the position has shifted until today where there are more there’s more of a I would say a a Schism happening on the right but how would you make sense of these competing

Perspectives and priorities on economics um especially you know speaking contextually and drawing from from these readings which we’ll Link in the uh show notes for anyone who’s interested yeah know that’s a great question uh again I go back to the Federalist and actually Adam Smith there’s a misunderstanding

About what a free market is and what the American Founders consensus about economics versus politics was and um if you read The Federalist Papers you don’t even need to get out of the first 10 they’re uh very much uh suspicious of monu’s claim that free markets and commerce simply soften mores in the

Spirit of the laws montue talks about the uh the great effects of Commerce it loosens Moray which is to say it makes you a little bit more degenerate and soft but you’re not as warlike uh because you’re going to think more in terms of economic exchange and you’ll

Tolerate other people’s views and it also uh for the sake of commercial exchange and and and money interest but also um in that context of the spirit of the laws he thinks that it will also uh soften the warlike the spirited uh the spirited nature in human beings now the

Federalists completely reject that uh they actually say in one of the early Federalist papers that you know be careful of those who claim that Commerce somehow is going to soften moreas and lead to a reduction in war it’s just the opposite what happens is especially in

The modern era there are many wars that are fought for financial reasons for oil for resources for what what have you nothing has changed macelli would agree with them that that man doesn’t need much of a pretense to go to war um and the idea that Commerce can somehow serve

As some kind of Panacea for security is extremely dangerous so the American Founders were never uh simply free Traders like you often hear today where the only thing that’s real is the market and National and political interest is just sort of an epip phenomenon of the past that holds back material progress

Uh Adam Smith for example uh is all in favor of tariffs if tariffs necessitate a certain kind of if if National interest necessitates them then so be it and what he’s essentially saying is there are limits to just simply free economic trade and those limits are set

By the standard of national interest um it’s only recent especially in the rise of libertarianism and anarco capitalism that there’s an idea that the only thing that’s real is a market and everything else is a figment of one’s imagination and um I would say that melli monu I’m

Sorry not monu but certainly Adam Smith and the founders would reject that so you can have um economic interests you can have uh Prosperity uh but you have to do it with a statesman’s eye can’t just simply be indiscriminate trade I’ll give you an example if free trade is all

There is then why doesn’t Israel trade with Iran and and enrich Iran wh well the obvious answer is well by enriching an enemy who wants to destroy you you’re swing the seeds of your own destruction so obviously a free market isn’t how a Statesmen would simply judge policy many

Factors have to play play into it not the not the least of which is your own National interest and National Security um so yeah I don’t see a conflict you know between economic prosperity and national interests but uh but that is at odds with certainly a lot of uh modern

Libertarians who uh like I said think that free markets are essentially the answer to everything in free trade um the other question you had was about toille and the inevitability of what was the uh the the collapse of feudalism Marlo was that was that the

Question um yeah so it was toille um and the yeah I think it was the is that what I said yeah the death of fiilis and the yeah TR your question and if I if I captured it correctly let me know um in Beyonce and regime a book that toille

Wrote about the French Revolution he points out that the French Revolution was inevitable and one of the the reasons why it was inevitable was because France of All European countries had destroyed its feudalism before any other nation in Europe but it didn’t just simply do that it centralized

Authority in the hands of a monarch and so what you essentially had was a soft despotism sof because he wasn’t ruling with an iron fist he was essentially bribing the aristocracy who had always served as a buffer to centralization to essentially take titles without any political responsibility all political

Action would be governed by Versailles sort of central government the consequence of that is once the aristocrats according to toille abnegated all political responsibility their responsibility to their own surfs dwindled and they used to be a political experience and political participation actually on the part even of the Surfs

In Europe what happened once government centralized in France is that you had no longer an aristocracy or a lower class having any political experience and so for toille you were bound to have a revolution in abstract ideas because you no longer had a class anymore that had any political experience so they were

They were vulnerable to Fantastic abstract ideas of Viva you know Liberty and reason completely divorced from reality because they lost contact with uh political participation that’s why in Democracy in America uh he warns Americans uh about ever losing U interest in local participation in forming Civic associations that push

