Defending National Loyalty

Nationalism according to Hazony is the view that the world ought to consist of independent nation states, each constituted at bottom by the loyalty granted to it by its individual constituents in return for its nurturing and protecting the prior loyalties granted by them to their families, clans, and tribes. This view contains three unresolved difficulties. (1) It claims to provide a wholesale alternative to Lockean and post-Lockean constitutionalism, though unlike Locke et al. it fails to differentiate political from apolitical loyalties. (2) It cites biblical Israel as the model for loyalty-based nationalism but disregards the biblical prophets' insistence that national loyalty must be grounded in obedience to the (divinely revealed) law, not vice versa. (3) It limits what it calls the Bible's “political philosophy” to putative “natural laws” or moral principles, while overlooking the biblical authors' unobtrusive self-distancing from prophetic moralizing when, facing the prospect of their nation's long-term exile, they quietly encourage what amounts to a political–philosophical examination of the merit of biblical law as such, e.g., by calling it “your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the nations.”

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• Saving Nation, Faith and Family. Yoram Hazony’s National Conservativism and Its Theo-Political Mission

  Open Access•Michaela Quast-Neulinger•Religions•2021

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