A Bridge to Collectivism.

• Author: Lemieux, Pierre
• Position: The Virtue of Nationalism - Book review

The Virtue of Nationalism

By Yoram Hazony

304 pp.; Basic Books, 2018

Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism is a well-written and challenging book. While today's Trump supporters would likely agree with its main theses and conclusions, classical liberals, small-government conservatives (perhaps), and libertarians will be troubled or disagree.

The author is a philosopher and president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem. According to its website, the institute's mission is "to contribute to a revitalization of the Jewish people, the State of Israel, and the family of nations through a renewed encounter with the foundational ideas of Judaism." As we will see, this is congruent with the ideas expressed in The Virtue of Nationalism.

Hazony warns us at the outset that he will not "waste time trying to make nationalism prettier by calling it 'patriotism'" because they are the same. Fair point. He defines the nation as an association of tribes "with a common language or religion, and a past history of acting as a body for the common defense and other large-scale enterprises." As opposed to primitive tribes--the "tribes of Israel" that we meet in the Bible, for example--it is not always clear what today's tribes are, although we can imagine many. Nationalism stands for "a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference."

The book's argument can be summarized as follows: The choice of an international political order is between national states on the one hand and imperial or world government on the other. This choice parallels the distinction between nationalism and liberalism: nationalism claims that each nation should be independent in order to pursue its own interests, aspirations, and purposes; liberalism "assumes that there is only one principle of legitimate political order: individual freedom," and that this universal principle can be imposed on all nations. Contrary to rationalist liberalism, nationalism is consistent with man's natural loyalty to his own kind, from the family, the clan, and the tribe, up to the nation. The nation can better ensure external security than tribal anarchy can, and better elicit the loyalty of its citizens than other sorts of states. Independent national states promote diversity and experimentation, contrary to empty universal principles and homogenizing empire. A national state is also the only formula capable of nurturing and protecting free institutions.

Each of these claims is doubtful at best.

Underestimating liberalism / The national state and world government do not exhaust the possibilities for the world order. On the axis of political power, there are many alternatives between ideal anarchy with zero political power and an ideal world-state with potentially total power. For example, there are non-world imperial states, and everything that is not a pure national state is not an empire. The European Union, we are told, "is a German imperial state in all but name," but it's a strange imperial state if a national state can legally secede with a two-year withdrawal notice!

Liberalism is much more cautious toward a world state than Hazony assumes. (He generally takes "liberalism" to mean classical liberalism.) Some liberals did favor a world state: one was Ludwig von Mises, as Hazony notes. Others were continental liberals and Enlightenment thinkers that Nobel economics prizewinner Friedrich Hayek...