4. Familialism and the Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology
Edmund Burke, widely considered to be the father of modern conservatism, laid the foundations of the main principles of the Counter-Enlightenment’s social ontology in his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Herein he counters the Enlightenment’s rationalist notion of a society based upon abstractions by means of an emphasis on the epistemic value of tradition, which ties individuals not only to their community but also their ancestors and progeny (Burke 1790:107). Utilizing this historic and traditionalist principle was key to the Counter Enlightenment view of the nature and structure of society, one of the earliest representatives of this traditionalist Counter-Enlightenment school, the German philosopher-historian Johan Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) wrote the following concerning the character of the family as foundational to human society:
The most natural state is, therefore, one nation, an extended family, with
one national character. This it retains for ages and develops most naturally
if the leaders come from the people … Nothing, therefore, is more manifestly contrary to the purposes of political government than the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixing of various races and nationalities under one scepter (Herder,1820:298).6
The family then, for Herder, was foundational to the nation, with the nation in the ethnic sense, that is, as an extension of the family and clan, being the unit around which the state is to be built. That states, therefore, should be considered as organic historically-developed extensions of the family as basic unit, as opposed to an aggregate of individuals, was particularly evident in the social ontology of the influential French Counter-Enlightenment philosopher Louis de Bonald (1754-1840). His work entitled Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile démontrée par le raisonnement et par l’histoire is primarily concerned with the relations between God, man and society by way of response to the ideas of the Enlightenment as embodied by Montesquieu and of Rousseau (Sarah, 2018:69). In it he writes, with reference to the social order that “Man only exists through society, and society shapes him for herself” (De Bonald, 1796:103).7
Per De Bonald’s traditionalism, therefore, the individual never exists in the
abstract but only as a member of society. The nuclear family is the logical and historical precedent for the larger family, i.e., the nation as political society. As a matter of fact, in the opinion of de Bonald, “any system which does not base the constitution of political society on the domestic society … is false and unnatural. This is the standard by which to measure all constitutions” (De Bonald, 1817:413).8
Having set the family, therefore, as the basic unit of society, de Bonald
(1830:441) applied its very constitution to political society as well: he argued that just as the nuclear family is constituted by a father, mother, and infant, so the state is constituted by the state’s power as the cause, the ministers as the means and the citizens as subjects. In other words, just as the father embodies the will of the family, the king embodies the will of the nation as political family.
Across the Atlantic, the Counter-Revolutionary Southern Presbyterian pastor and moral philosopher Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898) advocated a similar ontological social paradigm:
The theistic scheme, then traces civil government and the civic obligation to
the will and act of God, our sovereign, moral ruler and proprietor, in that He from the first made social principles a constitutive part of our souls, and placed us under social relations that are as original and natural as our own persons. These relations were: first, the family, then of the clan, and, as men multiplied, of the commonwealth. It follows thence that social government in some form is as natural as man (Dabney, 1892:305).
He also intrinsically connects his familialist conception of the social order
with his opposition to the social contract theory proposed by Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, which per Dabney, stands in direct opposition to it (Ibid., p. 308-309):
The claim of a social contract is [a] theory [that] is atheistic and unchristian. Such were Hobbes and the Jacobins. It is true that Locke tried to hold it in a Christian sense, but it is none the less obstinately atheistic in that it wholly discards God, man’s relation to Him, his right to determine our condition and moral existence, and the great fact of moral philosophy, that God has formed and ordained us to live under civil government … [In terms of the social contract] civil society is herself a grand robber of my natural rights, which I only tolerate to save myself from other more numerous robbers. How then can any of the rules of government be an expression of essential morality? … Commonwealths have not historically begun in such an optional compact of lordly savages. Such absolute savages, could we find any considerable number of them, would not usually possess the good sense and the self-control which would be sufficient for any permanent good. The only real historical instances of such compacts have been the agreements of outlaws forming companies of banditti, or crews of pirate ships. Those combinations realize precisely the ideals pictured by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Did ever one of them result in the creation of a permanent and well-ordered commonwealth? The well-known answer to this question hopelessly refutes the scheme. Commonwealths have usually arisen, in fact, from the expansion of clans, which were at first but larger families.
Evident from both the likes of Dabney and De Bonald is their proposition that the family as foundational to society falsifies any individualistic notions of liberty which fundamentally underlies the social contract theory. With both these theorists society is fundamentally the organic and historical outgrowth of primarily the nuclear and secondarily the extended family as basic unit of the divinely ordained human social order. Dabney’s comment that the implications of the social contract theory is functionally atheistic in that it denies the reality of human relationship to God as sovereign Creator, is particularly telling in terms of how central the opposition to the Enlightenment’s social ontology in particular was in the thought of the leading representatives of the Counter-Enlightenment.
This also holds true for the most well-known Dutch representative of the
Counter-Enlightenment, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876). He
wrote concerning the Enlightenment’s political theory that “[t]he proponents of this sociable order ordained by the state, of this society not of clans and families, but companies and pelotons are, in terms of the implementation of their system, content with the peace and liberty of the government—with the liberty and omnipotence of those who take care for the discipline of society and are the heads of the herd who provide us with this new grazing. They have sadly convinced so many of the greatness and superiority of their ideas” (Groen van Prinsterer, 1847:67).9
For Groen van Prinsterer, the individualizing implications of the social
contract inevitably leads to government tyranny since a society made up of
individuals, isolated from their natural and familial blood relations, is an ideal subject for government despotism. In this way, Groen argued, the social ontology of the Enlightenment inevitably led to isolation from those natural familial relationships in which humans were designed to flourish as well as a consequent loss of true liberty (Groen van Prinsterer, 1867:1). In other words, by virtue of its attempt to liberate the individual from the natural bonds established by blood and birth, it takes away the divinely-ordained creational structure in which humanity was designed to prosper and thrive, thereby enslaving it to the only authoritative social structure that remains, the state.
6 “Die Natur erzieht Familien; der natürlichste Staat ist also auch ein Volk, mit einem Nationalcharakter. Jahrtausende lang erhält sich dieser in ihm und kann, wenn seinem mitgebor: nen Fürsten daran liegt, am Natürlichsten ausgebildet werden … Nichts scheint also dem Zweck der Regierungen so offenbar entgegen als die unnatürliche Vergrößerung
der Staaten , die wilde Vermischung der Menschengattungen und Nationen unter Einem Scepter.”
7 “L’homme n’existe que pour la societe et la societe ne le forme que pour elle.”
8 “Tout systeme de constitution pour la societe politique, qu’on ne peut pas appliquer a la societe domestique … est faux et contre nature. C’est la pierre de touche des constitutions.”
9 “De voorstanders van dit gezellig verkeer, van staatswege verordend, van deze samenleving, niet in huisgezinnen, niet in familiën meer, maar in compagniën en pelotons zijn, bij de ten uitvoer leggen van hun stelsel, te vrede met de vrijheid van den Staat, van het bewind, met de vrijheid of het alvermogen dergenen die zorg dragen voor de discipline, die aan het hoofd der kudde staan, die met deze nieuwe soort van vetweiderij belast zijn.
Velen hebben zij van de uitnemendheid hunner ontwerpen overreed.”
