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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:02.35)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan and I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Christopher Yeomans, the Justin S. Morrill Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Purdue University. And we're talking about his book, Hegel and Republicanism, Non-Domination, Economics and Political Participation. Dr. Yeomans, wonderful to have you back on.
Chris Yeomans (00:24.127)
Thanks for having me.
PJ Wehry (00:26.443)
So just that initial starting question. Dr. Yeomans, why this book?
Chris Yeomans (00:32.046)
Yeah, so there's actually kind of an interesting history. So Sebastian Stein, who's one of the co-editors of the element series, asked me to write a book on Hegel and contemporary political philosophy. And so originally, the element was just going to have republicanism as one chapter.
And I had written a draft of that chapter, which is now the first chapter of this element, the bit about Philip Pettit and contemporary neo-Republicanism. And I was honored to be able to give that at the Johns Hopkins History of Political Thought Workshop.
PJ Wehry (01:10.19)
Okay.
Chris Yeomans (01:17.04)
And that was a fantastic experience and I've got a bunch of really tough questions that convinced me that there was a lot more to say about republicanism and particularly republicanism in its different variants.
than I had originally understood. And so the form of the book sort of shifted from being about some different currents in contemporary political philosophy to being about civic republicanism in its broader history. And so you can see what I sort of do in the book as I sort of work backwards in time, right, from 20th and 21st century neo-republicanism.
to 19th century labor republicanism, to the civic republican tradition, you know, that, you know, at least goes back to the 15th, 16th century in Florence and, you know, probably back to Aristotle. And so I work sort of backwards and try and close in on Hegel's position by a series of approximations.
So essentially we start with the neo-republicanism, which is the furthest from Hegel's own view, but figuring out why that is sort of motivates why he's in the neighborhood of labor republicanism and then figuring out where he's got differences there motivates seeing him as a civic Republican. Because I think if you just start with Machiavelli and Aristotle and civic republicanism, it can be kind of difficult to see where Hegel's going with that tradition.
PJ Wehry (02:58.473)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (02:58.896)
But if you can back up a little bit, get a little bit of a running start as it were, and motivate it by some of the interesting differences that he's got with neo-Republicans and labor Republicans, then you can bring into focus how he's related to that tradition. Yeah, so that's why.
PJ Wehry (03:15.073)
Yeah, yeah, no, it's great. And so as I kind of look at that, one thing I appreciated, and kind of set the stage a little bit, you're not trying to label Hegel as a republicanist, you're going to you're trying to trace through his thought and see how it can be helpful. What can be fruitful from tying these together? So it's not because I feel like some people would immediately if you try and label a great philosopher, people get
inappropriately angry. That's just, yeah.
Chris Yeomans (03:42.576)
I'm not trying to assimilate into a cause or plant a flag on top of him. I just think there are certainly civic Republican elements in his thought and he's got some critical remarks and interesting criticisms of other forms of civic Republicanism. So putting him in the neighborhood as it were, right, reveals some things.
PJ Wehry (03:48.069)
Right, right, right, right. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (04:05.964)
Yes. Yes. And last time you came up, you graciously came on. We talked a lot about the Roman roots of thinking, even like Roman ideas of property law. of course, I mean, and one, we see that in the United States, you you have the, I remember the first time hearing about George Washington dressed, you know, in a statue, like they have a statue of George Washington in Cincinnati, right?
Chris Yeomans (04:18.672)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (04:34.501)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (04:35.394)
We have that in Hegel. so he already has these Roman roots to his thought, very explicitly so. To help us understand a little bit, because you're talking about labor and neo and civic republicanism, what is the thread that ties those together? What makes something republican?
Chris Yeomans (04:41.828)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (04:52.473)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Yeomans (04:59.076)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (05:00.782)
or republicanist. Maybe we can say republicanist. don't know.
Chris Yeomans (05:04.4)
I think the easiest way to go at it is to distinguish it from liberalism. I mean, take the vast majority of political philosophy these days as liberal. There's a little bit of it that's Marxist, and then there's a little bit of it that's Republican. So just to distinguish Republicanism from liberalism and
PJ Wehry (05:12.718)
Okay.
Chris Yeomans (05:31.236)
to maybe formulate some ideal types here that wouldn't correlate to any particular theory, you can think of liberalism as holding that the polity is composed of individuals who are all bearers of natural rights, largely negative rights, rights to interference, and the state is instrumentally valuable.
in so far as it is a good way or perhaps even the best way to protect those natural rights.
For civic Republicans, the polity is composed of individuals who are members of institutions and social groups who have rights, but are, as it were, already embedded in social relationships.
PJ Wehry (06:22.254)
you
Chris Yeomans (06:29.322)
antecedent to politics or outside of politics or not strictly constituted by politics. And the state is intrinsically valuable because the state is nothing but us acting in our capacity as political or civic animals.
All right, so I mean, one way of putting this, John Pocock has a brief summary of republicanism as the combination of two ideas. Aristotle's idea that man is a political animal, human beings are civic creatures, and Machiavelli's idea that we live in time.
and everything that is in time disappears at some point and our nature can only be partially and contradictorily realized and that the heart of civic republicanism is trying to hold these truths together. To think that a state in which we can express our political nature is a fragile achievement.
always vulnerable to internal factionalism, to external domination, right? As the British Republicans would put it, right? The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And so, but you get in civic Republicanism, and this I will say is part of what interests me with respect to Hegel.
PJ Wehry (07:50.926)
. you
Chris Yeomans (08:11.265)
is in the political ontology of civic republicanism, you get a much richer conception of the citizen and of citizenship than you get out of most kinds of liberalism. And sometimes I put this point as saying, liberalism is political philosophy, but republicanism is social and political philosophy.
PJ Wehry (08:27.074)
Yeah. Yes.
