The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies

Combines accurate, thoughtful and keen analysis with a clear overall picture of current trends and realities and concludes with practical suggestions for logical response and action. This is a clear-eyed view of events transpiring around us but the analysis is not trapped by presumptions of time and space; it is viable as a tool to understand past and present, and anticipate future. I appreciated especially how MacIntyre laid out and explained an alternative approach to modern political theory, yet without becoming waylaid by excessive detail and tangential exploration. The tone of the work is scholarly and logical, even though it deals with very current and politically volatile themes. This dispassion is rare and very welcome. MacIntyre bases his foundation on work done by others but molds and develops those ideas into a political theory of his own. I hope this book is the first of many to come. We need his thinking.

A nice, compact summary of how political power truly works (particularly in the US). Helps put words to feelings of discontent many feel with the US's form of government and culture in a straightforward, easy-to-read writing style. I particularly liked the emphasis on the State vs. spheres of private society.If you need a crash course in core concepts of Italian elite theory/managerialism/similar topics (without reading all original texts) and how the US political situation got to where it is today, I highly recommend.Plus: I already knew many of the concepts the book promised to discuss, yet I still learned new things.

I’m absolutely thrilled by Auron MacIntyre’s new book The Total State. The author fully understands the essential dynamics of our time, including the calamitous failure of the great war on the virus. It’s not a book of epidemiology, thank goodness, but of sociology, history, and political theory. Therefore, he doesn’t miss the essential class element behind the disaster.As he clearly states, the COVID experience was all about the rights and privileges of the professional managerial class in government, media, and large corporations. They rigged the response to the virus in a way that maximized their safety and income, while exploiting those without power to serve their every need.The slogan was “we are all in this together” but the reality was of the working class stepping up to deliver goods and services to the elite classes until the vaccine could arrive. Then the new shot was forced on all those who had bravely faced the pathogen in order to get them biologically clean before being integrated back into society.The author gets this entirely correct, and I’m thrilled for it because so few authors do. But it is just a piece of his larger analysis, which is quite challenging. The essence of the thesis is in the subtitle: “How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.” His view is not that they might, or can, or are in danger of becoming so with the wrong policies decisions. The thesis here is more bold than that. He says that they will and they must.Wow. Intrigued? I certainly was when I began the journey of this book.I read as someone with a classical liberal heart, a person with warm feelings for all the great enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, a partisan fan of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, a person with tremendous affection for the achievements of the freedom project of the last several centuries but also a person deeply saddened by what’s become of it.MacIntyre does not hold that view. Not at all. He believes that the liberal project of the 17th and 18th centuries were the product of rationalistic arrogance, the belief that whole societies and cultures could be cajoled into a single model of organization by virtue of pieces of parchment, governmental architectures, slogans about human rights, and strict models of what defines the very notion of freedom and progress.He attempts to map out how the freedom of past centuries gradually mutated into the total state of today, a political order in which the entrenched and global bureaucratic elite face no limits to their power and ambition. He is not even slightly shocked that the center of the empire is the US simply because the US was the most successful deployment of the liberal democracy in history, and hence the one most vulnerable to the trajectory of arrogance, corruption, decadence, bloat, and hegemonic imposition without limit.Still intrigued? Read on.The journey begins with the neglected genius of Bertrand de Jouvenel, who traces the origins of freedom not with big declarations of human rights and democracy for all but with the insistence on the part of cultural centers for independence from state power. In European history, it was the minor royals, the landed gentry, the multigenerational centers of wealth and enterprise, and the keepers of faith that formed the real resistance to state power.De Jouvenel further argues that it is precisely these robust institutions of cultural and social power that keep state power at bay in a way that individuals on their own never could. When they die out, everyone becomes vulnerable to pillaging but higher powers. In his view, the sloganizing around individual rights and infinite choice and progress is but a masquerade that hides a power grab. When these mediating institutions are weakened, state power only grows.You might recognize this outlook at conventional old-world Tory theory, one that is anti-liberal at its core. That seems true in some respects but the journey has only begun as our author takes us through a highly competent tour of thinkers I doubt most students have encountered in generations, simply because they have been smeared as reflexively right wing: Joseph de Maistre, Gaetano Mosca, Carl Schmitt, Vilfredo Pareto, James Burnham, and Samuel Francis.I will just say plainly that these thinkers are not my cup of tea. I’ve been severely critical of all of them for reasons I don’t need to explain here. That said, we must admit the following. Together they have provided the single most powerful attack on liberalism classically understood that has ever been marshaled. It’s not even obvious to me that it has been sufficiently answered by anyone, unless I’m missing something.The critique is this. Liberalism is a form of rationalism, one born of intellectuals rather than real human experience, a construct involving definitive propositions about how life should be conducted that is necessarily imperial in that it overrides the aims, ethos, and operations of all other organic institutions in society. It says, in essence, you must think this way or hit the highway. In so doing, it tramples on religious traditions, familial aspirations, local folkways, tacit knowledge born of long experience, norms and manners of local communities, and diminishes the role mediating structures in the social order.Liberalism, in this view, is a managerial project – like an architectural blueprint draw up by someone who has only studied but never built anything – one requiring expertise to administer and hence experts and bureaucrats at all levels of society. But the people who inhabit these positions are relatively detached from the social order they presume to manage and hence their decision making and interests are necessarily less knowledgeable and humane than they otherwise would be if people were truly left to their own devices.The critique is deepened by the observation that liberalism as a philosophy is necessarily devoid of genuine meaning of the sort that traditional religion seeks to provide. It extols the inherent glory of material achievement and progress but offers no real solace when it turns out – as it always does – that success alone does not fulfill deep human longings.In that sense, his view is that democratic liberalism is a false god that always fails. Having robbed people of a moral and faith-based center, liberalism is well positioned to invade lives and communities with bureaucratic management while promoting dependency and arbitrary power.The author uses all the modern crises to illustrate his point: the Covid disaster, the US proxy war with Russia, the imperialism of world bureaucracies, the hegemony of the administrative state and the impotence of the judiciary to control it, and so on.If all of this sounds dreadful – and it does indeed – there is some light on the other side: he predicts that the total state of the 21st century is destined to fail.“Liberal democracy made assumptions about human nature that were false. It outran the consequences for a long time because it was able to amass an unprecedented amount of wealth and power, but eventually the bill always comes due. Constitutions are not eternal guardians of the political will and states do not become objective and self-governing machines simply because rules get written down on a piece of paper. Man has not moved beyond either religion or politics. Questions of faith and sovereignty will continue to sit at the core of the human experience, just as they always have. Matters of meaning, identity, and existential conflict cannot be removed by the promise of cold objective reason and credentialed experts.”In this prediction, I sense that he is correct. The world state cannot work. The total state cannot work. The resistance of administrative totalitarianism is growing, as the population grows ever more impoverished, subjected, and inflamed in fury against the overlords who are not in hiding any longer. We know who they are. They are parading on TV every night, like a scene from District One in Hunger Games. This is truly unsustainable.MacIntyre ends his book with some speculations about how all of this will unfold. His speculations are well thought out.Having mapped all of this out, I feel the need to register fundamental disagreement. I simply cannot accept his big theory. In fact, I see the whole apparatus as an unnecessary overreach. Liberalism is wholly defensible, not as an imperial and rationalistic product of intellectuals but as a simple aspiration for a society that can managing itself complete with mediating institutions, traditions, familial dynasties, and a state that is nearly invisible to daily life, something like what the US experienced under the Articles of Confederation.I’m not nearly as pessimistic as he is about the whole liberal project. As an answer, I might propose the writings of Benjamin Constant, Adam Smith, and Lord Acton, while admitting that I do long for a longer and more pointed refutation of the tradition of thought that has so heavily informed this book. That said, I truly hope everyone will read this, and ironically hope you can learn from it while rejecting the darker features of the work.