Back against any kind of centralized Authority we don’t have a feudalist system here we we started really sort of on a blank slate whereas with Europe they had centuries of feudalism that at least taught many people that there needs to be some kind of check on centralization of government and

Feudalism serve that sort of indirectly and by accident it wasn’t by design it was by Human Action but not design it just so happened that was the political organization that ensued after the fall of the Roman Empire um but toi’s biggest concern really is um how do you restore

The effects of feudalism when you could never go back to them no one’s going to take a knight in modern days seriously monarchy is at this point is just celebrity it’s it it nobody takes it seriously as a real institution um so what you have now is really either some

Kind of republicanism or democracy or tyranny as far as toi is concerned so how then do you restructure or reassert local participation when you no longer have feudalism you don’t longer have the three Estates you don’t have a distinct Church a distinct aristocracy and he believed that America held the promise

For that as as a he held up America to the French and pointed out that what made America so unique unlike the French Revolution is that it was founded by Christians Christians with an English past uh of Civic and local participation and he says these early American

Puritans did something that no one in France ever dreamed was possible and now was combining Christianity with liberty in the French Revolution the revolutionaries hated the church hated its hierarchy uh they wanted to destroy it as much as possible they didn’t like any kind of hierarchy they were driven

By this egalitarian Utopia that they you could have a world in which no one was politically uh better off than anyone else the danger with that is that for toille America showed that you need Christianity and you need the idea of political participation to have the kind

Of Freedom that is now the only one available in the modern world now why Christianity like why why introduce that two reasons he wanted to correct Europe’s disdain for Christianity because of the Enlightenment this idea that you could found on just sort of this cartisian ego or individualism and

That would be enough to just be able to govern your life and uh and he showed that that is absolutely impossible it will actually lead to tyranny because you would create a society of weak and dividuals uh who would who would be too weak without a

Class or an estate to support them to stand up to any kind of governmental overreach and you’re seeing a lot of that today now what toel saw in the Puritans and the Christians was because they were unfree in their morals in other words they could distinguish license from Liberty they already had

The habits therefore of self-governing they could govern their own desires that was a prerequisite as far as toi was concerned for the next step which is to govern your life so if you can’t govern your own appetites you’re not suited for Liberty and uh so and then and toille

Believed that Christianity more than any other religion was the best religion uh to equip human beings with the mores necessary for an era bift of any kind of feudalism and with a potential tyranny of government and the tyranny of the majority on the horizon and so he did

Everything he could to encourage faith in Catholicism uh he believed also that uh Catholicism as long as it may remain true to its magisterium and didn’t cave to the modern world will always attract those in the modern world who are sick of just materialism or individualism or

Need some kind of order they need some kind of hierarchy they need a an a a rich intellectual and religious tradition and so he thought that uh the future looked bright uh for for for Catholics uh he did did like the the role that Protestant religion played in

Educating the young females he felt that it gave them a little more degree of Freedom so that they had a sense of choosing their own husbands they weren’t cloistered like they were in France and under Catholicism so he saw the pros and cons of each religion and wanted to

Encourage them as much as possible I want to pick up on the thread and dive deeper into the French Revolution because over the weekend I saw the new Napoleon Movie um and I thought it did a great job of capturing the sort of chaos and uh almost like hilariousness of the French Revolution

Obviously many people died but like it was so chaotic it was almost funny and it was I think it was in a way mocking I don’t know whether that was intended or not if the whole thing was just meant to be a little bit of a funny movie but I

Was sort of one on a serious note something that jumped out at me was like after the terror they depose robes Pierre um and then they have this committee but um sort of Foreign Affairs takes a role so in the movie uh Napoleon leads the battle at tulone to take back

The uh this fort and then basically kick the British out and at the end of the battle which is successful and everyone should go watch this movie the battle scenes are incredible but um after this battle all of the soldiers are have their rifles up and they’re going long

Live the republic long live the republic and then 5 years later once Napoleon has a coup and then installs himself as the emperor everyone starts shouting long live the emperor and just I just sort of jumped out at me like how do you go from being a nation that’s saying like Viv

LEF France down with the Anan regime long live the republic and then five years later you’re shouting long live the emperor because like in America that would have never happened I mean maybe I guess it would have if Washington said I’m the king now people might might have

