There are perhaps no more cited words of poetry, at least poetry of a genuinely high order, than the opening stanza of W. B. Yeats’s haunting 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” There the Irish poet evokes a true apocalypse where “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .” The “centre” that Yeats refers to is less the political center between two partisan extremes than the center that is civilization itself. In modern times, writes Yeats, “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”: mercy and decency are under assault as never before as “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

With vivid, even unforgettable words and imagery, Yeats captures the spiritually destructive cumulative effect of a murderous and suicidal European war, the nihilism that both informed it and resulted from it, the trahison of those trusted to be guardians of European culture and civilization, and the emergence of bloody civil war in Ireland and of the specter of a cruel and unprecedented totalitarianism in Soviet Russia. “Passionate intensity,” one might think, can be a force for decency and civilization when it is tied to civilized restraint, but “lack of conviction” is hardly a virtue in any historical circumstance. How then to reconnect restraint and decency with energy and conviction and thus to the “centre” in Yeats’s rich and capacious sense of the word? How are we to overcome the debilitating separation of passion and civilized restraint, a divide that risks making the “best” among us both feckless and ineffective?

Two old friends of mine, the distinguished analytic political philosopher John Kekes (now approaching age ninety) and the political theorist and renowned scholar of French liberal political thought Aurelian Craiutu, have attempted to bridge this gap in two impressive recent books that ought to command our respect. I do not always agree with their arguments and emphases, or the ways that they define “moderate conservatism” and “moderation,” respectively. But erudition, decency, and, yes, moderation shine forth on every page of their books, and both authors do much to illumine thinkers and themes that point to the recovery of what I would call a tough-minded moderation. Together, these books shed much-needed light on the ongoing task of formulating a vigorous public philosophy for a free and decent society, one that is neither pusillanimous nor fanatical, neither excessively hard nor excessively soft.

Having lived under totalitarian regimes in East-Central Europe (Kekes fled Hungary after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution in the fall of 1956, and Craiutu grew up in Ceaușescu’s Romania, one of the most draconian and surreal of the regimes behind the Iron Curtain), each author has experiences that inform his thought, experiences that most people today do not share. Neither Kekes nor Craiutu makes the mistake of opposing totalitarian fanaticism with the kind of easygoing moral relativism that makes it impossible to support balanced moral and political analysis over illusory and socially destructive utopian schemes. Both speak freely and confidently about the classical virtues—courage, temperance, prudence, and justice—that enable civic comity and allow decent human beings to live lives of dignity and self-respect. Both speak to the necessity of respecting moral and political pluralism (on the plane of both facts and values) without in any way denying the myriad goods of life—relative goods, perhaps, but goods nonetheless. We are far away from Isaiah Berlin’s thin “value pluralism,” which is more relativistic (and feeble) than Berlin knew or appreciated. 

John Kekes’s lucid and for the most part compelling book begins with a self-correction. As the author of several books making the case for conservatism and taking on academic egalitarianism on the left, he now wishes to emphasize what his “moderate conservatism” has in common with a “moderate liberalism” that also wants to preserve the American political system against extremists on the left and right. In making this change, he has clearly been unnerved by certain forms of populist activism and by soi-disant conservatives who refuse to acknowledge what remains valuable in liberal theory and practice. At the same time, however, he remains deeply skeptical of theorists and activists on the left and right who appeal (in Adam Smith’s phrase) to “ideal plan[s] of government” that treat “the different members of a great society” as “different pieces upon a chess-board” to be moved about at will. With Smith, Kekes opposes as “the highest degree of arrogance” the pretension of ideologues and abstract theorists that their “own judgment” is “the supreme standard of right and wrong.” Tocqueville aptly called this destructive propensity “literary politics,” as if these irresponsible theorists believed they were free to write a political play that ignores historical experience and the limits that define the human condition. This preference for abstract theorizing over practical reason and historical experience is shared by reactionary thinkers and those who hold up models of a “postliberal” utopia, along with the far more numerous class of “progressive” ideologists.

In a striking passage, Kekes takes pointed, and well-deserved, aim at those “motivated by an immoderate moralistic fervor and indignation at the history of the wrongs that have been done to those they suppose themselves to be defending.” These purveyors of egalitarian dogmatism and “crusaders” for liberation and emancipation are angry, “immoderate and intolerant,” and thus “blind to the complexities of moral and political evaluations.” They weaponize the law “against their opponents” while ignoring or being “unaware of external threats and of the domestic necessity of maintaining order, peace, and security.” They are feverishly committed to untenable “overriding ideals” and are contemptuous of the moral achievement that is a constitutional order rooted in liberty and law, which has the great merit of having “met the test of time.”

