Frank Meyer (political Philosopher) - Philosophy of History

Philosophy of History

The most important place to begin placing Meyer in context is an article he wrote titled "Western Civilization: The Problem of Political Freedom" that closes his 1996 In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. As a thinker in what Hayek called the "critical rationalist" philosophical school that is the more empirical one as contrasted with the "constructivist rationalism" of a priori deductivism, Meyer's understanding of world history is central to his philosophy. Meyer's essential argument is explicitly based upon philosopher Eric Voegelin's multi-volume Order and History that all world history until more modern times was composed of "cosmological" societies that unified all social activity under one controlling myth subsuming society and the state in one common understanding and power monism. Meyer labeled these societies "tightly unified" in their mores, culture, economies, religion, and government, suppressing all contradictory understandings.

Following Lord Acton's "Liberty in Ancient Times" Meyer found only two historical "stirrings" where this cosmological unity was even temporarily breached. In Athens, Socrates used his vision of the cave to discover a reality behind its cosmological reality as interpreted by its democratic authorities, which challenged them by viewing ideal forms as the real repository of truth beyond the myths of its culture. The unity was challenged so fundamentally that it turned upon the prophet, killed him and returned to the previous unity. Abraham likewise rejected the cosmological unity of Ur and claimed a God that was independent of and more powerful than its myth, which Moses reinforced years later by rejecting Egyptian cosmological society, to establish a Jerusalem whose prophets likewise challenged state and society, with Nathan even forcing the monarch to admit evil and repent. Still, the representatives of state power generally ignored or restricted the challengers and, in any event, a new cosmological state, Rome, ended both stirrings and established an even stronger cosmological unity.

Caesar became the "sanctified symbol of the cosmos," in Meyer's terms, and came to dominate the known world. About the same happened in China, India, Persia, the Americas and the rest. Modern times did not break the unity until a small voice in Rome's hinterlands cried out “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's." The Incarnation, the "flash of eternity into time," Meyer labeled it, effectively severed the unity through its concrete effects and proved even more empirically enduring in Europe than Caesar. Yet it did not create a new unity but a "tension" between empirical power and a mystical power sourced from another world but energizing this one. In Europe are "two sets of tensions" of church and state contested and later added other tensions from cities, towns and estates that culminated in a Magna Carta demanding that no single force unify the rest, creating the conditions for freedom under agreed upon law rather than a single state-enforced cosmological way.

The idea of dividing power to allow freedom within its tradition was only partially realized in Medieval Europe and was later challenged fundamentally by the rise of national monarchies and parliaments that claimed a divine or popular right and power to reconstitute itself in new cosmological or utopian forms to retrieve the sense of order and unity promised by monism. Before the tension was tamed in England, it was transferred to America where it was protected by its colonial isolation, allowing the tension and balance of power between freedom and tradition to reach its zenith in the United States Constitution ). The utopian temptation to return to the cocoon of cosmological or radical unity, however, survived even in the U.S.

Whether reform was from Woodrow Wilson, or more foreign influences such as Rousseau, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, these saw division of power and the tradition that sustained its tension as the central societal problem of modern times, with the task of reform to remove these impediments to a restored unity. To Meyer, the task of conservatism was to preserve the tension of the Western tradition to protect human freedom, which was inherently pluralist.