Gone along with it but sort of I guess how do you yeah how do you transition from I guess jealously guarding your Liberties of the people and of democracy against a king to now being champions for another king yeah I think what that shows you is that their

Instinct all along was for God they wanted something that was Transcendent it’s just that they were corrupted by the Enlightenment and they were corrupted by the lack of any political experience that centralization robbed from them now the reason why there had to be a Napoleon is for the same reason

The Federalist warned us about ancient republics the problem is uh once you have chaos or Anarchy which is what ensued uh during the U the French Revolution you’re going to need a strong hand to then reinforce order it’s the same thing you find in the Middle East

You go in and you’re thinking you’re going to have a regime change and you’re going to have Liberty just popping up everywhere and and once you give them the right to vote who do they elect religious people they don’t want a democracy uh or they end up being once

Again falling back into despotism Tok Field’s main point in that work is that if you don’t have centuries of political habits and religious habits uh to temper human desire you know and to encourage self-rule self-governance you’re always going to have a revolution that leads to to Anarchy that will then require a tyranny

To restore order and that’s what happened in the French Revolution I recently finished a book um I I think we plugged it on the podcast before because it took me a while to read um because it was like a thousand pages long and I have a child so um it

Was really informative of kind of there’s these Continental differences that like literally Continental differences between the um the Francophile Bolsheviks who certainly Drew from you know the Paris commune and the lessons of that failure but also the successful French revolutionaries um between their Revolution and the French

Revolution and um I mean the Russian Revolution was hugely impactful for the 20th century and also even you know the the the conservatives the the neoconservatives and a lot of the progenitors of what we would think of as conservatism today um for that that ferment a lot of them were um at least

You know influenced by trosky and a past life um but something that kept coming up in the book is this um mention by a lot of the I think Gorky was one of them so a lot of the like intelligencia the Russian intelligencia commenting on how

Asiatic um Russia was and um some of the the cultural elements of the war that or of the Revolution that were almost most scandalous to them these people who otherwise were very you know they wanted to see the French Revolution take place in Russia but when it played out it was

Um it was it was much more almost barbaric was the language a lot of these revolutionaries would use and it it’s something I’ve been meaning to look more into is kind of you know what was perhaps the difference was um was it religion was it the the fact that a lot

Of Russia was it’s a huge vast continent with a lot of peasantry um what would you say and you know maybe drawing from your knowledge about the the French revolutionaries and just everything from the geography to the cultural practices the religion of of France at that time

In the 18th century um what about the the Russian Revolution how have how should we you know especially as conservatives think of um this revolution that didn’t happen I guess too long ago comparatively speaking but also um what were the on the ground the setting um in the late 20 18th 19th

Century um early 20th century that made it so much more um I mean it ended in a year you know almost a century of Soviet communism so what went wrong I guess I’m not a fan of the French Revolution either but something clearly was much different about the Russian yeah no and

There were actually very a lot of similarities you know first of all that sounds like a great book if you can remember the name let me know I’d love to read it it’s called a people’s Tragedy by um Orlando FIS I think his last name is spelled he’s a British

Historian of Russian history okay no I’d love to take a look at it you know have you ever looked at tolto war in peace he actually anticipates I just ordered it yeah I think you’re gonna find a lot of your answers there believe it or not because one of the things that Tolstoy

Um is reflecting on and he’s an enlightened thinker and at the time you know before he become became a an Orthodox Christian at the time he was heavily influenced by rouso and he used to apparently carry a little pendant with a picture of so in it it was his

God now why is that relevant Russo was a counterrevolution uh sorry counter Enlightenment revolutionary and one of the things that Russo denied was one of the main premises of the Enlightenment and that is the the more you spread enlightenment the more you purifying morals and the more you’re actually

Going to bring about Freedom ril thought this was a naive picture of the Enlightenment and that it would actually lead to the opposite it would lead to things like the French Revolution this is I’m drawing on Ros for of course so one of the things that tolto brings

Up in War and Peace is and he’s fully aware he mentions many of the philosophes he mentions the European Enlightenment and he fears he fears that Russia like the French are going to go jump in all in on the French Revolution and not recognize that like Burke did

That each people has a cultural inheritance that forms its character some people are capable of that kind of Liberty and some are not it would be like prematurely letting your child out of the house and drive you know they have no experience on the road you don’t