Chris Yeomans (08:36.951)
And so it was always exciting to me the way Republicans are, including Pettit, are, they're very live to the social valence of political relationships and the political valence of social relationships. And this always struck me as of a piece with Hegel's concerns, for example, in poverty and so on, right? Where, where what he's really concerned with is something like what Pettit calls the eyeball test.
PJ Wehry (09:06.314)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (09:07.076)
Can you walk down the street with your head to hell high? Can you walk into church and feel like I belong there? This is my church. This is where I go. And that sense of social equality and the way that political relations are involved in that, all of that is very important to civic Republicans or Republicanism generally.
PJ Wehry (09:30.944)
Yeah, it's so funny and if I had taken the time I If I'd had a couple hours to think about it I would have seen these connections immediately, but as you're talking You this actually fits like a puzzle piece into numerous interviews. I've had recently
I just had a pastor on to talk about how the church should work with other civic institutions for placemaking to create a sense of belonging and public squares. And how this idea of we should just sell land off and make the most money. instead of where in the past it was institutionalized to create a public square where people could exist and they had a right to exist and be together.
Chris Yeomans (10:15.971)
Yes. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (10:16.982)
Right. And that, that I, that's, that's really fascinating. Good. Yeah. Yes.
Chris Yeomans (10:20.451)
And that is very, very appropriate. I think there's another element to republicanism, which Hegel particularly picks up on in his appreciation of Machiavelli, which he says of Machiavelli something like, it's a mistake to the Prince as a compendium of timeless wisdom for every place that is no place. No, no, no, no.
PJ Wehry (10:36.654)
you
PJ Wehry (10:42.172)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (10:46.093)
He's trying to figure out how could you have a self-governing entity among Italian city-states, which are so weak that they are constantly vulnerable to external interference, to internal coups, and to tyranny from the inside. And so this sense of place is really important. Now, I mean, look, you know, it...
PJ Wehry (10:54.998)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (11:14.031)
it connects to some of the parts of the early Republican tradition with which we would have a harder time identifying now, which is like Machiavelli and lots of the Florentine Republicans thought, yeah, look, if we're gonna be self-governing, there's gonna be some territories around us that we're gonna dominate. And that's the way that this is going to work, right? This is the setup for labor Republicans. mean, early Republicanism is not
PJ Wehry (11:33.85)
Right, right.
Chris Yeomans (11:43.945)
universalizable. There is very much this sense that self-government is a fragile achievement, and often, maybe always, it is achieved by depriving somebody else of that kind of governance.
PJ Wehry (11:45.398)
Hmm
PJ Wehry (11:59.384)
Hmm. Which has, even if you go back to Greece and Rome, definitely seems to be the case as well.
Chris Yeomans (12:06.139)
Certainly, certainly. so you get to and look, Hegel worries about these things too. Right. I Hegel's claims about sovereignty are very much in a civic Republican register when he has this. I don't know how to describe it. Sort of a tone of voice where he says, yeah, look, all states are sovereign. And that's worth about as much as the paper that you print that notice on, unless you have
PJ Wehry (12:32.071)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (12:36.129)
a governance structure that corresponds to your actual constitution so you can self-govern in a meaningful way, and you can protect yourself against enemies abroad. If you can't do that, well, your sovereignty is not worth too terribly much, right? There's that kind I don't know what you want to call it, realist element to it. What I don't think you have in Hegel is this view that you sometimes get in earlier civic Republicans that actually self-governance requires.
PJ Wehry (12:51.502)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (13:04.675)
that some of our neighbors are not self-governing because otherwise they're enemies that are a threat, right? And I don't think you see that in Hegel. So there's a step towards universalizability in Hegel.
PJ Wehry (13:07.054)
Yeah. The another and forgive me, it's just it's interesting how it it correlates. I had Dr. Alexander Rosenthal Pueblo on and he's done a lot of work with Richard Hooker and his book Crown Under Law was comparing Richard Hooker with Hobbes.
Chris Yeomans (13:30.72)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Yeomans (13:36.451)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (13:36.91)
And at the foundation, Hobbes believed that individuals banded together for strength, but they start as individuals and society came to be. Whereas for Richard Hooker, society was there first, has always been there, and is valuable as an institution itself. Which I was like, I have heard this before, and it's interesting to see it. Yes, yes. Yeah. Okay. And so that's our...
Chris Yeomans (13:59.181)
That's right. Hagle is on team hooker. That's for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (14:07.134)
So you could, it's, and I think sometimes at a very surface level, people kind of disconnect the continent and England, right? You like, because of the language barrier, but that was, I mean, it's constantly crossing back and forth.
Chris Yeomans (14:15.129)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (14:20.143)
Yeah, and I mean, I would just say for Hegel, I think the key feature on this aspect of his thought is Montesquieu. And on both of these things that you just mentioned, the sense of place and the sense that society has an existence and a validity antecedent to politics outside of politics, however you want to put it.
PJ Wehry (14:28.654)
Mm.
Chris Yeomans (14:47.775)
I think Montesquieu is really central to Hegel's thought for this. I think it's harder for us to see because for variety of reasons, mainly practical, Montesquieu is kind of dropped out of the canon of Western political thought. And the reason I think it's practical is having taught
surveys of the history of European political thought, it's pretty hard to figure out where you have the like four weeks that you would need to do to do the spirit of the laws. Because there's not a couple of chapters you can excerpt like you can for Locke or for Hobbes because Montesquieu's whole point is there are a dozen variables that are relevant to the question of whether a state is just.
PJ Wehry (15:21.29)
Yeah
Chris Yeomans (15:38.231)
And then you have this whole final 100 pages that is a reconstruction of French law out of the Germanic tribes as they relate to Roman law. man, know, sophomores, you're going to hit them with that for three weeks. It's really hard. But as a result, it just kind of drops off. And so people tend to see the Rousseauian background to Hegel.
