Russel Kirk on the Nation-State

All history, and modern history especially, in some sense is the account of the decline of community and the ruin consequent upon that loss. In the process, the triumph of the modern state has been the most powerful factor. "The single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has been the rise and development of the centralized territorial state." There is every reason to regard the state in history as, to use a phrase that Gierke applied to Rousseau's doctrine of the General Will, "a process of permanent revolution." Hostile toward every institution which acts as a check upon its power, the nation-state has been engaged, ever since the decline of the medieval order, in stripping away one by one the functions and prerogatives of true community - aristocracy, church, guild, family, and local association. What the state seeks is a tableland upon which a multitude of individuals, solitary though herded together, labor anonymously for the state's maintenance. Universal military conscription and the "mobile labor force" and the concentration-camp are only the most recent developments of this system. The "pulverizing and macadamizing tendency of modern history" that Maitland discerned has been brought to pass by "the monumentous conflicts of jurisdiction between the political state and the social associations lying intermediate to it and the individual." The same process may be traced in the history of Greece and Rome; and what came of this, in the long run, was social ennui and political death. All those gifts of variety, contrast, competition, communal pride, and sypathetic association that characterize man at his manliest are menaced by the ascendancy of the omnicompetent state of modern times, resolved for its own security to level the ramparts of traditional community.

[from pages 485-6 of The Conservative Mind ]

Finishing Mr. Kirk's monumental and un-pu-down-able work, I now turn my attention to a work mentioned in Mr. Kirk's book: The American Republic by Orestes Brownson. Brownson was "a pro-Union, anti-abolitionist, anti-slaveholding journalist" and Roman Catholic convert. Here is an article by the man who wrote the introduction to the edition linked to above, Peter Augustine Lawler: Orestes Brownson and the Truth About America. This page also offers an informative background to the author: Orestes Brownson (1803–1876).