You don’t want to hold them back you want to see them flourish but it has to be at the right time and for the right reason with under the right super guidance guidance and what have you and one of the things that tolto points out is that the Russians tried to experiment

With the enlightment by The Liberation of the Surfs the Surfs in Russia were different from what the french had if you read the the onen regime by toille when the aristocracy and feudalism in France exist Ed there was no such thing as a surf without political experience there were political duties and

Obligations on on the part and uh he digs into archives and shows that they were a very political class they weren’t just simply doormats for the aristocracy or something like that they had real political participation the Russians did not so they had no experience of politics so they began where the French

End up which is to say with no political experience whatsoever and as soon as you have that you have the the inexperience of Imagine The inexperience of flying a plane and now you’re in the cockpit that’s the difference between having political experience flight time flight

Hours and not having any at all and all you have is a book about how to fly a plane with no real contact hours that’s what happened with the French and with the Russians um and when you don’t have experience you don’t know how to check

Fanciful ideas and so when you when you have these Enlightenment ideas that now you know human beings can govern themselves autonomously well we all know individuals can do that but it depends on their age their circumstances and their experience and to too believed that the Russians were either only uh

Going to find that kind of Freedom under a monarch or some kind of Emperor or just under despotism where they will find uh just at least security and order but not Liberty so he’s very much like a burke very much like Russo very much like toille you know let the French have

Their French Revolution but the Russians should change and and correct on their own terms some of the abuses of politics and should not be embracing ideas that were incubated uh in another part of the world we’re starting to come to a close and we’ve hit on a lot of really

Important thinkers in the western Canon and sort of in the background has been Edmund Burke and so I know you PID a lot of attention to Burke you’ve taught for isi students uh you know burk’s Reflections on the Revolution and taken students through various passages and showed them what

His sort of thinking was uh I want to ask about Burke in America because a lot of isi students will know that Burke is critical of the abstract rationalism of the philosop um but as a sort of as a Statesman he ends up being a uh a

Defender or a defender or supporter of the American Revolution uh in spite of some Enlightenment influence in America um but I I guess a sort of a two-part question is if you could explain a little bit more why um Burke would find a cause to Champion in a new country

That claims for itself to be on the basis of the laws of nature and Nature’s god um if you dive in a little bit more on that but then I guess there’s a sense in which we’ve had America’s had a sort of French Revolution um it hasn’t been

As bloody or as violent but like a revolution in ideas from the founding is to where we are now um obviously a lot of people would say that like the country’s pretty unrecognizable both politically uh you know socioculturally um but so a why Burke would have championed America if it’s

Has similar uh themes to the French Revolution but then also what we need from Burke today like what Burke could tell us about solving our problems today yeah that’s a great question you know it seems so incoherent on the surface that why would he condemn the French

Revolution on the one hand and then support the American in fact KL Marx believed that the only reason he did that was he must have been paid off by American sympathizers and he actually thought that and many people I think just couldn’t quite understand where Burke was coming from I don’t believe

Any of that played a role if you look at a short uh Speech a letter or actually a letter a letter to the Sheriff’s of Bristol one in one of Burke’s writings um he points out in in that the reason why the American rep Revolution was justified was because England had become

A tyranny there was this view among the English that Parliament had such extreme and such total Authority that to to slight parliament in any way was like going before an Angry God Sinners before an Angry God and so what ended up happening was the the uh the the

Sympathy the uh the affection between the Americans and the English broke down and as a result England became a tyranny I mean Burke essentially accuses the English of tyrannical behavior and he feels that no people should tolerate a tyranny and so that the Americans were genuinely uh justified in Breaking with

Uh with England he didn’t think that uh the the French were Justified he he felt that as as as a monarchy there were still opportunities for the French to actually draw from their own tradition uh certain reforms and so he highlights in his Reflections on the French

Revolution um How England did that at one point you know that the Glorious Revolution was such a situation where there wasn’t a complete break with the past there was a mending of ways in the way that a weaver you know would find like a hole in your garment wouldn’t

Pull the whole thing apart wouldn’t startle over but would just simply menend from what is there the other thing the other reason why he supported the American Revolution is that he also believed that the Americans were very different from the French uh the Americans did have um they had political experience

