Richard Hooker's Political Particularism

Scattered reflections

As I’ve harked on in the past, one of themes that has risen to the surface in my own political developments is a renewed emphasis on what I call particularism: the recognition that each political order is faced with specific circumstances, interests, threats, needs, and struggles such that political systems and laws vary between nations. There is no universalistic political code as is implied in most modern political theories: libertarianism, liberal-democracy, theonomy, marxism, etc.

I consider this to be one of the defining features of Classical Conservative thought from Russell Kirk back through Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke. I remember reading the section on Thomas Hobbes in Paul Gottfried’s study of Carl Schmitt (truly one of history’s more eminent particularists) and finding interest in his connection between Hobbes and the sort of legendary Anglican divine Richard Hooker, a great defender of Queen Elizabeth’s religious settlement. Hooker had sought to grapple with the weaknesses of the conformists against their Puritan critics in a much more holistic way so as to justify and defend the English political regime.

As most people who have looked into Hooker are aware, Brad Littlejohn is one of the most important popularizers of Hooker’s thought. I don’t agree with everything he does—or associates with—but I will be forever grateful for his work in synthesizing the academic contributions of Hooker studies. Especially in light of my need for a political theology to comport with my budding paleoconservatism.

Several years ago he wrote an article for the American Conservative on Hooker and I’ve read it a few times. As I continue to emphasize what I have learned from Hooker and certain themes become crystalized in my mind amidst increasingly rightward shifts among Christians, I want to comment on some aspects of that article that stand out to me. I want to do this so as to constantly clarify that while I am tired of the pietist, secularist classical liberal thinking that pervades American evangelicalism, I am equally unsettled by the transformationalist, Neo-Puritan political thinking of the theonomists.

Hooker to me is the great advocate of continuity and political realism; that is, unlike universalists like the Puritan agitators, he saw in legal revolutions the seeds of political destruction not unlike how Edmund Burke critiqued the French Revolution. In fact, it is obvious that Burke followed Hooker here. To be anti-revolutionary was to be keenly aware of the destruction that will ensue in the unleashing of holistic programs to overhaul the laws of the realm. The stability of the order, from which the harmonies of private life find their footing, is more vital than efforts to bring legal systems into conformity with utopian visions.

As Littlejohn observes:

it is not enough to show that a proposed reform will be better in the abstract, for laws do not have the luxury of governing abstractions. Laws govern people, and people tend to respond poorly to sudden social or legal changes. Laws, however much people grumble about them, become familiar features of the social landscape, and if suddenly altered, people lose their practical and moral bearings. Indeed, the very moral authority that we seek to instill into our laws can backfire when they are changed too often.

Yet Hooker was indeed a particularist, siding with Calvin’s recognition that every political order had its own political and legal needs, which could shift over time and circumstance. In this, in his siding with the magisterial political tradition, he stood against both stubborn status quo thinking, and the universalist political instincts of the Puritans, led by Thomas Cartwright, among others.

Littlejohn quotes Hooker to say:

Laws are “instruments to rule by, and…instruments must always be designed not merely according to their general purpose, but also according to the particular context and matter upon which they are made to work. The end for which a law is made may be permanent, but the law may still need changing if the means it prescribes no longer serve that end.”

This was the confrontation that presented itself to the political Puritans:

In fact, it was precisely the Puritan revolutionaries who did not seem to appreciate this point. Although they were eager to raze the current regime, the one they planned to erect in its place was to be for all time, since it was authorized by God. This fanaticism of revelation would exhibit startling similarities to the fanaticism of reason two centuries later, as Eric Voegelin observed in The New Science of Politics.

From this, following Hooker, we can appreciate the fact that politics has a constant theme of flexibility to it; if politics is unwilling to confront the dynamics of social changes and developments it is subject to either takeover or collapse. Hooker then used “natural law” (an extremely difficult and varying concept that often pits its own advocates against each other) to emphasize that those holding power have the authority to “what may be done” or what is prudent to do in order to address constantly changing political realities. Natural law doesn’t function, for Hooker, like a universalist would like it to: one fixed law for all time and circumstance. I would like to discuss the difficulties of natural law at another time.

One of the implications of particularism is that political authority becomes absolutely vital. Aside from all the myths and good feelings with regard to the “sovereignty of the people” with American democratic rhetoric, someone actually has to decide when laws should be applied, in what way, and when they should be suspended. If we are particularists, then circumstances could render the need to determine exceptions. This is the true sovereign of a system, the true political power. The sovereign is a person, granted authority to act politically by God. Human authority therefore is a key aspect to this way of thinking.

