If you've never heard of Orestes Brownson, you're in good company; the 19th-century thinker, man of letters, and controversialist was influential in his time but has been all but forgotten since his death in 1876.* Brownson recently came to my attention when I re-read Christopher Lasch's THE TRUE AND ONLY HEAVEN, a book in which Brownson features as an example of a neglected strain of American "republican" thinking (mixed with what Lasch called Brownson's "Christian radicalism"). Entirely by coincidence, I then happened across an article about Brownson by Scott Yenor (at the Claremont Review of Books), heralding a new Brownson biography (SEEKING THE TRUTH, by Robert Reinsch).
According to Scott Yenor, "Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) spent 50 years thinking through the tensions between the American experiment and modernity." Brownson's intellectual journey saw him embrace, at various times, Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, Robert Owen's utopianism, and finally Roman Catholicism. As Yenor explains:
The young Brownson advocated emancipation from religious authority, the total separation of church and state, and undercutting religious claims by scientific discoveries. Such reformation served the advancement of man’s empire over nature, including human nature. The “richest gift” God bestowed on man, contended this young Brownson, was the “capacity for Progress.” “Progress” meant human control over fate—our reshaping the world to fit our ever changing, ever growing ambitions and thirst for democratic justice.
Youth is the time for idealism, but age brings (if we're lucky) a certain chastened wisdom:
Though his zeal for social reform never wavered, Brownson changed his mind about the modern regime’s ends...Brownson believed certain elements of the modern regime were inimical to human flourishing. Protestantism's embrace of individualism, modern democracy’s assertion of indefinite human power over the moral and physical world, and consensual government's continual remaking of the civil order all combined to uproot the citizen, leaving him at the mercy of his own fallen nature.
Modernity has never lacked for confidence in its ability to remake all sorts of things, a confidence best expressed by Thomas Paine's "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." (The fact that MSNBC's Chris Matthews is fond of invoking that assertion should be enough to mark its absurdity.) Modernity's "creative destruction" has been rampant for the past three centuries, and the results to date have been mixed, to say the least.
In Yenor's telling, Orestes Brownson believed that Checking modernity's destructive tendencies required: reverence for restraints of the sort found in America’s Constitution; informal and social checks on government's power; adherence to the inviolable liberty of the human person with respect to belief and property; and an understanding of the ends individual liberty serves.
Above all, Yenor emphasizes Brownson's turn to religion:
The mature Brownson—in what seems a direct rebuke to his earlier self—held that “the mad effort to separate progress from religion…has rendered modern Liberalism everywhere destructive, and everywhere a failure.” Though he retained his understanding of progress and civilization, he became convinced that they were inseparable from religious authority.
That aside, you don't have to be born again to recognize that modernity isn't all it's been cracked up to be or to question whether whatever we've gained in the transition from pre-modern to post-modern outweighs all that we've lost. Orestes Brownson may seem an archaic relic from the distant past, but his concerns about our civic health are as timely today as ever; after all, when the dust settles from the current administration's downfall, we will have a republic to rebuild and a polity to reconcile.
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http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/orestes-brownsons-republican-remedies/
*But Wikipedia remembers him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orestes_Brownson
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