PJ Wehry (15:38.574)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (15:58.606)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (16:03.011)
But Hegel has this very idiosyncratic reading of Rousseau as a liberal who only cares about individuals or who has an individualistic political ontology. And so in trying to understand, and that's very different from the way most of us understand Rousseau now. And so when you're trying to understand Hegel as a Rousseauian, you're always kind of working at cross purposes to Hegel's own understanding.
But Montesquieu is really, really important, and particularly this sense that how the social relates to the political is everything. Right?
PJ Wehry (16:32.27)
and Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (16:40.961)
And you get it in various doctrines in Hegel. You get it in, you know, for example, this sort of famous line where he says, you know, people ask who should write the constitution. And that shows they don't understand anything about constitutions because there's already a constitution. And the question is, how do we articulate that? How do we modify it by constitutional means? But what he means is there's already an order of social powers.
and they already have a series of relationships to each other. And if you try and just sort of dump a political system on top of that, it's not gonna be able to govern effectively. And even if it does, say through tyrannical means, you're not gonna achieve self-government or what Montesquieu called moderate government, right? You get it in that, you get it in...
all the time that Hegel spent in his lectures talking about the shtanda and the estates and trying to sort of get the political phenomenology right to really understand what was going on. So anyway, I think Montesquieu is really important for that. Yeah. But I think Montesquieu is largely a civic Republican too, you know.
PJ Wehry (17:52.51)
Yeah. Yeah. Do you?
PJ Wehry (18:02.638)
And I'm curious, you mentioned that some of it's the difficulty in teaching Montesquieu. Do you also think that it's the kind of ascendancy of liberal thought that also means that he's been excluded? He's difficult to teach and he's, that's, know, almost everything that you hear now is individual rights based.
Chris Yeomans (18:27.459)
Yeah, that's right. I think both of those things, and there's just less attention. Montesquieu is very, here's what Montesquieu thinks, and I'll say what he thinks and then I'll say where it comes out. Montesquieu cares quite a bit that the government make demands of citizens
that they see as reasonable and of a peace with their social customs. So, I mean, this comes out in Montesquieu's very funny discussions of sumptuary laws, of vice laws.
PJ Wehry (19:13.917)
Hmm
Chris Yeomans (19:14.689)
of laws against drinking or I think he includes prostitution in these. He says basically it's almost like listening to that speech from the Godfather. He's like, this is what ordinary people do. Like you just made them criminals by having these laws. Like why would you do that, right?
PJ Wehry (19:30.055)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (19:35.149)
You need to have laws where people think, yeah, that more or less articulates the way I was thinking of it. Maybe it pushes in a little bit of direction rather than that direction. know, age restrictions on alcohol, 16, yeah, know, probably younger than that, you shouldn't be drinking. But he just thinks like, if you're not reasonable in this way, you create these dual systems of law where you've got a law on the books.
but no constable is gonna enforce that. And what that really means is there's just a tax on people who sell liquor, right, which is paying off the local cops, because nobody's actually gonna enforce those laws. And then you're in a bad situation. But I mean, you know, it goes further. He has these fantastic discussions of why things that look barbaric to us about early French justice.
PJ Wehry (20:04.578)
Yep. Yep.
.
Chris Yeomans (20:32.449)
are reasonable in the context of Germanic tribes. Like why, how long you could hold onto a hot poker might mean something about whether you were a reliable witness. Well, because that means you worked with your hands and you had callous, strong hands. And those are people you trust. Those are solid people, right?
PJ Wehry (20:48.806)
Chris Yeomans (20:54.991)
There's this whole long discussion of it that's really a kind of historical political phenomenology. And look, maybe he's got it right and maybe he's not got it wrong. But all of it, to go back to the sense of place, he's like, the French are the French. They're not somebody else. And they've got their history and they got their customs and they got their expectations. Don't tax their wine. That's a bad idea. They're not going to like that.
PJ Wehry (21:07.72)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you can immediately see that with like, people will talk about different policies in other countries. And not to say that we can't borrow policies from other countries, but you look at
Sometimes people say things like, oh, they do this over here in this country. We should do that here. And I'm like, okay, I want you to think about the people who live on your street. And I want you to think about how they would respond. Like, like, it's you know, it's like, I was like, well, I wouldn't want it to apply to me, but it seems to help. You're like, oh, I think that's the point.
Chris Yeomans (21:39.043)
Yeah, right.
Chris Yeomans (21:45.986)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Chris Yeomans (21:50.701)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, for the United States, we have a very interesting phenomenon this around gun culture and the Second Amendment, right? And a lot of that is coming out very interestingly now, given the recent shooting in Minneapolis, right? And the responses to him being armed. I fascinating. But yeah, I the sense of place.
PJ Wehry (21:59.372)
Yeah. Yes.
PJ Wehry (22:12.204)
Yes. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (22:15.703)
runs very strong in civic republicanism. And so it gives you people like Montesquieu where there's not like a definition of property that's really gonna help you or there's not really two principles of justice that are gonna help you. Instead, know, there's a chapter on how religion is relevant and there's a chapter on how climate is relevant. There's a chapter on how commerce is relevant.
And it's really hard. you know, the stuff that gets included is usually like the taxonomy of the three forms of government and their, you know, the springs that make it work, you know, honor, for example, for a monarchy and so on. But I mean, look, I'll just mention some of the monarchy, which is related to this, which is.
PJ Wehry (22:55.322)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (23:02.37)
BLEH
When Montesquieu and Hegel are talking about a monarchy, they're talking about a prince at the head of a system of orders. And so the reason that honor is so important in a monarchy is because you essentially have all of these dukes and barons and noble families competing with each other for honor. And
Montesquieu wants to figure out like how do you use that to the state's advantage? And he has these fantastic thoughts, know, that, gosh, what's the line? I won't be able to say it as nicely as Montesquieu, he's just such a wonderful writer. Something like the estates, the nobility are never more helpful for the state than when they're being recalcitrant.
