This book aims to delineate the tradition of political moderation. The urgency of such endeavour is evident in our times of a polarized and overheated political debate, in which opponents increasingly fail to find common ground. We live in a time when political debate often degenerates into a shouting match between opponents who are deaf to each otherâs arguments. In many ways, âthings fall apart; the centre cannot holdâ. 1 The middle classes are under pressure, centrist political parties lose support, the middle ground increasingly becomes a no-manâs land between camps entrenched in their own self-righteousness. All this stands in stark contrast with the tradition of political moderation, which for a long time has been considered a precondition for a secure and stable society, as a well as the bedrock of democratic institutions. The essays in this volume are inspired by the widely shared need for a more nuanced political discourse, and by the conviction that the history of modern politics offers a range of experiences and examples of the search for a middle way, which can help us to navigate through the tensions of the current political climate.
At the same time, the volume will offer a diagnosis of the problems and pitfalls of middling between extremes, and of the weaknesses of the moderate point of view. There is also a âdarkâ side to the politics of moderation. The arguments of moderation and the related idea of the middle way were used to defend causes that are often found morally reprehensible, such as slavery, the defense of privilege based on birth, the veneration of the state, eurocentrism, radical Salafism and Nazi ideas of a ânew European orderâ. The capability to be rational and moderate was and still is claimed to be a unique feature of white middle-aged men from the upper middle classes and assumed to be a legitimation for their monopoly of power. Political elites generally believed that people from low birth and common descent were incapable of controlling their passions and composure. Moreover, moderation has often been imposed by military victors on a defeated population under the threat of violent interference, as was the case in post-Napoleonic France and post-1945 Europe, or functioned as a tool of imperialist and colonial conquest.
Yet despite, or maybe even because of these evidently problematic contexts and conceptions of moderation, we believe that the tradition of political moderation contains important lessons for our contemporary world. We aim to explore the variety of attempts in modern European history to find a middle way between ideological extremes, from the juste milieu between old order and new liberty of the Restoration era, via the attempts to bridge the ideological divide between capitalism and socialism, the promise of the welfare state and the European project as way to escape the ideological warfare of the âshort twentieth centuryâ, to the current calls for a moderate Islam as a response to both fundamentalist and anti-Islamic extremism.
The approach presented in this book is part of a broader movement, both scholarly as well as among the general public, of people who seek to promote moderation as a political virtue, as a political practice and as an effect of sound public institution, without being blinded to the more pernicious aspects of the search for moderation. An example of the call for moderation came from the New York Times columnist David Brooks, who in 2017 published an article entitled âWhat moderates believeâ, in which he urged the American progressives not to oppose the right-wing populist politics and person of president Donald Trump with an equally populist politics of the âwarriors of the Leftâ. 2 Instead, he called for moderation, as âa way of coping with the complexity of the worldâ, by embracing the plurality of the truth, the notion that politics is a limited activity, and incremental reform instead of sudden revolutionary change. In March 2018, Andrew Rawnsley argued in The Guardian that âpopulists will eventually be found out â moderates must be ready for that dayâ because âthe broad formula of the centre-left still has appeal to many millions of votersâ. 3
Also, elsewhere, a call for moderation can be heard. In 2016, a group of Utrecht humanities students started the initiative âDare to be Greyâ to counter what they regarded as the increasing polarization in Dutch society, enthusiastically defending the right to be âgreyâ. As they wrote on their website: âfierce debates about immigration, racism and the place of minorities in our society have become an everyday reality. The Grey Middle Ground with all the countless personalities, worldviews and nuances is being drowned out by the extremesâ. 4 Also in the Netherlands, the journalist Fidan Ekiz published a âplea for the radical middleâ in reaction to what she perceived as the rise of extremism and social divisions. 5
These are only a few scattered examples, and their scarcity is indicative of the fact that so far, the topic of moderation has received only limited attention from scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Radicalism and (violent) extremism have been the preferred topics for researchers in the field of politics and political history. While there are plenty of studies analysing the current radicalization and polarization of the political debateânotably in the context of populist politicsâthere is hardly any work that addresses the tradition of political moderation, which might offer a way out of this political predicament. One example is the recent study by Paul O. Carrese, Democracy in Moderation: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Sustainable Liberalism (2016), in which he presents moderation as âa central concept for inquiry, and for civic self-definition and civic education, among free peoplesâ. 6 His work builds in many way on the work of one of the few scholars who previously has explored this path, Aurelian Craiutu. In his study A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought, 1748â1830 (2012) as well as his more recent work Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (2016), Craiutu argued that moderation is an independent intellectual tradition which can be traced back to the eighteenth century, if not to classical and biblical Antiquity. 7
In this volume, this claim will be investigated by historians and social scientists who all explore how moderation and the politics of the middle way were conceptualized in different moments of modern history. Our aim in this book is to historicize the topic of moderation, not for its own sake, but as a way to answer a series of questions that the idea of moderation evokes. A first question is to what extent there is actually a tradition of political moderation, and if so, where it starts, and how it develops. How was moderation conceptualized in different situations and in different periods? This requires, first of all, an attempt at historical reconstruction, stemming from the intuition that the politics of moderation always has been part of modern politics, and does not need to be invented from scratch: it is a tradition that only needs to be revived. Such a historical reconstruction will also help to answer the question whether moderation is only the ad hoc response to specific circumstances or whether a veritable political tradition of moderation exists. A related issue is to what extent moderation can also be regarded as a global phenomenon. While Montesquieu for instance argued in his Spirit of the Laws of 1748, that moderation is a uniquely European quality that defines a âEuropean civilisationâ, the examples of moderation from the American context, but also the signs of an Islamic as well as a Confucian tradition of moderation, indicate it is applicable to other times and places as well. 8
It is to be expected that, as every tradition, the tradition of political moderation is neither uniform nor fully coherent. There are recurrent tensions and contradictions that require further analysis. One issue to address is whether moderation consist of a compromise or middle way between substantive political values, or whether the middle way is a value in itselfâa third way. If moderation is primarily a mode of politics, is it then a personal virtue, a practice, or a characteristic or effect of political institutions? And if it is a substantial political value, how is then the idea of a âradical middleâ or âcentreâ defined in relation to its opposites like âextremismâ and âradicalismâ, and how is it connected to notion like fairness, public reason, or prudence? Finally, a historical reconstruction of the tradition of political moderation will help to understand how the notion of moderation functions rhetorically. How is a call for moderation used to promote a certain point of view, or to legitimize political institutions or social relations? Is the politics of moderation itself actually a form of political moderation, or just another way to sell whatever point of view needs to be sold?
In addressing these topics we aim to cover the full variety of moderation within and beyond modern European history. Yet as always, reconstructing a phenomenon historically requires a middle way between acknowledging the diversity of its manifestation and the identification of a core that remains essentially the same over time, even if it is studied in its transformations. Next to these problems of conceptualization, we need to articulate by what method we think we can reconstruct the tradition of moderation. Finally, we will sketch how the contributions that follow help to delineate the contours of the tradition of political moderation in modern history.
The Concept of Moderation
There are many ways to conceptualise moderation. The core of the debate on moderation is the quest...