He doesn’t really talk about their abstract ideas he doesn’t talk about you know the natural laws you point out and the laws of nature and the laws of go and the natur’s gods what he’s really looking there is trying to show sympathy with the with the Americans that when England overreaches when Parliament

Becomes the equivalent of an Angry God before Sinners whove slighted it then then the real issue isn’t so much condemning America as much as fixing what’s wrong with with England and England needs to curb that appetite of tyranny um and uh and that Burke’s real concern um so I hope that’s helpful now

As far as what we can learn from Burke um you know Burke is excellent for a number of reasons U that every thinker I mean regardless of where the positions are has something to contribute I think Burke’s greatest contribution is the recognition that affection among citizens is crucial it builds a

Political body that does uh that creates a certain kind of Harmony that isn’t just simply relying on law coercion to bring about order and and he speaks about the importance of traditions like chivalry which for us is just comical and stupid but for him that really created a moral imagination that created

A certain kind of uh sympathy and desire to uh to help uh to correct any desire to abuse power always help those who were in need and he felt that there was a certain kind of moral imagination contained in certain Traditions uh especially like I said in the in the in

The um in the the the tradition of chivalry that helped to reinforce affection and I think in our age where especially the left is so interested in creating conflicts over any conceivable difference it literally goes against what Burke believed was the source of finding some kind of Common Ground abum

Citizens you don’t want to demonize and which is what the left does today this is what was going on during the French Revolution uh they wanted to and England did it England when Parliament became this absolute God sort of to speak it would strip Americans of any kind of

Dignity it even hire Germans to go out and kill Americans if they could find them and so that demoralizing of a human being stripping them of any kind of dignity paved the way for justifying terrible tortures and Death on them and so Burke is excellent because he shows

You that when when any segment of your population starts to do that you’re actually laying the foundation for stripping people of their rights and their security and right to exist and we don’t have have that kind of rhetoric anymore we don’t have we just simply assume it’s Party politics and it’s just

People trying to get ratings and it’s just people trying to get attention you know it’s far worse than that toille really reminds you of the political necessity to restore some kind of Civility through building affection for one’s fellows and we’re living in a polarized age where we want to destroy

Any kind of affection because you’ve demonized uh half the country as irredeemable or deplorable and and and would warn against such things that that that lays the foundation for tyranny because if you really are living among evil people then tyranny is Justified in clamping down on them and Burke feared

That what happened to the English with respect to the Americans could potentially happen to England if it ended up taking on the manners of the French Revolution so I think he was excellent for our day for that to just draw attention on how important Civility and affection are for a good healthy political

Order well thank you so much Dr khabib that’s a perfect note to end things on I actually love the the prospect of doing like a lecture or something on chivalry the moral imagination um because I I think that’s a term that I would love to unpack because it’s it’s one that Kirk

Also really liked a lot and Drew from Burke um and uh We’ve held events on the topic before in the in the uh context of art so um I think the the political imagination as you mentioned is also something that needs um you know generationally honed um so so uh it’s

Been a pleasure to have you and um if listeners want to read more of your stuff perhaps pre-order your book um when it comes out follow you where can they find you um right now I’m not I’m not on social media but they could find me on the Hillsdale politics Department

Uh there’s a list of my a very short list of things that I’ve published uh the book isn’t ready to go out yet I’m still trying to wrap it up I’m hoping to make more progress over the spring and definitely by the end of the summer um

But I’m sure it will be listed on our faculty website and if and my email is there if anybody has any questions or followups I’m what I’m willing to uh to engage in any kind of uh back and forth as well so it’s an honor to be with you

Guys thanks for having me excellent thank you Dr khabib and also for any students listening Dr khabib will also be um lecturing and teaching at our honors conference our Premier student conference um which will take place um in August of 2024 so if you’re interested in applying go into ii. org

And you’ll find an application there uh those are due February 4th so hope to see yours and thank you for listening to conservative conversations with isi if you’ve enjoyed this podcast uh please be sure to head over to is.org resources to see all that we offer our members including the intergate review select

Modern Age articles debates seminars lectures and of course this podcast thanks again for listening don’t forget to wrate and review and we’ll see you next time on conservative conversations with iide