Excerpt from Lenore Ealy’s lecture for the 2024 Cátedra Joseph Keckeissen.

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I am grateful to Carroll and the Fe y Libertad team for the invitation to join you this evening. We gather at what many perceive to be a moment of crisis.  Yesterday’s U.S. presidential election reminds us of the challenges facing democratic societies.  During this election cycle, both major U.S. political parties have been backsliding on economic understanding and making proposals that would seriously damage what F.A. Hayek called «the constitution of liberty» and the economic principles that promote prosperity.  However, I believe our current crisis is not merely political nor economic.  Rather, it seems we are at the precipice of a deeper crisis of meaning and civility that threatens the foundations of free societies worldwide.

This crisis manifests itself in multiple ways: We see universities where the fear of being recorded saying something «unwoke» has turned classrooms into ideological conformity machines. We witness the rise of illiberal movements on both left and right that reject the classical liberal principles of limited government. We observe the weaponization of government agencies against citizens, and we watch as populist nationalisms resurge globally in response to the perceived failures of domestic governments and international institutions. Most troublingly, we see a generation of young people who seem to have lost faith in the possibilities of freedom itself beginning to use the old vocabularies of nihilism and violence.

Such problems as these are social crises, but they are also deeply personal crises.  There is an interplay between socia events and the psychological–or existential–challenges we each confront as individuals.  Understanding the nature of a social crisis thus requires us to reflect not only on how we as individuals make sense of the world, but also on how social institutions help us generate shared meanings. Aristotle said that we are political animals, but I think that politics can be only derivative of our more fundamental interpretations of reality.  What we believe about reality shapes the choices we make for our lives and our families and has profound implications for how we organize our society and our economic, political, and cultural affairs.  So, this evening, I will ask you to join me in thinking about two of the institutions we rely upon on most to tell us something about the nature of reality–Science and Religion–and how they matter if we want to live as free people in free societies.

My thoughts on these matters have been deeply influenced by the work of British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), who invited us to re-examine the relationships between science, faith, and society that have evolved since the early Enlightenment.  Polanyi’s insights establish continuities between our present crisis of meaning and earlier social and political crises that have shaped the modern world, and it is my hope that you will likewise approach his writings as an aid to understanding some of our present challenges.

Polanyi observed that the crisis of meaning in the West stems from what he called a «moral inversion» that produced modern nihilism. This nihilism emerged from an entanglement of Enlightenment moral skepticism with the secularized fervor of Christianity. The result was a peculiar modern condition: we have intense moral aspirations for our societies but deep skepticism about the reality of moral truth itself.

Before proceeding to explore Polanyi’s analysis, I want to say that I hope that my remarks tonight will also pay appropriate tribute to Professor Keckeissen, whom I unfortunately never had the pleasure of meeting.  To get acquainted with him, I recently spent some time with Professor Keckeissen’s doctoral dissertation on «The Meanings of Economic Law.» Keckeissen’s subject sought to shed light on a critical question that had plagued the advance of economic sciences since the Methodenstreit of the 19th century:  namely, «whether thre are economic laws after all.»  Keckeissen observed that the rise of positivist thinking–that is an approach to science that confines truth to empirical observation and deduction–cuts economic laws off from a deeper grounding in natural law or logical reasoning. Both methodological positivism in law and the positivist foundation of modern science that Polanyi criticized severed epistemology from metaphysics.  Practically, this dissolved many transcendent and traditional constraints on power and created vacuums that men tried to fill with technocratic controls rather than a confident respect for the «permissionless» human action and spontaneous social processes of a free society.  

In perceiving the need for more attention to «the study of the epistemology of science» I think that Keckeissen, like Polanyi, perceived the need to limn the possibility of connections between our «subjective» experiences and the reality of «objective» truths about the world around us.  I would like to join these two great teachers in this effort at greater epistemological reflection and awareness, but I am a historian, rather than an economist or scientist, so my talk tonight will proceed by first reminding you where we sit in history.  I will then try to explain why I believe Polanyi’s writings remain particularly relevant, given the nature of many of the challenges we see around us today.  To conclude, I will encourage you to remember that even in times of crisis we still have in our power to choose a path marked by hope rather than fall into despair. 