Human laws and institutions, then, rest upon a foundation of tradition, experience, and trial and error. Beneath these, to be sure, is the deeper bedrock of transcendent moral order, but only the long, hard work of human reason and ingenuity can adapt this order to the needs of each society. While law as such carries divine sanction, the authority of particular laws rests chiefly on human authority. Though imperfect and uncertain, such authority is, for Hooker, sufficient.

Hooker proves his classical conservatism in his embrace of historical development. Besides particularism, another pillar of authentic classical conservatism is its historicism. One of the things that the late twentieth and twenty-first century conservative movement gets most wrong about conservatism is its rabid opposition to any form of historicism. I have discussed this in another context when discussing Leo Strauss. The classical conservative, like Hooker, sees in the historical process the stabilizing effects of collective wisdom, permeating out into the forwarding stepping present. The denial of historical guidance is a willingness to be sociologically blinded.

Hence arises the conservative respect for tradition. When it comes to law-making, the wisdom that is gleaned from long study of human nature is indispensable. Good lawmakers will recognize that much more than one lifetime is needed for such wisdom. Tradition, for Hooker, is simply the accumulated wisdom of centuries, which we would be foolhardy to ignore.

This applies to particularism specifically in that particularism emphasizes the uniqueness of each and every people’s particular experiences. One of the primary problems with internationalism, multiculturalism, and all these post-enlightenment projects is that they deny the particularity of people groups. It is in customs, cultural, collective memories that national priorities find their basis. One cannot find universal political solutions precisely because a people’s struggles and the things that are good for them vary from place to place.

What is implied here is a type of “national conservatism;” that is, a conservatism of independent nations (in America, historically, this would probably have been regions). The authority of law, Littlejohn points out, “rests on a foundation of local custom and accumulated practice.” If history provides boundaries for group identities, and politics relates to these boundaries, then customs and traditions playing a key function in the political priorities of varying peoples. Because of this, Hooker follows Calvin against the modern theonomist movement:

Littlejohn: “Hooker recognized that even God himself did not attempt to legislate civil laws for every time and place. The laws of Moses, he notes,” 

were established with careful thought for the places and persons to which they applied, as all good positive laws must be. Given that not all nations are the same, and God prescribed these laws with such an eye to the particular needs of Israel, how could we think that the fact that God made these laws unchangeable for one people means they should govern all nations forever. (—Hooker)

In Hooker’s day, the advocates of universalist, internationalist conformity were the Puritans:

The English Reformation had grown in large part out of the assertion of national freedom against what was seen as the overreaching universal aspirations of the papacy.

The Puritans were a bit like modern globalists: idealists who thought they knew the best way to run things and wanted all countries to follow that same model. Hooker responds like a good nationalist: what’s best for Switzerland or the Netherlands may not be best for England. Hooker’s defense of the Church of England was framed as a defense of national sovereignty, of the freedom of each particular Christian community to determine the form of its corporate life. 

The Puritan demand for international uniformity, he argued, rested on three confusions. The first, which Hooker has already addressed, was the idea that polity and ceremonies were essentially matters of divine, rather than human, law. The second was a flattened view of human nature that ignored history, politics, and social context: if an institution or practice was good for one people, Cartwright reasoned, then surely it must be good for all. Third, Cartwright proposed this international uniformity, as internationalists of every age do, as a peace program: Christians of every nation will dwell together in peace and unity if they all have the same laws and customs.

The above was merely a scattershot collection of some themes that have been meaningful to me in my own thinking, but the contributions of Hooker are legion. What is important to me about Hooker is that he provides the link between the greater political traditions of classical Europe and modern problems. There are tremendous implications for having a Hookerian state of mind when it comes to circumstantial political particularity.

On one hand, we can be more conscious of the march of history that is absent post-enlightenment anglo-American political thought. We can reject the Cult of Presentism that permeates of contemporary mind. On the other hand, particularism allows us to recognize that we currently sit on the other side of the revolution that Hooker and Burke warned against. I think doubling down on this fact places me in a different position than current advocates of Burke (such as Hazony and the National Conservatism folks). If legal upheaval would cause a type of destabilizing chaos, and if we have already experienced this legal revolution, in the Civil Rights Revolution, we already live in post-America. We have already been politically severed from our past. Historical continuity was vital in Elizabethan and Burkean England. It was vital too in prewar American political life (much to the chagrin of the Progressive establishment).

But we live on other other side of the revolutions that have actually already expired Western Civilization. Particularism allows us to accept this and not be restrained by legal norms that no longer exist, in our quest to politically confront our existential enemies. If we believe in circumstantial particularity, and we are honest about the situation, we can be politically liberated from the restraints that the Left uses against conservatives to subdue us.