PJ Wehry (23:58.533)
Yeah Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (23:58.893)
Because then they're forcing the prince to think and the prince's advisors to think a little bit more about what they're doing, to move a little bit more slowly. And so they help to retain that kind of connection between the laws and the customs. And again, these are things that Hegel is signaling in making in some sense
PJ Wehry (24:06.19)
Hmm. .
Chris Yeomans (24:27.554)
the master concept of political philosophy, Sittlichkeit, right? Which we translate as ethical life, but Sitten goes together in this German phrase, Sitten und Gebräuche, right? Moors and manners, customs and habits. It's sort of an old sounding German phrase, but it's like the sorts of things where like in the Midwest, we hold doors open for people.
PJ Wehry (24:36.078)
Hmm Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (24:56.3)
Right? Even though they're like 20 feet away, we hold the door open for them. But it's just like somebody who doesn't do that and they're rude. Right? If you don't do that in LA, you're not being rude. Right? Nobody expects you to do that. These are just, you know, ways that we express how we relate to each other. And those are super important for Hegel, for Montesquieu, for Republicans, And so that's part of how these are sort of connected together.
PJ Wehry (25:05.08)
Right. Yes.
PJ Wehry (25:20.75)
I mean, you can hold the door open or in certain neighborhoods, you lock your doors. In other neighborhoods, you don't lock your doors and you would be unreasonable based on the neighborhood, not on that like some kind of universalizable thing. As you were talking about the, so civic Republicanism, if I understand correctly, considers stability as
Chris Yeomans (25:36.162)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (25:49.922)
an achievement, right? That it's very fragile. And so when you talk about the connection between laws and customs, the reason that that connection is so valuable is that is stability. That is the achievement beyond the fragility or in spite of the fragility.
Chris Yeomans (26:04.942)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. And I mean, it's an achievement internally because it gives you buy in for people in the system, right? It makes a huge difference whether you think about your government. It could be better, but I more or less share the values that it has, or it's going in the right direction.
PJ Wehry (26:28.375)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (26:30.508)
you know, the tax rates should change a little bit, but I'm on board with progressive taxation or, you know, we should require gun training and gun safes, but I'm on board with people having guns, right? It makes a big difference whether you think that or you think, no, this thing that people think is a right is no right at all and hugely dangerous and no civilized society would allow it.
Right? That's a hugely different relationship to your government. Right? And I mean, the other thing going back to Machiavelli is it translates externally by whether people are going to be willing to take up arms to defend Florence. Right? Do they care enough about what Florence is to defend it against external armies? Right?
PJ Wehry (27:03.214)
you
Chris Yeomans (27:25.612)
So like first, they care enough not to, particularly your noble families, do they care enough about it not to be in league with your external actors, right? And second, do they care enough about it to take up arms? Because otherwise, at least, know, in Machiavelli's time, your other option was mercenaries.
PJ Wehry (27:35.362)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (27:48.237)
Mm.
Chris Yeomans (27:49.55)
I mean, this is why I spend some time talking in the book about the importance of standing armies and Hegel's support for that and how that's a real shift from republicanism, right? All the way through Aristotle into Harrington and the English Republicans, there is this thought often tied to notions of nobility.
PJ Wehry (28:03.694)
Hmm. Okay.
Chris Yeomans (28:16.046)
that the people who are willing to bloody their swords and lose their sons in battle are the people who get to take part in government.
PJ Wehry (28:33.422)
Yes. Sorry, go ahead. like.
Chris Yeomans (28:36.534)
No, I mean, there's just this connection there. And, you know, it goes in somewhat different ways. But, you know, in in German, an old way of talking about the estates was as the Lehrwehr und Nehrstande. The learned estate, the Lehrstande was the clergy. The warring estate was the nobility.
And it's worth saying in the German Wars, the nobilities would lose most of their sons in battle. This happened all the time, like extraordinary losses. But there was thought to be this connection between hereditary land ownership, military service, and influence in the government, that there was a kind of virtue that connected those. And Hegel decisively breaks from that.
PJ Wehry (29:06.834)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (29:19.342)
you
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (29:31.658)
He has a view, I mean, you know, quite interesting given his own family history, right? And particularly, right, his illegitimate son who was in the Dutch Foreign Legion and died in battle in Jakarta. But he has these very interesting discussions of the military personality that are very poignant, actually.
but present the military life in a way that is completely different from the way Republicans understand it. I mean, at one point he has this great line that it combines a complete absence of mind, like just following orders, with the most complete presence of mind.
under conflict and combat and stressful situations. But he is very clear that it is, as he puts it, it's not a civil personality.
PJ Wehry (30:34.912)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (30:36.074)
It's not connected to the things that structure our ordinary social life and the things that the state is mainly caring about. And so it's a fascinating and very real difference, but motivated, I think, by something that appeals to the Republicans, which is Hegel just thinks you are not going to defend Prussia with a militia. That is not how
PJ Wehry (31:02.31)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (31:05.132)
you defend yourself from the Habsburgs. You are not gonna defend Bayern from Napoleon with the militia. Like lots of early 19th century Germans, they learned from Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars like, this is what state power looks like. This is how things actually get done in taxes.
PJ Wehry (31:32.782)
Did you unplug the thing?
Chris Yeomans (31:33.422)
in armies and if you want to have a sovereign state that can actually defend itself that's what you need to do.
Chris Yeomans (31:47.83)
Oops, I think I lost you PJ.
PJ Wehry (31:59.69)
I, yes. I thought my internet went out for a second and in the past, the kids have knocked out the router. And so I ran downstairs, but they, wasn't them. It's just a disruption service. we're good. I apologize. yeah. Yes.
