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Hey Spence, I particularly liked the following part of the article and think it would be a good point of discussion:
"Thus the State lays claim to govern all groupings within the society: it is the final arbiter of legitimate and illegitimate groupings, and from its point of view, the only ontological realities are the individual and the State.
Eventually the State lays claim to set up its own education system to ensure that children are not overly shaped by family, religion or any particular community; through its legal and police powers, it will occasionally force open "closed" communities as soon as one person claims some form of unjust assertion of authority or limits upon individual freedom; it even regulates what is regarded to be legitimate and illegitimate forms of religious worship. Likewise, marriage is a bond that must be subject to its definition.
A vast and intrusive centralized apparatus is established, not to oppress the population, but rather actively to ensure the liberation of individuals from any forms of constitutive groups or supra-individual identity. Thus any organizations or groups or communities that lay claim to more substantive allegiance will be subject to State sanctions and intervention, but this oppression will be done in the name of the liberation of the individual. Any allegiance to sub-national groups, associations or communities come to be redefined not as inheritances, but as memberships of choice with very low if any costs to exit.
Modern liberals are to be pro-choice in every respect; one can limit one's own autonomy, but only if one has chosen to do so and generally only if one can revise one's choice at a later date - which means, in reality, that one hasn't really limited one's autonomy at all. All choices are fungible, alterable and reversible. The vow "til death do us part" is subtly but universally amended - and understood - to mean "or until we choose otherwise."
IV
As Tocqueville anticipated, modern Statism would arise as a reaction against the atomization achieved by liberalism. Shorn of the deepest ties to family, place, community, region, religion and culture, and profoundly shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon our autonomy, we seek membership and belonging, and a form of extended self-definition, through the only legitimate form of organization available to liberal man: the State.
Robert Nisbet saw the modern rise of Fascism and Communism as the predictable consequence of the early-modern liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities: stripped of those memberships, modern liberal man became susceptible to the quest for belonging now to distant and abstract State entities. In turn, those political entities offered a new form of belonging by adopting the evocations and imagery of those memberships that they had displaced - above all, by offering a new form of quasi-religious membership, now in the Church of the State itself."
Any comments from others on how it applies to the American State? Spence? I can see how the modern "liberal State" could be very appealing to many. Any defenders?
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