Statecraft as Soulcraft

In an interview on Freedom Isn’t Enough

Your fourth book is George Will’s Statecraft as Soulcraft from 1983. It contains a marvellous sentence: ‘To those who are liberal, and to those who call themselves conservatives, I say “politics is more difficult than you think”.’ This is a book about the fundamental importance of politics and the inability for us to rise above it, or view it as politics. It rejects the idea that politics is a dirty thing we’d be better off without. That too is a very Whiggish idea – is that why it’s on your list?

That’s right, and George Will says as much in the book. This book is on my list for a few reasons. One of them is personal – this book was a path to conservatism for me. I discovered it as a high school student in the mid-90s – by then I was interested in politics and it was clear to me that I was a conservative. What this book showed me was that there was a way to be a conservative that was not dismissive of politics. In a way, it’s a corrective to libertarianism. It’s also a corrective to social conservatism; it stands for what I would now describe as a small ‘r’ republicanism. 

It argues that one of the crucial functions of politics is the formation of citizens. Government doesn’t just allocate resources, it doesn’t just defend the country, it also has a lot to do with how we define ourselves, with what we decide is admirable and noble, or ignoble, and what we decide it is to be an American. It’s an extraordinary book and I wonder if George Will actually would agree with much of this book today. He’s been through something of a transformation…

You say there’s a tension in the book with social conservatism. Would a standard reading of social conservatism say it is the school of conservatism that understands the importance of – and need to use – law to fashion public morals?

Yes, but I think that’s a little different from what George Will is doing in this book. I think this book is about forming citizens, and social conservatism is about forming human beings. In both cases, there’s a role for government and the law, and in character formation, but the question is, what sort of character formation? Will’s book is deeply respectful of the difference between private and public, in a way that social conservatives would think is probably excessive. But he doesn’t define public in the very limited way that libertarians would. It really does stake out a middle ground, where a public life is actually something very important, and government has a lot to do with the shape of our public life, but that is not the same as shaping private morals.