Chris Yeomans (32:03.896)
Okay.
You
I
I will tell you this like digression, like a month into COVID, when we were all at home, all internet, totally dependent. I went out to plant something in my backyard and hit the internet line and cut our internet. And the rest of the family was very unhappy with
PJ Wehry (32:31.47)
PJ Wehry (32:40.206)
Mmm.
Chris Yeomans (32:40.308)
Even though was only like a couple of hours, seemed at that point, right? This was, I don't know, April or May. Right, exactly. Like the world had gone away.
PJ Wehry (32:45.112)
Ground to a halt.
PJ Wehry (32:49.474)
Yeah
well, anyways, I, so you were talking about the military personality. and I can't remember the very last thing you said, but, yes, go ahead.
Chris Yeomans (32:59.341)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (33:03.746)
Well, I'll just repeat it, then you can see how much you've still got. I think it was for reasons that Republicans would understand, which is just that Hegel thinks you can't defend a modern state with a militia or really with mercenaries, even if you could buy enough of them. That's not how you win the Napoleonic Wars. It's not how, yeah, anyway, so.
PJ Wehry (33:08.814)
Thank you.
PJ Wehry (33:15.64)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (33:26.786)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (33:31.692)
So that it's a real, goes back to this thought that sovereignty without effective self-government is just a word and you can throw it around, right?
PJ Wehry (33:48.344)
But it's not worth the paper it's printed on if you can't defend it, right?
Chris Yeomans (33:51.106)
That's right. Right. That's right. You know?
PJ Wehry (33:56.11)
Yeah, I mean, I have a couple things that that popped up as you were talking, even going back to the sense of place. And even what you need from your military, even as you're talking about Hegel, talking about a professional standing army, that's a different thing in Germany versus Switzerland. Right? Even though they were even though they speak German. It's amazing how like Poland,
Chris Yeomans (34:04.941)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (34:13.731)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (34:20.248)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (34:26.858)
incredibly rich farmland, plains, has a very just, you have a completely different set of things to worry about than the Swiss in the mountains, right? If I understand correctly, everyone has like two years in the army, and then they're all kind of part of the army, but they don't have like a standing of, well, that's a lot easier in the mountains, right? It's very different thing.
Chris Yeomans (34:29.058)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (34:47.948)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, and it's also very in contemporary Switzerland. The social expectation is very strong.
PJ Wehry (35:00.216)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (35:01.042)
And if you are a male and you did not go into the service or serve honorably in the service, you're going to have economic trouble. Right. It's going to be, you know, that's an expectation for playing a role in society. There's more of that old Republican view, right, that if you didn't sort of stand up or were not prepared to stand up,
PJ Wehry (35:11.661)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (35:29.9)
Why do you get a share in social self-government, even if not political self-government, right? Whereas that's decisively been lost in Germany, right? And thus, know, very interesting conversations in Germany right now about, you know, how to try and re-staff up the military, you know, worries about compulsory conscription.
PJ Wehry (35:46.997)
Yes. Yes.
Chris Yeomans (35:58.018)
Right, which was apparently never actually taken away, but only suspended. But socially, could you reimpose it? It's not clear, right? That kind of sort of social contract or expectation that you're talking about in Switzerland is decisively absent in Germany. That's what makes this huge difference, right? Yeah.
PJ Wehry (36:17.965)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (36:21.614)
where you have continuous history, like there's a continuous culture for centuries in Switzerland with a decisive rupture in Germany.
Chris Yeomans (36:27.342)
you
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, look, this kind of,
Chris Yeomans (36:38.798)
continuity, right? If you've got it, I think Republicans think you have an incredible resource that you can draw on.
because the truth of the Republic, as it were, sort of falling into time and being a thing that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, being a thing that's contradictory, being a thing that's incomplete, part of that is that since you're undergoing change, past customs are no secure basis for making future judgments.
PJ Wehry (37:24.364)
Hmm. Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (37:25.006)
and principles are likely to only be temporarily valid. Right? This is the importance of fortuna, of fortune, chance, contingency that Pocock in particular associates as essential to the Machiavellian moment. And that's why he says Republicanism really is these two things. Aristotle's view that human beings are political animals.
And Machiavelli's view that the republic is in time is a fragile achievement, is subject to contingency and the play of historical forces over which no one has any control. And thus, that you need a mode of government that connects whenever possible to these historical customs.
but understands that truly historical moments are moments of uncertain futures and potentially dramatic change. And you have to govern in that way. That's why one of Machiavelli's great lines from the Prince is that, innovation produces lukewarm friends, but ardent enemies.
PJ Wehry (38:48.745)
Mm.
Chris Yeomans (38:49.654)
Art an enemy is because if you change something, they know exactly what they lost. Lukewarm friends, because they don't really know how it's gonna turn out. And you you've made a change and maybe it's good for them, but maybe it's not really gonna go in that direction. And so you are constantly governing in a way where those opposed to you are always more opposed to you than those who are for you are for you.
PJ Wehry (38:54.369)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (39:00.248)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (39:19.662)
But it comes out of this view that this is what change does, right? This is what change does to our relationships, to law, to power, to authority structures. And one of the claims that I really try and make in the book, and this is maybe another answer to your first question, why the book, is this thought that, well, historically there was a kind of missed opportunity.
PJ Wehry (39:21.925)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (39:38.54)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (39:47.726)
for the German historians of historicity like Reinhard Koselic to really engage with the Anglophone historians like Skinner and Pocock. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that, to me, a couple of generations later, oh, it seems like such a missed opportunity because...
PJ Wehry (39:49.806)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (40:12.834)
There is really so much in common, though in terms of their historiographical practice, it's often quite different. But this sense that Koselic has that animated my book that we talked about last year, The Politics of German Idealism, this sense of this wonderful metaphor of the turn of the 19th century as like a saddleback, right? As a valley between two mountain peaks of early and late modernity.