MacIntyre does a great job outlining the current neo reactionary thinking. Drawing from sources that were either "lost" or worse deemed "not worthy" by modern liberalism, he gives a good explanation as to the current structure and possible trajectory of modern society. Conservatives and Liberals will both hate large parts of this book as it skewers their strongly held mythologies and world views.The only weakness is the author's slight misunderstanding of Francis' further refinement of Burnham's work. The Managerial Class is a complete class. Yes, it is run by a managerial elite, but it also consists of a large number of non-elites and allies. Our current situation is defined by a class struggle between the managerial class and the old bourgeois class. This struggle is almost over as the managerial class has triumphed.Further, despite the author's assertion that the managerial class is something new- it is not.At least twice before in history the rise and triumph of a managerial class has occurred in empires. One ended in barbarian invasion. The other in unbelievable stagnation and then dissolution.Don't let the above criticism stop you from reading this book. Whether you are a progressive or conservative, it will challenge your worldview and expose you to some thinkers that have been carefully veiled and hidden by our current ruling regime.

Should you read this book? If you already have a positive view of the author’s other work, then of course you should. If you are conservative and unfamiliar with the dissident right, then you are in for a treat! If you lean left, The Total State could be anything from confusing to a window into the other side’s mind to opposition research.The book is a description of modern liberal democracies from the point of view of some political theorists you might not be familiar with. Auron’s analysis of the Total State is narrative-like in the build-up and possible resolution of a disturbing problem. And the problem is disturbing! And it is also why you should read this book if you are interested in political theory left, right, or other.The chapters often include a summary of a political thinker and his relation to other figures discussed in the book. The web of connections helps the idea of a Total State click. Most chapters have at least one, but never too many, on average half-page length quotes (Kindle), of a thinker like Joseph de Maistre, which tie into Auron’s ongoing description of the Total State. Using good Christian charity, he never quotes Yarvin at length, but did spend three chapters outlining the Cathedral in a way someone unfamiliar with Moldbug would understand.Whether or not you see Auron’s analysis of the fate of the Total State as positive or negative might be a matter of time preference. My only criticism of the book is that it might have needed another set of eyes to catch some sentence structure issues. However, Auron is still quite quotable: “As odd as it sounds, we are governed by a decentralized atheistic theocracy. A religious system without an official holy book or central church, but a religious system of moral assumptions all the same (pg. 32).”