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To speak of our present crisis, we first need to consider our location in history.  The present in which we live is inescapably in the Modern Age downstream from what we call the Enlightenment.  There is no clear point at which the «Middle Ages» became the «Age of Reason,» but we can point especially to the 17th and 18th centuries as the period that saw the explosion of scientific inquiry, technological innovation, and economic growth that have shaped the modern world in the West and our various visions of freedom. 

It was in the early modern era that Europeans began in earnest to challenge traditional ecclesiastical and political authorities in the name of reason and liberty.  This led first to a splintering of the Christian church and to wars of religion.  And then came two critical, and sharply different, political revolutions:  a “conservative” American Revolution, which gave us the world’s boldest experiment with constitutional self-governance, and the French Revolution, which foreshadowed the less stable models of governance that would take root in most of the European nation states and their colonies and plantations.  

These two revolutions–both framed in hopes for expanding freedom and enlightenment–seem, nevertheless, to have incorporated two different views of reason and religion. For the North Americans, the application of greater «reason» in politics was less of an attempt to realize abstract and utopian ideals but was rather to open the possibility for deliberation, prudence, and reasonableness in establishing conditions in which liberty could flourish. As Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist 1: 

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

For the most part, the goals of the American Revolution, and its eventual constitutional settlement, were widely harmonized with the religious sentiments of the American people from the nation’s very diverse pulpits.  President Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789 invoked divine assistance for the nation, encouraging citizens to pray that God would, among other things, “render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed.”  As the American nation was born,  the American people largely softened their need for legally established religious orthodoxy and adopted a more pluralist form of religious toleration that allowed faith communities of many kinds to flourish.  The colonists turned nation builders in North America were bound together, at least for a time, in an embrace of political unity over religious uniformity and a shared sense of the opportunities stretching out before them across a vast continent.

The French Revolution took a sharply different path.  The French revolutionaries elevated Reason to a cult that destroyed not only the monarchy and aristocracy, but also the clerisy, the calendar, and many other religious and cultural traditions. French churches were transformed into «temples of Reason,» hosting festivals celebrating atheism, liberty, and philosophy.  

For many of the French, the revolution required conformity of belief and solidarity, even at the cost of persecution.  Consider Robespierre’s alignment of virtue and terror:

We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish, in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror. If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time [both] virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.

In his reflection on The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville would later observe that:

[t]he French made, in 1789, the greatest effort that has ever been made by any people to sever their history into two parts, so to speak, and to tear open a gulf between their past and their future. In this design, they took the greatest care to leave every trace of their past condition behind them; they imposed all kinds of restraints upon themselves in order to be different from their ancestry….

While the Americans had sought continuity with their English past, the French tried to drive out the past in a way that could only be achieved through sustained violence.  The hopes of the French Revolution may have begun in Enlightenment, but they were dashed on the bloody shoals of revolutionary terror.

Even such violence, however, could not extinguish the impulse to revolutionary utopianism once it had been unleashed.  Such hopes to perfect society through reason would find expression under both Napoleonic empire and in the later French republics.  We can see this in various forms of technocratic utopianism, from Henrí Saint-Simon’s vision for an industrialized «science of society» to Auguste Comte’s positivist sociology.  And we see this same spirit, ultimately, in the «scientific socialism» of Karl Marx, who observed that:

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past.  

What happens when you strip a people of their history and tradition in the name of rationalism?  Coercion of all sorts becomes necessary.  Radical and revolutionary responses to the «social question» of the 19th century typically came to embrace not only a rationalized bureaucratization of society but sought to impose various forms of national social and economic planning as “a means for the deliberate reconstruction of society by a special organization of scientists, industrialists, and bankers.”

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