In contrast to this attitude of unrelieved repudiation and negation, moderate conservatives display gratitude for what has been passed down from previous generations and support gradual and cautious—moderate—reform when it is called for. They studiously avoid indignation and prefer “civility” to “contempt” in dealing with fellow citizens. They want “to heal the nation’s wounds,” in the noble words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and not to irresponsibly exacerbate them. They prefer thoughtful citizenship to reckless activism. This is a noble and emphatically non-utopian “ideal” precisely because it is much more than simply an abstract ideal.

In a manner befitting what some have called “conservative liberalism” and what he calls “moderate conservatism,” Kekes defends the full range of common decencies that “make possible political moderation” and “peaceful coexistence with others in our society.” Acknowledging different political, theological, and philosophical standards for evaluating and ranking these goods, he nonetheless stays close to common sense by affirming that these common decencies provide a reasonable basis for human beings to live together in a regime of law and liberty. When Kekes takes aim at abstract and unilateral claims to “liberty” or “equality” or “social justice” being always and everywhere the “overriding political Good,” he is affirming the complexity of the political good and not denying it as such (or so I interpret him). A responsible statesman, and a political philosopher who takes the statesman’s responsibilities seriously, cannot ignore the legitimate conflicting claims that must be given their due in any society in order to avoid despotism and govern effectively. Rights cannot be absolute because the rights of criminals and lawbreakers must be curtailed and because rights exercised without concern for other primary political goods inevitably weaken and divide the social order. 

A responsible statesman, and a political philosopher who takes the statesman’s responsibilities seriously, cannot ignore the legitimate conflicting claims that must be given their due in any society in order to avoid despotism and govern effectively.

All social and political goods must be judged before the tribunal of prudence or practical reason. Here Kekes is at his conservative best. What Montesquieu called “extreme equality,” and Tocqueville diagnosed as a tyrannical leveling, an all-consuming “passion for equality,” cuts off the salutary dialectic between equality, excellence, and just desert (the examples from Montesquieu and Tocqueville are my own). In the manner of a long and noble tradition of moral and political philosophy, ancient and modern, Kekes defends “justice as desert,” the moral and civic imperative to “give every man according to the fruit of his doings,” in the words of Jeremiah 17:10. This is an imperative echoed in largely complementary ways by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Justinian, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill (in one of his phases). The task of practical reason is not to remain blindly faithful to a “theory of justice” that is “context-independent, universal, and unconditional” but to respect those traditional, legal, and reasonable pathways that allow decent and law-abiding citizens and social actors to “get the good things they deserve” while avoiding and gradually overcoming rank injustices. Such practical reason respects the rule of law, which is never merely “procedural” or “general” (as some estimable thinkers such as Hayek and Oakeshott have wrongly insisted) but an element of the political good without a capital P and a capital G.

Moderate conservatives, as Kekes understands them, respect sound tradition, learn from historical experience, and “respond with flexibility and understanding to the changing contexts and conditions of our lives.” Rather than approaching “the unavoidable conflicts between primary goods that we have learned to value” as a reason for despair (or arbitrary choice), Kekes sensibly appeals to Aristotelian practical reason as refracted by Edmund Burke in his great paean to the politics of prudence in the Reflections on the Revolution in France. The intricate nature of man and society must be respected, even honored. “The rights of men,” Burke wrote, “are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises between good and evil; and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a commuting principle; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally, and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.” 

In this beautiful panegyric to the moral and political faculty of the soul that is political reason, Burke articulates with rare eloquence a central feature of what Kekes calls “moderate conservatism.” Burke, however, is by no means opposed to metaphysics per se, and he affirms with the utmost conviction that the human being is a “religious animal” who must stand in awe before the judgment of Providence. The Jacobinism Burke loathed was an “armed doctrine” that was inseparable from a tyrannical “atheism by establishment,” as he put it.  

Kekes shares Burke’s loathing of ideological fanaticism and millenarian atheism even if his kind of conservatism is strikingly, but not aggressively, secular in character. Moderate conservatism, as Kekes conceives it, does not depend on “theoretical speculations about the nature of the cosmos.” Kekes thus defends “an intermediate realistic response between cosmic illusion and disillusion.” Theists and defenders of a natural moral law that points to a transcendent realm outside and above the human will have much to admire in Kekes’s sober rehabilitation of practical reason. But with Burke and Tocqueville, I fear that such moderation cannot long survive the generalization or widespread adoption of an attitude of moral nihilism and cosmic “disillusion.” “The spirit of religion,” as Tocqueville memorably called it, however weakened in the late modern world, remains an indispensable support for “the spirit of liberty,” rightly understood. A strictly secular moderate conservatism is in my judgment extremely difficult to sustain. Religiously grounded hope (not to be confused with either superstition or secular utopianism) provides a powerful antidote to lawlessness, nihilism, and despair. 