PJ Wehry (40:36.558)
Yes. you
Chris Yeomans (40:43.146)
as a period that understood itself as a period of transition, where the very meanings of the words that we're using to talk about the future are shifting as we use them, that the ground is literally shifting under our feet, that this is a kind of recognition of what Machiavelli and the Florentines would have called fortuna, right? And that this would, and that trying to come up
with a system of government that could handle this was so important, right, and such a distinctive task. And I think this is one of the reasons that Hegel holds on to this sort of archaic German term, the estates, the Stenda, right, which even as he's using it has a kind of archaic ring to it, right?
it but it describes well so it has an archaic ring to it and and hagel understands that he has to update it right so now the nobility and the peasantry they're now in one estate they're now in an agricultural estate you have this brand new estate of civil society right or the estate of trade and industry people producing for markets
PJ Wehry (41:53.194)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (42:00.387)
Thank
Chris Yeomans (42:08.342)
And then instead of the clergy, you have this public estate that's sort of the clergy and the civil servants and the lawyers and the professors. And so it's updated, but he holds on to the term. I think because he thinks, man, this is a resource that has been transmitted to us and you don't get many of those. So use them when you can. Try and keep that connection.
so that you can try and convince people living in Bayern or Prussia or Saxony or wherever that they've got something in common with each other and that there's a real project of self-government that could happen here, right? And that it isn't just that we've got this cosmopolitan class
producing for the markets and they've got more in common with the merchants in France and England than they do with the people just down the road in Dresden or Berlin. Right? No, no, no, no, we've got something together. We've got something where we're all engaged in a modern project of freedom. We're all trying to figure it out. We can be in conversation with each other. And that would be a form of self-government that would
But if you say like, we're just going to ditch the whole old order and start something new, well, rhetorically speaking, that's a disaster. You just lost 80 % of the population, which is rural, either farmers or the nobility or blacksmiths or whoever they are. You just lost them. And now all you're speaking to are your bureaucrats and your merchants.
PJ Wehry (43:35.278)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (43:54.606)
It seems like you could have, you can have like this radical revolution and you understand that it is about replacing institutions. But what we've learned is those are incredibly bloody, right? That's the French revolution, right? That's literally, it's like, we're going to start from the ground up. And it's like, not only did the old guard die,
Chris Yeomans (44:00.303)
That's not a good way to get a project of self-government off the ground.
PJ Wehry (44:24.162)
But the new guard very quickly became the old guard and also died. once you throw everything out the window, then everything's up for grabs. There's something interesting here too, as I've heard kind of this, I was talking to that pastor, he's talking about this public square and he's just in an American context, he's trying to justify it, right?
Chris Yeomans (44:28.472)
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Chris Yeomans (44:34.04)
That's right.
PJ Wehry (44:49.39)
And so it's interesting because I've heard it apart from him, this idea of social capital, this way of saying, there's long-term economic value. And it sounds similar, but I think what I'm hearing from you is that the difference between social capital and Stenda, and I think it's important for an American context, is that social capital is still an individual concept. And so it's still lacking a very important
Chris Yeomans (44:55.01)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (45:14.412)
Yeah, that's right.
PJ Wehry (45:17.686)
valuable asset that we get from something like shtenda, the estates, which is both historically rooted and social versus this kind of like, well, you know, if you educate people in the long run, you make more money. And it's like, or, you know, or there's, or there's better outcomes for individuals. And it's like, that's, that's very liberal thinking versus this very like, republic. And I think most of our listeners will understand that this is we're talking in like, like 20th.
Chris Yeomans (45:21.998)
That's right.
Chris Yeomans (45:30.21)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (45:46.06)
or like 19th to 18th century liberal Republican, right? But that's, those are very different things.
Chris Yeomans (45:48.622)
That's right.
Chris Yeomans (45:52.674)
Yeah, I think that's right. And what is so important for Hegel is the Standa.
are a set of relationships with norms that people understand. And maybe they're pre-political, but they are pregnant with the political because they are power relationships with norms. And families are that way and churches are that way. And the grains is that way. Sorry, what was you going to say?
PJ Wehry (46:10.06)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (46:17.26)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (46:25.132)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (46:30.22)
Education.
Chris Yeomans (46:33.345)
Education, schools are that way, local redevelopment boards are that way. These are ways that we come together to solve problems and negotiate norms. And that's really, really hard to do. So if you've got to establish practices that do it well at all,
PJ Wehry (46:33.471)
Education.
Chris Yeomans (47:00.75)
you should try as best as you can to hold on to those. Now, I should say, I mean, we've talked about liberalism in the 18th, 19th century sense, maybe talk a little bit about conservatism in that sense, in the sort of Edmund Burke sense of conservatism, right? Sometimes Hegel, yes, right, right, these sorts of, right? And sometimes Hegel is tarred with, well, not tarred, but sort of associated with that group, right?
PJ Wehry (47:16.277)
Yeah.
or Metronik.
Okay. Okay.
Chris Yeomans (47:30.198)
sort of Burke's view that if it's not necessary to change, it's necessary not to change, right? And I don't think Hegel has that view. Hegel has the view more that all norm-governed interactions are ipso facto renegotiations of those norms.
because in all norm-governed interactions, you are always disagreeing at least a little bit about what the norm means or how it ought to be applied, or I mean, nowhere is this more obvious than when you're watching sports.
right about whether right that was really offsides or that's really a handball or that was really past interference right. It doesn't matter how much verbiage you throw at the norms right I have no idea how long the NFL rules book is I'm sure it's like tax law at this point right it doesn't matter.
PJ Wehry (48:16.748)
Haha.
