“Inspired by Faith and Doctrine”
17th January 2024
Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) was a Hungarian-born philosopher, a professor at Brooklyn College, a friend of Russell Kirk, and the author of more than forty books, including Politics and the State: The Catholic View, originally published in 1980 by Franciscan Herald Press. In 2018, that work was reissued by Cluny in the edition under review herein: an affordable softcover volume titled The Church and the State, published with ecclesiastical permission and with the subtitle The Catholic Tradition as an Integral Element of Western Political Thought. The work is divided into a brief preface, an expansive introduction, and five chapters.
The preface begins by identifying a philosophical circumstance peculiar to American political thought. Molnar argues that Americans are reliant upon manifest pragmatism to determine the range of their political theory, as a consequence of their scepticism regarding such theories. Consequently, in America, there is a widespread acceptance (or quasi-acceptance) of only four conservative approaches to political theory: one derived from interpretations of The Federalist, one based upon the theories of Leo Strauss, one based upon the theories of Eric Voegelin, and a half-respectable, somewhat un-American one in the form of Marxism. The last of these, Molnar observes, “in spite of the popularity of its advocates in some academic circles, has not entered the mainstream of American political thought”—a statement that still rings true today, albeit less certainly than when it was originally published in 1980, now that congress finds itself beleaguered by a squad of far-left Marxists.
The problem with ‘conservatism’ is that it isn’t really an ‘-ism’, i.e. an ideology that strives for a certain end-state, like progressivism or Marxism. As Russell Kirk famously pointed out, ‘conservatism’ is actually anti-ideology, in that it reflexively opposes ideological movements of any kind.