Aurelian Craiutu’s book Why Not Moderation? gives a rather less conservative coloring to the defense of moderation. His book provides a practical application to the themes he had limned so well in his more scholarly 2016 book Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. In both works, Craiutu defends a fighting faith he calls “radical moderation,” a faith he ably defends against any proclivity towards tepidness, cowardice, and pusillanimity. Craiutu is no friend of the woke left or its indulgence towards new forms of totalitarianism. But he clearly worries more about Donald Trump, whose boasts and exaggerations he identifies, hyperbolically in my view, with demagoguery and a threat to democratic norms.

The great strength of this book is the way it highlights moderation as a central and recurring theme of the tradition of political philosophy “from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to Montaigne, Montesquieu, Burke, and Tocqueville.” Craiutu ably defends the intrinsic connection between moderation and the mores of a free and open society that values civility and compromise. Like Kekes (although with less vigor perhaps), Craiutu acknowledges the dependence of political moderation on certain qualities of the soul like prudence, courage, and justice, and the moral virtue of what Kekes identifies as sophrosyne, which classic authors identified with “moderation or restraint.”

Craiutu is not wrong to criticize those members of the New Right who fail to acknowledge the virtues of the liberal order at its best. The list of these benefits is long: the rule of law; a market order (accompanied by an appreciation that the best things in life lie beyond “supply and demand”) and its result, the “Great Enrichment,” as the economist Deirdre McCloskey has described the unleashing of productive energies that lifted the poor out of age-old misery and destitution; precious civil, political, and religious liberties; and much more. But Craiutu may not fully appreciate how rare his own sturdy liberalism is. Most liberal theorists and activists today have rolled over when confronted by a “culture of repudiation,” as Sir Roger Scruton memorably called it, that valorizes the most extreme forms of relativism and “autonomous” self-assertion and actively works to upend, once and for all, the precious moral capital left by a broader and deeper classical tradition of political moderation rooted in self-restraint.

Craiutu’s fictional leftist interlocutor, “Lauren,” is a veritable woke loon, while his “radical” conservative interlocutor “Rob” is a Catholic who defends “traditional family values” and “opposes same-sex marriage” (as all of the proponents of classical moderation so respectfully cited by Craiutu throughout his book would have done). The endless self-radicalization of democratic modernity is something that Craiutu, a noted Tocqueville scholar, should have addressed in his book. Surely, “Rob” is right that Socrates would be canceled on college campuses today and that in influential elite intellectual circles a spirit of self-loathing (which to his credit Craiutu adamantly opposes) has crowded out civic gratitude and salutary self-criticism. 

Craiutu is right to criticize “the politics of warfare,” if by that he means a spirit of unrelieved enmity replacing the always tenuous telos of authentic politics, civic amity and concord. But a figure such as former Attorney General William Barr should not be criticized (as he is by Craiutu) for saying that traditional morality and the Christian religion have been under systematic assault in elite culture and even in our public schools. How else could Barr have explained the way in which gender ideology and the transgender cult have been imposed on young people as part of an increasingly obligatory civil religion? In my view, true moderates must vigorously oppose the spirit of repudiation and negation that is for all intents and purposes coextensive with civic and moral nihilism. True moderation is not a geographical phenomenon, so to speak, aiming to stay in the safe ground of the middle as the Gadarene swine go off the cliff. We need a “manly, moral, regulated liberty,” as Burke put it in a particularly evocative formulation. Craiutu, however, is skeptical of appeals to “manliness” by those on the right, even though they were central to the political reflection of two of his heroes, Burke and Tocqueville. This dissonance between him and these two classic exemplars of moderation might give him pause.

John Kekes, Aurelian Craiutu, and I agree that the “centre” is not holding. Their new books analyze our present discontents with erudition, moderation, and an appropriate appeal to the intrinsic benefits of civility, dialogue, and the spirit of compromise. That is all to the good. But true moderation also depends on a certain greatness of soul that liberal theory is hard-pressed to recognize or defend. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his work of dramatized history November 1916 in reference to Pyotr Stolypin, the last great statesman of the Russian Old Regime, who tried to steer the country he loved between reactionary petrification and revolutionary violence and fanaticism: 

Nothing is more difficult than drawing a middle line for social development. The loud mouth, the big fist, the bomb, the prison bars are of no help to you, as they are to those at the two extremes. Following the middle path demands the utmost self-control, the most inflexible courage, the most patient calculation, the most precise knowledge.

This noble, eloquent, and instructive reminder of the intimate connection between moderation and spiritual self-command proves these virtues to be a vital part of the “centre” whose dissolution Yeats so powerfully lamented—and that so needs restoration today.