Chris Yeomans (48:39.212)
Right? And I mean, it's worth saying the early early hopes for legal codification were precisely that you could say it specific enough so nobody could disagree. Frederick the Great really thought that the Prussian Civil Code, the Algeminus Landrecht, would get rid of the need for lawyers. I mean, it's sweet and naive in retrospect. Right. I mean, the bigger the tax law is, the more tax lawyers you need. But but this thought that
PJ Wehry (48:50.228)
Right. Yep.
PJ Wehry (48:55.726)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (49:05.87)
Cough
Chris Yeomans (49:08.578)
that you're always renegotiating. This is at the basis of this doctrine and hagel that I talked about a little earlier, right? Which is this view that we already have a constitution, everybody does. It works better in German, Verfassung is less tied to the notion of a written document than the English constitution is.
It's more like the structure of the thing or the way something is organized. And we use constitution in English sometimes that way too, but not usually when we're talking about politics. But his view is, look, we have a constitution. Maybe it hasn't been written down, but we have social groups that have certain kinds of power relationships with each other where those power relationships are governed by certain norms.
PJ Wehry (49:51.31)
Yes. Thanks.
Chris Yeomans (49:57.802)
Some of those norms are implicit. Some of those norms are explicit. But that's already, again, if it's a pre-political situation, it's pregnant with the political. And so what you're doing is that group of people, which is already organized in that way, is going to find a way to write down some laws or to clarify what they mean by property.
or to clarify what they mean by inheritance, or to clarify what they mean by a marriage and the church's role. But you're not going to do what some of the southern German states did, which just sort of adopt the code Napoleon, right? At least in parts.
PJ Wehry (50:40.334)
Yeah. you
Chris Yeomans (50:51.158)
You've got people who've got certain customs who are in pre-political, pseudo-political relationships already, and you're just bringing things to visibility, right? You're giving people terminology, but you're not giving people terminology to end debates. That is a fool's errand.
You are giving people terminology to have productive debates and debates with words and lawyers rather than armies. That's what you're trying to do. But again, it's very different from a sense that we're conserving something. It's more the sense, as it were, that we're continuing a
PJ Wehry (51:22.926)
Hmph.
PJ Wehry (51:29.679)
Yes. Yeah.
There's this in... Go ahead.
Chris Yeomans (51:48.024)
process of renegotiation.
Right? And then if we can continue this process of renegotiation, we don't get bloody revolution. Sorry, go ahead.
PJ Wehry (51:52.785)
Yeah, yeah. So one thing that I'm hearing is, whereas for Burke, if it's not necessary to change, it's necessary to not change. For Hegel, change has extra, it costs something.
Chris Yeomans (52:05.837)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (52:14.254)
And so we shouldn't change for no reason. We should be aware of the social cost, not just the cost and custom. Yes.
Chris Yeomans (52:17.132)
Right.
Chris Yeomans (52:21.602)
That's right.
That's right. With the combination of the Machiavellian insight changes coming. Right? Like, yeah.
PJ Wehry (52:29.28)
Yes. There's this interesting concept from Kierkegaard, and as you've talked about, it keeps coming to mind when you talk about the Republican time, and it's in repetition, I believe, that his idea of repetition is that every time you think you're doing the same thing over and over again, but every time you do something, it's slightly different, just because it is piled on top of the thing before it.
Chris Yeomans (52:52.205)
Great.
Yes.
PJ Wehry (52:58.632)
And you don't notice the slight deviations. that's a real, that's that's a, think he identifies a mechanism that is at the heart of like this Republican time, right? Is that useful there?
Chris Yeomans (53:01.581)
Let's wait.
Chris Yeomans (53:08.75)
Right, yeah, It is, and it's one of the reasons Hegel thinks it's important to raise this process to reflection and give it some terms, right? And so I think he would have some sympathy with this notion that part of what happened, part of why the French Revolution
PJ Wehry (53:22.616)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (53:37.358)
Hmm
Chris Yeomans (53:38.744)
could be such a decisive break is that the old regime was actually already dead and had been dead as a social matter for 50 years. But what had happened is people had kept, they kept repeating the same terminology and going through the same judicial forms and political forms, even though they didn't actually correspond to reality anymore.
PJ Wehry (54:07.628)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (54:08.044)
Because the reality was the bourgeoisie, which was floating all of the loans to the government, had all the power. And so you already had this shift. And so in a certain sense, all that the National Assembly had to do was to give names to things that had already been happening for half a century.
And I mean, I don't know where anywhere where Hegel says something like this, but this is sometimes said in French revolutionary historiography in the 20th and 21st centuries. But I think he's sympathetic with that kind of notion that it is very easy in law and in political philosophy to be using terms that do not correspond to reality.
PJ Wehry (54:39.022)
and and
Chris Yeomans (54:55.086)
and therefore are having a completely different effect or in fact no effect. And you not realize that, right? Yeah. Ideally, like I was saying, you have these processes of renegotiation so that even if the words aren't changing, you are actually changing your understanding of them incrementally as you go through.
PJ Wehry (55:02.414)
Yeah, well and so yes, go ahead
Chris Yeomans (55:24.91)
That gives you at least some basis for navigating the bigger social changes which are coming.
PJ Wehry (55:31.308)
Yes. Yeah, which of course also reflects the way that linguistics works. Right? It's like words change. Why is that happening? Well, because republics, know, governments, not just republics, are in time. Right? Like that's like...
Chris Yeomans (55:39.765)
Thanks
Chris Yeomans (55:44.982)
Yep. Yeah. Yep. In fact, I would just tell you my my undergraduate degree is in linguistics and my first thought was to go to graduate school in linguistics to study pidgin and creole languages.
PJ Wehry (56:01.13)
Chris Yeomans (56:01.142)
because I was fascinated, right? So a pidgin is just a contact language. It's a simplified language, often in colonial situations where a bunch of people speak in 10 different languages, have to figure out a way to get the sugar cane cut or whatever it is that you're doing. And so it's a super simplified language. And then children grow up speaking it and they fill it out and they create a language as they're learning it. And then we call those creoles.
PJ Wehry (56:11.1)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (56:17.716)
Yep.
Chris Yeomans (56:29.814)
and the process of human beings taking these rudimentary raw materials, kids, and building a language out of it, I just think is the most fascinating thing in the world. But it's a good example, mean, terms change sometimes slowly, sometimes very quickly, but they change through use, right? They change through use. you meet the moment of change by letting your political concepts do that too.
PJ Wehry (56:30.249)
That's Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (56:59.328)
and not assuming, and this is a part of why, for example, I think we talked about last time and it's a part of this book too, Hegel actually wants us to shift from talking about property, eigentum, to talking about vermögen, resources, because he thinks property still gives you this kind of lock-in picture of something that you own.
PJ Wehry (57:16.925)
Hmm you
Chris Yeomans (57:27.532)
that is individual and yet also economically productive. And so you have this thing that matters economically and personally and maybe judicially all in kind of the same way, right? But the modern market-based economy bears no relation to that. The most useful thing that I can have is access to machines that I could never myself buy.
PJ Wehry (57:36.942)
Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (57:58.446)
The way the division of labor works is precisely not by everybody having their own plot, right? Not by every worker bringing their own tools into the factory. No, by the workers working on some machine that the company itself had to take out a 30-year loan to pay for.
Right? And which is in some sense the property of the company, but not actually the property of any of the shareholders who are supposed to own the company. The ownership relationships get really weird. And if your model is lock-in private property where I got this piece of land and I'm going to improve it with my own labor, and then I've mixed it, and then it's mine, then you're really not going to understand what is valuable about ownership interests in the modern economy.
PJ Wehry (58:45.106)
and
Chris Yeomans (58:46.158)
And so you're gonna have to shift to thinking of, I can tune personal property as being, cool things that I own like this cup that I got in Taiwan or my bicycles, which I'm not gonna share, nobody else gets to ride my bicycles, thank you very much. But those are not economically important things, those are sort of fringe things, right? Everything that's economically valuable to me.
PJ Wehry (59:02.636)
Hahaha
PJ Wehry (59:09.166)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (59:13.358)
is something that I own with others or something that has some sort of systematic value, even if I own money, right? That's valuable because of a financial system that works in a certain way and owning money is really owning a stake in that kind of system. And so sometimes...
PJ Wehry (59:18.19)
and
PJ Wehry (59:28.307)
Which if you don't agree with that, if you don't agree with that, you don't understand inflation. Sorry.
Chris Yeomans (59:33.038)
Yeah, that's very much right. That's right. Right. That's right. Yeah. just actually my last semester I taught a graduate course in the philosophy of money. So soon there will be a book on the the social ontology of economic institutions out that we can chat about as well.
PJ Wehry (59:51.446)
Yes, that was something look forward to. I apologize for interrupting. just that seems... I want to be respectful of your time.
Chris Yeomans (59:55.278)
Not at all.
PJ Wehry (01:00:02.914)
Besides buying and reading your excellent book, which I think this comes out, this episode will come out right before. So pre-order, because that always helps boost the sales especially. What would you recommend to someone who has listened for the last hour to think about or do over the next week?
Chris Yeomans (01:00:08.962)
Yes.
Chris Yeomans (01:00:12.386)
Thank you.
Chris Yeomans (01:00:24.812)
Well, if you haven't dipped into any of the Republican literature, which lots of us haven't, I can't recommend highly enough Pocock's book, The Machiavellian Moment. It's a huge, gigantic book. Do I have it here? I don't see it. It must be at home. But it is.
PJ Wehry (01:00:31.566)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (01:00:43.15)
Hmm
Chris Yeomans (01:00:53.096)
an extraordinary work of historiography that helps you to see how republicanism could move from Aristotle's Greece to Machiavelli's Florence to Harrington's England to the Federalists United States, which is weird for a view that is about place.
PJ Wehry (01:01:23.505)
Hmm
Chris Yeomans (01:01:23.766)
and is about history and a specific experience of history. And so that is one of the fascinating parts of it. It is also beautifully written, written at a time when historians wrote as much, I think, for the educated public.
PJ Wehry (01:01:30.636)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (01:01:38.21)
Always wonderful.
Chris Yeomans (01:01:47.582)
as they wrote for each other. And so despite its length, it has a very essayistic quality to it. And there's just lovely formulations and beautiful English prose. I think also, you know, if you're interested in this with respect to Hegel reading Reinhard Koselig's work is for the same reason, just extraordinarily valuable. Philosophical, I won't say that as a writer, I would put him in the same
PJ Wehry (01:02:03.758)
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (01:02:17.53)
a rare echelon as I would put Pocock. But I think that these are really wonderful things. unfortunately, these are all long books, but Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, talk about another extraordinary and beautiful writer, you know, or just read things like the Persian letters, which are just so funny as a skewering of.
PJ Wehry (01:02:26.349)
Mm.
PJ Wehry (01:02:32.272)
Hmm
Hmm.
Chris Yeomans (01:02:44.238)
contemporary pretensions and that gives you a lot of a sense of Montesquieu who in a way like Hegel, right, part of the historicism is being willing to see, hey, my people are just another weird tribe at another specific place in history with their own views and mores and habits. And let's see if we can figure that out and what justice and self-government would look
PJ Wehry (01:03:12.59)
Dr. Yeomans, thank you so much. Great answer. Yeah, and a great conversation. I appreciate it.
Chris Yeomans (01:03:17.228)
Thank you, PJ, for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah.
Chris Yeomans (01:03:23.586)
Very wide-ranging. Thanks for your questions.